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2 Parish churchwardens assisted by four overseers of the poor (substantial householders, the middling sort) were to raise a parish fund “by taxing inhabitants and occupiers of land in the parish” and in kind and apply this fund to: purchase make-work materials for the able-bodied poor (sometimes utilized in Houses of Correction); relieve at home or outdoors the “lame, impotent, old, blind,” and those otherwise unable to support themselves (and whose grandparents, parents or children were unable to maintain them); and put poor children to work or into apprenticeships. “Wandering and begging” were prohibited, unless begging was for food and approved by the overseers (The Statutes of the Realm, 12 vols. [London, 1963 (1810-28)], 4: 896–98)Google Scholar.

3 For their praise of Burleigh, Charles I, Laud, and the Council for enforcing the poor law, see: Tawney, , Religion, pp. 170–75; and Webb, English Local Government, pp. 67, 70, 77, 398Google Scholar. Leonard noted the irony that “these infringers of individual liberties were also…the protectors of the poor” in their vigorous enforcement of the “socialistic schemes” of the old poor law, which provided “more poor relief in England than we ever had before or since (English Poor Relief, pp. 163–64, 171, 185, 165-06, 277)Google Scholar. For the historians’ harsh estimates of post-Restoration poor relief, which nevertheless made the transition to industrialization relatively peaceful, see: ibid., pp. 293-94, 302, 304; Tawney, , Religion, pp. 237, 262; and Webb, English Local Government, pp. 424, 404–05Google Scholar. For parish, laissez faire see Marshall, Dorothy, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), pp. 6–9.Google Scholar

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6 Webb, English Local Government, pp. 401, 150, 350, 406–07Google Scholar. “religion”, Tawney’s volume, which they admired, appeared in 1926 when much of the Webbs’s volume was already completed. In that same year, Sidney provided the Preface to Salter, F. R., ed., Some Early Tracts on Poor Relief (London, 1926)Google Scholar; he used the occasion to announce the arrival of the “fourth stage” in the history of provision for the poor—the “maintenance of a ‘National Minimum’ in the Standard of Life”—which had been hinted at by Vives, , Luther, , and Zwingli, , but “the time was not yet come” (pp. xi–xii)Google Scholar.

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24 An indispensable entry into Reformation historiography is Margo Todd, ed., Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

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38 Hindle, Steve, “The Birthpangs of Welfare: poor relief and parish governance in seventeenth-century Warwickshire,” Dugdale Society Occasiopnal Papers, No. 40 (2000): 1–32Google Scholar. One can only look forward with anticipation to Hindle’s book, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1640 (London and New York, 2000). For a recent challenge to the conventional wisdom that responses to the Book of Orders were relatively few, see Langeluddecke, Henrik, ‘“Patchy and Spasmodic’ : The Response of Justices of the Peace to Charles I’s Book of Orders,” English Historical Review 113 (1998): 1231–48Google Scholar.

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