Bricks, Brickmaking, and the Economies of the Old Poor Law: Staffordshire 1750–1834

ABSTRACT This article considers the place of brickmaking as an activity supported or promoted by parish poor relief. Parochial work schemes were typically founded on agricultural work, textile manufacturing, or unskilled tasks like oakum picking, yet the manual exertion was necessarily required for making bricks prior to mechanization attracted some parishes to experiment with this form of hard and deterrent labour. Brick production did not take place in a vacuum, however, ensuring that the consequences of a parish commissioning or making bricks could be felt across the community which supplied raw materials or services, ensuring that the process was not solely a check on indolent poverty. Close reading of overseers’ vouchers, the receipts which sometimes survive attesting to the detail of parish payments, show the significance of brick in parish economies for the paupers, parish officers, parish suppliers, and wider communities.


Introduction
As for laborious work I could not stand -certainly that would have to be proved as for a Brick Bank will not do unless something easy I am Young to be sure but every one as not got the same constitution. 1e author of this pauper letter, Samuel Parker, wrote in anger from Kidderminster (Worcestershire) in 1833 to protest at his parish of settlement's refusal to grant him relief at a distance.His home parish of St Mary's Uttoxeter (Staffordshire) had embarked on an experiment for setting the workhouse poor to work by employing the able-bodied in brick manufacture -hence Parker's otherwise gnomic reference to a Brick Bank.Presumably a parish reply to one of his earlier letters, now lost, urged him to return home and work in exchange for relief.If the overseers of Uttoxeter were making a strategic offer of the workhouse as a form of deterrence, their policy worked.Parker suffered different forms of distress from destitution, which his letters describe in painful detail: but he did not go 'home'.This article considers the deployment of poor-law sponsored labour in the context of the wider

Economic Histories of the Old Poor Law
The economic history of the Old Poor Law has traditionally had a very narrow remit in line with preoccupations around profit and the implications of parish policy for the labour market.George Boyer, for example, considered the economic rationale for the development and continuation of outdoor relief for able-bodied men in lieu of wages. 3He concludes that such out-relief did not cause dependency but evolved as a response to farmers' need for seasonal labour so placing the contemporary emphasis firmly on the priorities and finances of ratepayerproducers.It was a more efficient and attractive option for farmers than either full contracts for employment or the use of migrant labour (owing to the risk of recruiting people who might not have been persuaded to leave when work dried up).Also, it is possible to view this sort of outrelief as a replacement for declining cottage industry, comprising a response to long-term change and not a short-term expedient for the 1790s.Farmers were subsidized by the nonlabour-employing ratepayers, thus making out-relief a cost-minimizing strategy for farmers at the same time that it became a resented feature of relief for ratepayers who did not have farming interests at heart.Carl Griffin, in contrast, has directed attention towards the unemployed poor, and poor relief to secure and enforce occupation for those with no prospect of work, or at least insufficient work. 4He considers parochial employment via the scattered establishment of parish farms in the south and east of England.He judges that agricultural work overseen by parishes comprised a partial solution to the longstanding problem of supplying relief in exchange for labour, traditionally (in the older literature at least) chiefly confined to activity within the walls of a workhouse.The farm offered a functional work scheme for some parishes but not all, since he finds parishes which swiftly abandoned farm projects or gave only short-lived evidence of their use.The farm was as much a moral as an economic establishment, being preferable to setting adult men to work on the roads (with its attendant evils -the risk to the pauper of idleness and further degradation). 5orkhouse labour as a specific variant on such make-work schemes has traditionally been regarded in economic terms as a failure of intent.The seventeenth-century narrative that prompted the first large-scale workhouses, founded individually by Act of Parliament, had been beguiled by the prospect of setting the poor to work so efficiently that the poor rates could be drastically reduced or cancelled.This was never the outcome of workhouse employment, with the result that early histories regarded such experiments with haughty hindsight: At workhouse after workhouse the various manufactures that were tried had eventually to be given up, owing to the impossibility of securing either honest management or continuous industry, either economical purchase of the raw materials or the full market price for the commodities produced. 6e piecemeal and generic nature of such evidence as typically survives concerning workhouse work has meant that historians (including the present author, until now) have struggled to escape this anachronistic strait jacket. 7orkhouse schemes can also be interpreted in the light of human capital formation. 8esearch in development by Susannah Ottaway re-asserts the labour focus of the workhouse on the grounds of both legal and philosophical drivers.She examines the work of children and adolescents in East Anglian institutions as foundational for the individuals' future economic prospects at the same time that it met social expectations for young paupers' 'improvement'. 9he work itself -textile production -was less significant than the time discipline, and acclimatization to supervision that enabled parishes to send workhouse youngsters to viable placements or apprenticeships.
