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This chapter explores how quickly formal welfare provision spread across rural England in the years after the Elizabethan statutes. It then discusses the mechanics of collection in those parishes where assessments, rates, and pensions were introduced, before moving on to investigate the nature and scale of parish provision, and especially the balance between cash pensions, payments in kind, and occasional relief. The chapter also considers the possibility that there was a distinctive ecology of poor relief, in which the nature of the problem of poverty, and of the responses adopted to ameliorate it, varied across different social and economic settings.

This chapter analyses the micro-politics at play in the assessment and disbursement of parish relief. In doing so, it both emphasizes the complexity and ambiguity of the relationships between the various participants — the labouring poor, the parish officers, the county magistrates, the itinerant judiciary — in the ‘welfare process’, and argues that this process involved protracted and often antagonistic negotiations between and among the sectional interests who had a stake in the allocation of resources in the local community. It also critiques two of the most popular paradigms in the current historiography of social welfare, which has recently become polarized between emphases on entitlement on the one hand and subordination on the other.

This chapter discusses the historiography of informal relief strategies in the early modern period, emphasizing the significant impact on the scholarship of Keith Thomas' allusion to the ‘tradition of mutual help’ and, perhaps more significantly, of Olwen Hufton's concept of the ‘economy of makeshifts’, first developed in her seminal The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1974). It discusses the relative and enduring significance of four specific aspects of informal relief in the parishes of rural England: the exploitation of common right; the support of kin; the kindness of neighbours; and the resort to ‘crimes of necessity’. It suggests that even though parish relief eventually did spread across rural England during the course of the early modern period, there was no inevitable transition from informal to formal care. Even at the end of the period, those who received parish pensions supplemented their collection with a wide range of income generated from other sources, especially the informal and quasi-formal networks of charity.

This chapter explores the thresholds of belonging set by ratepayers and parish officers in deciding how eligibility for relief should be decided, and details the techniques they deployed in ridding themselves of prospective burdens. It emphasizes the tensions between the Elizabethan poor laws and the 1589 statute regulating the accommodation of inmates and lodgers; discusses the significance of marriage as a process through which poor strangers might be identified and excluded; and illustrates the variables that might explain why some poor migrants were assimilated to, and others marginalized from, the community of the parish.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of Paul Slack's Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. The account of poverty in this book is then compared to Slack's contribution. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

Looking at the experience of parish relief shared by a tiny minority shows only a small fragment of the changing nature of poor relief as a whole, and the majority of those who were in need moved at the margins of a system in which notions of entitlement were both under-developed and contested. In reconstructing the workings of that system, the evidence presented in this book provides an invaluable historical perspective for debates about the rights and obligations of the poor in 21st-century society, where the piecemeal dismantling of the welfare state implies that there is likely to be, once again, no right to relief from cradle to grave.

This chapter outlines the army’s anti-marriage policy, which evolved to constitute a tacit acceptance of marriage but fairly strict enforcement of the numbers of wives allowed to travel ‘on the strength’. Increased supply networks and Enlightenment femininity meant that camp-following wives were less appropriate to Europe’s armies. Subaltern officers and common soldiers were now discouraged from marrying, yet the policy suffered assaults throughout the period from parish ratepayers, philanthropists, regimental officers, and the husbands and wives themselves. Parish relief evolved to constitute a separation allowance for common soldiers’ wives, and a pension scheme emerged for officers’ widows early in the century. Demands for compensation were buttressed by wives’ own sense of performing a duty to the state by supporting husbands’ service from home.