The relationship between family and welfare in Europe has long been and continues to be a central theme for historians, anthropologists, sociologists and demographers. Its importance has been given added weight in recent decades by policy debates on the future of welfare provision in many European countries, including Britain. Both current debates and the historiography of the last two decades or so have tended to characterise family forms and welfare regimes in Europe in terms of a north–south (perhaps more accurately a north-west/south-east) divide. Put simply, northern Europe tends to be associated with nuclear family forms, ‘weaker’ family ties, and relatively generous provision of poor relief, both overall but also, and particularly in the case of England, in rural areas. By contrast, southern Europe, and also often eastern Europe, are associated with extended family forms, ‘stronger’ family ties and less generous poor relief provision, restricted in the main to urban areas. The relationships between these variables are complex, yet have serious implications both for our understanding of economic development in Europe and for social policy, both past and present. This chapter aims to offer a critical reflection on the current state of historiography and some of the claims made for different welfare regimes across Europe. It addresses the interrelationship between welfare regimes and family forms and ties and the merits of different welfare systems, including the comparison of rural and urban poor relief. In doing so, it hopes to highlight some of the distinctive features of the English poor law. While the chapter draws on a wide secondary literature on southern Europe, it also presents some preliminary research findings for Catalonia, a region for which little work has yet been done on poor relief.

North–south divides

England’s poor laws were undeniably unique in Europe. While other countries occasionally experimented with the funding of relief via taxation, England was the only state where a series of national statutes from 1572 onwards provided for compulsory relief of the poor by the inhabitants of the parish, to be funded via local rates, implemented in almost all parishes by the end of the seventeenth century. Relief took the form of work for the able-bodied (theoretically), and both regular and casual payments in cash and kind.