The poor law

In the sixteenth century, there was no unemployment pay and no child benefit. There were no old age pensions and no National Health Service. Instead, each town had 'almshouses' and 'hospitals' to look after the old and sick. Rich merchants often left money to almshouses in their wills.

After 1550 there were so many poor that the almshouses could not cope. The bands of beggars worried the Government. It got Parliament to pass laws, partly to help the poor, and partly to force them to work.

The new laws said that those who could afford it should pay a tax to help the 'deserving poor'. This meant the old, the disabled, and the sick who could not work. But the Government said that healthy young men and women who had no jobs must be lazy. It called them 'vagabonds', and said that they had to be punished. Some were whipped, some were branded with red-hot irons, and some were put in the stocks.

People agreed that the poor could not be left to starve. But no-one liked paying taxes to help care for them. In the eighteenth century, some parishes built 'workhouses'. These were homes and work-places for the poor. To scare off the 'scroungers', they made the workhouses as unpleasant as they could.

Walter Robson: Crown, Parliament and People; Oxford University Press, 1992/2002, page 82