The emergence of poverty as a problem

In any pre-industrial society the great majority of the population is inevitably poor, and so it was in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless at the beginning of the period relatively few were entirely devoid of the means to keep body and soul together. Really desperate and chronic poverty tended to be the experience only of certain well defined categories of people, notably those disabled from working by illness, injury or old age; widows with dependent children; and orphans with no parent to care for them. Moreover in rural society the prevalence of customary arrangements to cater for such groups ensured that, as long as most families had land and livestock, most even of them were provided for more or less adequately. Family farmers who could no longer work their own fields normally made them over to a son or son-in-law, or if necessary a non-relative, in return for house-room and their subsistence as long as they lived. And it was almost universal for widows to retain part, or even all, of their late husband's holding until they died or remarried, or at the very least until their eldest son came of age, after which he would be obliged to support his mother. Serious harvest failure, outbreaks of animal disease or the levying of taxation by the crown might reduce households which normally managed well enough to dire straits, but otherwise destitution was only likely to befall members of that small minority of families dependent largely upon wages for their livelihood, and who had little else to turn to if deprived of their employment for whatever reason.