Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 9781472589941, 9781474296212, 9781472589958

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones
Masterless Men
Being vagrant in England between 1650 and 1750
Definitions: Rogue, vagrant, and vagabond
Stereotyping, sexuality, and space
A cultural and social history of vagrancy
The arguments
1. The Assumption of Idleness
Idleness, the ‘path of mistake’
The argument
Indenture and the unsettled state
Transport and impressment
Improvement and idleness
Improvement by the numbers
Identification and vagrant news
Conclusions: The assumption endures
2. Rogue Ballads
Cheap print and popular roguery
Ballads as a historical source and the problems of historical laughter
‘Carefree’ by choice
‘Mending kettles handsomely’
‘Forlorn travellers’
‘Revenge a widdowe’s wrong’
Health as morality
Vagrancy in ballad woodcuts
Conclusions
3. Hidden Histories: Vagrancy, Migration, and Crisis in Local England, 1650–1750
Introduction
Settlement, migration, and demography
Constables’ accounts and their ambiguities
Quantifying social description
Dalton’s Countrey Justice and Gardiner’s Compleat Constable
A case study of Grandborough, Warwickshire: 1671–1704
The paid private contractor
Quarter sessions, petty sessions, and (mis)classification
Vagrant stories, vagrant spaces
4. Masterless Women: The Female Vagrant in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750
Picaras and precarity
The gendering of homelessness
Vagrancy, sex, and domestic service
Masterless women with children
Absent husband: Vagrant wife
‘Why Do You Not Take Us Up?’ Ann West, Mary Davis, and one vagrant family
Conclusions
Conclusion: ‘But Words Will Never Hurt Me’
‘The beggar-king of Ithaca’
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

Cultures of Early Modern Europe Series Editors: Beat Kümin, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick, and Brian Cowan, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, McGill University Editorial Board: Adam Fox, University of Edinburgh, UK Robert Frost, University of Aberdeen, UK Molly Greene, University of Princeton, USA Ben Schmidt, University of Washington, USA Gerd Schwerhoff, University of Dresden, Germany Francsesca Trivellato, University of Yale, USA Francisca Loetz, University of Zurich, Switzerland The ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities has generated a wealth of new research topics and approaches. Focusing on the ways in which representations, perceptions, and negotiations shaped people’s lived experiences, the books in this series provide fascinating insights into the past. The series covers early modern culture in its broadest sense, inclusive of (but not restricted to) themes such as gender, identity, communities, mentalities, emotions, communication, ritual, space, food and drink, and material culture. Published: Food and Identity in England, 1540–1640, Paul S. Lloyd (2014) The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850, Sara Pennell (2016) Forthcoming: Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy, Brendan Dooley (2016)

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 David Hitchcock

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © David Hitchcock, 2016 David Hitchcock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4725-8994-1 978-1-3500-5812-5 978-1-4725-8995-8 978-1-4725-8996-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hitchcock, David J., author. Title: Vagrancy in English culture and society, 1650-1750 / David Hitchcock. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: Cultures of early modern Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015048079 (print) | LCCN 2016005235 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472589941 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472589958 (epdf) | ISBN 9781472589965 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Vagrancy–Great Britain–History–17th century. | Vagrancy–Great Britain–History–18th century. | Rogues and vagabonds in literature. | Vagrancy in literature. Classification: LCC HV4545.A3 H57 2016 (print) | LCC HV4545.A3 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/48094209032–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048079 Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe Cover design: Sharon Mah Cover image: Punishment of the Whipping Post (anonymous), published by John Seller, Guildhall Library, London Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vii viii ix xi

Introduction: Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones Masterless Men Being vagrant in England between 1650 and 1750 Definitions: Rogue, vagrant, and vagabond Stereotyping, sexuality, and space A cultural and social history of vagrancy The arguments

1 4 7 12 15 18 19

1

The Assumption of Idleness Idleness, the ‘path of mistake’ The argument Indenture and the unsettled state Transport and impressment Improvement and idleness Improvement by the numbers Identification and vagrant news Conclusions: The assumption endures

21 24 26 27 30 36 41 49 52

2

Rogue Ballads Cheap print and popular roguery Ballads as a historical source and the problems of historical laughter ‘Carefree’ by choice ‘Mending kettles handsomely’ ‘Forlorn travellers’ ‘Revenge a widdowe’s wrong’ Health as morality Vagrancy in ballad woodcuts Conclusions

55 56 59 65 69 74 76 79 82 87

vi

3

4

Contents

Hidden Histories: Vagrancy, Migration, and Crisis in Local England, 1650–1750 Introduction Settlement, migration, and demography Constables’ accounts and their ambiguities Quantifying social description Dalton’s Countrey Justice and Gardiner’s Compleat Constable A case study of Grandborough, Warwickshire: 1671–1704 The paid private contractor Quarter sessions, petty sessions, and (mis)classification Vagrant stories, vagrant spaces Masterless Women: The Female Vagrant in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 Picaras and precarity The gendering of homelessness Vagrancy, sex, and domestic service Masterless women with children Absent husband: Vagrant wife ‘Why Do You Not Take Us Up?’ Ann West, Mary Davis, and one vagrant family Conclusions Conclusion: ‘But Words Will Never Hurt Me’ ‘The beggar-king of Ithaca’

Notes Bibliography Index

91 91 94 98 101 102 104 108 111 115

123 123 125 132 136 140 143 146 149 154 157 190 223

List of Illustrations I.1 I.2 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3

