Between the mid-fourteenth century and the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, English poor relief moved toward a more coherent and comprehensive network of support. Marjorie McIntosh's study, the first to trace developments across that time span, focuses on three types of assistance: licensed begging and the solicitation of charitable alms; hospitals and almshouses for the bedridden and elderly; and the aid given by parishes. It explores changing conceptions of poverty and charity and altered roles for the church, state and private organizations in the provision of relief. The study highlights the creativity of local people in responding to poverty, cooperation between national levels of government, the problems of fraud and negligence, and mounting concern with proper supervision and accounting. This ground-breaking work challenges existing accounts of the Poor Laws, showing that they addressed problems with forms of aid already in use rather than creating a new system of relief.

In this important study, Professor McIntosh argues against the suggestion that social regulation was a distinctive feature of the decades around 1600, resulting from Puritanism. Instead, through an examination of 255 village and small-town communities distributed throughout England, Professor McIntosh demonstrates that concern with wrongdoing mounted gradually between 1370 and 1600. In an attempt to maintain good order and enforce ethical conduct, local leaders prosecuted people who slandered or quarrelled with their neighbours, engaged in sexual misdeeds, operated unruly alehouses, or refused to work. Professor McIntosh also explores who the offenders were as well as the factors that led to misbehaviour and shaped responses to it. More generally, Professor McIntosh sheds light on the transition from medieval to early modern patterns and succeeds here in opening up little-known sources and new research methods.

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Poverty, Charity, and Coercion in ElizabethanEngland Just as the Abrahamic religions shared a set of basic assumptions about poverty during medieval and early modern periods, so too did each faith wrestle with the question of how widely charity should extend. Difªculty arose less in the realm of theory-in which all three religions taught that although poverty could not be ended, giving to the needy was a pious act-but rather in the practical area: Which poor people should be helped, in what ways, and who should pay for this assistance? In making such decisions, communities had to decide upon the scope of their beneªcence. Should we help only our own poor, those people living among us and known to us individually, or does "our community" extend more widely to include those with whom we share a religious or other identity but have no personal ties? Even among our own local poor, does it matter why they are needy and what their moral conduct is? These questions were perhaps easiest to answer for minority groups whose constituency was clearly deªned and who did not qualify for whatever assistance was provided to members of the dominant population. But Jewish and Muslim communities were often prepared to offer assistance to their co-religionists who lived in other places or were travelers. Even in regions where nearly everyone shared a religion, as in much of Western Europe, decisions about the objects of charity were often contentious. 1