Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (review)

This volume is a dense, resourceful, empirical, and revisionist exploration of localism and belonging in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural England. Snell is concerned particularly with how the political culture of parishes and townships impeded the full implementation of the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834, as well as with the loss of community that accompanied the forward momentum of modernization, and now globalization. His work, although much less friendly toward modernization, bears comparison with Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London, 1979). Snell’s chapter-length treatments of local identity, settlement, rural marriage patterns, the clash of the old and new poor laws, the sustaining role of parish overseers, and the multiplication of parishes are imposing monographs in their own right.

The author’s first challenge is to show that the onset of industrialization and modernization, well underway by the 1840s, initially did not dislodge the embedded localism of the rural English. Loyalty to place was often fierce in its xenophobic resistance to newcomers and violent rivalries among proximate villages. A high percentage of endogamous marriages characterized village life well into the last years of the nineteenth century, and the sense of belonging to the parish and its traditions was deep. On these issues, Snell’s work is pointedly anthropological, but his anthropology is heavily data-driven and descriptive, not theoretical. His conclusions on local marriage patterns, for instance, are informed by reports of 18,442 marriages from 69 parishes across 8 counties.

Snell is convinced that historians, in failing to appreciate “the main instincts and counter-alignments affecting rural societies” (73), have overestimated the extent of the new poor law’s influence and its deleterious impact on local attachment. Thus, two commonplaces have emerged. First, the new poor law’s intention—to confine poor relief as much as possible to residency in union workhouses where paupers’ livings would be “less eligible” than they would be through self-support on the outside—was largely achieved throughout the realm. Second, the new policy diminished the separate parishes’ control over settlement (place of entitlement) and their ability to dispense the outdoor relief authorized by the Elizabethan, or old, poor law.

A disincentive to building or expanding workhouses and providing indoor relief was the costliness of the effort. More telling, though, was that the workhouse idea was unable to prevail against the closely guarded rural tradition of parish-centered outdoor assistance. Villagers who “felt themselves to belong in their own parishes” resisted the intrusion and centralization of the new policy (211). Thus, measured by financial outlay, Victorian social welfare was not workhouse-centered: From 1840 to 1939, outdoor relief averaged 79 percent of all welfare costs in England and Wales. Outlays for workhouse-centered relief achieved parity with outdoor expenses in the Northwest by 1874/75, but only in London were they notably higher. Snell finds in the “participatory community spirit” of the overseers of the poor the best representation of the parishes’ strength (364); by comparison, the current pursuit of virtual communities is a callow substitute. Snell urges historians to adopt a revised approach to Victorian localism, however coarse it was in some aspects. The lessons learned about parish or local belonging may yet stimulate current policymakers.