First published in 2006. In the eighteenth century England scope and activities of the Poor Laws were wider than they are to-day-they had jurisdiction over a larger class of people and were expected to do more for them-this widespread influence assumed particular importance after the Restoration, because from that date England was entering on a career of social and industrial change. The purpose of this study is to give an account both of the way in which the Poor Laws affected the lives of the mass of the labouring Poor in the later part of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth-century, and of the contemporary attitude towards poverty.