Peter Stearns noted in 1977 a paucity of available historical scholarship on any aspect of aging, and important work has been ongoing to fill that lacuna. Since 1991 at least a half dozen edited volumes with broad coverage have appeared, and in 2004 two thickly descriptive and comparative local studies of elderly poor men and women were published. In The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England, Susannah Ottaway explores the perceptions, descriptions, and expectations of the elderly and adds to Steven King's comparison of the quantity and quality of poor relief in the North (more parsimonious) and South (more generous). Her sites are Terling (Essex), Puddletown (Dorset), and Ovenden (West Yorkshire).

The second of these volumes is Lynn Botelho’s, under review here, in which the author compares poor relief for the elderly in two Suffolk villages: Cratfield, a prosperous dairy-farming settlement, and the smaller, protoindustrial Poslingford, bound to the Stour Valley cloth trade. We acquire much more information and perspective on Cratfield. Its surviving records are fuller and extend back to the early sixteenth century, while Poslingford's begin only in the mid-seventeenth century. If one might question the chronological range in the title, this still is an important and complex book that will reward the careful reader. Botelho moves forward nothing less than a gathering revisionist perspective on the Old Poor Law's impact in rural England. Her central finding is to confirm that by the later seventeenth century the implementation of the policy was unique in each parish because of its particular religious affinity (both puritan, but milder in Cratfield) and economic circumstances. Furthermore, in each, as much as was possible, assistance was tailored to individual lives and needs. All this was consigned rapidly to “the world we have lost,” according to Botelho, in the years after the dearth and welfare crises of 1795 (73).

Very much to the author's credit are the prosopographical characterizations she develops of the marginally poor cohorts in each village, those too poor to pay the rate but not penurious enough to warrant the parish's assistance—15 percent of the population in Cratfield and 39–79 percent of Poslingford's residents. Deft family reconstitutions and record-based biographies allow Botelho to illustrate her argument with life stories drawn from 337 denizens of the two villages. And it is the elderly among these marginally poor people, not the ratepayers or the pensioners, who are the center of her attention. This fuels her fresh look at the Elizabethan policy as a presence in the late seventeenth-century countryside and, in turn, leads her to challenge several assumptions embedded in conventional early modern, social welfare historiography.

Here I can discuss only one and mention two others briefly. Botelho is convinced that there has been far too much attention to the Poor Law and the disposal of its mandated parish fund and not enough to the charities that supplemented the casual assistance or pensions offered by the parish and that helped the economically marginal to stay afloat. She emphasizes the continuing importance and discretion of Cratfield's churchwarden (an office of late medieval origin across the realm to supervise funds acquired by parishes and their testament-driven charities) in the late seventeenth century in dispensing cash, rent, fuel, caregiving, and medical assistance from formal and informal sources. Supplementary assistance was available in Poslingford from eight endowed charities and six wills that designated gifts to the poor. Here Botelho adds much backup to John Walter's claim for charity's ongoing importance in the Old Poor Law era. She estimates that an annual budget for an elderly poor person in Suffolk would have been £5 10s., while in Cratfield the average pension was £2 7s. 9d., and in Poslingford, £1 7s. 8d. Thus whether a pensioner or not, an elderly person had to put together an “economy of makeshifts” from employment (self-generated or from the parish), any of the churchwarden's charities, living arrangements that might include the almshouse (Cratfield) or a live-in “third party overseer” (Poslingford), and whatever assistance resident grown children might by able to provide.

A second damaging assumption, according to Botelho, is that the politics of “going on the parish” is captured best in the special pleading and machinations of the petitioner before the overseer. Becoming dependent on the parish in one's old age was a gradual slide, not the result of a dramatic plea. It typically began in one's mid- to late forties and took an average of fourteen years in Cratfield. And, the relatively comfortable pensions for the aged in the first decades of the seventeenth century began to diminish in the 1630s, as vestries and overseers directed more of the parish fund to the young working poor. This intensified older people's commitment (and others’ encouragement) to remain independent as long as possible. The effort had its costs, however: the few in each village who were pensioners, recent or more long-term, outlived the nonpensioned poor, seventy-two to sixty-eight years in Cratfield and sixty-five to sixty-three years in Poslingford.

Yet, a third dissent is Botelho's denial that the “feminization of poverty” applies to the 80 percent of the population in rural circumstances. Women in Cratfield managed the economic transition from middle to old age better than men, were 50 percent more likely to maintain independent households, and entered their pensions later than men even if they died younger (66.3 years compared with 73.7 for men). Older women pensioners in Poslingford, all single or widowed, began their dependence at 54.8 years, eleven years before the men, and outlived them (68.5 compared with 62 years). And three women pensioners there had extraordinarily lengthy stays on the parish, ranging from ten to thirty-five years. Nevertheless, unable to unearth clear evidence that women were overly represented among the poor in her villages, Botelho suggests that for rural England in the seventeenth century “gender parity” may prove to be more descriptive (117).

The book is not without its shortcomings, particularly Botelho's attempts at the outset and in her conclusion to set larger intellectual, political, and economic contexts for, and European comparisons to, the Poor Law. These feel obligatory and are neither current nor convincing. But they fall outside the author's primary endeavor and contributions, which are innovative, pathbreaking, and deserving of further attention.