ABSTRACT
The whole of the sixteenth century is remarkable for the cautious but progressive experimentation by the state with measures designed to secure the control and relief of poverty. We shall first be concerned with tracing out the development of poor-law legislation brought into a great statutory corpus at the very end of the Elizabethan era, though we shall treat this subject relatively briefly since it has been most competently described by authorities in whose debt we stand. Of even greater significance to us, and we believe for the relief of poverty, was a roughly parallel development of the law of charitable trusts and the evolution, and, at the close of the century, the perfection, of the charitable trust as a great and most effective mechanism for those who wished to perpetuate their philanthropic aspirations.
