Dr Margaret Ounsley will be giving a talk to us on ‘Workhouses, Inns & Vestries: How Reading parishes cared for their poor in the 18C’ drawing on the work she did to complete her PhD in Poor Law History.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century England developed a system of poor relief which was the first mandatory, universal, tax-based system in Europe, and, quite possibly, the world. Its implications were huge, helping to build the urban and industrialised society of the nineteenth century.
Through the mundane paperwork necessary to administer it, it is possible to build a picture of the daily lives and struggles of the ordinary people it affected. Reading is particularly fortunate in having a rich supply of such documents. By piecing them together we can study the boys who were sent to apprenticeship, the women employed to help strangers in labour, and the vagrants travelling on the Great West Road to London.
In Reading a particular set of circumstances applied which meant the system operated in a way quite different from the villages of Berkshire, or the metropolitan parishes of London. A system that had as much to do with politics and pubs as it was to do with poverty.
The event will be held in the Garden Hall of Watlington House, accessed from South Street. Arrival from 10:30am, then the talk will run from 11am to 12 noon.