14th August 14th August 1834 saw the implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act in England and Wales, introducing workhouses for the healthy poor. The Poor Law Commission was given the power to unite parishes in England and Wales into Poor Law Unions, each Union being administered by a local Board of Guardians according to the directions issued by the Commission. According to the Act, relief was only to be given to able-bodied paupers through the workhouse and central to the formation of a Union was the provision of a workhouse building. By the time of the Poor Law Commissions fifth annual report in 1839, a total of 583 unions (covering some 95 percent of parishes) were operating in England and Wales. After the Government reformed the Poor Law in 1834 workhouses were built to house the destitute in appalling conditions. Fathers, mothers and children were separated on entering the workhouses and no one outside the workhouse system was allowed relief. For the poverty-stricken the options were stark: to enter the workhouse or starve. In Carmarthen for example, it was noted by The Times newspaper that prisoners in the towns jail were better fed than those in the workhouse. As a result workhouses were both feared and hated in equal measure by those forced to enter them or who lived under the threat of ending up inside their walls. One day in June 1843 the workhouse at Carmarthen was stormed by the Rebecca Rioters who, in 1842-43, carried out a campaign of protests across south-west Wales, mainly against the high charges at the tollgates on the public roads. There was a tollgate for every three miles of road in Carmarthenshire, with tolls exacted every time a farmer and his produce passed through them, and the Rebecca Riots resulted in hundreds of these tollgates being demolished in daring night-time raids. But attacks were also made against a number of workhouses in the area as protesters expressed their hatred of the new Poor Law of 1834 and the means by which paupers were being treated.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:10:01 +0000
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