Our archive has four small items on permanent loan which can take you straight back to the Food Banks of the nineteenth century, the dreaded workhouses. Two workhouses, the Williton and Dulverton Unions, served the many parishes of Exmoor with room to house 700 unfortunate paupers between them. Many more received a small weekly sum and an allowance of bread as ‘out-relief’.
We also have a microstudy on the two workhouses, ‘Rattle His Bones’ by Jack Hurley, published in 1974 by Victor Bonham-Carter and S.H. Burton’s Exmoor Press. From this, amongst much fascinating detail, we learn that Williton’s weekly allowance for “a person of 70 years and upwards, incapable of work but still moving about” was one shilling and six pence, plus one loaf. Overall, in 1847, bread consumption by workhouse and out-relief paupers was 2,260 loaves a week in the area served by the Williton Union. In 1860 Dulverton Board of Workhouse Guardians tried to replace the bread tokens with a five pence cash sum, when the cost of a quartern (two pound) loaf was six and a half pence! Local protests forced an increase to six pence.
Dulverton Workhouse, originally named Exmoor House, was opened in 1855 and had its last permanent residents in 1930. After the second world war, the building was used for council offices until the Exmoor National Park Authority adopted it as their headquarters. We are grateful to the ENPA for the loan of these most evocative items.