From the perspective of the paupers involved there was the scope for parish labour to consolidate, or undermine, their 'working identity'. 10A measure of coercion in the matter of work will have been perceived differently depending on the person's life-cycle stage and physical capacity, as Samuel Parker's letter above implies, but the capacity of pauper letters to refine our understanding on this point has not yet been fully assessed. 11Poor workers also secured an immediate if scanty reward for their efforts.Work beyond the workhouse secured a bare income.Even work inside the house could yield a cash gain in the form of encouragement money, usually calculated by time or materials worked, or as a proportion of income.Adults in a workhouse were customarily given two pence in each shilling earned. 12There is no extant research to suggest how these earnings were spent, but workhouse residence would have ensured that it typically went back into the local economy.
Paupers, and the parochial ideologies that shaped their experience of relief, were not the only significant participants in the management of poor relief: parish officers held vested interests that were potentially reflected in either income supplements, work schemes, or other modes of dispersing ratepayers' money.Robert Dryburgh considers self-interest as a significant force for overseers under the Old Poor Law and finds that by prioritizing paying paupers' rent in Bolton, overseers channelled income to property owners who were their fellow vestrymen, relatives, or friends while technically avoiding personal profit. 13The town continued to pay rents into the 1840s as a cheaper alternative to indoor relief, and one which happened to unite humanity and economy with interest.Until very recently, only Dryburgh has been directly concerned with suppliers and officials rather than the impact of welfare schemes on the poor before 1834.Under the New Poor Law, though, Doug Brown found that one of the few ways in which Guardians could exercise autonomy from central New Poor Law authority was in the matter of suppliers. 14He characterized the deals brokered for workhouse supply as being not merely neutral or indeed solely material transactions, but also carrying a moral component.Guardians were not obliged to accept the lowest tender for goods and services, with the result that their choices prioritized Union/trader relationships over an exclusive focus on efficiency or economy.Brown construed suppliers as sitting at the intersection between the poor-law 'world' and those in the local and regional economy.
Recent research on supply networks for the pre-1834 poor law, specifically since Dryburgh, derives largely from the AHRC-funded project 'Small Bills and Petty Finance'. 15This work uses overseers' vouchers, the receipts retained by parishes to prove payment for goods and services, to map the personal and geographical relationships between suppliers, officers, ratepayers and paupers.Articles by Peter Collinge chart, respectively, parishes making choices between grocers with a focus on female-lead businesses, and the relationship between vegetables grown in workhouse gardens and their context in the market for seeds and plants. 16The latter regards the garden as a site of both production and adherence to statutory intentions for workhouses, where outside space was used to set paupers to work.Collinge posits the supply of workhouse consumables as partly reflective of parish desires to shore up local businesses.Vestries spent money within the parish, sometimes to reward former or future parish officers, and sometimes to benefit businesses that needed reliable customers delivering predictable cashflow.
A fully holistic approach to the history of workhouses specifically has been advocated very recently by Myungsu Kang. 17His 'ecologies' of the poor law integrate multiple socio-economic factors that need to be considered when accounting for the decision to open a workhouse or to manage it as either a parish-run or a farmed-out establishment.He demonstrates the significance of transport infrastructure and agricultural zones for these decisions. 18his article picks up these historiographical trends around enforcement of pauper labour, the economic integration of relief within local communities, and the methodological exploitation of data in overseers' vouchers via a focus on workhouse durables, specifically the bricks used to build or augment institutions.Augmentation might involve an extension to premises but could also entail the enlargement of a workhouse's purpose as an employer of surplus labour.The analysis that follows is not interested in the success of employment schemes from either parish or producer/ratepayer perspectives in terms of policing labourers' morality, enterprise longevity or net profit, but rather in the complex relationship that could exist between parish resources, personnel, paupers' application to work and the consequences of that work for local businesses.The process of commissioning, making, and using bricks held implications for all concerned.

