LIFE IN THE TIME OF THE STUARTS 103 



trouble to the parish authorities responsible for their 

 care. ) The law worked badly. The principle that the 

 parish was to be responsible for its own poor sounds 

 clear enough ; but the application was not always easy. 

 A woman might have been born in the West of England 

 and lived all her life as the wife of a man residing in 

 a Midland village : was she to go back to her place of 

 birth before she could obtain relief? The members of 

 an orphan family of pauper children might have been 

 born in different villages : were they to be separated ? 

 This question of parish responsibility has been decided at 

 different times in different manners. At one time it was 

 laid down that the responsible parish was the pauper's 

 place of birth ; then the place in which he had settled for 

 three years : later, the three years were reduced to one. 

 As a natural effect of this legislation every parish wished 

 to keep actual and prospective paupers from spending a 

 year within its boundary and thus obtaining a ' settle- 

 ment.' Every effort was made to keep poor people 

 on the move. As time went on and the poor showed 

 no signs of diminishing, the parishes felt they had not 

 sufficient power to keep undesirable people outside their 

 boundaries. To meet this view, Parliament passed in 

 1662 the Act of Settlement 1 which allowed the re- 

 moval of any stranger, within forty days of his arrival, 

 back to ' his own parish/ a phrase which was further 

 explained to be one in which he had lived forty days. 

 He was only to be allowed to stay if he could give 

 security that he would never become chargeable to the 

 parish. This act, although much modified by other 

 statutes, 2 remained in force for over a century ; it re- 

 introduced a modified form of bondage, going far indeed 

 towards reviving the old rule of astriction, under which 

 1 See Appendix, p. 170. 2 Ibid. pp. 170, 171. 



