History of Parliament Online

Although we think of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the period in which Parliament legislated a new relationship between the state and social life, the regulation of society has been a central preoccupation of Parliaments and parliamentarians since the institution began to exist. The preservation of public and social order and hierarchy was a natural concern for the local elites who sat in Parliament, and poverty, crime and the legal system and social mobility (though before the eighteenth century politicians were as keen to suppress it as to encourage it), were all matters on which Parliament has always legislated.

Dealing with vagrancy - a symptom of rural poverty - was a central preoccupation for parliamentarians in the pre-modern period, for this was a problem which they were constantly confronting in their local communities. It was especially so for Elizabethan Parliaments, which legislated for a compulsory poor rate to provide relief for the poor in 1572, and for the establishment of workhouses in 1576. The key pieces of legislation on the subject, however, were the 1597 and 1601 poor law acts, which set up a system of overseers of the poor. Although the 1601 Act remained the foundation of the system of poor relief for more than two hundred years, the operation of the system remained a constant concern, and the increasing costs of poor relief (blamed on the 'Speenhamland system' of administering the poor law in operation in most places from the 1790s) resulted in a reform, the 'New Poor Law' (or Poor Law Amendment Act) of 1834 which imposed a more uniform system, designed to deter people from seeking relief as much as possible.

Many efforts to regulate aspects of society had their origins in the concerns of religious authorities, or in philanthropic impulses related to religious reform movements. Marriage was a particular concern of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and movements for the reformation of manners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although concerns about abduction and clandestine marriage were the primary motives behind the Marriage Act of 1753, which finally brought some formality to the confused and unregulated arrangements for marriages that had previously existed. 

Attempts to legislate on blasphemy and prophane language were made from time to time throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often with ecclesiastical backing, but rarely made much headway. The massive campaign against slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - a campaign which helped to change the way Parliament itself worked - was strongly supported through religious bodies, including the Quakers, and the evangelical movement. 

Most educational provision before the nineteenth century was carried out by religious bodies, whether the Church of England, or one of the dissenting churches, and until the nineteenth century it was not something that was much raised in Parliament. Soon after the 1832 Reform Act, however, Parliament began to provide grants from taxation to schools, but the relationship between religion and education prevented a comprehensive system of state-funded education until W.E. Forster's Education Act of 1870.

Although Parliament imposed limits on the hours worked in factories for children from 1833, progress on many other social concerns was slowed by alarm at the consequent growth of the state during the 1830s and 1840s. Thereafter a process of reform became inexorable, requiring a vast body of new legislation. The Public Health Act of 1848 set the trend: legislation on many other areas of social and working life followed.