Brickmaking and Brick-Makers Before Mechanisation
Brickmaking was a seasonal process, whereby clay was dug in autumn, weathered over winter under mats or straw, tempered in spring, and then fired. 19Firing took place from the warmer weather of spring, approximately March-May, until the onset of autumn which might have been delayed until November, although traditional firing contracts typically ended on 29 September.This made the summer the busiest quarter for brickmakers and an ideal counterpart to an occupational portfolio where other activities were concentrated in the winter.Brickmaking April to September might be paired with maltmaking October to March for an annual cycle of labouring productivity.Bricks were fired either in temporary clamps or permanent kilns.The former were more flexible since they could be used just once for a specific project, but the results were highly variable as the heating and cooling processes were difficult to control.This could result in significant wastage if bricks were over or under fired.Permanent kilns were an investment in both land and infrastructure but ensured a consistent quality of brick as firing temperatures were easier to regulate.Kilns also permitted diversification into alternative products that required more careful manufacture such as tiles and ceramic pipes.Mechanization of brickmaking was introduced from around 1841, involving wire-cutting machinery to standardize brick sizes. 21he price of bricks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended on the quality of the product 'there being ten or a dozen different kinds of Bricks and Tiles' in the mid-eighteenth century, and on other factors such as the availability of fuel and its transport costs. 22In his reports to Parliament about poor-law institutions in 1776, Thomas Gilbert's data coincidentally included scattered details about the cost of brick purchases to build workhouses.In Bristol, the cost had proved comparatively low at eleven shillings and six pence per thousand bricks, whereas the cost in Reading's St Lawrence parish had been more than twice this price, at twenty-four shillings per thousand. 23 tax was levied on brick and tile production from 1784, initially demanding payment of two shillings and six pence for every thousand items fired (with exceptions for tiles used in drainage), generating data on the quantities of products taxed. 24A snapshot of brick and tile production in England for the period 5 January 1832 to the same date in 1833, (Figure 1), demonstrates the distribution of manufacture across the provinces.The returns were given for separate excise collection points, so it is necessary to conflate some of the totals to illustrate the situation in different counties.Devon, for example, in addition to being a large county, was a more significant producer of bricks than Cornwall such that there was only one collection for the latter county but three for the former (at Barnstaple, Exeter, and Plymouth).If the figures are grouped to reflect the county locations of excise collection centres, the prominence of a handful of counties becomes clear. 25any counties had one or more brickfields, and a majority could claim to make at least 20 million bricks or tiles in a year.Cheshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire all produced well over 50 and nearer 60 million pieces of brick or tile.Lancashire led the field with 130 million.The position of Staffordshire in this roster of counties is distinctive, however, because it was both the second largest producer of bricks and the single most prominent county of origin for tiles.The fact that the county was home to the Potteries district has dominated the Staffordshire's economic history: its role in the output of functional and decorative tiles (as opposed to tableware and porcelain) has implications for our understanding of the employment experiences of its resident unskilled labourers 26 Similarly, the impact of canal-building on urban economies in mid and south Staffordshire from the 1770s onwards was instrumental in both generating demand for bricks in the waterways' construction and in facilitating the transport of heavy freight like finished bricks to other locations. 27he prospects and reputations of brickmakers divided opinion in this period.Patrick Colquhoun regarded brickmaking as a prominent resource for the employment of males and was inclined to place a high value to the economy on the labour involved in building with brick, estimating a contribution of £700,000 per annum in addition to the cost of the raw clay. 28Other commentators of the early nineteenth century were moving in a different direction, however, in their perceptions of brickmakers as a problematic human resource.A Parliamentary inquiry into mendicity and vagrancy in London, for example, identified the village of Haggerston as inhabited by 'brickmakers of the very lowest class of society, and perhaps some of them of the very worst characters'. 29In 1834 brickmakers were vilified by the Poor Law Commissioners for their improvidence and their proverbial tendency to resort to the parish in winter.Earnings for brickmakers were high in the spring and summer months, as much as fifty shillings per week, and auxiliary roles for children in the manufacturing process ensured that family incomes could double this.The brickworkers' prosperity was allegedly short-lived owing to their tendency to 'squander their earnings in liquor' and avoid saving for leaner times. 30The pursuit of other occupations in the autumn and winter was presumably less consistent or less lucrative, because brickmakers were explicitly among the thriftless able-bodied poor that the Commissioners were seeking to reform.
The opportunities offered by brickmaking and brickyards could look very different from the perspective of the poor and labouring people working there or in their vicinity.There is little evidence about men's responses to brickyard employment, but 22 representatives of this 'muscular' pursuit who were interviewed in the late 1820s or early 1830s protested that 'neither rheumatism, nor any inflammatory complaint, is frequent among them'. 31There is good reason to infer that, as in other occupational contexts, men valued independent laborious employment on the grounds of its debt to their physique and its productive capacity and were valued by others accordingly.Joanne Begiato has argued that blacksmiths, for example, were lionized as 'idealised virile workers' in this period as a symbol of appropriate muscularity. 32Beyond the direct employees of brickyards, firing bricks created heat that could be used for parallel purposes, such as the chance to cook food free of the costs of fuel: Patrick Colquhoun referred to gangs of youths who deserted their parents to live a vagrant lifestyle, roasting stolen food in brickfields. 33Even so, physical proximity to brick clamps or kilns for warmth was hazardous.A man was burned to death in his sleep in 1789 while sheltering from the wind at the side of a kiln in Tottenham Court Road. 34Similarly, the brickfield held dangers for its employees, as where a 15-year-old lad had his leg broken by the fall of a cart loaded with bricks. 35In these ways, the physical solidity of bricks gives way to a looser mesh of meanings held by brickmaking for the national economy, for male workers, for the expression of social concern, and for pauper life-cycles.A canny set of vestry decisions could deploy bricks in the maintenance of more than one set of relationships or family economies.

