An Early Tudor Poor Law (Chapter 26) - Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government

While 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. 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 1597 and 1601. It is generally agreed that nothing much was done until the reign of that queen, though acts were passed under the early Tudors.