This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

ensuring social welfare, but the Church most certainly did. Everyone was required to pay one tenth of their income to the Church, of which one third was—at least in theory—reserved for the relief of the poor. For additional requirements, such as Christian burial of the indigent, additional collections were held. The arrangements mixed compulsion with volunteerism, backed by a powerful medieval Christian ideology of charitable work that would find its reward in the afterlife. Different localities found different ways to tackle the problem, but whatever the methods, broadly speaking, they worked. One historian has suggested that no century until the wealthy twentieth century was kinder to its poor.

      Changing times, however, brought changing problems. As the pace of change in agriculture picked up, displacing the landless and swelling the towns, it became increasingly clear that large swaths of the poor had been made poor through acts of man, not God, and that the older methods of poor relief were no longer sufficient. The time-honoured ideology of the societas christiana, the Christian society, wasn’t replaced, but it became buttressed by an emphasis on civitas, the responsibility of civil society to make good its own failures. In 1536, a new poor relief bill was brought before parliament. Although parliament had considered and passed numerous poor relief measures in the past, this one was newly radical in its scope. The bill acknowledged that poverty might have causes other than ‘visitation of God’ and the pauper’s ‘own default’. It aimed at relieving poverty of every kind. A national council would provide wages, food and medical care for the able unemployed, who would be given employment on public works, mostly transport related. The whole project would be financed by the king and his wealthier subjects, with further voluntary contributions from everyone in every parish.

      The bill was too much. It went too far for the spirit of the age, and parliament ended up settling for a more traditional bill—urging charity for those in genuine need, while at the same time imposing tough measures on the able-bodied vagabond. A succession of further bills prodded restlessly at the same barrage of issues. Should vagabonds be whipped, stocked or bound over as slaves? Should the impotent poor be prohibited from begging, allowed to beg freely or permitted to beg only under licence and if wearing a badge? But for all parliament’s vacillation, the drift was towards a more organized social response to need. In 1570—that is, while Harman’s Caveat was still selling like hot buns on a cold night—the city of Norwich launched a sweeping anti-poverty crusade that offered skills training, education, health-care, work and custodial support. The city employed thirty-four physicians and other practitioners (one third of them women) to offer care. A census was taken to establish who was sick, who old and who disabled, in order that the city authorities could take due responsibility for their care. Norwich was ahead of the game, but the country was moving fast in the same direction.

      A bout of poor harvests in the 1580s, then again in the 1590s, brought matters to a head. The displaced poor had become a serious social problem. Would the country choose to act decisively or ignore the problem? It chose to act. The Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 were a radical step forward in the state care of the poor. Overseers were to be appointed in every parish to dispense funds for poor relief, which were to be raised by compulsory taxation. Overseers were to provide cash for food, and, if needed, medical care and housing as well. Work was to be provided for those who were poor but able-bodied.

      This was no mere paper law. The system actually did what was asked of it. Overseers were appointed, taxes were levied, poor relief funds were distributed. The Elizabethan Poor Laws—themselves the product of a long-established parish-centred tradition—formed the most generous, the most comprehensive and the most uniform system of social welfare anywhere in Europe. Indeed, one of its most striking features was its endurance. It was inevitable, for example, that from time to time those in power would become anxious about the cost of the system, and seek to restrict the payments made by parish overseers. Yet those overseers stuck to their task, and were more often than not supported by magistrates in so doing. The law required them to relieve poverty. To a highly impressive degree, that’s exactly what they tried to do. In 1696 (the date of the earliest vaguely reliable estimate), the system distributed just under 1 per cent of national income, or enough to help about 3.5 per cent of the population. A hundred years later, the system swallowed 2 per cent of national income and reached 10-15 per cent of the population. Private charitable and Church-mediated endeavours would have added signficantly to these totals.

      Migrants continued to arouse fear and suspicion. One of the great themes of poor law reform would be the tension between returning vagabonds to their parish of origin and seeking to permit the labour force enough mobility to keep up with a changing economy. But such concerns, as is amply clear to us, will never go away. Economies change. Labour moves. Generous benefit provision simultaneously helps the poor and attracts the cheats. Those Polish jokes (or Irish, Welsh or Cornish ones), like the poor, will be always with us.

      There’s a broader lesson in all this, though, and one that touches on one of the roots of British identity. One of the themes of this book is how very capitalist England, and later Britain, was. Long before the Industrial Revolution, England was the most capitalist society in Europe. Yet where is the red-in-tooth-and-claw energy of that capitalism now? The other day I listened to a radio phone-in that was discussing the need for proper regulation of estate agents. (In my defence, I should point out that it was a long journey and the only alternative was The Archers.) The presenter took it for granted that estate agents should be better regulated. The professional body of estate agents, whatever that is, agreed that regulation was needed. Every caller to the programme agreed that regulation was overdue. Not a single dissenting voice was raised. Why not? Had this been the USA, wouldn’t someone have phoned in to say something along the lines of: ‘Now I don’t like realtors any more than the next guy, but if there’s one thing I hates worse than a goldarn realtor, it’s the goldarn government poking its cotton-pickin’ nose into other people’s business’? In America, the market’s ability to weed out the scammers and incompetents is trusted more widely than the government’s. Why is this voice more or less inaudible in Britain? What has happened to those capitalist ultras of the past?

      The answer is that those capitalist ultras never forgot their social responsibilities. Ours has been a radically capitalist society for sure, but it also led the way in the protection of the needy. In part, it stood at the forefront of things because its state institutions functioned very well, very early. In Elizabeth’s England, it was possible to pull a parliamentary lever and effect the proper response in virtually every parish in the country. Less well-functioning states couldn’t have achieved that trick, even if they’d wanted to. But the English parliament didn’t simply have the power to pull that lever: it actually pulled it and made sure that it stayed pulled. Although members of parliament were property owners, and therefore would be paying for the Poor Law rather than profiting from it themselves, the swell of opinion remained solidly in favour of effective poor relief. In short, as a society, our national ideology has long been both that the government should protect the vulnerable and that it’s more than capable of doing so.

      William Bromyard, an English Dominican of the fourteenth century, wanting to remind his readers that social rank had nothing to do with intrinsic value, wrote that all ‘are descended from the same first parents and all come from the same mud’. As a society, we believed that then and very largely still believe it now, whether we’re English, Welsh, Scots—or Polish.

THE LAWMAKERS

       A BETTIR LAWE

      To judge them by their constitutions, most states are short-lived creatures, generally living no longer than a single human lifespan. Germany, Italy and Japan all acquired their founding documents in the wake of the Second World War. Since the fall of the Bastille, France has been through two empires and five republics, and has existed in its current incarnation only since 1958. Canada, being somewhat British, is something of an oddity and only formally acquired authority over its own constitution in 1982. Seen through this lens, the ‘New World’ of the United States is really no such thing, as the country boasts the oldest