Gnosall and Making Bricks for Parish Purposes: An Industrial and a Human Investment
In 1782, the parish of Gnosall in Staffordshire took the unexceptional decision to build a wall around its workhouse garden.The workhouse premises were augmented with a purchase of further, adjacent property in 1783, the year the wall was put up, so the work was presumably designed to offer coherence to the site and act as a barrier between the workhouse and the outside world. 36Whether this was chiefly owing to a desire to keep the paupers in or to keep light-fingered neighbours out of the workhouse's vegetable garden, is not clear.What the overseers' vouchers for Gnosall do reveal is that this decision necessitated the manufacture, purchase and transport of over 30,000 bricks.
This enterprise involved considerable organizational effort because, while the raw materials for making bricks were crude and available in bulk, the task of stocking, firing, and unloading a kiln was a specialized activity.The parish spread the workload over two key businesses.The first was the coal works owned by William Startin, operating out of Pains Lane in Lilleshall, Shropshire. 37The second was that of labourer John Humstone who was responsible for firing the bricks.The agreement brokered in February 1782 was that William Startin would 'Bear the clay, bring the coals and to find clods and straw for the covering of the said bricks & a strike of malt to burn them'.In other words, Startin pledged to supply all the necessary raw materials for making the bricks including malt (to make small beer for the men who minded the kiln -firing was thirsty work).That left John Humstone being paid solely 'to make and burn 30 Thousand of bricks for the use of Gnosall Parish at 6 shillings and six pence by the 1000', for a total remuneration for his own and others' labour of £9. 38The location of the clamp or kiln used to make the bricks is unknown; the implication of the overseers' bills, though, is that the raw materials were brought from Shropshire to Staffordshire, and that the bricks were fired near to the workhouse.In the event, the parish had to top-up the total number of bricks at its disposal by transporting 5000 additional bricks 33 Colquhoun, Treatise on Indigence, p. 258. 34 from Coton (part of Gnosall parish) and purchasing a further 400 from 'Dr Cluley's kiln'. 39here are two interesting features about the economics of this agreement for our understanding of parish priorities.First, Startin secured the contract to supply the necessary raw materials for the building project despite the eight-or nine-miles distance between his business and the parish of Gnosall.This signalled a lucrative arrangement for Startin.He transported over three tons of coal during 1782, and went on to supply red sand, lime, and other goods for the Gnosall workhouse in the summer of 1783 and beyond at a charge of £43 15s (finally paid in June 1784). 40To understand the implications of this contract, it is important to appreciate Startin's position within the parish.He was an inhabitant of Gnosall with a history of holding parish office: indeed, he has been described as 'a dominating personality in the Poor Law Administration of Gnosall' across the whole period 1779 to 1794. 41As a perpetual and salaried overseer (before the Act which permitted such salaries) he routinely paid bills to other parish suppliers. 42Therefore, he was a direct beneficiary of Gnosall's redistribution of poorrate income in the 1780s in a fashion which later was specifically forbidden by the act of 1815. 43It remains an open question among historians whether this practice of parish officers securing contracts constituted a form of embezzlement or was merely an aspect of the 'social geographies' required to ensure the running of parish poor relief. 44econd, the way in which John Humstone was remunerated is distinctive.He was paid at the rate of one guinea at a time, over a series of weeks in the summer of 1783.This may have been a customary way to pay a contractor to ensure that work was undertaken at a steady rate, but Humstone could have been paid all at once in arrears (in the same way as William Startin), when all of the work had been completed satisfactorily.This payment structure suggests, instead, that Humstone was himself poor and that regular payment for work was essential to his own family economy.I have argued elsewhere that poor relief could be distributed in ways which used salaries and contracts as a way to prevent other parishioners from falling into dependent poverty. 45While Humstone was not definitively and legally 'settled' in Gnosall -the surname is present locally -his manner of payment suggests his own marginal status was relevant (despite any skill he possessed in managing brick firing).

