POOR RELIEF

The concern of the state, local authorities, and individuals with the relief of the poor is reflected in England in a mass of records. For long periods the chief community action on a local basis lay in the administration of the poor law and other charitable acts. Thus local historians seeking to deal with this aspect of the history of their town or area will need to be well acquainted with the general history of the poor law, while at the same time the many local variations make the subject particularly worthy of study.

The history of the poor law in England falls conveniently into two periods broken by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and the types of records also fall into these two chronological categories and are dealt with below in this way.

Generally speaking the administrative unit for the relief of poverty for the period before 1834 was the parish, and it is in parochial records that much of the history of early poor relief must be sought. The researcher will find that these records incidentally provide a great deal of information on other aspects of local social history.

The basic sources for the parochial poor-law administration are the accounts of the overseers of the poor, officials established under an Act of 1597 and including the church-wardens. These records provide details of the amounts of poor rate collected from the better-off parishioners, as well as how it was expended.