Produced by MWS, Christopher Wright and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLISH POOR RELIEF London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AVE MARIA LANE. Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET. [Illustration] Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Bombay: E. SEYMOUR HALE. THE EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLISH POOR RELIEF BY E. M. LEONARD, FORMER STUDENT OF GIRTON COLLEGE. CAMBRIDGE: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1900 [_All Rights reserved._] Cambridge: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. TO THE REV. WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM, D.D., LL.D. FELLOW AND LECTURER IN TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MANY KINDNESSES I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. PREFACE. The present account of the early history of English poor relief is chiefly derived from the municipal records of London and Norwich and from the reports of the justices of the peace which are included amongst the state papers. Information on the subject is also contained in the Privy Council Register, while some of the orders of both Privy Council and justices and a few of the overseers' accounts are to be found in the collections of the British Museum. A fairly effectual system of relieving the destitute by public authority has had in England a continuous existence since the seventeenth century. Attempts to found such a system of poor relief in the sixteenth century were common to most of the countries of Western Europe, but the continued existence of any organisation of the kind is peculiar to England.