Elizabethan Poor Laws

?Life for the scummy in Elizabethan England was very harsh. Unemployment and rapid price inflation increased create many villagers to leave their homes and come to the towns to look for work. However, they often could not nonplus employment and ended up begging in the streets. Elizabethan myopic justices, enacted in 1601, were incredibly beneficial in uniting the community to come through care and nurture for the qualifying less fortunate. These natural laws set a lively foundation for Britains welfare arranging and established guidelines for the deserving and wretched poor.I chose this topic because it vastly influenced our world today, not only physically, but morally. My bulky research was conducted mainly through internet resources. Thanks to online databases provided by the domain Library System I was able to assure valuable primary election sources such as newspaper articles. I was too able to find credible, scholarly summaries, documents, essays, and more than on my topic, making it much more tame to thoroughly educate myself and others.Gathering so much background knowledge to a fault provided more validity to statements I concluded and overall information include in my presentation. I personally felt an exhibit would be the virtually tremendous in portraying the vast research I realised passim the History Fair process through vibrant illustrations, documents, photos and more. The 1601 Elizabethan Poor Laws suitably fits the Rights and Responsibilities theme. Everyone had a share rights and responsibilities, from the Justices of the Peace, to the upstanding householders, even the poor themselves.The poor werent just goldenly treated out of the blue. Only the deserving poor were assisted. Deserving classified as the Helpless poor also know as old folk, or children of poor families and the able-bodied poor- muckle who could work, wanted to work, and attempted at earning a living. It was the responsibilities of the poor to remain headstrong and avoid indolence, sluggishness, and misdemeanor or else they would be classified under the more dangerous and itinerant group of rogues and vagabonds(beggars and stealers) vastly targeted by the government.Townsfolk were known to abhor beggars and treat them harshly. Their streets had become overcrowded and dirty, and the poor and beggars were accused of be scroungers and suspected of being criminals. It had then become a right, where two or more substantial householders were to be yearly nominated by the Justices of the Peace to serve as overseers of the poor in each parish.The overseerswere to raise weekly or otherwise, by taxation of every inhabitant, such competent sums of money as they shall prize fit, however one of the later complaints about the 1601 Act was that the basis of the law was that it rated land and buildings but not personal or movable wealth. accordingly it benefited the industrial and commercial groups in society who did not fall in spite of a ppearance the parameters of the legislation and so did not pay into the poor rates unless they also happened to own landed property.The 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law continued with special variations and adjustments, for example the 1662 Settlement Act, Gilberts Act (1782) and the Speenhamland system of 1795 until the passing of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act which ultimately formed the basis of poor relief throughout the country for more than two centuries. It was a reasonable and unbiased system run for and administered by local people at a cartridge clip when the population was undersized enough for everyone to know everyone else and his/her conditions and circumstances.Personally, the 1601 Elizabethan Poor Laws taught me that warmth for the poor is a divine purpose in our community today, that it allow for remain a responsibility to the poor to guide our actions in transnational development to ending poverty. This act recognized that well applied, targeted, and effective ava il can and should be used to achieve progress on challenges such as health, education, and substantial living in our poverties. The care of human livelihood and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of a good government, doubting Thomas Jefferson