We now think of a state pension, child benefits and income support as our right when we are in need, and as a central system which underpins the whole fabric of society, but until the early 20th century each ecclesiastical parish was responsible for its own poor or sick inhabitants. Datchet's parish drop-in-centre, The Bridge, was the village poorhouse since at least the 1540s, though it has been rebuilt on the same site several times since then. In the 1530s Parliament decreed that the churchwardens (and later 'overseers of the poor') should organise 'relief' for their own paupers, using the church parishes as units of local government - as they continued to be right up to the establishment of civil parishes in 1894.

The evidence for The Bridge being a poorhouse comes from a 1548 survey of the Manor of Datchet which listed all the owners of houses and land to assess the value due from rents. The Church-wardens of Datchet owned 'one tenement called Mathewes at rent 12d'. (This house can be identified as being next door to the present Royal Stag because that building was described in the same survey as 'next to the poor'.) Several branches of the Mathewe family had lived in Datchet for a long time and a John Mathewe probably rebuilt Church Cottage in around 1500, much as we see it today. It is quite likely that one of the family had given a small cottage to the church to use as an almshouse, though it was never properly established and endowed as almshouses so often are in other places.

No more is known of 'Mathewes' until 1727 when the deeds and minutes of the Barker Bridge House Trust show that, for some obscure reason, that body had become responsible for the repair and rebuilding of the 'Parish Almshouse'. But it would still have been the churchwardens and overseers who decided who had a place there and arranged payment for their upkeep. Funds were raised by a tax on local inhabitants, the Poor Rate, which was set by a church vestry meeting and supervised by the Justices of the Peace. The 'vestry' was not just a room in the church used for putting on vestments, but a meeting of the vicar, churchwardens, overseers and principal inhabitants to conduct the secular business of the parish, quite separately from any religious matters. Unfortunately, Datchet's vestry minutes only survive from 1806 so there is no early evidence for how the almshouse was run and who were its occupants. However, the system at that time was much more benevolent than the punitive Victorian workhouses; those who could not help themselves were helped, either in their own houses or in an almshouse, as long as they genuinely belonged to that parish. Those who became dependant could only claim relief from the parish of their 'settlement', and a great deal of time and trouble was taken in returning the destitute across the country to their original parishes or ejecting them before they became a charge on the rates. Vagrant women who were pregnant were often hounded over parish boundaries to avoid another baby becoming the parish's liability.

In 1820 the old almshouse was let out as a shop, with the rent going towards the Poor Rate, and as such it passed to the civil Parish Council in 1894. It became redundant because a much bigger workhouse had been built away from the village centre at the far eastern end of the parish, at the end of our modern Holmlea Road. In the 1780s and 90s the problems of poverty and vagrancy among the able-bodied had become much worse and parishes all over the country were having to provide for greater numbers than ever before. While we do not know when the workhouse was built or what it looked like, there is a lot of other evidence from the detailed vestry minutes which still exist in the Buckinghamshire Record Office, as well as 19^th century maps showing exactly where it was.

Workhouses of this period were intended to provide employment for those who were capable, and the running of the establishment was leased out to a middleman who would make what profit he could while receiving an allowance from the parish for feeding and clothing each inmate. In 1795 an agreement was drawn up between the overseers and Stephen Riddington, who intended to carry out a variety of textile manufacturing using pauper labour, though such schemes as this were seldom successful. The overseers stipulted that for dinner the inmates should have 'good, sweet, sound and wholesome roast or boiled beef or mutton, with good wheaten bread and small ale without stint', and that they should sit together at meals, eating at their own discretion till satisfied. The children were to be taught to read and say their catechism and to say grace before and after meals. A man was also employed 'to take care that the children behave themselves quiet in the Church every Sunday'. It is doubtful whether the reality of life for the paupers actually met these good intentions, but those overseeing their support were local people who knew them and there seems to have been genuine concern for their welfare. One of the jobs which was still being carried out at the workhouse in 1825 was cutting teazles on the Common (where they still grow in abundance) for commercial use in combing the surface of woollen cloth. The land around the workhouse was used to grow food, and an 1820s directive requires all manure produced in the workhouse to be used on its own gardens.

Then in 1834 a new Poor Law drastically changed the relatively informal single parish system. All parishes were to be grouped in a 'Union', pooling the resources from their poor rates and building a new Union Workhouse to a standard plan. These are the workhouses familiar from Victorian literature, where even elderly couples were separated and the regime was deliberately harsh in an attempt to deter people from accepting poor relief. Datchet was part of the Eton Union and the workhouse still exists as Upton Hospital on the way to Slough. Its design was altered during building, lowering the profile of its roof so that it would not be visible from Windsor Castle. The workhouse of the Windsor Union was in Crimp Hill, Old Windsor; this also also became a hospital, an outpost of King Edward VII's, until its recent conversion into private luxury housing. (The workhouse is also the reason for the name of the nearby 'Union Inn' pub.)

Datchet's old workhouse building survived for some time after the new system took its place, with rooms rented out to the poorest tenants and with cottages built within its grounds to provide more housing for the growing population of labourers. By the late 19^th century a farmhouse occupied its site (later Talbot's Farm) but the memory survived for much longer in the name of Old Workhouse Road, changed to Holmlea Road in the 1930s. The history of the old almshouse had been forgotten until in 1994 the Parish Council decided to commemorate its centenary by restoring the building and leasing it to the village's Ecumenical Council of Churches. The first of the Parish Council's series of historical plaques was then installed on the front wall of 'The Bridge', recording the fact that there had been an almshouse on the site since Elizabethan times. Returning the building to community use has been a great success, and all the activities which take place there now are appropriate modern variations on its original charitable purpose.