Social Welfare in Pre-industrial England: The Old Poor Law Tradition

Social History in Perspective

by Paul A. Fideler

Paul A. Fideler crosses period boundaries to establish the five-centuries-long symbiosis between the pre-industrial market economy and parish-centered social welfare, institutionalized in the Elizabethan Poor Law. Utilizing recent work in economic, social, demographic, political, medical and welfare history and attending to developments in religion, ethics, and political thought, he highlights the unique assumptions, perceptions and repertoire of relief initiatives that sustained the Elizabethan social welfare tradition until its demise in the early decades of industrialization.

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2006

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes you find free books by little known historians from small liberal arts schools with no reviews about them anywhere. In this case, I happened to learn about the back and forth of public and private attempts at social welfare in England from the 13th to 19th century. Pretty good find, all things considered. My main takeaway is that blaming the poor vs helping the poor has been around for a long time, and that there is certainly something lost when we rely on mandatory contributions rather than private charity, in a way that is comparable to the way Marx would say modern industry alienates us from our labor. The author seems to make clear that the old localized parish system had to be actively destroyed in order for more centralized strategies to work.

It certainly makes one wonder about the differences between rural and urban life (or maybe between neighborhood vs city vs nation vs etc. life) in general. How does one act charitably in an urban setting when there is basically no community, just atomized individuals floating around? Where there is no community it doesn't really seem to matter how money gets to its destination. What matters are the results. Recipients would no longer need to be seen or connected with on a personal level. It also raises an interesting moral question: does exercising moral virtues like charity require community? Or, in other words, does individualism snuff out certain virtues, and in fact has it already partially done so? Clearly there needs to be some kind of balance, and the new types of community we create (like Goodreads, for example) have yet to show whether they can fill that gap.