Recent research into poor relief in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England has largely focussed on explaining the impact of relief from the pauper's perspective as they negotiated with overseers and guardians of the poor for the pittances that kept them from utter destitution. This experiential turn has added the pauper's voice to a historiography that has now grown rich with different local, regional and national studies of the complexities of poor relief during this period. Somewhat unfashionably perhaps, this book provides a different but nevertheless very welcome perspective to understanding how relief policy was shaped and implemented in the period of transition from the old to the new poor law.

Adopting an approach that systematically seeks to understand how policies are framed, adopted, implemented and amended, Dr Shave provides an admirably well-researched and detailed analysis of poor law practices in southern England. The book comprises six substantial chapters all based on extensive new research. Sandwiched between the introduction and conclusion are chapters that explore the introduction of Gilbert's Act, of Sturges Bourne's Acts and of the knowledge networks that encouraged the adoption of common sets of poor law policies. The chapters are equally strong and empirically rich, each identifying how local experiences were situated within regional patterns of relief. Drawing on an impressive amount of research in both local and national archives, Dr Shave amply demonstrates the importance of understanding how poor law policies were constructed not just as a response to economic conditions or through negotiations between paupers and officials but through the sharing of local knowledge. She also makes the very important point that policies were not written in stone and often changed, sometimes as a result of failures that lead to scandals, such as the example of medical negligence at the Bridgwater union and the much better known case of the Andover workhouse, where in the 1840s starving paupers gnawed at the putrid bones that they were forced to crush, and sometimes because of administrative neglect which saw permissive legislation fall away through inaction.

This research provides new and important details in the crucial period of transition from the old to the new poor law. It shows that enabling legislation such as Gilbert's Act (1782) and the Sturges Bourne Acts (1818 and 1819) were adopted more widely than has previously been suggested, particularly if local acts, that used the same terminology but which were known under different titles, were included. Likening the pattern of adoption to islands of practice linked by networks of knowledge sharing helps to explain the geographical concentration of similar poor law policies. Local officials drew upon knowledge gleaned from visits to and visits by other parish officials, they visited different workhouses, consulted with fellow office holders, read reports of poor law administration elsewhere, took note of the vigorous public discourse disseminated through innumerable pamphlets about poor relief, gathered experiences from poor law contractors, discussed different schemes of relief with the newly appointed Assistant Poor Law Commissioners who represented the central Poor Law Commission, and wrote to those Commissioners for advice.

The transition from the old to the new poor law is also explored in relation to the role of the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners and relationships with the central Poor Law Commission. The two scandals that followed the introduction of the new poor law, in Bridgwater over medical care and later over bone crushing in the Andover workhouse, had their antecedents in the ways in which poor law policies were initially created and implemented in these districts. Bone crushing, for example, appeared to be far more common in Wessex (Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire) than elsewhere, largely because of the keen support by the two Assistant Poor Law Commissioners for the region, Colonel Charles A'Court and Edward Carleton Tufnell.

Although the book takes into account personal narratives as a way of understanding the impact of policy decisions, the main emphasis is not the pauper experience as such but rather a wider set of experiences and the policies that directed how relief was to be provided. Dr Shave reminds us that the experience of providing poor relief, as well as of receiving it, needs attention and the chapter on local knowledge networks is a useful corrective to the view that policies were either the outcome of negotiations between hard-nosed relieving officers and guardians, and demanding paupers or, after 1834, handed down from on high by the central authorities.

What emerges from this exceptionally rich and detailed research is a thorough and grounded understanding of how poor law administration developed across large swathes of southern England stretching from Sussex in the east through to Somerset in the west. It is a very significant and highly original contribution to an already considerable body of work on the English poor law.