4.1

‘The mark of an un-named vagrant woman in Kent, 16 June 1691’ An EEBO N-gram of ‘rogue, vagabond, vagrant’ for 1480–1700 ‘Excerpt from a report on the vagrants held and discharged in the Bishops Gate Workhouse, 1705’ Title and central woodcut for Richard Brome, ‘The Beggers Chorus’ Pair of woodcuts for ‘The braue English Jipsie’ Woodcut from ‘Cupid’s Revenge: OR, An Account of a King who slighted all Women, at length was constrained to Marry a Beggar’ and woodcut from ‘The Bedfordshire Widow; OR, The Poor in Distress Reliev’d’ Moll arrives in London, Plate 1 of Hogarth’s 1731–32 Harlot’s Progress engraving

1 13 41 83 85

86 132

List of Tables 3.1 3.2

Quantifying social description: Grandborough 1671–1704 Vagrants passed by Hertfordshire Houses of Correction

106 120

Acknowledgements The pages of this book are etched with the generosity, insight, and care of many people. It simply would not exist without them. Steve Hindle and Mark Knights, who both supervised my PhD, have been consistent sources of sound advice for more than five years now. I owe them both a very great deal indeed, both intellectually, and in Steve’s case, likely also in the form of gig tickets. I sometimes wondered if Bernard Capp found more vagrants than I did, given the number of wonderful references he has passed my way over the years, for which I am always grateful. Bloomsbury series editors Beat Kümin and Brian Cowan have been helpful and generous with their time and interest since I first proposed the book in late 2012; their comments and those of reviewers have shaped this book unerringly for the better. Bloomsbury Academic’s commissioning editor Rhodri Mogford has been wonderfully helpful. I learned much of what I understand about the craft of history from staff in the History Department of the University of Warwick, from exposure to a rich range of subjects, methods, and sources of inquiry, often through the medium of departmental research seminars, and I have no doubt a certain ‘Warwick’ stamp will always remain on my scholarship. The department promotes a warm inclusivity that brought people and their work together. In no particular order I wish to thank Rebecca Earle, Gabriel Glickman, Maria Luddy, David Lambert, Laura Schwartz, Caroline Steedman, Paulina Hoyos, Jean Noonan, Robert and Tracy Horton, and the many friends I made there, particularly David Doddington and Grace Huxford. The generosity of archives and research libraries has played a significant part in the story of this book. I had the immense benefit of a short fellowship at the Huntington Library in 2014 to write up large parts of the manuscript and to undertake research in their excellent early modern archives. Staff at archives in Cheshire, Surrey, Kent, Warwickshire, London, and Essex have all been wonderfully helpful. The British Library and Pepys Library at Magdalene College have been generous with image permissions, as have the Kent History and Library Centre and Washington University in St Louis. Brodie Waddell has been generous with both his keen editorial pen and with sources from his own journey through the archives. I owe much of the intellectual energy underpinning the chapter on ‘Masterless Women’ to a small but enormously

x

Acknowledgements

useful conference organized by Brodie and Mark Hailwood in 2013 on the future of ‘History from Below’. Conferences and seminar series at Birkbeck, Liverpool, the IHR, Warwick, and Cambridge have all served to refine and nuance my arguments and I am very grateful to many fellow early modernists and social historians for their kind interest and very helpful suggestions. The School of Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church has also consistently supported my work, and I am very grateful for many productive discussions with colleagues in the hallways or at the pub. Particular thanks must also go to office-mates and friends Zalfa Feghali and Ben Lafferty, to friends Lydia Plath and Nick Witham; to travel together along the bumpy road of early career academia is, at least, to travel happier. To Chloë Day: you are my rest and refuge. I dedicate this book to my family: how we see the world is dependent on where we stand in it, and I stand anchored by the love and kindness of those who hold my heart.

List of Abbreviations Research libraries (BL)

The British Library

(Folger)

The Folger Shakespeare Library

(FH)

The Friends House Library and Archives

(Huntington)

The Huntington Library, Archives, and Botanical Gardens: Rare books or Manuscripts

(Kew)

The National Archives at Kew Gardens

(LV)

The Library of Virginia

County record offices (CRO)

Cheshire Record Office

(ERO)

Essex Record Office

(KHL)

Kent History and Library Centre

(LMA)

The London Metropolitan Record Office

(SHC)

Surrey History Centre

(WRO)

Warwickshire County Record Office

Key online databases (EBBA)

The English Broadside Ballad Archive.* http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

Burney Collection The Burney Collection, 18th Century Newspapers database, Gale Online Collections (DNB)

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online

(EEBO & ECCO)

Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online

* Ballads used throughout this volume are referenced in part using the unique identifying number assigned to them in the EBBA database, using the short form EBBA ID(s): xxx. Full printed references to the ballad collections I consulted are available in detail in the bibliography.

Introduction: Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones

Figure I.1 ‘The mark of an un-named vagrant woman, 16 June 1691.’ Kent History & Library Centre, Maidstone Q/SB/22, f. 129.

Thomas Wright, a victualler, rode his horse away from Mersham church and towards Mersham Hatch in Kent in June of 1691. Suddenly, a ‘creature lying by the highway’ stood up, ‘took up a stone’, and hurled it at his face. ‘Cut and battered’, Wright wheeled his horse about to confront his attacker, but ‘the aforesaid creature did run away’. Nursing a bleeding face, Wright returned to Mersham church, where ‘some people drinking, and seeing him bleeding did ask [him] what was the matter’. Given that he had just been hit in the face by a rock, Wright apparently replied rather matter-of-factly that ‘there was a person that had thrown a stone at him and did run such a way’, and on hearing this ‘some of them ran and brought the person before the constable who secured her’.1 On Saturday, 16 June, Thomas Wright swore before a magistrate that his story was true, and the vagrant woman who had been apprehended by Mersham parishioners drinking in front of their church subsequently appeared before the assembled solemnity of an English sessions court, so that she could be interrogated by powerful men.

