1. Summary of the Argument

The aim of this book has been to provide an explanation for the development and persistence of policies providing outdoor relief for able-bodied workers, and to examine the effect of such policies on certain aspects of the rural economy. The book is an extension of the revisionist analysis of the Old Poor Law begun by Mark Blaug in 1963. As such, it builds on the pioneering work of Blaug (1963; 1964), Daniel Baugh (1975), and Anne Digby (1975; 1978). These authors rejected the traditional literature's conclusion that outdoor relief policies had disastrous consequences on the rural labor market. Their arguments concerning the effects of the Poor Law on labor are convincing, and leave little else to be addressed. The revisionists' explanation for the adoption and persistence of outdoor relief, however, is not as well developed. To date, no study has appeared that adequately explains the economic role of outdoor relief and the reason why it developed in the last third of the eighteenth century.

Three issues must be resolved in order to determine the economic role of outdoor relief. The first concerns the system's origins. Was outdoor relief an emergency response to the high food prices of 1795, as the traditional literature claimed, or was it a response to long-term changes in the economic environment? Evidence from local studies and available data on relief expenditures suggest that outdoor relief became widespread during the period from 1760 to 1795.