When officers of Ludlow's Palmers' Gild composed their reply to a royal inquiry into the state of English gilds in 1388–89, they included the following description of their organization's plan for assisting indigent brothers and sisters:

The same gild also offered aid to sick, aged, and wrongfully imprisoned members and set aside money for dowries so that daughters of families that had experienced unexpected misfortune might marry or enter nunneries.

The Palmers' Gild was a religious fraternity, a type of voluntary association that enjoyed tremendous popularity during the late Middle Ages. These gilds were lay associations of men and women that devoted themselves to a variety of religious and social undertakings. Unlike the more well known craft fraternities, religious gilds drew their members from a variety of professions and made no attempts at industrial regulation.

The seventh of the thirteen “ancient and indubitable” rights proclaimed in the English Declaration of Rights was neither ancient nor indubitable. It declared “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by Law.” The right of ordinary subjects to possess weapons is perhaps the most extraordinary and least understood of English liberties. It lies at the heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows and between the individual and his government. Few governments have ever been prepared to make such a guarantee, and, until 1689, no English parliamentary body was either. Its elevation that year to the company of ancient and indubitable rights unmasked the deep-seated distrust between the governing classes and the crown. Together with the equally novel article that gave Parliament greater control over standing armies, this right was meant to place the sword in the hands of Protestant Englishmen and the power over it in the hands of Parliament.

The actual novelty of this right had eluded historians for a variety of reasons. First, its framers were taken at their word when they described it as ancient and indubitable. Indeed, Whig historians preferred to believe there had been a conservative revolution. Thomas Macaulay rejoiced that “not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers … almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it.

One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.

Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.

The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.