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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    _ What we may call the membership of the parish was as indeterminate as its boundaries. Both law and custom assumed that the mhabitants of a parish were those who were reputed to belong to it. Whether by this was meant all who actually resided in the parish, or those who owned or rented lands or houses within the parish—including the outsitters —or merely the heads of households, or the adult men only or those only who possessed what was called a legal settle- ment in the parish, was never generally determined by law, and differed according as particular rights or obligations were m question. The obligation of the parish to set the poor to work, maintain the aged and impotent, and apprentice the children, extended only to those who had a legal settlement therein; and this status depended, not on residence at aU, but on a whole range of other considerations, such as' parentage or marriage; the ascertained place of birth, of completed apprenticeship, or of continued service; the occu- pation of a tenement; the acting as a parish officer; or the payment of rates; the whole interpreted by a long and ever- growing series of statutes and legal decisions. On the other hand, the obligation of the individual to mend the roads depended merely on residence or occupation of a tenement within the parish, whilst that of serving the various parish offices depended, according as one or other of them was concerned, on varied and never generally determined com- binations of residence and occupation.^ The parish had the right to require the payment of rates from all occupiers of a separate chapel, or long-continued separate rates, woxild not alone suffice, without the existence of a Constable or the reputation of being a viU. Moreover' a vill had to contain at least several houses, and not be proved to be a mere extra-parochial place. See the cases cited in Tlie Laws relating to the Poor, by Francis Const, edition of 1805, which deserve more study from constitutional historians. It may possibly be that, as Mr. Round asserts, parochial divisions are artificial and comparatively modern. The formula that the parish is the township in its ecclesiastical capacity is . . . not historically true {The CommuTie of London, by J. H. Round, ]899, p. 10). In Northumberland, at least, it can be said that the ecclesiastical and civil boundaries are rarely conterminous (J. C. Hodgson, in History of Northumberland, 1892 vol. vi p. 348). 1 The few recorded cases (apart from the law of settlement), as to who was a parishioner, were cited in R. v. Adlard in 1824 {Reports of Cases, etc., by R. V. BarnewaU and C. Cresswell, vol. iv. pp. 772-780). Non-resident occupiers were liable to pay rates, to receive an apprentice, and to serve as Overseer; but not to serve as Constable nor to attend the Court Leet.
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