The Law of Settlement

The law of settlement and removal developed into a subject of great legal complexity.

The details are not important here, but a brief outline of the origins of the law is helpful to understand how it worked.

The issuing of settlement certificates was first authorised by the Act for the Relief of the Poor of 1662.

This sought to prevent the unhindered movement from place to place by those amongst the poor who, in the words of the Act itself, were tempted to take advantage of parishes with ‘the best stock, the largest commons and wastes and the most woods for them to burn and destroy’.

Anyone moving into a parish, if they occupied a property worth less than £10, could be removed by a justices’ order to the parish where they were last legally settled.

Exactly what qualified as a person’s legal place of settlement was the subject of continuing definition and refinement by subsequent Acts of Parliament. Deciding the proper place of a person’s legal settlement could be a tortuous business, which produced another type of document, known as the ‘settlement examination’.

The Act of 1662 recognised that people moved around in search of work, whether seasonal (the Act specifically mentioned harvest work) or long-term.

To be exempt from the threat of removal, people moving out of their own parish could obtain a settlement certificate to carry with them. This they lodged with the overseers of their new parish.

In this way the certificates found their way into the parish chest and from there finally into the archives.

An Act of 1795 forbade the removal of anyone until they actually ‘became chargeable’, that is, sought poor relief.

The law of settlement and removal outlived the abolition of the old poor law in 1834.

An Act in 1846 created made it impossible to remove anyone who had lived in a parish for five years before applying for poor relief. Relief now had to be paid by the parish (after 1865, the poor law union) in which they lived.

Minor amendments to the law of settlement continued to be made.

The last was enacted in 1900, but the law of settlement outlived even the new poor law, abolished in 1930.

The last vestiges of the law of settlement and removal were not repealed until the introduction of National Assistance in 1948.

One important fact to be borne in mind in the North of England is that the unit of settlement was generally not the parish but the township. This was because many northern parishes were very large, and the townships (originally a manorial unit of administration) had taken on responsibility for poor relief and other civil affairs.

In the Doncaster area, many parishes consisted of only one township, but several contained two and occasionally three, four, or even five or six.