June 9 - The Workhouse at Cleobury Mortimer

"Relief refused - the workhouse offered"

The workhouse in Cleobury Mortimer had been in use since around 1730, but it was not
until the changes in the Poor Laws in 1834 that it became home to as many as 80
people at any one time.

Up until then, parishioners who fell on hard times were helped to stay in their own homes, being given money, food, clothes, tools etc to allow them to do so. All that changed. By law conditions in the workhouse were to be such that the condition of a pauper in the workhouse would be less attractive than the condition of the poorest labourer outside the workhouse. No-one was forced to enter, yet some asked to be allowed. Decisions to offer the workhouse instead of relief often appear to be arbitrary.

How grim was it? How were paupers treated and what were the living conditions like? What were their stories? Extensive research into the experience of poverty in the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has given a detailed insight into the realities of life in the Cleobury Mortimer workhouse.

About the speaker

Robert Hodge is chairman of the local Cleobury Mortimer & District History Society and is currently researching for a PhD on the experience of poverty in the area in the 18C and 19C.

The Cleobury Mortimer Lectures 2016 are in aid of the St Mary's Youth Project