Longmate, Norman: the Workhouse: a Social History.(Book Review)

From: History: Review of New Books | Date: June 22, 2004| Author: Arnstein, Walter L. | Copyright information

Longmate, Norman The Workhouse: A Social History North Pomfret, VT: Pimlico 318 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-7126-0637-8 Publication Date: July 2004

The sixteenth-century Elizabethan Poor Law constitutes the oldest tax-supported form of social welfare in Anglo-American history. Each of England's more than ten thousand parishes was expected to levy "rates" (that is, property taxes) to aid those members of society who could not subsist on their own: orphans, the very old, the very ...