{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027171969967822666, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011798355380765105, 'mean_word_length': 4.878151260504202, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Poor relief and community in Hadleigh, Suffolk 1547–1600. Studies in Regional and Local History, vol. 12 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2013). Pages xvi+224+Appendices+References+Index. £18.99 paperback, £35.00 hardback.

It is well known amongst scholars of early-modern social welfare that the famous Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 were built on the back of local experimentation as much as central direction. In a recent important and challenging book, Marjorie McIntosh has argued that these local experiments in formal poor relief were not only taking root in the great towns like London and Norwich, but were springing up across the countryside of southern and central England. This volume, which works as a kind of companion to the national study, takes a microscopic look at poor relief in Hadleigh, a small Suffolk town. By the late sixteenth-century Hadleigh operated a sophisticated and well-resourced system of support for its deserving poor. It drew considerable income from rates, as would the Elizabethan Poor Law in its eventual form, but it also operated a ‘mixed economy’, making use of charitable donations, endowments, and providing support in the form of doles, boarding out, training, and residential care in almshouses. Scholars of poverty will find this a valuable treasury of statistical information about recipients of poor relief. It sits in the mould of detailed local studies like those of Tim Wales, William Newman-Brown and Samantha Williams – studies that link relief data to family reconstitutions to gain an insight into some of the demographic and social characteristics of the relieved poor. Like these works, this is a high-quality example of the art, and it is also one of only a handful of detailed local studies of poor relief to have been undertaken for the Tudor period. Its main finding, that despite Hadleigh’s small size it ran a sophisticated and complex system of poor relief, one which anticipated the later ‘Old’ Poor Law, is a useful one. The factors underpinning this sophistication, McIntosh argues, were that Hadleigh was a wealthy town, but the textile manufactures that created its wealth also left a reservoir of poverty. In other words, it had both the need and the means to instigate formal mechanisms of poor relief. The town would also, in common with communities at the same time, have been worried in Elizabeth’s reign about the need to control and monitor the migrant poor, and there is the hint of a suggestion that early Protestantism might have nudged local policy-makers towards a greater interventionism. As with all such local studies, the book raises issues of typicality, and it is fair to say that on this the jury remains out. I suspect that McIntosh would see BOOK REVIEWS