Elizabethan Poor Law Research Paper

Question 1 (A)

From the beginning of the early years of capitalism, in sixteenth century, with the transforming economic and social structures, a change with regard to attitudes towards the social assistance emerged. In the history of social policy development, both poor relief and traditional charity relations had significant functions in preindustrial Europe. Marco H. D. van Leeuwen (1994) states that the wealthy had the obligation to assist the poor, and the poor had to accept the legitimacy of the social order (p.593). Through giving alms, the rich had the chance to buy “salvation,” and through accepting alms, the poor secured their subsistence. It was also a way of controlling the destitute by the wealthy. Since poverty was regarded as

Geremek (1997) figures out the principles of the poor law which were institutional aid to the poor, job creation, the imposition of work, and the repression of the vagrants (p.166-167). Nonetheless, it was no more than a codification of the existing practices. After that, despite the disciplining aspect of the practices of the Poor Law of the seventeenth century, T.H. Marshall (1965) also remarks that ambiguous position of Elizabethan Poor Law which was located between the planned society and competitive economy (p.87). The Poor Law was “the last remains of a system which tried to adjust real income to the social needs and status of the citizen and not solely to the market value of his labor”

Cloward (1993) reveals a relationship between the assistance to the poor and the concerns including maintaining the civil order and regulating the labor market (p.8). By underlining the the coincidence between the emergence of the “free” wage laborer and organized public provision for the destitute, they explain that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ poor relief revealed when a threat of civil revolt because of a bad harvest or high prices emerged. Relief programs serve as a larger economic, political, and social purpose to ensure control and to force the poor into the labor market (p.3). Indeed, relief was used to enforce work and regulate the labor market in various ways. The enforcement of work was a common feature of social policy throughout the sixteenth century England (Geremek, 1997, p.165). It was very common to make work the condition of social aid. Moreover, the relief was deliberately kept under the market wages in order to make people prefer to work. Consequently one can realize that the practices of indoor and outdoor relief were used together from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and this opens a window to understand the historical development of means-testing as a social