Social Welfare in Pre-industrial England: The Old Poor Law Tradition

By Paul A. Fideler

Crossing period boundaries separating late medieval, early modern, and long eighteenth-century England, Paul A. Fideler offers a coherent overview of parish-centered social welfare from its medieval roots, through its institutionalisation in the Elizabethan Poor Law, to its demise in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

The study:
- Incorporates the latest scholarship
- Weaves together social, economic, demographic, medical, political, religious and ideological history
- Offers fresh treatments of the contextual importance of Christian moral theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanist and protestant thought in the sixteenth century and neo-Stoic benevolence and political arithmetic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- Explores two competing approaches to social welfare: societas (voluntary, rooted in custom and tradition) and civitas (mandatory, embedded in policy and law)
- Concludes with a detailed examination of the first histories of social welfare in England undertaken in the late eighteenth century

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333688953
• ISBN13: 9780333688953
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Red Globe Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"