THE EARLY HISTORY
OF
ENGLISH POOR RELIEF
London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE.
Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay: E. SEYMOUR HALE.
EARLY HISTORY
OF
ENGLISH POOR RELIEF
BY
E. M. LEONARD,
FORMER STUDENT OF GIRTON COLLEGE.
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1900
[All Rights reserved.]
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
TO THE
REV. WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, D.D., LL.D.
FELLOW AND LECTURER IN TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MANY KINDNESSES
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
PREFACE.
The present account of the early history of English poor reliefis chiefly derived from the municipal records of Londonand Norwich and from the reports of the justices of the peacewhich are included amongst the state papers. Information onthe subject is also contained in the Privy Council Register,while some of the orders of both Privy Council and justices anda few of the overseers' accounts are to be found in the collectionsof the British Museum.
A fairly effectual system of relieving the destitute by publicauthority has had in England a continuous existence since theseventeenth century. Attempts to found such a system of poorrelief in the sixteenth century were common to most of thecountries of Western Europe, but the continued existence ofany organisation of the kind is peculiar to England.
Possibly this fact has an important influence on our nationalhistory. We are apt to consider the facts that we are a law-abidingpeople and that we have not suffered from violent revolutionsto be entirely due to the virtues of the national character andthe excellence of the British Constitution. But before theintroduction of our system of relieving the poor we were by nomeans so free from disorder. The poor laws themselves wereat least partly police measures, and, until they were successfullyadministered, the country was repeatedly disturbed by rebellionsand constantly plagued by vagrants. The connection betweenthe relief of the poor and orderly government in Englandappears fully during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, and it may be that our legal system of poor relief has[viii]ever since contributed to the absence of violent catastrophes inour national history.
But although the continuous existence of a system of publicpoor relief for nearly three centuries is peculiar to England, theEnglish organisation was at first only one of a series of similarsystems which began to arise during the sixteenth century inmost of the countries of Europe.