Why workhouses?

By 1601 parish officials were given legal authority to collect money from rate payers to spend on food, clothing or fuel for the ‘deserving poor’. The first ‘workhouses’ were not residential, but simply places where work was provided in return for handouts, for those able to do something in return for their support. There are references to a workhouse in Abingdon as early as 1631.

Early workhouses

Eventually it became clear that the cost of ‘out relief’ (or 'outdoor relief') could be reduced if, instead of providing the means (rent, fuel, food) for poor families to stay in their own home, they were all housed together in one place. Residential poorhouses multiplied, though some out relief was still available.

By the eighteenth century Abingdon had two workhouses: one run by the parish of St Helen’s, with 120 inmates, and one by St Nicolas, with 12. The St Helen’s workhouse was in Otwell Lane (between Broad Street and the Market Square, now called Queen Street).

During the early nineteenth century, poverty increased dramatically. The Napoleonic Wars produced injured servicemen who swelled the ranks of those unable to work, and the Corn Laws restricted imports so that the price of bread rose. To manage this crisis the government passed a Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834.

Parishes which had previously cared only for their own local poor now banded together into Unions, managed by a locally elected Board of Guardians. Each union provided a central workhouse serving all the parishes, and out relief was largely abolished.

and 12 Oxfordshire parishes: