This book, focussing on the developing county of Lancashire, draws on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief to peer into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. It looks not only at their struggles with poverty, illness and socio-economic upheavals but also at the strategies of economic survival they adopted. An intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted.
The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620-1730 (People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History, 4)