2

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

‘This examinant doth say that she is a woman, from whence she came she cannot tell, and wherefore she threw a stone at Thomas Wright aforesaid she cannot tell or will not, neither will she confess that she did throw a stone at him.’2 Thus began the examination of an unnamed vagrant woman found near Mersham church in 1691. The woman ‘doth not know what her name is’ and ‘neither will she speak when she is asked but in a sorte of Scottish language’. She apparently did admit ‘that she hath beene a vagrant a great while’ but for how long, she ‘cannot tell’.3 Above, you can see her mark (Figure I.1). Two scratches on the page; this is perhaps all that this woman ever left, by herself and of herself, in the written record. Her birth and baptism might be recorded, as might her eventual death, but without a name and a parish of settlement, her ‘mark’ on the pages of a Kent examination, and the fading imprint of her attack on Thomas Wright’s presentable state, might be the only marks of hers that historians can ever recover. Her story is a riddle, we might be initially baffled by it, but it is a deeply instructive symbol of the historical experience of vagrancy in early modern England, and of its cultural construction. The extent of our knowledge about this woman stands dwarfed by the breadth of our ignorance about her life: we do not and cannot know her age, her home, if she had a family, or even the circumstances that brought her to the roadside between Mersham church and Mersham Hatch in the closing decade of the seventeenth century. Long dead and longer silenced, she nevertheless has much to tell us. History should only ever achieve problematic and partial certainties; even a single human story is simply too complicated, proud, confusing, and profound to recover in its lived entirety. History must always be, and always is, ‘a meaning imposed onto the infinite multiplicity of the real’.4 This challenge of accounting for and wringing meaning from infinite human experience is made doubly hard when the people you want to study, the lives you want to recover – homeless people, rural subsistence migrants, and urban down-and-outs – were almost all illiterate and appeared primarily as passive and silent objects in legal sources or as illusory caricatures in fiction. It is difficult for the historian to know with any certainty what ‘being vagrant’ was like. Consider the unnamed ‘Scottish’ vagrant: did she actually throw a stone at Thomas Wright’s head in June of 1691? The very likely answer is yes. But what motivated her to do so? Should we assume that her flight from the scene was proof of her guilt, as did the magistrates who examined her? ‘Scotland’ is a big place, so where was she from? What was her name? What, if anything, did she actually say in the courtroom in Kent on 16 June 1691, how did she say it, and how much of the tattered written record that remains was the invention of authority? Did she actually say that she had been a

Introduction

3

vagrant ‘a great while’? The unnamed woman ‘cannot tell’, and of course neither can we.5 Running alongside this thin archival stream of lived experience, we find a rich seam of cultural interpretation and representation, a body of knowledge, or discourse, about vagrancy that reifies it and that replaces the silences of legal records with inventive, engaging tales of roguish duplicity, ingenuity, danger, and undeservingness. ‘Wondrous characters’ populate these pages, imaginary spaces, and even occasionally the actual jails and gallows of England’s past: rogues, highwaymen, cheats, mountebanks and quack doctors, dissemblers, fireeaters, actors, and fortune-tellers whose lives and stories blended fiction and fact. One particularly adept ‘imposter’ was Bampfylde Moore Carew (1693–1759), an Englishman who fell in with a gypsy band at a young age and proceeded upon a life of cheating and vagrancy. After an roguish apprenticeship as a ratcatcher, Carew became a full-time confidence trickster, spending most of his time impersonating poor people who lost everything through fire or shipwreck or as a ‘counterfeit crank’, a wandering beggar afflicted with madness. In his spare time between cheats, he stole hunting dogs. Ostensibly the ‘King of all Beggars’, Carew was caught and tried as a vagrant and eventually transported to Maryland, where he apparently managed to escape, befriend some Native Americans, swim the Delaware river, and disguise himself as a Quaker (‘with many a demure thee and thou’) in order to travel to Boston and book a passage back to England.6 It seems likely that the majority of Bampfylde’s stories were mediated through another author and exaggerated or entirely fictional. Carew was, like many roguish anti-heroes, very famous: his story known, told, and retold for more than a century after his death.7 Carew was a real individual, but his ‘life’, as related in his Apology, is an excellent example of the early eighteenthcentury ‘literature of roguery’, and by that very token Carew’s story represents a profound misrepresentation of what vagrancy was like for most contemporaries who experienced it. Like any good storyteller (or liar), Carew’s tale mimics life to a credible extent, and it is told in a fashion designed to reinforce existing preconceptions of idleness and vagrancy. Carew was a wild youth who fell in with the wrong sort of folk at an early age. His roaming life eventually caught up with him and he was justly punished. His ingenuity and picaresque antics served to return him to England, and – in a later edition – he managed to elope with a respectable apothecary’s daughter and retire to Scotland. The deceptions central to Carew’s character echoed crucial contemporary assumptions about vagrancy as a fundamentally mendacious state. Tim Hitchcock writes that ‘the moment one steps beyond the shimmering image of

4

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

the literary beggar and the red-cheeked street seller, they disappear in a storm of dust and lies’.8 Those lies had enduring appeal. Peter Clark has labelled the descriptions of early modern vagrants ‘pathological hyperbole’.9 That hyperbole elided lived experience. Paul Slack suggests that we must ‘pierce the haze of rhetorical abuse’ that surrounds the vagabond in order to see him ‘as he was, to define his status, or to assess the significance of his mobility’.10 That haze of abuse was deliberate. In these cultural representations and misrepresentations of vagrancy – this storm of dust and lies – in ballads and biographies, novels and plays, we will find contemporary attitudes towards mobility, poverty, and undeservingness on display. This book’s task is to travel through this culturally imagined and represented vagrancy towards the lived experiences of the mobile and vagrant poor and to describe the effects of vagrant lives on rogue fictions and of rogue fictions on vagrant lives.

