The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the
seventeenth century: the first century of welfare.The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first
national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for
hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity.
The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of
Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the
seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented
by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of
England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering
picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life,
their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender
norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and
mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth,
trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of
poor folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of
economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial
economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, andof their
willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they
and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of
what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were
being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History
and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

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• Publication Date: September 18, 2014
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 337 Pages
• File Size: 89 KB