Brick and Tile as the Raw Materials of Pauper Labour
Enforced work was a feature of the at least two English institutions in the second half of the eighteenth century: the workhouse and the Bridewell or house of correction.The latter was a place of incarceration for the poor guilty of minor misdemeanours.The extent to which labour regimes were enforced in either of these settings is in doubt.
Workhouses might demand productive work of inmates, to offset the cost of their relief, and/or strenuous work to inculcate labour discipline with or without the prospect of a profit. 46Paupers were not necessarily compelled to complete either form of task, since youth, age, disability and sickness acted as buffers against the imposition of work of any kind. 47Furthermore, workhouse masters and matrons did not always have the necessary skills (industrial or personal) to oversee work-schemes successfully. 48he inmates of the Houses of correction were usually more likely to be able-bodied than their workhouse counterparts, in a context which was designed to levy hard labour as a form of punishment rather than as a means to fund relief. 49Work was technically demanded fairly consistently; the rate of literal performance of work was more of a problem, particularly by the second half of the eighteenth century. 50One option for supplying menial task-work was to offer brick-and tile-breaking for the purposes of making cement.Four of the Houses of Correction examined in Thomas Gilbert's Parliamentary report of 1776 confirmed the beating of bricks and tiles into dust for these purposes in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, while James Neild's survey of prisons in 1812 found the same practices in use within the House of Correction at Lynn (Norfolk). 51Hull reported the use of prisoners to 'pound tile sherds to mix in mortar' in 1777 and again in 1819. 52It seems that the solidity of bricks was attractive for levying exhausting work.
Brickmaking, conversely, was an attractive option for parishes which could afford the time, land, and other resources to demand work from its able-bodied poor.The Corporation of the Poor in Exeter deployed work in a parish brickfield as one of its relief options, apparently as an alternative to admission to the city's flagship workhouse. 53en who accepted the offer of brickyard work were paid five shillings per weekconsiderably lower than the 10 or 12 shillings available to agricultural labourers -in an experiment that the Corporation of the Poor regarded as a success on both practical and moral grounds.The men worked in exchange for money, but not so much money as to prevent the emergence of a profit: after paying the workers, the Corporation of the Poor retained a balance of nearly £200 in 1830-1 from the sale of gage and coping bricks, plus floor, gutter, drain, and sink tiles. 54he Poor Law Commissioners were impressed.They reported verbatim: This mode of employing the poor is worthy of attention; the simplicity of the various operations of digging, washing, sorting, and beating the clay, piling the unbaked bricks, piling the kiln, removing and carting the bricks when burnt, filling in and levelling the ground &c render it peculiarly adapted to such a purpose. 55ne of the appeals of a parish farm, vice Griffin, was the diversity of training it offered to poor youths of both sexes.Boys might hope to learn ploughing or animal husbandry skills, while girls could be taught milking or related dairying with the prospect of their finding work more readily or at an earlier age. 56Brickmaking was rather different, in that it offered a laborious occupation to robust adult men but probably not directly related skills (unless they were able to pick up on the techniques used to ensure successful firing).Boys were employed at brickworks in cutting earth for the (adult) moulder and carrying the clay once in the mould, yet formal training must have been meagre or non-existent as brickmakers 'never take apprentices'. 57In other words, parish brickmaking was a punitive approach to providing work for the male, able-bodied poor rather than conflating employment with youth training (in the manner of the Hundred Houses in Suffolk). 58It is not yet clear whether Exeter's practice in setting the poor to work making bricks became more widely known and emulated or whether the Corporation personnel were imitating another such scheme elsewhere.It is evident, however, that other poor-law administrations had reached the same conclusions about the utility of a brickyard for setting the poor to hard, menial work.

Uttoxeter Workhouse and the Pauper Brickworks
Uttoxeter is a small market town, located almost at the centre of England.By the early nineteenth century, it had access to goods brought from a distance via canal, because there was a wharf just outside the town by 1805, but in a period of unprecedented population growth elsewhere in the country, Uttoxeter's population remained relatively stable at 4600 to 4800 across 1821-41. 59It had formerly enjoyed a reputation as an important centre for the cheese trade, but this was waning. 60Uttoxeter's canal wharf was germane to both acquisition of coal for brick firing and the transport of finished bricks.
