ABSTRACT
From 1572 onwards local authorities in England had been legally empowered to levy rates to provide for the care of the hopelessly poor, while from 1597 onwards they were by law required to lay such charges upon their community in discharging a social obligation which the society had now formally undertaken. But as was so often the case with Tudor legislation, the law as debated and then prescribed at Westminster bore no precise or necessary relation to the realities of its administration in the thousands of parochial entities of which England was comprised. The fact is that the great codification of poor laws passed in 1597, and restated in 1601, was essentially prudential, having been drafted and passed by a government which liked to be fore-armed against all emergencies and which had been seriously frightened by the distress and the attendant disorders just prior to the convention of Parliament in 1597. The law was carefully and unambiguously drafted; a brilliantly conceived system of administration was established in which the remotest parish was linked with Westminster; and the whole realm was declared to be a single community of responsibility for the relief of poverty which threatened to overwhelm the private resources of any single locality. But the mechanism of relief thus created was intended as a system of co-insurance, as it were, when the normal resources which could be marshalled in any community had failed. The central authority very wisely contented itself with arming the local authority which it had created with plenary powers of levying and collecting taxes for the succour of the poor, but it made clear that it had no intention of intervening so long as any community resolved its problems in its own way.
