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Strikers and the Right to Poor Relief in Late Victorian Britain: The Making of the Merthyr Tydfil Judgment of 1900

This article is a contribution to the on-going debate about the rights of the poor to relief under the terms of the New Poor Law. It focuses on the 'leading‘ case of the Attorney General v. the Merthyr guardians (1899 and 1900) and argues that hitherto historians have profoundly misunderstood the nature of the case. It was not a 'clarification‘ of the legal position of strikers under the poor law; on the contrary, it was a significant departure from the widely held view that (even) strikers had a right to poor relief if they were destitute.