It is well known amongst scholars of early-modern social welfare that the famous Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 were built on the back of local experimentation as much as central direction. In a recent important and challenging book, Marjorie McIntosh has argued that these local experiments in formal poor relief were not only taking root in the great towns like London and Norwich, but were springing up across the countryside of southern and central England. This volume, which works as a kind of companion to the national study, takes a microscopic look at poor relief in Hadleigh, a small Suffolk town. By the late sixteenth-century Hadleigh operated a sophisticated and well-resourced system of support for its deserving poor. It drew considerable income from rates, as would the Elizabethan Poor Law in its eventual form, but it also operated a ‘mixed economy’, making use of charitable donations, endowments, and providing support in the form of doles, boarding out, training, and residential care in almshouses.

Scholars of poverty will find this a valuable treasury of statistical information about recipients of poor relief. It sits in the mould of detailed local studies like those of Tim Wales, William Newman-Brown and Samantha Williams – studies that link relief data to family reconstitutions to gain an insight into some of the demographic and social characteristics of the relieved poor. Like these works, this is a high-quality example of the art, and it is also one of only a handful of detailed local studies of poor relief to have been undertaken for the Tudor period. Its main finding, that despite Hadleigh's small size it ran a sophisticated and complex system of poor relief, one which anticipated the later ‘Old’ Poor Law, is a useful one.

The factors underpinning this sophistication, McIntosh argues, were that Hadleigh was a wealthy town, but the textile manufactures that created its wealth also left a reservoir of poverty. In other words, it had both the need and the means to instigate formal mechanisms of poor relief. The town would also, in common with communities at the same time, have been worried in Elizabeth's reign about the need to control and monitor the migrant poor, and there is the hint of a suggestion that early Protestantism might have nudged local policy-makers towards a greater interventionism.

As with all such local studies, the book raises issues of typicality, and it is fair to say that on this the jury remains out. I suspect that McIntosh would see Hadleigh as untypically sophisticated in its approach to the problem of poverty, and yet by no means as untypical as we might have thought before her other book Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012) came out. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasizing that Hadleigh was, at this point, a small town – with multiple parishes – and not the kind of tiny rural settlement that was routinely rating for the poor 100 years later. For all its strengths as a local study, this book does not do much to settle the question of whether the Poor Laws were a fundamental product of 39 and 43 Elizabeth, or whether they were deeply embedded before that.

Aside from this, the book throws up two concerns. The first is the general unwillingness of the author to engage with much of the most recent literature relating to her subject. Too often, complex areas of social historiography are alluded to with a simple reference to another of the author's own works, whereas readers really deserve to be directed rather more fully to these vibrant areas of scholarly debate. When discussing the role of the extended family in supporting the poor, for example, McIntosh references her own work, but not that of Peter Laslett (on nuclear hardship), or the recent – important – post-revisionist scholarship of Naomi Tadmor and others. When she comes to tackle the role of Protestantism in the development of Hadleigh's poor relief, readers should really be pointed towards the scholarship on European relief systems that has done so much to challenge the old notion of an easy relationship between Reformation and the growth of state social welfare. Perhaps most surprisingly, the discussion of the relationship between population pressure, Puritanism and social control finds no room to refer readers to the work of Keith Wrightson and David Levine or of Margaret Spufford.

More fundamentally, the methodology of linking poor accounts to family reconstitutions is not discussed in anything like the fullness it needs to be. An appendix on methodology, which goes into some detail as to the mechanics, says little about how the inherent weaknesses of the approach might introduce biases into the study. It is not that the method employed is bad, indeed it is exemplary; it is just that it has fundamental problems that the author does not fully discuss. There are biases implicit in linking records of relief payments to family reconstitutions based upon a patchy parish register, and the reader should be alerted to these.

However, the book is, nonetheless, a fascinating micro-study that works both as a local companion to her earlier survey published in Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600, and as an uncommonly detailed investigation in its own right. It is a book that is important not just because it is the earliest really detailed study of poor relief in a small community, but also because it is one of the best.