If you were not granted a Settlement Certificate, one of two things could happen. You might be allowed to stay in the parish if your original parish ("parish of settlement") agreed to pay a fee, usually quarterly, to sustain you in your new parish. If not, you would receive a Removal Order, sometimes accompanied by a written pass to the parish of settlement showing the route to be taken. This would apply even within a city or town which consisted of more than one parish. Your parish of settlement was obliged to take you back.
Removal Orders would often take a person or a family back to a place of settlement miles across the country, sometimes to a parish they had only known briefly as a small child. It was not uncommon for a husband and wife to have their children taken from them, each being removed to separate scattered parishes. Children under seven were rarely removed to a different place from their natural parents as they would have had to gain a settlement of their own to be removed somewhere other than their father's place of settlement. Illegitimate babies and children could be removed away from their mothers in the 18th century if the child was not born in the mother's place of settlement (the settlement of illegitimate children was their place of birth) - but not always. Sometimes an agreement was made between the overseers of the child's place of settlement and the overseers of the parish where it was living so that it could be maintained by the former whilst living in the latter. Children whose mother had remarried a man with a different place of settlement from their father could be removed away from their mother as they would retain their father's settlement, but again agreements could be made between parishes as with illegitimate children above.
In 1662 an Act of Settlement was passed to define which parish had responsibility for a poor person. A child's birthplace was its place of settlement, unless of course its mother had a settlement certificate from somewhere else stating that the unborn child was included on the certificate. However from the age of 7 upwards the child could have been apprenticed and gained a settlement for itself. Also, the child could have obtained a settlement for itself by service by the time it was 16.
Typically, a legitimate child would take it's father's place of settlement, and an illegitimate child would be settled in its place of birth until:
After 1697, the poor were allowed to enter any parish in search of work, so long as they had a Settlement Certificate signed by the church wardens and overseers of their place of settlement and two magistrates guaranteeing to receive them back should they become chargeable.
No one was allowed to move from town to town without the appropriate documentation. If a person entered a parish in which he or she did not have official settlement, and seemed likely to become chargeable to the new parish, then an examination would be made by the justices (or parish overseers). From this examination on oath, the justices would determine if that person had the means to sustain himself and, if not, which was that person's parish of settlement. The results of the examination were documented in an Examination Paper, but few of these have survived. As a result of the examination the intruder would then either be allowed to stay, or would be removed by means of what was known as a Removal Order.
A married woman was normally settled with her husband (exceptions abound).
Complaints about someone had to be made by churchwardens and overseers within forty days before a magistrate. Settlement papers contain details of every event having a bearing on settlement, from cradle to present circumstances, age, parentage, birthplace, apprenticeship, employment, marriage, names, ages of children, etc. were all written down. They were kept by the parish (normally in the Parish Chest) as evidence of settlement someplace else