The first century of welfare: poverty and poor relief in Lancashire 1620-1730

摘要

The First Century of Welfare is a case study of Lancashire in what is (roughly) the first century of the Old Poor Law. The unconventional date range, 1620-1730, reflects the concentration of the primary sources the book is based on: mainly Overseers of the Poor accounts, several thousand petitions to Quarter Sessions as well as the Order Books of Quarter Sessions, various tax records, town and parish accounts, and three'wonderfully detailed' censuses of the poor of Bolton. The author, Jonathan Healey, takes a refreshingly conservative approach, prefacing the book with a bald statement that'those who like their history heavily theorized will probably not like book'. This approach is very much to his purpose, which is to address the question of poverty from the inside, and to allow the early modern poor of Lancashire to speak with their own voices, as transmitted through the documentary record.Thus, Healey aims to understand what combination of factors led people to depend on formal poor relief during this period, which he argues saw a fundamental shift from more piecemeal and localist welfare provision to a well-organized, integrated national system of social welfare (albeit one that still operated at the parish and borough level) - the first national Poor Law.