ABSTRACT
A nation’s government and policy, wrote Sir Thomas Smith, should fit the people agreeably ‘like a garmet to the bodie or shoe to the foote’. When the fit is proper, the realm enjoys ease, pleasure and profit; but, if ‘too litle or too great’, it does ‘hurt and encomber’ convenient use.1 The crafting of the Poor Law was an important and sustained policy endeavour in the sixteenth-century Tudor years. Signs of preoccupation with poverty abound from Thomas More’s Utopia to William Perkins’s Cases of Conscience and from the calls for poor law reform in the 1520s and 1530s to the culminating statutes of 1598 and 1601. Nevertheless, we have no comprehensive study of the intellectual fabric from which the Old Poor Law was fashioned. Instead we have clusters of interest in the policy ideas of particular Bills, statutes, decades and reigns. Unfortunately, there is no consistency of question or method across these studies, and they yield little overall perspective on the role of ideas, perceptions, and social and political thought in the Old Poor Law’s formation.2
