To assert that Joseph Conrad was the first English novelist to recognize a basic English ignorance of Russia and the Russians would be patently absurd. As early as 1891, Rudyard Kipling began his short story “The Man Who Was” with this cryptic sentence: “Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt.” He then follows this opening with a concrete example of the difficulty one can encounter in trying to measure a Russian by Western European standards.

Winston Churchill's famous dictum (as part of a statement made in 1939) exemplifies this difficulty: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

Joseph Conrad, however, was in a more favorable position than most English citizens of the twentieth century to interpret Russian behavior to the West. Born in 1857 in Russian Poland, he had been in a peculiarly advantageous situation to observe first-hand the Tsarist autocracy. In 1862 his father was condemned to exile in Russia because he had taken a leading role in the formation of the secret Polish National Committee. Conrad's mother, there-upon, chose to accompany her husband into exile, taking young Joseph with her. By 1863, the mother had contracted tuberculosis as a result of the hardships she suffered in Russia. After she died in 1865, Joseph was allowed to return to Poland in the care of a maternal uncle. His father was released in 1868 and moved to Cracow with his son, only to die during the following year. Joseph returned to his uncle's home, where he remained until he left for Marseilles in 1874.

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.

Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:

The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.

The recent debate concerning the problems of ecology has focused our attention upon the relationship between man and his physical surroundings. For the most part, historians have been interested in such questions tangentially. ignoring the basic issue of the effect of the environment upon people. The rising interest in the history of technology is based on the realization that political and military events, the history of ideas, and changing social patterns take place within the physical world. The effects of the environment can hardly be ignored if one is to understand fully historic change. One problem which illustrates the interrelationship between human and natural spheres in history is the development and use of the chimney and fireplace in medieval England. Hitherto it has not been fully realized how the new heating technology affected the spectrum of society, and changed the mores of medieval life.

Early medieval buildings heated by a central hearth required a high ceiling to prevent sparks from causing fires. Thus, whatever warming might come by sitting around the fire in a circle was partly offset by the upward dissipation of heat into the large, high-ceilinged room. Moreover, when such rooms had louvers at their peaks to vent smoke, they also let the heat escape — a waste of fuel, as well. With adoption of the fireplace and chimney in many homes of the twelfth century, the number of persons sitting next to the fire was reduced by nearly three quarters, thus diluting the functional capability of large rooms. The chimney fostered the small room. Though heat loss still occurred through the chimney, it was much less than the loss from the open hearth. Moreover, with a chimney the danger of fire from sparks lessened. Rooms could be built smaller and with much lower ceilings, heating the area more evenly. When precautions were taken to exclude draughts, a smaller room heated by a fireplace warmed fewer people but with a better heat distribution than the larger hall with a central hearth, where most of the heat rose toward the high ceiling, and of course, no person benefited from it.

Many historians have written about the impressive social achievement of the last Liberal Government which sat in Britain from 1905 to 1916. Prominent among them is Bentley Gilbert whose Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain importantly expands. Maurice Bruce's excellent survey The Coming of the Welfare State. Much of this work has emphasized the political maneuverings for legislation which increased the economic security of millions of British citizens. This paper takes a different, supplementary approach. It is an attempt to understand the impact of the Liberals' social reform program on a part of the philanthropic community which had asssumed an important role in meeting the problems of poverty. The focus is on the provisions for social welfare made by voluntary and statutory agencies in order to clarify the beginnings of their successful partnership which today operates in the Welfare State. David Owen, in his monumental study of English philanthropy, has rightly characterized the modern role for voluntary agencies as “Junior Partner(s) in the Welfare Firm,” but he has wrongly stated that this role was recognized only after the First World War. The voluntary-statutory partnership in social welfare was formed during the Liberals' legislative revolution from 1906 to 1911: voluntarists who were affected by it understood its signficance for their work.

The welfare measures of the post-Second World War Labour Government gave final recognition to the fact that in Britain social development was no longer to be the by-product of economic development, and that the State must plan comprehensively to meet social needs rather than filling in the gaps left by private effort. In a very real sense the proposals of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, given shape in this new age by a Fabian disciple, William Beveridge, became the foundation of British policy. But the social legislation enacted by the Labour Government was implanted in ground haphazardly prepared by previous measures which provided for specific needs, but often with little reference to related questions.