In Speenhamland near Newbury, Berkshire, local magistrates gathered at the Pelican Inn to create a system that would spread across southern England. This rural crossroads became the birthplace of a poor relief policy that calculated human survival by bread prices and child count. The quiet Berkshire countryside, which Romantics like Wordsworth celebrated for its "natural" childhood innocence, was actually where authorities decided that poor families needed to produce more children to avoid starvation. The very rural parishes Wordsworth wandered collecting tales of spiritually wise children were landscapes shaped by this policy—where having seven children meant seven bread allowances, and losing two to disease meant a family might keep counting them as "seven" to survive.
Photo found at: http://www.berkshiredownsvillages.co.uk/Speen.html