General considerations

Poverty in its most basic sense may be characterised as a shortage of the resources required to satisfy life's three fundamental needs: sustenance, shelter and warmth. This is the kind of poverty which exists in parts of the developing world today, and it is also what most people in the past would have conceived of as poverty. Until the twentieth century, there was a broad acceptance in western society that some degree of poverty of this sort was a permanent and ineradicable fact of life: ‘the poor you will always have with you’. This was linked to the conventional Christian belief in a divinely ordained hierarchy in which the ranking of people into different stations was regarded as God's will.

In medieval and early modern times, the poor were everywhere in evidence. A majority of those who lived on the land produced only just enough to feed and clothe their families. Unfavourable environmental factors made survival in certain parts of Europe (such as the Scottish Highlands or the French Massif Central) persistently more challenging than in others, but peasants everywhere fared harshly, and a single poor harvest could bring disaster. Neither were living standards any better in Europe's medieval and early modern towns. Wages paid to urban workmen were pegged to bare subsistence needs, and they had to endure periodic worklessness as well as a frequently pestilential environment.

By the eighteenth century, England was exceptional among its European peers both in the amount of its national wealth and its progress from peasant subsistence to agricultural and industrial capitalism. This did not, however, translate into significant improvements for labouring families. Survival-level wages continued to be accepted as normal, and while these might just fulfil a family's physical needs, they also precluded savings. Without a margin in reserve, any of life's vicissitudes, be it illness, injury, death of a spouse, failing sight or an extra mouth to feed, could plunge a family into difficulties overnight. The loss of work in a slump or bad weather might bring a whole household into insufficiency. For family members too sick or disabled to contribute to their keep there was little to spare, and there was nothing to call upon when, as inevitably happened, one grew too old to work oneself.