On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550-1750 (review)

This huge book (over 450 pages of heavily annotated text) compels one to ponder the transitory nature of history making. The book is scholarly in the extreme. Illustration and example abound. Comment is judicious and not judgmental. It is without doubt the last word on its subject. As a final-year university student fifty years ago I read up on provision for the poor in Tudor and Stuart England. The books I read then were the last word on the subject. What has changed? More information has become available and historians appear to be more assiduous in pursuing it: this book has been ten years in the making and the footnotes tell their own story of industriousness. Do such developments mean we know more than we did? Certainly the language used to express what we know has changed. Here the writing is lucid; there is no linguistic posturing. Yet one detects a greater detachment from the subject than was the case in the days of Tawney and Power. Is detachment the price history has to pay for having been professionalized? for having become academic business? Might a consequence be the acceptance of the poor on capitalism's terms—that they are a necessity? We no longer think (as we did fifty years ago) that poverty would be eliminated because it should be; now we know it cannot be: without the poor there is no profit, and without profit where would the wealthy be? What, one ponders, will be the last word in another fifty years when "globalization" has beggared the planet?