Britain's workhouses grew from a law passed after the Black Death
The workhouse, where the destitute got a bed only in exchange for labour, has roots in a 1388 statute written to stop plague survivors chasing better wages. Over five centuries it hardened into a system designed to make relief unpleasant, and the last traces vanished only in 1948.
The Black Death killed about a third of England's people, and the Statute of Cambridge of 1388 responded by fixing wages and keeping labourers in their parishes. Historian Derek Fraser argues that fear of disorder after the plague is what made the state, rather than private Christian charity, responsible for the poor. Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries from 1536 removed a major source of charity, and the Poor Act of 1575 set the principle that able-bodied people who needed help must work for it. The Poor Relief Act of 1601 then made each parish legally responsible for those who could not work through age or illness.
The word itself first appears in 1631, when the mayor of Abingdon reported building one to set poorer people to work. A 1723 act pushed parishes to require anyone seeking relief to enter a workhouse and labour, usually unpaid. A government survey in 1776 counted more than 1800 parish workhouses in England and Wales, about one parish in seven, with room for over 90,000 people. Cost-cutting could be grotesque: in 1814 Henry Cook's wife and child, inmates of the Effingham workhouse, changed hands for one shilling at a market in Croydon, and the parish covered the travel.
Unemployment after the Napoleonic Wars, farm machinery and poor harvests had broken the old relief system by the early 1830s. The New Poor Law of 1834 tried to deny help to anyone who refused to go inside. Inmates broke stones, crushed bones for fertiliser or picked apart old rope, known as oakum, with a metal spike, and some authorities hoped to turn a profit from this free labour.
Over the 19th century the buildings filled increasingly with the old and sick rather than the able-bodied. A 1929 law let councils turn workhouse infirmaries into municipal hospitals, and workhouses were formally abolished in 1930, though many carried on as Public Assistance Institutions until the National Assistance Act 1948 ended the Poor Law entirely. Scots usually called them poorhouses.
Source: Workhouse
