THE POOR LAW OF OLD ENGLAND Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda The Poor Law of Old England: Institutional Innovation and Demographic Regimes The English poor law has attracted a great deal of controversy. Until relatively recently, most historians held the English old poor law (opl)—the parish-based system of poor relief introduced at the end of the reign of Elizabeth 1, which lasted in modiªed form until the 1830s—in low regard. Certain scholars agreed with Malthus that it was a spur to overpopulation. Others stressed its ineffectiveness and harshness—“a wrong and disastrous answer to certain difªcult questions”—and a destroyer of mutual obligations linked to family and kinship. Since the 1960s, a revisionist literature combining comparative analysis and careful case studies has seen ªt to restore the reputation of the old poor law, pointing to its efªcacy in re- lieving the indigent and even linking it to economic progress in the early modern era. 1 In important and wide-ranging studies, often based on metic- ulous parish-level micro-analysis, Walter, Smith, and Hindle, among others, made the case for the opl’s role in keeping rural destitution and epidemic disease at bay in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Smith linked parish relief with re- duced marital fertility and a lower re-marriage rate of widows, ar- guing that the attendant increase in old-age security facilitated the 1209 - JIH4103 p. 339 Journal of Interdisciplinary History Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xli:3 (Winter, 2010), 339–366. Morgan Kelly is Professor of Economics, University College Dublin. He is the author of, with Cormac Ó Gráda, “Market Contagion: Evidence from the Panics of 1853 and 1857,” American Economic Review, XC (2000), 1110–1124. Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor of Economics, University College Dublin. He is the author of Famine: A Short History (Princeton, 2009); Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton, 2006). The authors thank John Broad, Virginia Crossman, Steve King, Karl Gunnar Persson, Richard Smith, David Stead, and John Walter for advice and support, and an anonymous ref- eree for trenchant and ultimately helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. © 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (London, 1913), 170, as cited in George R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (New York, 1990), 2; Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977), 148– 149. For reviews of the older literature, see Boyer, Economic History, 1–8, 51–84; Mark Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Journal of Economic History, XXIII (1963), 151–184. The classic source for Malthus’ critique is Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1826; orig. pub. 1798), 63–117.