SPEENHAMLAND SYSTEM, a system of poor relief adopted by the Berkshire magistrates in 1795, by which the wages of labourers were supplemented from the poor-rates up to a certain level, an additional dole being permitted for each child. At a critical moment the Berkshire justices were forced to adopt a des perate remedy, but it was a pernicious plan, for it unfairly trans ferred the burden of wages from the employer to the rate-payer, it encouraged the farmers to pay inadequate wages, and degraded the labourer to the position of a pauper. The system lasted until the new Poor Law of 1834; it was never in force in Scotland or the north of England.
SPEKE, HUGH (1656–c. 1724), English writer and agitator, was a son of George Speke (d. 169o) of White Lackington, Somerset. Educated at St. John's College, Oxford, Hugh Speke joined the Green Ribbon Club, and in 1683 he, was put in prison for asserting that Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, had been murdered by the friends of the duke of York. In prison Speke kept a
printing-press, and from this he issued the Address to all the English Protestants in the Present Army, a manifesto written by the Whig divine Samuel Johnson (1649-1703), urging the soldiers to mutiny. In 1687 he was released, and in 1688 he served James II. as a spy in the camp of William of Orange. In December of this year a document, calling upon the Protestants to disarm their Roman Catholic neighbours was freely circulated, and much damage was done to property in London before it was found that it was a forgery. Speke asserted his authorship in his Memoirs (1709), revised as The Secret History of the Happy Revolution in 1688 (1715). Speke died in obscurity before 1725.