ABSTRACT
The most enduring component of public welfare has been the provision of income to people unable to obtain a livelihood by means that enjoy higher social esteem, namely, by work or by inheritance. This chapter focuses on the development of the enormously influential Elizabethan Poor Law. The development of government responsibility for the poor took place over a period of seventy years, from 1531, during the reign of Henry VIII, to 1601, near the end of the reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I. The laws of the Tudor period, and especially of the Elizabethan period, reflected the beginnings of a national government taking responsibility to provide work for the unemployed. The English colonists who began establishing permanent settlements in America four years after the death of Queen Elizabeth brought the Elizabethan Poor Law with them. The principles of public responsibility for the poor and dependent classes when family responsibility failed, taxation, and localism became the foundation of American public welfare.
