ABSTRACT
During Tudor times some attempts were made to deal with the problem of the poor and unemployed. At the end of Elizabeth I’s reign a Poor Law was passed, and this was to remain the backbone of social legislation in England until 1834, when the Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. The Poor Law was, as it was intended to be, a harsh Act, designed as much as anything to discourage people from relying on public funds. The fact that the Poor Law remained basically unchanged for over 200 years is not a testimony to its humanity and effectivenessrather it shows the attitude of the times. In the opinion of most leading politicians, industrialists, landowners and churchmen, it was not the business of the government to interfere with the running of factories and mines or the building of houses. According to this attitude, poverty was the result not of low wages but of fecklessness and a lack of incentive to work. So industrialists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued to build insanitary houses for their workers, forced them to work long hours in shocking conditions and paid them minimal wages.
