Elizabethan Poor Law

Alarmed by rising levels of material hardship and resulting social unrest, the English propertied classes passed laws through their representatives in parliament that established a compulsory system of public poor relief in 1598 (amended in 1601) to assist and control the growing number of poor and vagrant individuals during the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I. Population growth, price increases, poor harvests, and a 60% decline in real wages in the previous decades meant that even those with jobs could no longer stay out of poverty. These “laboring poor” became as much a concern as the traditional “impotent poor” (widows, the aged, and the infirm) for the wealthy landed and urban classes and a far greater threat to social stability. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1598 (also known as the Old Poor Law) was the first ordinance of its kind in Europe and its administrative framework remained largely unchanged for 2 centuries.

With the state-sponsored closure of monasteries and the disbanding of religious guilds, fraternities, almshouses, and hospitals, private institutions that had provided aid to the poor disappeared in England between 1536 and 1549 just as economic dislocation became severe. Sixteenth-century England, like the rest of Europe, experienced a massive price inflation caused by rapid population growth, the debasement of its coinage, and the influx of American silver. Grain prices had risen by nearly 400% from 1490 to 1590 while money wages fell behind. Like earlier poor laws in 1531, 1536, 1572, and 1576, the Elizabethan Poor Law attempted to regulate the effects of economic dislocation caused by the transition to a capitalist economy by policing and aiding paupers, especially after the Oxfordshire uprising of 1596. The Elizabethan Poor Law banned public begging and spontaneous almsgiving and divided the poor into three groups: able-bodied adults, children, and the old or non-able-bodied (the impotent poor). Overseers, appointed annually by justices of the peace, put the able-bodied to work in workhouses or punished their idleness, gave apprenticeships to poor children, and provided cash payments and medical treatment to the impotent poor. Because each parish was responsible for the maintenance of its own indigents, all of these activities were funded by a tax (i.e., rate) that the parish levied on itself and that churchwardens and overseers collected and administered, although many parishes tried to push questionable applicants off to another parish.

It is difficult to determine how quickly parishes implemented the Old Poor Law but estimates are that, by 1660, a third of English parishes collected poor rates regularly. The police function of the law was easier and less painful (for the parish) to implement. The law allowed parish officers to whip vagabonds and vagrants and return them to their home parish, and it also allowed the afflicted party to appeal parish decisions to the local justice of the peace. Passing a national law that mandated a local tax to support and police the poor locally was a typical English solution to a European-wide problem of rising pauperism and a result of a centralizing Tudor state allying itself with a long-standing tradition of elite local self-administration.

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