English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1906 (repr.1922)
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    acted as salaried Overseer, we rise to higher flights than mere peculation. The duty of billeting soldiers upon the innkeepers of the township was turned into a lucrative source of private revenue. In order to be favoured in the distribution of billets, each innkeeper was induced to make a series of presents to the all-powerful official. Thieves and the persons from whom they had stolen were alike laid under contribution, stolen property being impounded, and in many cases converted to private uses. Even the duty of paying the paupers was made to yield its toll of profit. A clergyman and magistrate testified to the Deputy Constable having bought £100 worth of base and counterfeit copper coin for £40, with which, as Overseer, to pay the outdoor poor their weekly allowance.^ His crowning iniquity, at least in the eyes of the respectable inhabitants, was his conversion of the revenue derived from bastardy cases into an all-pervading system of blackmail. The former Overseer had, in 1786-1787, been regularly collecting and accounting for weekly payments from 614 fathers of illegitimate children. The Eed Basil Book, in which the names and addresses of these fathers were re- corded, was promptly lost as soon as the Deputy Constable took office as Overseer, and there was no regular register of illegitimacy kept from the year 1787 to the year 1790, nor any sum [credited as] received on this account. If the public are credulous enough to believe that aU the children belonging to these 614 fathers, and all the children born since the year 1787, died before the year 1790, this absence of bastardy revenue might be accepted. Unfortunately it was proved that the Deputy Constable, when acting as salaried Overseer, had been terrifying erring or duped citizens into paying considerable sums for children of whom they were alleged to be the fathers.^ FinaUy, this ingenious official, contriving so 1 A Disclosure of Pm-ochial Abuse, etc., by Thomas Battye, 1796, p. 90 pall W paying the poor in base coin had been sufficiently frequent to call for express prohibition by Act of ParUament in 1769 (9 George III. c. 37) Ihe Bed Basil Book, etc., by Thomas Battye, 1797. When on the first If reL7lt7tr ''Tr'' °°'^r admlnlLltL^ ff Overseers aie Li^ to 'Y ^^'^'''' significantly enough, was that the district uverseers aie not to make any agreement to take what is called Hush Money from he reputed fathers of bastard children, but all applications in this respect
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