Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/760

 A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK poor, and needing the chastening influence of restraint and enforced industry ; many people, however, not least the poet Crabbe, regarded the innovation with horror and were in full sympathy with his denunciation ''*" of the ' Pauper palace, which they hate to see, . . . A prison with a milder name Which few inhabit without dread or shame.' Both points of view appear to have been justified to a certain extent by immediate consequences. An inquiry into the state of the workhouse at Melton in 1791 *" dis- closed fearful conditions of neglect and inhumanity, especially in the treat- ment of the sick. On the other hand the general report of the Suffolk workhouses appended to Arthur Young's treatise and published in 1793 (by which time Melton had a new governor) speaks of the improvement in morality and the superior good order noticeable in the incorporated as com- pared with the other districts, ' less of drivers riding on their waggons, tippling in alehouses, and smaller immoralities and improprieties ; the poor respectful and civil to their superiors, the children less prone to steal wood and turnips.' '" It is significant that the spinning (especially hemp-spinning for coarser textiles, which was more remunerative than yarn-spinning, being paid at the rate of dd. a day ^'^) was found to be the most productive employment for the workhouse inmates. An attempt to employ them in agriculture met with little result — a few ' let out for husbandry ' earned bd. a day by weeding."* The inmates of Oulton workhouse made nets for the Lowestoft herring fisheries, the merchants furnishing twine to be braided by the yard. The workhouses are described as clean and, airy, and, by implication, the cottage homes of the poor as filthy, airless, and slovenly ; the food, ' good brown bread,' cheese of the county, ' excellent small-beer home-brewed from the best malt,' "' was at least so far more plentiful than the ordinary diet of the class to wh'ch the inmates belonged that at Semer a large number of deaths occurred among them owing to too much meat having been allowed to those who came in after suffering extreme poverty."" Yet the death- rate in these first years owing to epidemics of ' putrid fever ' and smallpox was enormous ; in 178 1 130 inmates of the Bulcamp workhouse, where the average number of inmates was 203, died of a 'putrid fever,' which also carried off one-third of the inhabitants of Blythburgh.'" The administration of out-relief appears to have been so indiscriminate as to lead to abuses as great as those which existed under the old system.^*^ According to the evidence taken before the Poor Law Commission of 1 83 1, Suffolk, with a population by the last census (1821) of 270,542, had an average poor rate of js. lod. per head."' ^ ' Borough (ed. 1834), 287. "* Rep. of Com. of Enquiry, 791. jipp. to Gen. View, 86. "' Gen. View (1794), 50. *" App. to Gen. Fietc, 78. Ibid. 85. "» Ibid. 82. •" Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. "' Rep. Sets. 1831, Lords, viii, 248. 680