Masterless Men The social history of vagrancy in early modern England draws heavily upon the records of the early modern criminal justice system and the history of the poor laws in order to reconstruct the lives and experiences of vagrants in the Elizabethan period and onwards.11 The work of A.L. Beier remains the seminal contribution for the period leading to 1640. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 was published in 1985 after over a decade of research and it is still a touchstone in the historiography of early modern English poverty. Beier argued that the vagrancy laws of the late Tudor period and onwards were constructed and enacted to deal with a new social problem: ‘a large landless element with no firm roots and few prospects’ that was unique to the demographic and economic contexts of the period between 1560 and 1640 and which did not persist beyond the civil war.12 Masterless Men struck down persistent and inaccurate orthodoxies in the scholarship on roguery and vagabondage; particularly the (then) widely held notion that there was a vast ‘Elizabethan underworld’ filled with hardened and organized criminals, and that vagrants often travelled in large ‘bands’, a characteristic transferred from stereotypes of gypsies. Beier’s scholarship suggested that less than a third of all career vagabonds were criminal in nature and that there was far more of a fluid continuum between begging, cyclical wage labour, and petty crime than was usually supposed.13 Paupers could and would make shift by using all three methods in a single day, if they needed to do so to survive.14 Beier also demonstrated that low levels of real wages, combined with high population growth

Introduction

5

and a large contingent of poor youth, created a crisis situation which exacerbated existing conditions of poverty, in effect creating an army of ‘rootless’ young men without any prospects. The vagrants in Beier’s sample are predominantly young, most often male, are single, able-bodied, and frequently bound for urban destinations.15 These ‘masterless men’ were reviled in print and from the pulpit as ‘Children of Belial’ and portrayed as a danger to the entire body politic.16 Beier argued that after 1660 the number of cases of ‘permanent vagrancy’ must have declined – an assessment based on evidence of increased demographic stability between 1660 and 1700, assumptions of broader economic prosperity based on higher average wages and increased spending on social policy and settlement, as well as changes in enforcement and judicial opinion.17 But he admitted that ‘while historians have been aware of the shift in policy after 1660, they have not examined the reasons for it in any depth’.18 In itself, this observation begs the question of whether or not historians have attempted to examine vagrancy itself in any depth after 1660 and before regular records detailing vagrancy cases resume once more in the mid-eighteenth century. The conclusion of Masterless Men described the decline in levels of this form of vagrancy as in part due to a redefinition of pauper mobility and settlement in the 1662 Settlement Act. While lowering levels of ‘permanent’ vagrancy might indeed have been a by-product of stabilizing demographic growth, such a category seems to me like a statistical fiction. The text of contemporary statutes shows no lessening of the general confusion surrounding who should be labelled vagrant and who should not, and it seems unclear precisely what is meant by ‘permanent’ vagrancy in any case. Does a person have to die homeless for vagrancy to be ‘permanent’? In any event, vagrancy in the period after 1662 remained without a doubt one of the pre-eminent concerns of projectors, legislators, parish officials, magistrates, and even monarchs, not to mention a spectre haunting the lives of the poor themselves. It did not vanish as either a cultural construct or as a social and economic consequence in the century after 1650, and we should be wary of arguing that a relative paucity of traditional records indicates a clear ‘easing’ of an economic problem (vagrancy) known to be structural in nature, particularly when the number of landless labourers of both sexes in search of work continued to consistently rise. Despite arguably underplaying the significance of vagrancy in English social and cultural life in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Masterless Men rightfully remains the definitive social history of vagrancy in England before 1660, and the present monograph is in many respects an effort to add on to the stories of homelessness and desperation that it told.

6

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

Masterless Men’s contention that the spectre of vagrancy after 1660 was reduced to a mere shadow of its pre-civil war presence quickly became a consensus opinion among social historians of migration. In 1987, Peter Clark and David Souden’s otherwise excellent edited collection Migration and Society surmised the following regarding vagrancy in the later seventeenth century: Unlike earlier, when it had embraced a wide variety of tramping poor including unemployed labourers and craftsmen, vagrancy during the Restoration was more restricted. Numbers probably diminished, and movement of this type was limited more to a rump of petty criminals, sharks, entertainers, tramps, ne’er-dowells, and Scots and Irish, swollen during and after wars by hundreds of itinerant soldiers and sailors and their families.19