Brickmaking was a feature of the midlands economy local to Uttoxeter in the second half of the eighteenth century in east Staffordshire.Near Burton on Trent, for example, brick kilns were worked at both Winshill and Stapenhill. 61Brickfields were probably developed in Uttoxeter in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.In 1818, the Parsons and Bradshaw Directory of Staffordshire reported no brick-makers in the town yet land rich in clay and accompanying kilns were for sale near to Uttoxeter in 1807 and in 1834 there were five brick-makers listed in addition to the parish 'yard'. 62The parishrun brickworks had definitely been founded by the mid-eighteen-twenties, because the first parish-retained receipt for industrial materials, attesting to the purchase of wooden laths for the brickyard, is dated 25 March 1825.The latest equivalent receipt is that dated 31 October 1837, so just after the implementation of the new Poor Law Union at Uttoxeter, and consonant with the idea that the new workhouse was built on the foundations of the old.The Uttoxeter Union Workhouse is also presumed to have covered the workhouse's former one-and-a-half-acre garden, and the parish brickbank (Figure 2).
Brickmaking was not, however, typical of Staffordshire's workhouse employment practices.In the 1790s, Frederick Morton Eden found blanketing being made at Lichfield and hop sacks being manufactured at Wolverhampton. 63 Small-town and rural workhouses sent the workhouse poor out to work on local farms. 64Aside from these generic textile and agricultural pursuits, there was some tailoring of work schemes to local expertise.The poor of Stoke on Trent were unsurprisingly employed in earthenware in 1803, in other words in one of the main employment sectors available to local labourers in that decade and one where they might have some existing skills. 65None of these precedents foreshadow Uttoxeter's turn to brick.
The Uttoxeter parish brickyard was therefore distinctive in its inception, and furthermore came into operation at a particular moment in nineteenth-century economic history, beginning after the worst years of the post-1815 slump.Its founding was perhaps influenced by the sentiments (if not the practical facilities) behind the Poor Employment Act of 1817: few parishes availed themselves of the newly-available government loans for the generation of employment, but the earliest successful application was made to support mine-working in counties including Staffordshire. 66Uttoxeter's brickmaking project persisted until the town switched to post-1834 poor-law administration, but this was as a result of ideological and practical constraints, not the viability of the parish business. 67Brickmaking remained profitable in the town and the closure of the parish yard left a gap in the market.This was exploited by existing manufacturers and tempted others into the field.Uttoxeter grocers Porter and Keates acquired their own brickfield and quickly established a reputation for the quality of their output: see, for example, an agreement of 1851 brokered at Weston Coyney (13 miles north-west of Uttoxeter) specified the production of good draining pipes, 'of the same sort and as good as Porter & Keates of Uttoxeter or as good as the clay will make'. 68The town of Uttoxeter may therefore have exhibited the same sort of chronological experience of brickmaking as was seen at Norton in North Yorkshire. 69or the duration of the parish brickyard, clay was cut on site in huge quantities.The parish's investment in 'claygetting' involved the extraction of (for example) 1435 yards of clay at a cost for labour of £27 8s 9d, achieved in advance of the brickmaking season in 1832. 70If these were square yards, this amount of clay could make over a million bricks. 71The parish was making both bricks and tiles, requiring the use of at least one semi-permanent kiln for tile manufacture, even if coarser bricks were also made in clamps. 72The infrastructure, once established, was used multiple times in each year, and favourable weather extended the manufacturing period.In 1836, the kiln was fired for the twentieth time before 1 November. 73ttoxeter's parish government cleverly found two separate ways of registering income from the brickyard in annual summaries of the overseers' accounts.First, the parish met all costs of brick production, ensuring that sales of bricks and tiles were credited to each year's accounts.The brickyard grossed £270 and £420 in 1830-1 and 1831-2 (before the deduction of production costs comprising £248 and £318 respectively). 74The management of the yard was delegated to a brickmaker who was paid by results, in a similar way to that adopted by Gnosall for the remuneration of John Humstone over 40 years earlier. 75But this brickmaker then paid workhouse men for their labour out of his own receipts from the parish, meaning that earnings of the workhouse inmates at the brick yard delivered another modest line of income for the overseers.
