Speenhamland

 

In order to prevent civil unrest due to food shortages and high bread prices, on 6 May 1795 The Berkshire Court of Quarter Sessions, among them John Blagrave who had some land at Englefield, met at the Pelican Inn at Speen near Newbury to approve a scheme to provide a minimum wage for agricultural labourers. The system adopted had much in common with modern tax and welfare system, including some of the invidious consequences. Agricultural labourers were to receive a guaranteed wage based on how many children they had and the price of a standard loaf of bread. However, laws passed under Queen Elizabeth and King James I did not allow the Court to impose a minimum wage on employers so any difference between the guaranteed wage and the actual wage received was made up from the parish rates.

 

However benevolent the intentions of the Magistrates, the scheme was unsatisfactory. On the one hand it allowed unscrupulous employers to profit from high commodity prices while keeping wages low in the knowledge that their employees would be supported from the rates - which they too paid, of course, but only their share - and provided a positive disincentive for fairer employers to pay good wages in the knowledge that they were also paying, through the rates, to make up for the poor wages paid by others. On the other hand, it was said, it would encourage the labouring classes to breed and there was certainly an increase in population of 50% between 1802 and 1831. The availability of cheap labour, courtesy of the Speenhamland subsidy, also served to stifle innovation and mechanisation in agriculture.

 

For those farmers who had sufficient acreage to make it necessary to employ workers but not sufficient to be able to make big profits this would clearly have provided a good reason to give up farming and do something else or to become employees themselves. Despite the problems with the scheme it remained in force until 1834.