June 2026

On 5 July 1948, the National Assistance Act came into force. With it, the Poor Law — the system of poor relief that had governed the lives of England’s destitute since the reign of Elizabeth I — was abolished entirely. The workhouse era, which had begun with scattered parish experiments in the 17th century and […]

In the summer of 1845, a story emerged from a workhouse in the small Hampshire town of Andover that shocked the nation and brought the entire New Poor Law system into question. Inmates of the Andover Union Workhouse, set to work crushing bones for fertiliser, were found to be gnawing the rotting marrow from them

By the second half of the 16th century, England was facing a poverty crisis unlike anything it had seen before. The roads were thick with wandering poor. Towns were overwhelmed with beggars. Parishes were struggling to cope with floods of displaced people who had no legal right to be anywhere at all. Two forces above

Before the state took any formal responsibility for the poor, it was the Church that stood between the destitute and starvation. For centuries, monasteries fed the hungry, hospitals housed the sick, and parish priests distributed alms to those who had nothing. But the Church also extracted a heavy price from the very people it claimed

Long before the first workhouse was ever built, the roots of poverty in England were already deeply embedded in the land itself. Two interlocking systems — feudalism and the manorial economy — ensured that for the vast majority of people, poverty was not a misfortune but a birthright. Understanding these systems is essential to understanding