So to borrow Carl Griffin's phraseology, what was the function of the brickyard in the polity of Uttoxeter's parish arrangements for poor relief? 76The town's workhouse was built in 1789 with inventories of 1794-5 listing a kitchen, pantry, dining room, workshop, brewhouse, lying-in room, and around 12 sleeping chambers. 77The building typically held 44 people in 1830-2, comprising a mixture of children, the sick and elderly, plus able-bodied adults. 78In these respects, the Uttoxeter workhouse was akin to similar institutions in many small English towns during the 1820s and 1830s.What made it more distinctive was the parish's adoption in 1800 of Thomas Gilbert's Act of 1782. 79This permitted parishes to run workhouses chiefly for the vulnerable poor rather than for the able-bodied. 80Circumstantial evidence including the terminology used for parish officers under Gilbert's Act such as 'visitor' and 'guardian' suggests that parish relief continued to be organized somewhat in accordance with the Act into the 1820s. 81Taken with the evidence for workhouse occupancy, though, it is clear that the Uttoxeter workhouse accommodated the able-bodied.Further, it diverged from the Gilbert's intentions by using the workhouse as a place to test the neediness of the adult poor and as a conduit to hard labour.The arduous nature of brickmaking renders it all-but inevitable that Uttoxeter's parish government adopted it as a means of deterring claims for relief. 82The tasks exacted from pauper labourers included stone-breaking, as well as cutting clay and moulding/lifting bricks. 83The rebarbative combination of workhouse residence and hard labour was consolidated by the offer of scanty reward money.This means that Uttoxeter's work experiment did not even have the same virtue for paupers as Griffin's farms or Exeter's brickyard, both of which offered modest wages to paupers remaining in their own homes.Coincidentally, and perhaps inevitably, it operated on a minute scale compared with Exeter, which employed around 80 people every day. 84etween 1800 and the 1820s, the parish ideology underpinning the government of the Uttoxeter workhouse clearly shifted, from a desire to provide for the impotent poor to a determination to punish the able-bodied.The latter sentiment remained uppermost into the 1830s, as the stringency of the reformed Poor Law of 1834 was met with vocal enthusiasm by the newly elected Guardians. 85Inhabitants simply did not take the trouble to ensure that the legal framework of relief continued to align with the manner of its delivery. 86ven so the deterrent properties of a brick yard, so out of place in a Gilbert parish, were only one aspect of its functioning.In order to manufacture bricks, the parish had to acquire the right range of tools, materials, and services (Figure 3).Goods include products like Archangel mats (otherwise known as Russian or bass mats, probably used in both the brickyard and the workhouse garden to protect either weathering bricks or young plants from frost), sand (to prevent adhesion in the brick mould but also for composition of brick) and other items. 87Suppliers included Porter and Keates: before the firm's own foray into brickmaking it was benefitting from orders for, among other things, 30 Archangel mats at ten pence per mat and six clay shovels. 88Other tradesmen drawn into the orbit of the parish brickyard included cooper Samuel Brassington, who mended buckets at the brickyard and blacksmith Sampson Bartram who sharpened tools there. 89n addition to exerting demand for industrial materials, the brickyard also functioned at the intersection between the parish, its officers, and its suppliers.John Dumolo, painter and glazier, had a bill owing to him by the parish for materials and labour in repairing the workhouse: rather than pay the full amount, the total was reduced in recognition of Dumolo's own debt to the parish brickyard as a customer for bricks. 90Churchwarden Michael Clewley initially failed to pay his small bill for bricks, a relatively minor entry in a long list of questionable financial behaviour on Clewley's part. 91In addition to these flows of money, objects, and skill, the Uttoxeter overseers' vouchers permit rare insight into the paupers who offered the human resource component of the parish brickyard.Eleven men are named, which aligns with the eight to twelve men counted as labourers in the annual summaries of the overseers' accounts 1830-1 and 1831-2. 92Presumably only a subset of the adult men in the workhouse were employed in the brickyard at any one time, meaning that if Samuel Parker (who wrote the letter at the start of this article) was reporting the state of his health accurately, it is not inevitable that he would have been found fit for brickmaking.The appearance of names also means that it is possible to compose potted biographies for some of the brickyard labourers, using parish records and later census entries to expand on the data yielded by overseers' vouchers.
