Mark Blaug's classic 1960 essay "The Myth of the Old Poor Law" charged the commissioners of 1834 with largely using the Speenhamland system to vilify the old poor law and create will for the passage of a new one. However, historians such as Eric Hobsbawm have argued the old poor law was still damaging by subsidising employers, and heightening dependency of workers' incomes on local aristocrats. Speenhamland appears to have been one among many systems of bread scales, but it most likely owes its notoriety to Frederick Eden's "The State of the Poor" (1797). Eden attacked the system as an impediment to agricultural progress. Though some of Blaug's more drastic assertions may be ill-founded or overly polemical, it appears evident that Speenhamland was by no means a household name, and that since the practice was by January 1795 (the famous meeting was in May) being used in various villages, usually in conjunction with other means of relieving the poor. Because of failed attempts to reform the existing poor law at a national level, the scarcity of 1795 was largely dealt with by innovations in a haphazard way at the local level, and it seems improbable that a national and uniform policy existed.