BIALL handbook of legal information management

recipients of state handouts, but as actors who took positive steps to survive in a world in which those on the margins of poverty were prey to sudden, catastrophic misfortunes – the ‘worldly crosses’ of age, illness, widowhood and mental and physical disability. The comparison with norwich city records also highlights another point which archivists and researchers across the country may like to consider, i.e. that while The First Century of Welfare deals with Lancashire, there are undoubtedly other regions where a similar programme of research could be carried out. healey comments that Lancashire is interesting for its specially fascinating archives, chiefly the petitions to Quarter sessions which are held by the Lancashire Archives in Preston, but other counties may well have equally fascinating reserves of early modern records. A book like this shows what good use such resources can be put to. For this to happen, though, they must be available. Many record offices have a significant proportion of uncatalogued or partially catalogued material, which may be either unavailable to users in the search room, or, if it is available, difficult to use effectively because of the absence of finding aids and archivists’ unfamiliarity with the collection. Admittedly, the bulk of such material is likely to be modern, not seventeenth-century; but in the case of norwich city records, the series containing the poor prisoners’ petitions (together with many other types of petition) had been uncatalogued at item level, with only a brief piece (i.e. file) level description in the norfolk record office catalogue. A volunteer project to make these several hundred items more accessible is only just nearing completion at the time of writing. With an active volunteering programme that can mobilize expertise as well as enthusiasm, archives can potentially make great strides towards increasing accessibility and use of their under-exploited collections (by no means only their early modern ones). it is not only censuses of the poor, overseers’ accounts, and other documents specifically relating to the condition of the poor and their management by the authorities which archivists and researchers could look at. Petitions (as this book perfectly illustrates) are a most promising source of information, and they need not be directed to Quarter sessions: poverty-stricken residents addressed petitions to manorial and borough courts too, and other residents sometimes petitioned to various courts for the refusal or withdrawal of poor relief – healey provides examples of such petitions from Lancashire, which, as he says, provide only a starting point for a topic that has not yet been studied in much detail. To conclude, this is a serious and scholarly book which contains much of interest. its intensive focus on an under-used archive could serve not only as a model for other scholars, but as a reminder to archivists far away from Lancashire of what impressive uses their collections can be put to by researchers. in addition, the book is well supplied with black-and-white maps, illustrations and tables, and with scholarly apparatus, including a useful bibliography and index.