The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief in England and Wales that developed out of the codification of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws in 1587–1598. The system continued until the modern welfare state emerged in the late 1940s.
George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, was a British statesman of the Georgian era. Due to his success in extending commerce in the Americas, he became known as the "father of the colonies". President of the Board of Trade from 1748 to 1761, he aided the foundation of Nova Scotia, 1749, the capital Halifax being named after him. When Canada was ceded to the King of Great Britain by the King of France, following the Treaty of Paris of 1763, he restricted its boundaries and renamed it "Province of Quebec".
In Britain and Ireland, a workhouse was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses. The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "we have erected wthn [sic] our borough a workhouse to set poorer people to work".
John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont was a British politician, political pamphleteer, and genealogist who served as First Lord of the Admiralty. Of Anglo-Irish background, he sat in both the Irish and British Parliaments. He was the father of the Regency Era Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.
The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising in 1830 by agricultural workers in southern and eastern England in protest of agricultural mechanisation and harsh working conditions. The riots began with the destruction of threshing machines in the Elham Valley area of East Kent in the summer of 1830 and by early December had spread through the whole of southern England and East Anglia. It was to be the largest movement of social unrest in 19th-century England.
Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Norris was a Royal Navy officer and Whig politician. After serving as a junior officer during the Nine Years' War and the Williamite War in Ireland, he was given command of a squadron sent to North America to protect British settlements on the banks of Hudson Bay in 1697. Although he developed a plan to recapture some territories in Newfoundland and Labrador taken by French forces the previous winter, he was prevented from implementing that plan when the local council overruled him.
Newcastle-under-Lyme is a constituency in northern Staffordshire created in 1354 and represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2024 by Adam Jogee of the Labour Party. It was the last UK constituency to be co-represented by a member of the Conservative Party when it was dual-member, before the 1885 general election which followed the Reform Act 1884 and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. In 1919 the local MP, Josiah Wedgwood, shifted his allegiance from the Liberal Party to the Labour Party and the seat elected the Labour candidate at each election for the next hundred years, a total of 29 elections in succession. Labour came close to losing the seat in 1969, 1986, 2015 and 2017, and eventually lost the seat in 2019.
Charles Ignatius Sancho was a British abolitionist, writer and composer. Born on a slave ship in the Atlantic, Sancho was sold into slavery in the Spanish colony of New Granada. After his parents died, Sancho's owner took the two-year-old orphan to Britain and gifted him to three sisters living in Greenwich, where he remained for eighteen years. Unable to bear being a servant to them, Sancho ran away to the Montagu House in Blackheath, London where John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu taught him how to read and encouraged Sancho's budding interest in literature. After spending some time as a butler in the household, Sancho left and started his own business as a shopkeeper, while also starting to write and publish various essays, plays and books.
A poor law union was a geographical territory, and early local government unit, in Great Britain and Ireland.
Black British people are a multi-ethnic group of British people of Sub-Saharan African or Afro-Caribbean descent. The term Black British developed in the 1950s, referring to the Black British West Indian people from the former Caribbean British colonies in the West Indies, sometimes referred to as the Windrush Generation, and Black British people descending from Africa.
Great Packington, historically known as Packington Magna, is a hamlet, civil parish and country park in the North Warwickshire district of Warwickshire, England. The parish of Meriden is to the south-east, and Little Packington to the west. At Great Packington is Packington estate, which includes Packington Hall, Packington Old Hall and the Greek revival style St James' Church.
Maldon is a constituency in Essex represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since its recreation in 2010 by Sir John Whittingdale, a Conservative.
Abingdon was a parliamentary constituency in England, represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of England until 1707, then of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1885. It elected one Member of Parliament (MP) from 1558 until 1983, making it one of the few English constituencies in the unreformed House of Commons to elect only one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election.
The 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election resulted in the election of Democrat Edwin Edwards to his fourth non-consecutive term as governor of Louisiana. The election received national and international attention due to the unexpectedly strong showing of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who had ties to other white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Incumbent Republican Governor Buddy Roemer, who had switched from the Democratic to Republican Party during his term, ran for re-election to a second term but was eliminated in the first round of voting.
Westminster was a parliamentary constituency in the Parliament of England to 1707, the Parliament of Great Britain 1707–1800 and the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801. It returned two members to 1885 and one thereafter.
The Andover workhouse scandal of the mid-1840s exposed serious defects in the administration of the English 'New Poor Law'. It led to significant changes in its central supervision and to increased parliamentary scrutiny. The scandal began with the revelation in August 1845 that inmates of the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, England were driven by hunger to eat the marrow and gristle from bones which they were to crush to make fertilizer. The inmates' rations set by the local Poor Law guardians were less than the subsistence diet decreed by the central Poor Law Commission (PLC), and the master of the workhouse was diverting some of the funds, or the rations, for private gain. The guardians were loath to lose the services of the master, despite this and despite allegations of the master's drunkenness on duty and sexual abuse of female inmates. The commission eventually exercised its power to order dismissal of the master, after ordering two enquiries by an assistant-commissioner subject to a conflict of interest; the conduct of the second led to more public inquiry and drew criticism.
Ilchester was a constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of England, then of the Parliament of Great Britain from 1707 to 1800 and of the Parliament of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1832. It was represented by two Members of Parliament until 1832. It was one of the most notoriously corrupt rotten boroughs.
Voter turnout in US elections is the total number of votes cast by the voting age population (VAP), or more recently, the voting eligible population (VEP), divided by the entire voting eligible population. It is usually displayed as a percentage, showing which percentage of eligible voters actually voted.
Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Oxford, formerly Elizabeth Trentham, was the second wife of the Elizabethan courtier and poet Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Lilly Maxwell or Lily Maxwell was a British suffragist who, in 1867, was the first woman known to have voted at a parliamentary contest since the 1832 Reform Act had limited the franchise to ‘male persons’. This resulted in an important test case at the Court of Common Pleas.
