On the work of the Liverpool and District Regional Survey Association.

Originally published in 1932, this book examines the government of the county of Middlesex from 1660 to 1760. In this period, Middlesex was disadvantaged by its proximity to London, as overburdened Justices of the Peace ignored it for more pressing or urbane duties in the capital. At this time, the old Tudor system of governance was also falling into decay, leading the people to replace the law with more practical and direct forms of justice. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in English legal history.

This study of Cheshire and Lancashire society in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries is a unique attempt to reconstruct the social life of an English region in the later Middle Ages. Drawing on the voluminous archives of the two palatinates and the extensive muniment collections of local families, it offers an unusually rich and wide-ranging analysis of a dynamic regional society at a dramatic stage in its history.

This book offers a major reassessment of the place of the propertied class in eighteenth-century England. The common view of politics in this period is one of aristocratic dominance coexisting with plebeian vitality. Langford explores the terrain which lay between the high ground of elite rule and the low ground of popular politics, and shows that the Georgians were more active in this arena than is generally appreciated.

That ‘poor law was law’ is a fact that has slipped from the consciousness of historians of welfare in England and Wales, and in North America. Welfare's Forgotten Past remedies this situation by tracing the history of the legal right of the settled poor to relief when destitute. Poor law was not simply local custom, but consisted of legal rights, duties and obligations that went beyond social altruism. This legal ‘truth’ is, however, still ignored or rejected by some historians, and thus ‘lost’ to social welfare policy-makers. This forgetting or minimising of a legal, enforceable right to relief has not only led to a misunderstanding of welfare’s past; it has also contributed to the stigmatisation of poverty, and the emergence and persistence of the idea that its relief is a 'gift' from the state. Documenting the history and the effects of this forgetting, whilst also providing a ‘legal’ history of welfare, Lorie Charlesworth argues that it is timely for social policy-makers and reformists – in Britain, the United States and elsewhere – to reconsider an alternative welfare model, based on the more positive, legal aspects of welfare’s 400-year legal history.