Measuring the rise of the parish welfare state in England, c.1600-1800

"In the late sixteenth century, the famed Elizabethan poor laws commanded every parish in the kingdom to relieve their poor residents though local taxation. By around 1800, England’s parishes were spending more than £4 million per year on poor relief. This paper examines the long-term rise of the so-called ‘parish welfare state’ in this period through a new dataset based on annual expenditures on relief from a sample of more than 150 parishes, created by myself and Jonathan Healey. This paper will introduce the new dataset, outlining the process by which it was assembled and the methodology used to calculate annual relief totals at the national level. Its strengths and weaknesses, including coverage and representativeness, will be assessed. The preliminary results of this project can be compared to previous 'snapshot' estimates, showing - for example - that spending on relief in the mid-seventeenth-century was likely significantly higher than previously thought. The new series can also be compared to other indices such as population, inflation and GDP to shows how the growth of poor relief related to wider demographic and economic changes. Finally, the new series indicates that poor relief did not grow slowly and steadily across the period, but rather experienced alternating phases of expansion and retrenchment. These periods of stability were interspersed with bursts of rapid growth during crisis moments."