I characterize this line of reasoning as ‘the rump argument’. There is no evidence to suggest that vagrancy during the Restoration was ‘more restricted’ – if anything, the term was applied to a broader range of individuals, labourers, domestic servants and casual husbandmen, in addition to the multiple mobile populations associated with war, a state England found itself in more or less perpetually after 1670, first against the Dutch and then against the French. It is well known that the incidence of seasonal migration during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries rose, and that rising or stable average wages were not consistently a feature of the economic landscape; indeed growth in the purchasing power of wages across the later seventeenth century was strikingly uneven, with decades such as the 1690s witnessing the worst effective real wages since the dearth years of 1590s.20 It need hardly be said that landless agricultural workers – dependent on yearly contracts consistently terminated before twelve months has elapsed in order to avoid granting them settlement rights – could hardly be described as well off.21 Such a high level of mobility among the labouring poor, combined with the harsh vagaries of their life cycles, seems bound to generate cases of vagrancy and issues of relief and the disputed settlement of strangers. Even a superficial glance at the surviving vagrant examinations and passports after 1650 suggests a far more varied set of occupations and circumstances than arguments of Souden and Clark make space for. Thirty years of rich historical scholarship on the social histories of poverty and crime have passed since Masterless Men was published, and yet the period between 1650 and 1750 remains thinly populated on the subject of vagrancy.22 However, the historiography of vagrancy in the mid-to-late eighteenth century is more robust, owing partially to the increased availability of vagrant examinations after legislative changes in 1744.23 County benches began to keep

Introduction

7

duplicate records of vagrancy and settlement examinations, effectively doubling the chances for records to survive in the archives. The work of Tim Hitchcock has been particularly influential. In Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London Hitchcock describes London’s poor as ‘creative and imaginative actors in their own lives, and in the life of this metropolis. They were smart, resilient and flexible, and in the process of surviving, forced many of the changes which contributed to the creation of this newly modern city.’24 While discussing the ‘walking’ London of John Gay’s Trivia, Hitchcock contrasts the literary beggar found in Defoe and the Spectator with the grim reality of destitution that Londoners actually confronted and frequently relieved with money from their pockets.25 Read alongside other historians of urban poverty, Hitchcock’s work describes the unique setting of London and the distinctly urban contours of a poverty, and a city, which shaped the experiences of so many vagrants.26 The social history of vagrancy is composed of fragments of past lives, stories otherwise lost to posterity. The historiography of early modern vagrancy is also fragmented, into histories of migration, settlement, crime, law, and poverty.27 The vagrant as an historical subject thus tends to pass through history in much the same fashion as a real vagrant would pass through a parish or town. S/he commands our attention absolutely for short moments, for a variety of reasons ranging from pity to puzzlement, and then vanishes across parish bounds once again, back on the road by choice or, more likely, by constraint. Moreover, the vagrants we do find in the primary sources were not always homeless, nor would they necessarily always remain so. Vagrants sometimes did gain or regain a settlement and therefore a right to relief, and a trade apprenticeship or seasonal employment contract could have utterly changed their circumstances. Perhaps networks of kin or community at their destinations supported them long enough to become ‘settled poor’ once more. However, vagrants also ‘disappeared’ from the records in other ways: they might be convicted and transported overseas, tried without benefit of clergy as ‘incorrigible rogues’, deported to their home countries (if Irish or Scottish), or buried as anonymous victims of gaol-fever, plague, or from the dangers of childbirth.

Being vagrant in England between 1650 and 1750 You will find rogues and vagabonds wandering through every aspect of the history (less so the historiographies) of early modern England; the abject representations and experiences of poverty underpinned the social order, or

8

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

‘chain of being’, and animated the early modern state, particularly the state’s efforts to separate poor people deserving of relief from poor people who did not deserve it. This attempt to separate who deserves help from who does not seems timeless: a sad, eternal human urge to circumscribe the boundaries of who we ought to care for. Physical mobility was itself a threat to even the smallest spatial fraction of the English state: the parish. Subsistence migration filled early modern cities with the desperate and destitute, straining urban relief systems to their breaking points; mobile pedlars and paupers flouted the settled socio-spatial order of the parish bounds and the manorial estate, and it was thought that they carried rumour, social instability, financial burden, disease, and moral degeneration with them always. Vagrancy was the most threatening head of the plebeian ‘hydra’.28 It was the quintessential crime of status. Consider the list of people, subcultures, and professions which were defined at some point as vagrant in English (and then British) statute books for over 200 years: ●

All persons over the age of seven who begged ‘upon any pretence or colour whatsoever’

●

All idle persons using ‘Subtle Craft or unlawful games’

●

Proctors, patent gatherers, and ‘Gaol Collectors’

●

Fencers, ‘bearwards’, common players of interludes, and wandering minstrels

●

All peddlers, petty chapmen, tinkers, ‘especially if they be not known’

●

All common labourers refusing to work for ‘reasonable wages’

●

Paupers in receipt of relief who begged in a parish that was not their settlement

●

All persons ‘wandering and pretending themselves to be Egyptians’ (Gypsies)

●

Soldiers and mariners that beg or counterfeit any certificate from their superiors

●

Poor diseased people licensed to travel to the baths who begged relief

●

Anyone already punished as a rogue

●

Servants departing out of service without a testimonial from their master

●

Anyone infected with plague that moves contrary to quarantine29

In the eighteenth century, vagrancy legislation added the categories of ‘run-away husband’ and all persons ‘pretending to go work in harvest’, among others.30 A strict observance of these classifications would qualify most poor and mobile people as vagrants, but in practice we find substantial negotiation of these categories by both paupers on the move and by local authorities. This system

