Poverty, Charity, and Coercion in Elizabethan England

England struggled vigorously with the question of who qualified for assistance during the period when publicly supported poor relief was being developed, roughly 1550 to 1600. Many English towns, such as Hadleigh, Suffolk, experimented with methods of helping those poor people whom they considered deserving. But as urban leaders moved into forms of tax-based support, high costs led them to establish stricter criteria about who should be helped. By the end of the sixteenth century, English people were willing to pay taxes to support needy neighbors of good moral conduct who could not provide for themselves, but not idle or badly behaved people or outsiders.