The aged poor of rural, early modern England were not uniformly assigned to the fringes of the physical community and to the extremities of its affection, as were the solitary woodsmen and terrifying witches that inhabit so many fairy-tales. The indigent elderly were very much part of the village's mental world, as well as within its physical bounds. They delivered messages, as well as babies. They nursed the sick, washed the dead, swept the church, and sometimes collected poor relief. They remained an active part of the daily give-and-take, the social exchange of village life.

Just as the elderly were an integrated component of rural living, so too was England part of Europe. England and the Continent faced the same problems of population pressure, unstable economies and the budding of capitalistic exchange that characterized much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They also shared a common intellectual climate that included civic humanism, religious reform (distinct, that is, from the Reformation) and the centralizing state. It was not, therefore, surprising to find similar solutions to similar problems across western Europe. However, just as humanism was adapted to suit the particulars of each region, such as a preoccupation with religious questions in the North, so too did these humanistically inspired thinkers adapt the tenets of the New Learning (as it was called in England) to solve the problems of poverty as manifested there.