Introduction

9

of discretionary identification and punishment of vagrants was very powerful and had significant and wide-ranging effects on the lives of individuals. It was exported almost verbatim into the legal structure of English colonies, particularly England’s colonial territories in the Atlantic world.31 So what was it like to be a vagrant in England between 1650 and 1750? What, if anything, was different about wandering the roads of England during this period as opposed to the previous, or subsequent, century? Both here and in the later chapters of this book I will attempt to sketch some answers. The range of what we need to know in order to contextualize ‘being vagrant’ is simply vast. Social and economic historians of vagrancy would want to consider legislation, climate, local exclusion and national administration, the seasonality of work, social policy, the contours of a ‘vagrant life-cycle’, agrarian change and challenge (particularly bad harvest years and patterns of enclosure), historical epidemiology and the history of disability, the natural and built landscapes through which a vagrant might move, how the edifice of the poor laws and settlement regime actually worked, how casual charity was dispensed, the domestic effects of warfare, the history of crime and punishment, and contemporary social distinction and description, to name a few themes. The cultural historian of vagrancy would interrogate the discourses, representations and mentalités surrounding vagrancy, poverty, charity, work and idleness, honesty and deception, population as a national resource, popular sexuality and gender relations, and mobility and travel, again to name only a few relevant themes. No single monograph should promise to adequately interrogate this list of themes and contexts, but it does benefit us to be aware of how complicated the choices and constraints would have been in early modern vagrant lives. In order to get a sense of ‘being vagrant’, perhaps we should instead follow the unnamed Scottish woman as far as we can. Between 1563 and 1751, the English state passed thirty-two separate vagrancy laws.32 Some invalidated or collected all previous legislation, many attempted to redress ‘imperfections’ in the existing framework, such as the ‘Vagrant Removal Costs Act’ of 1700, which laid the charge of resettling vagrants on the counties of England as opposed to the parishes.33 When our Scottish vagrant stepped before the assembled magistrates in June of 1691, she would have been examined under several intertwined sets of laws: the Elizabethan poor and vagrancy laws of 1572, 1597, 1601, and 1604, fragments of which then formed the basis of the entire ‘Old Poor law’ system, and under a more recent law, the 1662 Settlement Act, the official title of which was ‘An Act for the Better Relief of the Poor of this Kingdom’. Over the next 150 years, parishes would use the often amended and updated 1662 Settlement

10

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

law to remove many thousands of ‘likely to be chargeable’ poor people from their bounds, redefining many excluded people as vagrants to save money in the process. These laws of poverty and settlement would have already affected our unnamed vagrant woman; the constable who ‘secured’ her in Mersham parish was summarily empowered to do so at his own discretion by each of these statutes. The Justices of the Peace whom she would have stood in front of were required by these laws to examine her and to determine as best they were able what her ‘parish of origin’ was, what her route of travel had been, and any other salient details of her life: her age, occupation, and family ties.34 The magistrates could award the constable two shillings for capturing her, and could reimburse the constable’s expenses in transporting her out of Mersham parish, transferred from official to official, and onwards to her parish of origin, using a network of ‘houses of correction’ or ‘bridewells’ – which were effectively prisons designed for poor people – along the way. By the end of the English civil war in the late 1640s, it was Justices of the Peace and petty constables who had the most wide-ranging powers of search, punishment, and seizure with respect to ‘loose, masterless, and idle’ people.35 An increasingly common method of removing vagrants was to contract out the work and expense of this conveyance to private individuals, who would then bundle a group of vagrants off and away using horse and cart and seek remuneration from the courts for their service.36 At each house of correction where this cart stopped, our unnamed vagrant woman would be whipped and put to work, at least according to the letter of the law. Cities with large penal institutions, such as London’s Bridewell, locked hundreds of ‘idle and disorderly’ vagrants away in this manner for months on end.37 The same carceral punishment awaited ‘loose women’, prostitutes, gypsies, ‘idle’ servants ‘lyving at their own hands’, and anyone deemed disruptive to the social order, for instance local alehouse drunks or perpetrators of assault. Our vagrant could even be transported to the colonies. The Justices, if they deemed her an ‘incorrigible rogue’, could punish our unnamed vagrant by indenturing her and transporting her across the Atlantic Ocean or by sentencing her to hang. She could thus have found herself transported to Virginia like Moll Flanders or Colonel Jack in the fictions of Daniel Defoe. By later seventeenth century, the ‘major precepts’ of Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Laws of Settlement – individual relief, local control, and a ‘parish of settlement’ requirement – were ‘so enmeshed in colonial thinking that Virginians put them into practice without waiting for enabling legislation’.38 If she was transported to the Chesapeake, our un-named vagrant would have recognized the legal

Introduction

11

landscape that she was ferried into. It was a close copy of the system she had just left behind. Why was she on the road? By far the most common reason that vagrants offered for their mobility was the search for work.39 The singlewoman Mary Knowles was apprehended as a vagrant in Chatham, Kent, in August of 1714. Knowles had been advised to travel into Kent ‘for the Hopping Season’, presumably to pick up short-term work and lodging by bringing in the hop harvest.40 She had originally come from York. Female vagrants were also often in search of their husbands or betrothed, who had either absconded or been drafted or impressed into military service. Younger vagrants were also often fleeing from domestic distress – particularly the death of parents, cruel apprenticeship conditions, or sexual predation by their masters. Our nameless Scottish vagrant had ‘beene a vagrant a great while’, so it is also possible that the reason she was wandering through Kent was simply to continue living, to achieve subsistence through constant mobility, begging the casual charity of parish officials and of passers-by. What was it like to be on that road? For one thing, our unnamed vagrant would have been travelling through the coldest temperatures in the last 11,000 years or so, about 1.5°C colder on average than temperatures today, the climatic end of the ‘Little Ice Age’.41 Given that she travelled through a wet, temperate environment in the Northern Hemisphere, this drop in temperature would have felt far more drastic. Harvests during the 1690s were almost uniformly disastrous, which almost certainly affected the level of casual charity she could have expected to receive.42 The terrible nature of the climate was reflected in popular literature; one ballad refers to a terrible flash frost and heavy snowfall on 23 December 1684: ‘Two Passingers that were both Man and Wife/In this extremity did part with life,/It would have griev’d a stony heart to see’t/How these poor souls lay starved feet to feet.’43 England was also suffering from a chronic shortage of coin currency or ‘specie’ during this decade, while what was in circulation was often clipped or otherwise heavily damaged, and this might also have affected the amount of monetary charity she was given.44 As a woman, she would have been a doubly marginalized figure, her vagrancy would have defied not just the social order but of course also the gender order. Women with children were likely to receive slightly more money when casually relieved, but all female vagrants were also ‘passed on’ out of the parish bounds with far more urgency than men. They were seen as a higher financial burden prima facie and as burdens that had the potential to impugn further on parochial poor rates through pregnancy or illness. And between 1650 and 1750, the ratio of female

