Between 1601 and 1834 the parish
was responsible for looking after the old, the sick, the needy and the
destitute. These responsibilities didn’t rest with the national
authorities in Whitehall, nor with the county council in Taunton, nor even
with the local authorities at Williton but were exercised by local people.
It was a world before the welfare state, before the NHS, before a
national systems of pensions provision, before disability benefit, before
statutory sick pay, or government funded unemployment benefit, or the
universal family allowance.
But it was nevertheless a world in which people were not left simply to
fend for themselves - there was a safety net – it was by no means
perfect and some aspects of it seem brutal to us today looking back –
but it was nevertheless a system of relief which by and large worked for
nearly 250 years.
Poor people are defined here as those who were either destitute in
absolute poverty, or were in work but their wages was not sufficient to
meet their daily needs of food, fuel and clothing. As a rough guide this
would have included about three quarters of the population in the 1500s, a
half in the 1600s, and 1/3 of households by end of 1700s. In other words
there were an awful lot more people in the past than there are today and
they were a much more important part of life than they are today