SOME EARLY HISTORY OF POOR RELIEF IN ENGLAND
Most modern treatises upon the poor law confine themselves to the period about and subsequent to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and comparatively little attention has been paid of late to the earlier history of the subject. The later period is, undoubtedly, the most striking phase of our poor law history, and no one would wish to minimise its importance. Yet the Elizabethan poor law had been in operation for some 230 years previous to that time, and the record of those years is quite as instructive to students as that of the years which succeed them. It is true that few early figures or statistics have been preserved, but there is abundant contemporary evidence to show that the main problem was the same in the earlier stages as in the later.
In England it dates from the decay of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf, when, as Professor Henderson of Chicago says, "the liberated labourer became free to be a pauper" ("Modern Methods of Charity," p. x.). In the Middle Ages undoubtedly pauperism was largely fostered by the abbeys, "dispensing," says Fuller, "mistaken charity, promiscuously entertaining some who did not need it and many who did not desire it: yea! these abbeys did but support the poor whom they themselves
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