All Hallows on the Walls Parish, Exeter

Registers of baptisms, marriages, banns, burials, marriage licences, certificates of banns, and miscellaneous forms and circulars

<p>Note: Overseers of the poor records for the parish are not found in this collection. Rate books for 1608 and 1878-1900, and accounts for 1655-1656 can be found in the Exeter City Archives collection at Devon Record Office. For other documents relating to poor relief, including rates from 1691, see the Administrative History</p>

Increasing poverty in the late seventeenth century caused the breakdown in Exeter of the system of poor relief by the Overseers of the Poor, especially in the parishes with most paupers. An Act of Parliament of 1698 provided that representatives from each of the City parishes should form a Corporation of the Poor to administer the poor relief for the whole City. This body levied poor rates on the twenty parishes and on Bedford and Bradninch Precincts. Copies of some of these rates survive in the Exeter City Archives in Book 159b(ii) (1708-1732), Book 159b (1691-1733 and 1822) and Book 160 (1752-1756). Box Y5 contains a few seventeenth and eighteenth century rates for some parishes, and folder W7 includes a list of overseers for all parishes, 1747-50. Under the New Poor Law of 1834, the Corporation of the Poor continued to exercise the functions which elsewhere were assumed by the Boards of Guardians.