The Elizabethan poor law of 1601 was the greatest attempt within the tudor dynasty to alleviate poverty and unemployment. To what extent do you support this statement?

The Elizabethan poor law of 1601 was fundamental in reducing poverty, notably in the localities, it served as a cohesive piece of legislature that unified a variety of poor relief efforts. However, this particular law was inherently idealistic, crucially in the regent's assumption that employment could simply be provided to all who needed it. Also the statement suggests that previous attempts within the Tudor period to tackle poverty were inefficient, yet this appears to be an oversimplification, the work of Henry VII and Henry VIII in employing JPs to work within the localities to tackle poverty and the series of laws enabled under Edward VI that categorised the potent and impotent poor, were seminal pieces of poor relief legislature. It is therefore necessary to assess the originality of the Elizabethan poor law of 1601 and to examine whether or not it was simply an amalgamation of laws created by previous monarchs and governments.
The motivation behind the poor law of 1601 lies within England's precarious financial situation: inflation, population growth and the lingering effects of coinage debasement. The relative effectiveness of this law was its ability to centralise all these individual poor relief efforts to create one unified piece of legislature that tackled the root of poverty while simultaneously providing employment options for those suffering within it. However, Elizabeth continued the tradition of separating the poor into categories in order to prioritise those who needed relief, the titles "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor", served to reinforce the changing attitude of Tudor England towards those in need. The latter title "undeserving" aptly summarises the problems of the 1601 law, by removing large sections of society and declaring them criminals and vagabonds, JPs and local judges could reduce the relative effort needed to completely tackle poverty. This superficial measure however appears to be inherited by Elizabeth's successors and reveals the reasons for Tudor England's growing financial precarity and impoverishment. The Tudor monarchs were belligerent to accept the scale of poverty and recognise that it was consistent failures within royal government that only exacerbated the issue, notably demands for extraordinary taxation and resources for war.