By the seventeenth century legislation in England required local guardians to collect a tax and to use the proceeds to provide cash or bread for those unable to provide for themselves. But there was already a long tradition of churches providing for the poor, so many parish churches continued to operate ‘poor boxes’ into which donations could be placed to be used by the clergy and churchwardens to supplement the often meagre statutory provision.
St Mary Abchurch still has its original poor boxes.
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