Crossing period boundaries separating late medieval, early modern, and long eighteenth-century England, Paul A. Fideler offers a coherent overview of parish-centered social welfare from its medieval roots, through its institutionalisation in the Elizabethan Poor Law, to its demise in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

The study:
- incorporates the latest scholarship
- weaves together social, economic, demographic, medical, political, religious and ideological history
- offers fresh treatments of the contextual importance of Christian moral theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanist and protestant thought in the sixteenth century and neo-Stoic benevolence and political arithmetic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- explores two competing approaches to social welfare: societas (voluntary, rooted in custom and tradition) and civitas (mandatory, embedded in policy and law)
- concludes with a detailed examination of the first histories of social welfare in England undertaken in the late eighteenth century.