ABSTRACT
It is a cliché, though one with deep roots in Judaeo-Christian culture, that thepoor are always with us (Matthew 26:11). Elizabethan England, increasingly familiar as it was with this kind of scriptural idiom, was a society in which the poor were not only present but increasingly problematic. There were, as we shall see, more poor people in both absolute and relative terms in England in the 1590s than had been the case even half a century earlier. But late-sixteenth-century Englishmen and women were gradually forced to recognise that the problem of poverty was not simply a matter of increasing numbers but also of changing typology. The discovery of a large proportion of the population, especially in the towns, who were entirely willing to support themselves through their own labour but were unable to do so with any regularity, was a shock to an intellectual system long accustomed to an easy distinction between the able-bodied but wilfully idle on the one hand and the disabled impotent poor on the other. Elizabethan policymakers accordingly designed a relief system which had to deal not only with the conventional problems of life-cycle poverty and congenital idleness but also now with the problems of under-and unemployment. This system, arguably one of the greatest and most enduring achievements of the Elizabethan age, had a profound effect not only upon the poor themselves, however they were defined, but also on the entire pattern of social and economic relations in urban and rural communities alike. The Elizabethans created, however incrementally (perhaps even haphazardly), nothing less than a bureaucratised welfare system which not only radically trans - formed the life chances of that small but significant minority who constituted the very poorest people in English society but also generated an archive which, if read against the grain, offers extraordinary insights into the life experiences of that larger constituency who, although rarely on regular relief and lacking a formal voice or authority in the commonwealth, made shift to survive as best they could.
