The history of England's statutory relief of the poor has a long and distinguished past. In its fundamental form of 1601, it stated that the worthy poor were to be housed and provided with a weekly pension; poor children and bastards were to be apprenticed; the labouring poor were to be given work; and the wilfully idle, those who according to common perception ‘lick the sweat from the true labourer's brows’, were to be punished and forcefully employed. The entire structure of relief was to be underwritten by a weekly rate and managed by especially appointed officers, the overseers of the poor.

Much too has been written about the implementation of these laws. The traditional wisdom is that a series of crises in the 1650s prompted parishes not yet assessing a rate to do so. More recent studies date this sequence of events later, after 1650. One critic of this ‘current orthodoxy’, Steve Hindle, extends his historiographical criticisms to include the profession's equation of the advent of poor rates with the advent of pensions. He does so by demonstrating the widespread funding of pensions through traditional means, and reminds us that the statutes themselves ‘granted overseers “discretion” to impose or not impose rates “as the time serveth”’. Hindle's point is an important one. However, this study contends that too much emphasis has been placed on the role of pensions, obscuring the continued importance of charity, and the poor's own efforts at self-help, in the survival strategies of the poor. Pensions were undoubtedly important, but they did not stand alone.