An Early Tudor Poor Law

W 5 tHILE the secularization of poor relief was one of the outstanding achievements of the sixteenth century in most of Western Europe, England stood out because she developed machinery for administration and enforcement to which there was no parallel elsewhere. The basic problems were much the same everywhere: economic causes were producing unemployment and in consequence vagrancy, and traditional methods of relieving the needy were proving insufficient. Since the problem was a general one, the solutions put forward and adopted also had many points in common. The need to relieve the real poor, the desirability of putting the unemployed to work, insistence on organized collection of alms (whether voluntary or compulsory), in short, the responsibility of the lay power for the less fortunate of its subjects-all these appear in the legislation of continental towns like Augsburg or Rouen or Ypres, in the thought of reformers like Luther or Zwingli, in the schemes of theorists like John Major or Juan Luis Vives.1 This general and natural agreement makes it very difficult to trace the influence of one scheme on another, or even to speak with much confidence of influence being exercised. Like problems tended to produce like answers, and English thought often arrived independently at much the same ideas as those evolved on the Continent. In the end England produced the only really effective national system of poor relief-the great Elizabethan code of I597 and i6oi. It is generally agreed that nothing much was done until the reign of that queen, though acts were passed under the early Tudors. Some municipal authorities produced workable schemes in the first half of the sixteenth century, but the government took no serious action beyond repressing vagrancy by savage punishments.2 Severe censures have been passed on the statesmen of the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI for their apparent failure to realize that a man might be poor and workless through no fault of his own; as Professor Tawney has put it: 'After three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the momentous admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely personal idleness.'3 The indignation behind this view deserves respect, even though it probably ignores the existence of the genuinely workshy whom temporary experience of the easier life of the roads taught the permanent advantages-such as they were-of vagrancy; that famous Elizabethan underworld of cozeners and coney-catchers was not entirely populated by the innocent victims of economic distress.4 Nor should it be forgotten that theorists and statesmen were aware from an early date of the part played in the creation of wandering bands of beggars by such phenomena as enclosure, depopulation, and industrial slumps. Legislation against these evils, however, proved ineffective, and relief measures were slow in coming

Economics · Political science · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice

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