Any attempt to define within accurate chronological limits the trends of thought or practice which developed in the long period during which the Elizabethan statute formed the basis of Poor Law administration is fraught with serious difficulty, for even within the confines of a single county contradictory policies repeatedly characterise places but a few miles apart. This is less true of the first forty years of the seventeenth century, during which time the administrative hierarchy, with the Privy Council at its head, made unflagging efforts to establish a centralised and uniform system, but in the course of the two succeeding centuries complete local autonomy resulted in the most varied administration—legal, extra-legal and illegal.

The explanation lies essentially in the isolated character of the very small communities with which we are essentially concerned. Communications were notoriously bad through the fenland county of Cambridge, yet it is in the marshy Isle of Ely rather than in the county proper that the influence of common impulses at various periods can more easily be traced. The more significant villages of the Isle were, in the main, situated on the drier ridges, and population tended to concentrate here, or in hamlets looking to the larger communities as centres. The successive series of experiments initiated by the enterprising little industrial town of Wisbech, bordering upon the East Anglian textile district, definitely gave the lead to the larger parishes of the Isle.