12

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

vagrants to male seems to be close to even, which was a striking departure from the preceding century.45 The sex of our unnamed vagrant would have afforded her one main advantage: she was in no danger of being pressed into military service. England was then engaged in multiple wars: suppressing a Jacobite rebellion in Ireland and fighting the Nine Years War against France. As for why she threw a stone at Thomas Wright, we can only guess. The 100 years between 1650 and 1750 saw immense social, economic, political, and cultural change in England and in the peoples and places that came to be associated with an English empire. And yet key continuities underpinned this reorientation of the body politic: certainly vagrants continued to be feared as harbingers of social disorder, pitied as emblems of marginal mobility, and castigated as symbols of undeserving poverty, but the context in which these ancient animosities were expressed profoundly changed; vagrants became subject to new commercial, legal, imperial, and cultural forces which had not characterized the preceding century as fully. Between 1650 and 1750, the vagabond was pulled in many directions, some of them new: vagrants were transported overseas, improved or ‘corrected’ at home, redefined into and out of existence by new laws, feared, casually relieved, constantly ostracized, and always resettled somewhere else. We cannot explain penal transportation and the origins of the colony of Australia; we could not understand the Reform acts of the nineteenth century, or the rapidly evolving carceral and charitable apparatus of London, or explain charity schools, or the workhouse ‘test’, or the settlement regime, or naval impressment, or the uncertainty and dangers of domestic service, without understanding the history of the vagrancy between 1650 and 1750. It may seem as if vagrants wander through our early modern histories, when in fact it is us, as historians, who wander blindly in circles around them. Though an utterly marginal state, vagrancy should be intellectually central to humanist inquiry. It is a profound expression of social and economic inequality.

Definitions: Rogue, vagrant, and vagabond Vagrancy is an ambiguous and fraught subject to study, not least because the vagrant subject is completely dis-placed, cast to the outside of our circle of common touchstones: home, social convention, economic order, and cultural respectability. Tim Cresswell notes that the words associated with mobility and homelessness are themselves morally suspect: mobility implies ‘a number of absences – the absence of commitment, attachment and involvement – a lack of

Introduction

13

significance’.46 Consider the three most common contemporary words for poor people on the move in early modern England: rogue, vagrant, and vagabond. These words were as historically and rhetorically ambiguous as the subjects, people, and ideas that they represented. ‘Rogue’ was the most widely used of the three terms (see Figure I.2), particularly in printed works, but its use was not confined to the categorization of mobile paupers. To be ‘rogue’ was to be associated with subversion, illicit sexuality, criminality, and marginality. The word summons images of rakish highwaymen and daring thieves, criminal underworlds, and sex which suborned the norms of expected behaviour. It was a powerful term of projection.47 The ideas of rogues and of roguery were distinct cultural preoccupations of Renaissance humanism, linguistic venues by which ‘the respectable projected onto vagrants qualities they disowned in themselves – social mobility, linguistic innovation, sexual misconduct, sedition, idleness’.48 What was deemed ‘roguish’ thus became the utterly necessary inverse of the Renaissance self-image. We find the word deployed as a term of abuse in the seventeenth century and also often as a sexual label: ‘my life, my soul, my dear fucking rogue’, wrote one amorous husband to his wife around 1670.49 The word itself was a sixteenth-century neologism probably coined in English by John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) and popularized by Thomas Harman, the author of a Caveat for Common Cursetors (1566–67).50 ‘Rogue’ can be a noun or become an adjective (‘roguish’). The term could refer to ‘an idle vagrant, a vagabond’ as defined legally by Elizabethan legislation of 1572 or to wander about, or behave like, a rogue or rascal.51 I do not use the term ‘rogue’ to

