Angela Nicholls provides a warm and well-informed account of almshouses in early modern England, focusing on Durham, Warwickshire and Kent. Nicholls demonstrates the integral role of almshouses in housing provision for the settled poor in many (but far from all) English communities. Almshouses arose in relation with parish-based poor relief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to be succeeded by the harsher world of the workhouse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Almshouses stood proudly for the pious charity of their founders, though most communities lacked such philanthropy. More usual was the unsung provision of modest cottages for the settled poor, with some parishioners bequeathing their dwelling-houses for the purpose. Thus, many of the less wealthy gave charitably to the parish poor, while only a minority of more powerful men and women founded almshouses. Benefactors might be motivated by compassionate concern for the plight of the poor and more pious expectations for their charity leading to a harmonious social order. In addition to exploring founders’ motivations, Nicholls focuses on the practicalities of almshouse provision, demonstrating their integration with wider parish housing and poor relief. Those with a place for life in an almshouse enjoyed security, but not always an adequate stipend. Far from all almsmen and women were elderly widows; they included unmarried mothers with children, or men down on their luck. Nicholls nevertheless finds a tendency over time for almshouses to become retirement homes for the elderly. Most only provided places for a small number of inmates; six on average. Amid the seas of poverty in early modern England these were very small life rafts. Why bother? Architecture offers some clues to their cultural significance. As Nicholls observes, seventeenth-century almshouses often resembled independent households in providing external entrances and cooking hearths. Alternatively, recipients of alms in buildings with a single shared entrance (sometimes in a complex with its own chapel behind a gatehouse) were more like subservient members of a great household. Whether resembling the cultural ideals of an independent household or hospitality in a great household, almshouses were built in a distinctive manner across England. Often built in proximity to a place of worship, their overall form was closer to hospitals and schools than domestic architecture. Almshouses also diverged from the architecture of personal mansions and public projects erected by the same patrons employing the same craftsmen. The distinctiveness of almshouse architecture points to these being symbolic as well as practical buildings. Most were built between the poverty crises that generated the Elizabethan poor law and parish workhouses after 1725. Relatively expensive to build and endow, these foundations were often strategically located at the gate to a great house or adjacent to a church. Nicholls's study is a sturdy piece of scholarship on the role of almshouses in parish housing provision, related to efforts by central government to regulate welfare, and attentive to the diversity of experience among benefactors, administrators and recipients of charity. A cynic might nevertheless suggest that these well-built and handsome buildings were erected more with an eye to God, fulfilling a personal desire for their founders’ memory to endure beyond death, than as a cost-effective means of meeting the needs of the unlucky in this life.