THE ACT OF 1662. ITS EARLY WORKING. LATER LEGISLATION

Throughout the whole of the period from 1601 to 1662 “destitution was supported wheresoever it was found, without any such interference with the labour of the poor and with their personal freedom as it was reserved for the restoration of Charles II to sanction, and for subsequent ages to deplore”.

The view which thus interprets as a revolutionary break with the tradition of the preceding sixty years the settlement policy inaugurated in 1662 is of course no longer tenable. Legally, it is true, the vagrant poor alone were removable after the Act of 1597, but Sir Francis Harvey had found it necessary, at the Cambridge Summer Assizes of 1629, to admonish justices not to “meddle either with the removing or setling of any poor, but only of rogues”, and attention has already been drawn to the growth in Cambridgeshire, during the earlier part of the seventeenth century, of a restrictive attitude towards the stranger on the part of both urban and parochial authorities.

The so-called “Settlement Law” of 13 and 14 Chas. II was indeed an almost inevitable development of the Act of 1601 itself, for since the Elizabethan statute definitely recognised the parish as responsible for the provision of the poor by a compulsory rate, it was certain that should difficulty be found in furnishing the necessary funds, the instinct of self-preservation would raise the query:“Who then are the poor of the parish?”