George Fieldstaff was someone who received benefits under the Old Poor Law as a labourer who was employed for his strength.Unusually, for histories of the Old Poor Law, he spans the boundary of pauper-ratepayer.Even more surprising, Fieldstaff moved from being a brick-yard labourer to being a rate-paying parishioner and a parish supplier of accommodation.Work as a brick-maker represented an economic nadir from which Fieldstaff permanently recovered.George Fieldstead was baptized in 1796, but his census entries suggest that he was up to 10 years old at that time. 93The family's surname is given variously as Fieldstad and Fieldstid before finally settling on Fieldstaff, unequivocally relating to the same people.George married Elizabeth Bacon in 1820 and the couple had at least two children, but he became a widower in 1824. 94He then married widow Maria Brough on 17 January 1825, for which event neither spouse signed their name. 95After the death of his first wife Fieldstaff needed to turn to the parish for help and subsequently spent time as an inmate of the Uttoxeter workhouse.By 1829 he was being employed in the workhouse brickyard, presumably cutting clay or hefting bricks in the manner of an industrial labourer, for which he was paid at the comparatively generous rate of one shilling and two pence for three-quarters of a day. 96n July 1829 was prosecuted at the Staffordshire quarter sessions for refusing to work while in the house but was paid again after he had resumed work in September of the same year. 97t is not clear quite when George Fieldstaff emerged from the workhouse and became a lodging-house keeper, but by 1832, Uttoxeter's parish relief system was paying him repeatedly to accommodate itinerant people at his house on Smithy Lane. 98He charged three pence per night for an adult and one penny for a child.His social elevation was signalled in the parish accounts by the addition of 'Mr' before his name.In 1834, he was paying poor rate on the property as an occupier, based on a presumed rental value of £1 15s per year, albeit this value was downgraded for subsequent years to less than half this sum, namely 13s 4d. 99This level of rent value does not suggest that Fieldstaff offered his guests a high standard of accommodation.Lodgers from 1841 onwards were occasionally listed as women of independent means, but this might have been disingenuous or even sardonic as most of the occupants of the house were labourers or beggars.At the time of the 1861 census, George and Maria were housing eleven boarders aged from their teens to their seventies, born nearby (for example, in Ashbourne) or much further away (including lodgers from Ireland). 100ieldstaff exhibits an unusual career trajectory, and one that might risk being dismissed as an aberration.He may have possessed personal qualities that enabled him, uniquely, to gain a measure of economic independence after life in the workhouse.Yet this was not the case: it is not possible to trace all of the 11 men known to have worked at the Uttoxeter brickyard, but a further two of them also definitely left the workhouse and went on to provide lodgings for the poor.Thomas Cope and Samuel Neild were both paid for their giving houseroom to the migrant poor, and while Cope was not keeping a lodging house by the time of the 1841 census, Samuel Neild and his wife Mary listed seven lodgers in 1851. 101All three men lived in Smithy Lane.This begins to indicate that the brickyard was not the only scheme available for supplying remunerative work to the able-bodied poor in Uttoxeter.The parish shifted from trying to twist men's arms to undertake hard labour, at least in the cases of Fieldstaff, Cope, and Neild, to solving two problems with one strategy: set up a man and his wife in a house with more rooms than the couple needed and guarantee them an income from the parish as landlords for the houseless, mobile, or other poor not suited to workhouse admission.The men's enjoyment of independence in the years after their brickyard labours should not be taken as causal.It cannot be assumed, for example, that arduous work redeemed them from indolence, and that independence was their moral and economic reward.Rather the evidence of the Uttoxeter overseers' vouchers points to the reversible nature of workhouse work for the able-bodied poor.

Conclusion
An apparently simple decision to build a brick wall had consequences well beyond the workhouse grounds that were being enclosed.In Gnosall, this gave William Startin an opportunity to secure poor-rate income for his business, with the presumption of wages for his employees and profit for himself, and John Humstone a chance to fend off poverty for at least another season.In the case of more substantive projects, as Griffin observed, parishes innovated in poor-law policy with or without making national impact. 102The Uttoxeter workhouse brickyard was quietly inspired, albeit not uniquely so, by a desire to operate as a deterrent on claims for relief.As in Gnosall, the ramifications of this decision were much wider, however, and the Uttoxeter evidence demonstrates the power of workhouse enterprise to become a significant, persistent component in the local economy.In the process of setting adult men to work, the parish became a repeat customer for raw materials and tools, and a supplier of brick and tile making use of the canal infrastructure.The same evidence has also enabled us to see individuals' scope for transition from workhouse pauper to ratepayer and supplier status.In a broader sense, this focus on consumer durables has refined our understanding of workhouse employment as a component of the drive towards reform of the poor.If brickmaking was a contributor to muscular manliness and a net gain to the national economy, yet independent brickmakers were denigrated for their fecklessness, then sporadic parish experiments with brickyards demonstrated the enforcement of a specialized version of labour control by ratepayers (rather than by employers and businesses beyond the poor law).The Uttoxeter data offers evidence that the social and local-government context coerced workers into performing labour that they did not choose, albeit that this specific form of coercion was time-limited and not only driven by the prospect of securing a net profit.Disciplined former brickmakers, as much as the bricks themselves, were the aspirational building blocks of 1830s provincial England.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The Heath area of Uttoxeter parish in the Tithe Map of 1842 illustrating the proximity of the post-1834 Uttoxeter Union Workhouse to remaining brickyards, such as that worked by Jane Baxter at plot 576.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Concentration of resources around the Uttoxeter parish brickyard, 1825-1837. 20 I am indebted to Steve King for this reference.
[untitled], Oracle 4 November 1789, p. 3.35West Sussex Record Office, Par 400/37/123/33a, b, Hurstpierpoint overseers of the poor miscellaneous papers, correspondence concerning the son of William Buckman 1830.I am indebted to Steve King for this reference.