ABSTRACT
In the context of early modern Europe, the English relief system is often seen as unique in its ability to mobilize substantial resources for the provision of care and financial aid to the poor. 1 Through the collection and redistribution of poor rates, it is argued, the old Poor Law succeeded in freeing the majority of the labouring classes from their obligation to assist family members, especially the elderly. 2 In England, therefore, it was the community rather than the family which assumed responsibility for supporting the indigent, old, and disabled. The amount of relief which public agencies on the Continent were able to provide is held to have been far more limited. The poor laws introduced during the 1500s were never consolidated so that, by the turn of the century, there was a considerable divergence between the English system of relief and the continental ones. The latter, it is claimed, increasingly tended to assist the poor in institutions located exclusively in the towns, and was therefore much less widespread and effective than the parish-based system available in England. Futhermore, the kind of care which these institutions offered to the poverty-stricken is seen as radically different from that provided across the Channel. For in England assistance was given in the home – or at least within a domestic environment – through the practice of 91entrusting the care of the needy to poor widows and other kinds of sick-keeper. 3 The impotent poor therefore were not isolated from the community. On the Continent, in contrast, when the poor gained access to public relief, it was usually within the context of structures likely to produce a sense of social stigma and alienation. The received image of institutions for the poor remains in fact substantially unchanged from that put forward by Foucault in his early works (namely his Histoire de la Folie) . 4 Continental institutions are thus seen as compulsory and segregated from the outside world, and characterized by day-to-day procedures inherently dehumanizing. A number of studies have subsequently emphasized the non-coercive nature of these institutions and stressed their role as centres for the provision of outdoor relief as well as shelter; 5 however, the tendency to describe them primarily as places of confinement persists. 6
