- Country Life : how the rural poor lived in the 1800sTales of village life in Stapleford and Shelford, a talk by Helen Harwood The rural poor were extremely poor and living at a time when the Poor Law of 1601, with its use of workhouses, was still in operation and there was no system for pensions or Welfare State provisions that we take for granted today. People were not paid enough and by 1855 a hundred and twenty people had set off from Shelford and Stapleford searching for a better life somewhere in the new world.
The website for Stapleford History Society