Poor relief inElizabethanEnglish communities: an analysis ofCollectors' accounts

Abstract

This article analyses 30 accounts of income and expenditure left byCollectors for thePoor inElizabethanEngland, before the period known as the old poor law. Collectors were appointed by parishes and incorporated boroughs in accordance with the poor laws of 1552 and 1563, but few of their fragile records survive. The accounts examined here document early use of compulsory rates to provide income, but several features of the distribution of relief differ from patterns common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Adult male recipients outnumbered women in many of the parishes; children were frequently helped directly; and cities and towns assisted a smaller fraction of their total populations than did villages but awarded larger per capita payments. Accounts from the 10 villages and small towns analysed most fully show thatElizabethanCollectors were moving away from the late medieval practice of providing only occasional aid; increasingly they awarded regular payments to a selected subset of the local poor. Comparison with the early seventeenth century suggests that the poor laws of 1598 and 1601 contributed to a transition that was already underway but did not create a new system of relief.