The First Century of Welfare

Detailed case-studies of poverty and poor relief outside towns are rare for seventeenth-century England. Detailed seventeenth-century case-studies of social history north of the Trent are rarer still. Consequently, Jonathan Healey’s research on poor-relief systems in Lancashire is doubly welcome, and represents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between regional economic and social systems, and relief legislation that aspired to be national in scope. Healey’s work also adds considerably to the social and economic history of early modern Lancashire, and sets this very well within the broader context of national economic and demographic cycles. Lancashire and other northern regions have suffered relative neglect by previous generations of demographic and poor-law historians because the surviving sources are often different in format to those subject to study in much of southern England. As Healey explains, legislators’ desire to tie settlement to parish rather than township after 1662 did not always work well in the north, where parishes might contain several distinct but dispersed townships. The same considerations often fragmented the administration of relief within the parish, so that township collectors had to administer their accounts separately, perhaps only reconciling them at an annual vestry meeting each Easter. This tended to militate against the creation of the neat books of overseers’ income and expenditure that survive with increasing frequency in many southern parishes after 1660. However, as Healey’s book makes abundantly clear, in this case absence of evidence definitely does not equal evidence of absence

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Economic history · Economics · Genealogy · Legislation · Neglect · Political science · Poor law · Poor relief · Poorhouse · Poverty · Settlement (finance · Sociology · Welfare · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity