Elizabeth I in procession, circa 1600. Wikimedia Commons
Within the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, England noticed the emergence of arguably the world’s first efficient welfare state. Legal guidelines have been established which efficiently protected individuals from rises in meals costs.
Greater than 400 years later, within the closing years of Elizabeth II’s reign, the UK as soon as once more faces perilous spikes in residing prices. Maybe at this time’s authorities may be taught one thing from its legislative ancestors.
Till the tip of the sixteenth century, it was a given all through medieval Europe that when meals costs rose there can be a consequent surge in mortality charges, as individuals starved to dying and ailments unfold among the many malnourished.
The Elizabethan Poor Legal guidelines of 1598 and 1601 turned the scenario in England on its head. Now when meals turned too costly, native parishes have been obliged to provide money or meals to those that couldn’t afford to eat. For the primary time in historical past, it turned unlawful to let anyone starve.
The legal guidelines have been clear and easy, and required every of over 10,000 English parishes to arrange a steady reduction fund to help the susceptible. This included the lame, the ailing and the outdated, in addition to orphans, widows, single moms and their kids, and people unable to search out work. Occupiers of land (landowners or their tenants) needed to pay a tax in the direction of the fund in proportion to the worth of their holding.
Overseen by native magistrates, the system’s transparency supplied no loopholes for avoiding the tax. The truth is, it inspired a flourishing tradition of charitable giving which supplied almshouses, apprenticeships and hospitals for the parish poor to alleviate destitution.
With this proliferation of localised mini-welfare states, England turned the primary nation in Europe by greater than 150 years to successfully put an finish to widespread famine. And it additionally enabled England subsequently to take pleasure in by far the quickest fee of urbanisation in Europe.
Between 1600 and 1800, big numbers of younger individuals left rural parishes to search out work in cities, protected within the information that their mother and father can be supported by the parish in instances of want – and that they themselves would obtain assist if issues didn’t work out. Lengthy earlier than the primary steam engines arrived, the Poor Legal guidelines had created an city workforce which enabled the economic revolution to take off.
Poor state of affairs
Then in 1834, every thing modified. The price of this stage of welfare help was deemed too excessive, and changed with a intentionally harsh new system during which the poorest women and men have been separated from one another and their kids and supplied solely with gruel in return for tedious chores in degrading workhouses. The concern of the workhouse was designed to pressure the poor to desire work – for no matter abysmal wages the market supplied.
It’s this model of the Poor Legal guidelines which tends to stay within the standard reminiscence, acquainted from the books of Charles Dickens, and obscuring the achievements of the Elizabethan authentic. However intensive current analysis has began to focus on how Elizabethan legislation modified British historical past – and supplies us with pressing classes for at this time’s welfare system and the pressures of the cost-of-living disaster.
Simply because the outdated Poor Legal guidelines supported a rare interval of financial prosperity, so too did the UK’s welfare state after the second world battle. Tax-funded funding in schooling (secondary and better), and the newly-created NHS noticed widened alternatives and residing requirements take off, because the UK loved over 20 years of the quickest productiveness progress in its historical past (1951-73).
Within the 1600s, meals distribution was legally enforced in England.
Shutterstock/Yau Ming Low
At this time, individuals often communicate of being pressured to decide on between consuming and heating as meals and power costs surge. But there isn’t any corresponding compensation for these whose wages and advantages don’t stretch far sufficient. A one-off hand out when hundreds of thousands of households are going through each gas and meals poverty is however a brief sticking plaster.
Till there’s a everlasting enhance in security web funds to these on common credit score, meals banks will proceed to proliferate and youngsters will proceed to go to high school hungry. The hyperlink between wealth and taxation was successfully utilized by the Elizabethans to begin to sort out inequality. However at this time’s globalised financial system facilitates offshore earnings and ever-rising inequality.
In my new e-book, After the Virus: Classes from the Previous for a Higher Future I discover modifications within the sense of ethical responsibility and the rigorously legislated collective endeavour that fashioned the muse of the UK’s previous – and most up-to-date – durations of prosperity.
The Poor Legal guidelines have been removed from an ideal system of welfare. However the truth that defending the poorest in society has beforehand led to widespread financial progress is a historical past lesson that shouldn’t be ignored by any authorities throughout a cost-of-living disaster.
Simon Szreter doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.
