The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the
seventeenth century: the first century of welfare.
The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded
social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of
thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and
productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor,
but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional
study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on
thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers
themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world
of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a
vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor.
We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and
their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms
conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness
and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's
lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the
destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor
folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the
strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the
context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained
from their relatives and neighbours, andof their willingness to engage
with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they
and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human
picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time
when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted.
JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social
History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
