What was Queen Elizabeth`s perspective on the poor citizens of her country?

She was spiteful of poor people begging on the street for money, and instead believed they should work instead. The dearth penalty was abolished but anyone found to be begging was whipped and returned to their own parish, and in some instances send to a House of Correction.

George Mason, at age 50, wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in only about 6 weeks. This document lays out the rights of the Virginian government and the rights of the people who live in Virginia. George Mason presented it to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in the middle of June 1776. All of the delegates loved what he had written and voted to make it Virginia’s “Bill of Rights.” George Mason was one of the first people to write down and explain the rights of individual citizens, and so many other colonies wrote similar documents for the people in their colonies too.

Thomas Jefferson considered George Mason to be one of “the wisest m[e]n of his generation.” Jefferson at age 33 used George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights for much of the wording of the opening to the Declaration of Independence only a few weeks later. The Declaration of Independence was the document that the Continental Congress signed on July 4, 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain to form the new country of the United States of America.