Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England

It is rare that a publisher's blurb undervalues a book, but this is one such occasion. This is much more than a "rounded synthesis of recent scholarship". For the first time we have an integrated study of the multifaceted subject of the poor and the government in this period. It is enriched by a wealth of telling detail from the author's own researches, which are used to instil a note of caution with regard to his general conclusions as well as to illustrate them. England by the end of the seventeenth century was seen by both foreign and home commentators as a most generous provider for the poor. Unlike other countries, England combined a uniform and nationwide system of poor relief, founded on the 1598 and 1601 Poor Laws, with a locally-executed practice based on the parish that resulted in wide variations in the rates and amounts of relief given and allowed the overseers of the poor discretion as to who was worthy of relief. The system preserved the desire for local autonomy and initiative whilst satisfying central government's need to lay down national policies (an analogous example is that of the locally-based enforcement of the law in this period), and it was not until the nineteenth century, when national priorities were undermining local independence, that the Poor Laws were replaced. Behind such a bare outline lies a complex story. Slack shows how a mixture of charitable funding and, especially in the later sixteenth century, fear of the poor helped to shape attitudes and legislation. The mix of Christian charity and punitive intention towards the impotent poor and the able-bodied vagabond respectively (the two categories were often ill-defined, as is illustrated by the debate as to whether a person fell into poverty through his or her own fault or through misfortune or large-scale economic factors), also lay behind the founding of hospitals and houses of correction. However, as Slack points out, these schemes for the improvement of the manners of the poor usually came to nothing, being the brain-children of godly magistrates then overtaken by political events, or who, later in the period, were faced with the entrenched hostility of parish and municipal officers, which saw off the large-scale and centralizing corporations for the poor. In the last forty years of the seventeenth century, attempts were made to remedy a weakness of the poor relief system-the lack of provision of …