Social Welfare in Pre-industrial England

Utilizing work in economic, social, demographic, political, medical and welfare history and attending to developments in religion, ethics, and political thought, the author highlights the assumptions, perceptions and repertoire of relief initiatives that sustained the Elizabethan social welfare tradition until its demise.

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Crossing period boundaries separating late medieval, early modern, and long eighteenth-century England, Paul A. Fideler offers a coherent overview of parish-centered social welfare from its medieval roots, through its institutionalisation in the Elizabethan Poor Law, to its demise in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

The study:
- incorporates the latest scholarship
- weaves together social, economic, demographic, medical, political, religious and ideological history
- offers fresh treatments of the contextual importance of Christian moral theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanist and protestant thought in the sixteenth century and neo-Stoic benevolence and political arithmetic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- explores two competing approaches to social welfare: societas (voluntary, rooted in custom and tradition) and civitas (mandatory, embedded in policy and law)
- concludes with a detailed examination of the first histories of social welfare in England undertaken in the late eighteenth century.