The Elizabethan poor laws stand as a great work from a dynamic period. How and why they were formulated have been questions which historians have asked for centuries. The discussions of these questions have varied, depending on the personal values and biases which each historian brought to this study. It is generally agreed that a very important function of the historian is interpretation. The study of history is not only a study of the events, but a study of the historians and their differing interpretations of those events. In the past one hundred years, numerous historians have devoted themselves to studying the Elizabethan poor laws. Their interpretations varied considerably in some areas and very little in others. This essay examines some of those interpretations and attempts to find methodological and/or ideological differences which may account for the differing opinions. The study focuses upon four broad schools of historical thought-Whigs, legal historiains, economic historians, and social historians. The historians selected represent a wide range of interpretations. James A . Froude, C. J. Ribton-Turner, and George Nicholls represent the Whig interpretation. William Holdsworth and G. R. Elton represent the legal interpretation. William J. Ashley, R. H. Tawney, and Peter Ramsey were selected as the economic historians. E. M.Leonard, B. Kirkman Gray, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A. L. Rowse, and W. K . Jordan are the social historians. Whig historians saw the poor laws as part of a continuing constitutional development. They interpreted them as representing the inevitable forward progress of the English system of government. Legal historians were concerned with the formulation of the law and with the machinery provided for its administration. Their interpretations focused on the law itself and its position in the legal system as a whole. Economic historians examined the factors behind the law and the economic factors in particular which they believed led to its passage. Thus, their interpretations centered upon discussions of the significance of such topics as enclosure, inflation, urbanization, and vagrancy. Social historians offered interpretations of the Elizabethan poor laws designed to explore the structural relationship between social classes.

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This study examined public perception of the social relevance of Christian churches in the year the New Poor Law was passed. The first two chapters presented historiography concerning the Voluntary crisis which threatened the Anglican establishment, and the relationship of Christian churches to the New Poor Law. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 revealed the recurring image of "true" Christianity in its relation to the church crisis and the New Poor Law in the working men's, political, and religious periodical press. The study demonstrated a particular working class interest in Christianity and the effect of evangelicalism on religious renewal and social concerns. Orthodox Christians, embroiled in religious and political controversy, articulated practical concern for the poor less effectively than secularists.

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The thesis challenges popular generalisations about the trades, occupations and locations to which pauper apprentices were consigned, shining the spotlight away from the familiar narrative of factory children, onto the fate of their destitute peers in port towns. A comparative investigation of Liverpool, Bristol and Southampton, it adopts a deliberately broad definition of the term pauper apprenticeship in its multi-sourced approach, using 1710 Poor Law and charity apprenticeship records and previously unexamined New Poor Law and charity correspondence to provide new insight into the chronology, mechanisms and experience of pauper apprenticeship. Not all port children were shipped out. Significantly more children than has hitherto been acknowledged were placed in traditional occupations, the dominant form of apprenticeship for port children. The survival and entrenchment of this type of work is striking, as are the locations in which children were placed; nearly half of those bound to traditional trades remained within the vicinity of the port. The thesis also sheds new light on a largely overlooked aspect of pauper apprenticeship, the binding of boys into the Merchant service. Furthermore, the availability of sea apprenticeships as well as traditional placements caused some children to be shipped in to the ports for apprenticeships. Of those who were still shipped out to the factories, the evidence shows that far from dying out, as previously thought, the practice of batch apprenticeship persisted under the New Poor Law. The most significant finding of the thesis is the survival and endurance of pauper apprenticeship as an institution involving both Poor Law and charity children. Poor children were still being apprenticed late into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Pauper apprenticeship is shown to have been a robust, resilient and resurgent institution. The evidence from port towns offers significant revision to the existing historiography of pauper apprenticeship.

Before the reformation and the schism of the Catholic Church, it had always been the duty of the Church and not of the state, to undertake the seven corporal works of mercy; feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, visit the prisoner, and bury the dead.¹ By dissolving these institutions, Henry had unwittingly created what would become a social disaster of biblical proportions. In essence, this act was rendering thousands of the poor and elderly without a home or shelter, it denied the country of much of the medical aid that has been offered by the church, it denied future generations of thousands of volumes of books and scriptures from the monastic libraries, as well as denied many an education who would have otherwise never received one without the help of the Church. The ultimate goal of my thesis is to prove my hypothesis that the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII was not merely a contributory factor in the need for the creation of poor laws, but the deciding factor (in a myriad of societal issues) for their creation. Footnote 1: Matthew 25 vv. 32-46.