I have written somewhere that the Poor Law, as the statesmen of Elizabeth made it and administrators later applied it, was “not merely a part of the English constitution but… assuredly that part of it of which ordinary Englishmen in their daily lives were most continuously conscious”. If this is true, exact study of the working of the Law, district by district or county by county, is a chief task for historians of administration and society. Looking back over the centuries, the main features of the landscape have long been familiar enough; but they were lit up, and many lesser features revealed, when Mr and Mrs Webb published their Old Poor Law in 1927. Use was made in that volume of some important Cambridgeshire material. A year earlier, Miss Dorothy Marshall, in her English Poor Law in the Eighteenth Century, had also drawn upon some of the Cambridgeshire—and upon other—MS. records. It is more than twenty years since Mr A. W. Ashby published his One Hundred Years of Poor Law Administration in an Oxfordshire Village. Recently (1932) a chapter in Mr J. D. Chambers' Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century has provided an excellent starting-point for a close survey of another county. Something has been done for most counties in the social chapters of the Victoria County Histories. This does not complete the list of good work.