Term : The Poor Law Township
The Poor Law Township, to use Winchester's term (1978), is the form of township community most familiar today through in the works such as the Northumberland County History and Hodgson's History of Northumberland, where, along with the parish, it provides the framework for the historical narrative of individual localities.
The boundaries of these territorial communities were mapped by the 1st edition Ordnance Survey in the mid-19th century and they have generally been presumed to have had a long and largely uninterrupted history stretching back in most cases to the townships of the medieval period. They are conveniently depicted on the maps which front of each volume of the Northumberland County History, from which figure 3 in each of the individual village reports is derived. A more detailed record of each township territory is provided by their respective tithe and enclosure maps and other historic maps catalogued and reproduced in the village reports.
The assumption that the medieval administrative vill was the direct ancestor of the post-medieval poor law township, and hence of the modern civil parish, was a reasonable one since functionally they are somewhat similar, representing the most basic level of civil administration. However the actual line of descent is much more complex.
The administration of poor relief was originally established at parochial rather than township level, with the requirement of the Elizabethan Poor Law Act of 1601 that overseers for the poor be appointed in every ecclesiastical parish in England (Statutes 43 Eliz. I c.2; cf. Winchester 1978, 56).
Following pressure in parliament to permit the subdivision of the huge ecclesiastical parishes in the northern counties into smaller, more convenient units, the 1662 Poor Law Act allowed 'every Township or Village' in northern England to become a unit for poor-rate assessment and collection with their own overseers (Statutes 14 Charles II c.12, s.21; cf. Winchester 1987, 27).
Winchester has argued, on the basis of the arrangements he documented in the Copeland district of west Cumbria that it was the territorial townships rather than the administrative vills, which were most frequently adopted to serve as the new poor law townships. However in Northumberland north of the Coquet there was in any case relatively little difference between the medieval territorial and administrative units, as noted above, and about three quarters of the townships identifiable in the 13th century may be equated with the poor law townships recorded by the Ordnance Survey. The disappearance or radical alteration of the remaining 25 percent was the result of settlement abandonment or colonisation during the late medieval period and estate reorganisation in the post-medieval period (Dixon 1985, I, 79-84).
The upland dales south of the Coquet were a very different matter. Redesdale and North Tynedale fell within the vast parishes of Elsdon and Simonburn respectively, the latter with a dependent chapelry at Bellingham which itself embraced all of upper North Tynedale. In Redesdale, six large 'wards' or townships are found, namely Elsdon, Otterburn, Woodside, Rochester, Troughen and Monkridge, plus the small extra-parochial township of Ramshope (Hodgson 1827, 82-3).
The wards were almost certainly created in response to the 1662 act and presumably represent subdivision of the parish to facilitate the administration of poor relief. There is no indication that they existed at an earlier date. They are not recorded in the 1604 border survey, which instead lists a great number of 'places' or 'parts of the manor' within the constituent parishes of the Manor of Harbottle. These places were in most cases more than hamlets, groups of farms or individual farmsteads, the kind of small early territorial township found in upland areas.
The twelve townships of upper North Tynedale, described in the County History (NCH XV (1940), 234-80), were established in 1729 by Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, specifically to administer poor relief, each township being responsible for the maintenance of its own poor and setting a separate poor rate (Charlton 1987, 98-9). Some of these townships may have been based on earlier territorial units, but others have rather artificial names - West Tarset or Plashetts and Tynehead- indicative of institutions established by bureaucratic fiat.
It is from these 'poor law townships', however ancient or recent their origins, rather than the medieval administrative vill, that the modern civil parish is directly derived in northern England. The Local Government Act of 1889, which established the civil parish, specifically stated it was to be 'a place for which a separate poor rate is or can be made' (Statutes 52/53 Vict. c.63 sec. 5). Today's civil parishes, however, are generally somewhat larger than the preceding townships, in part as a result of more recent amalgamations.