0.000011 0.000010 0.000009

World Frequency

rougue, vagabond, vagrant rogue

0.000008 0.000007 0.000006 0.000005 0.000004 0.000003 0.000002

vagabond vagrant

0.000001 0.000000 1480

1500

1520

1540

1560

1580

1600

1620

1640

1660

1680

Figure I.2 An EEBO N-gram of ‘rogue, vagabond, vagrant’ for 1480–1700.52

1700

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Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

describe any historical actor accused of vagrancy or defined as vagrant; instead my use of the term refers to the cultural representations of marginal, mobile, and deceptive characters found in early modern fiction, particularly when those characters adopt vagrant behaviours, proficiencies, and descriptors. The second term ‘vagrant’ refers an understanding of poverty and mobility as a criminal state.53 Vagrancy is, and has always been, the quintessential crime of status. Laws against vagrancy ranging from those of ancient Greece to the present day generally made no ‘specific action or inaction illegal’; instead, vagrancy laws offered a definition of who is and is not a vagrant based on social and economic status, personal condition, stereotype, and culturally contingent characterization.54 The term ‘vagrant’ or ‘vagraunt’ was defined initially in English by its use in late medieval statutes and always referred to those who ‘wandered from place to place’ and maintained themselves by begging ‘or in some other disreputable or dishonest way’.55 Mendacity, poverty, idleness, and social marginality seem to be the most fundamental characteristics ascribed to vagrants throughout history. I use the terms ‘vagrant’ and ‘vagrancy’ most often and most broadly when discussing the historical experiences of unsettled poverty and mobility, when describing the material and social conditions which shaped those experiences or when contemporaries themselves deployed the terms. The final term ‘vagabond’ is the oldest and the most ambiguous. The term derives from the Latin vagari, meaning ‘to wander’, and shares the same etymology as the word ‘vague’. The term also stems from the Latin word for wanderers or rural migrants: vagābondus.56 I sometimes choose to use ‘vagabond’ precisely because it is both vague and yet freighted with meaning. I consider the term ‘vagabond’ an appropriate middle ground between the cultural creation of ‘the Rogue’ and the legal and lived experiences of vagrants, and I consider it a linguistic bridge between the two worlds of culture and society with which this book is concerned. The term’s connotations also seem appropriate, since I argue that roguery and vagrancy were vague states of existence, despite, or perhaps even because of, the numerous lengthy statutes, proclamations, sermons, pamphlets, and popular songs which continually defined and redefined it. In the purest sense, the word ‘vagabond’ could describe any form of wandering or lack of direction. I have, for example, found early modern references to ‘vagabond lust’ and ‘vagabond Tories’.57 The term ‘vagabond’ was completely interchangeable with both rogue and vagrant, and I use it to highlight this vagueness, to explore this ambiguity and its significance in English society between 1650 and 1750.

Introduction

15

Stereotyping, sexuality, and space Three themes resonate throughout this book: stereotyping, sexuality, and space. A fourth theme, silence, particularly the silences of the archive, dominates my conclusions. In Richard Head’s The English Rogue, a popular piece of Restoration rogue literature, the protagonist Meriton Latroon, age twelve, encounters a band of gypsies when he tries to bed down in a barn for the night. Latroon is on his first ‘ramble’, bent on making the most of a newly vagrant existence. He becomes part of this gypsy company, and this is his description of the first night he spent as a vagrant: Most part of the night we spent in boozing, pecking rumly, or wapping, that is drinking, eating or whoreing according to those terms they use among themselves. Jealousie was a thing they would never admit of in their Society, and to make appear how Little they were tainted therewith, the males and females lay promiscuously together, it being free for any of the Fraternity to make choice of what Doxie he liked best, changing when he pleased.58

The gypsies drink healths to the royalty of the vagrant underworld, the ‘Princes of Maunders’, the ‘Marquess of the Doxy Dells’, and Latroon is ‘given’ a girl to tryst with. This passage highlights many egregious stereotypes of vagrancy in early modern England: vagrants travelling in large, intimidating bands, speaking in ‘cant’ or ‘pedlar’s French’, men and women both living sexually licentious lives, and spending their nights drinking ill-gotten ‘rum-booz’. This passage also highlights how spaces could become vagrant or became associated with vagrancy. An empty barn becomes the site of a socially subversive and sexually exploitative bacchanalia. We will find liminal spaces such as roads, barns, outhouses, and alehouses commonly associated with vagrants and their misdeeds in early modern literary and legal sources. Spaces on the border of, or properly outside of, the ‘settled’ bounds of the parish were by definition suspect. Sexuality and gender also play an obvious and powerful role in this construction of the vagabond: ‘Rum-Morts’ and doxies are figured as silent, sexually available female bodies, and the male ‘Upright man’, or vagrant band leader, gets first pick each evening. Such egregious stereotypes of vagrancy clearly inhabited the mental and cultural landscapes of early modern England, but they were part of a mélange of characterizations, attitudes, assumptions, and prejudices which shaped contemporary perceptions of groups and individuals. Historians have routinely engaged with stereotypes of religious denominations, political parties, ethnic

16

Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

groups, and troubling social ‘others’ such as witches, Jews, atheists, women, homosexuals, and gypsies.59 Tim Hitchcock has described the relationship between the stereotype of vagrancy and the reality of it as ‘a significant boundary that had a real historical impact’.60 Hitchcock has argued that, at least in part, a literary vision of vagrancy determined the design and intent of London’s major charitable and penal institutions for the poor. Contemporaries ‘needed to negotiate the substantial conflict’ which arose every time ‘a real pauper wanted access to an institution founded on a stereotype’.61 Stereotypical vagrancy also thoroughly imbricated fiction: eighteenth-century authors ‘chose to depict a certain variety of beggar, rather than beggars in general’.62 This book discusses the cultural construction of such stereotypes in different forms of literature because they shaped the historical experience of real vagrants via the laws, officers, and institutions designed to punish, apprehend, incarcerate, and reform them. We also do so because these stereotypes profoundly affected how settled contemporaries perceived, responded to, discussed, and felt about vagrancy. This cultural construction was far more multifaceted and ambiguous than current scholarship accounts for; for one thing, it was not always uniformly negative or proscriptive. If anything, the actual lived experience of vagrancy was often far more grim than the various jovial rogues and beggars of ballad literature would suggest. We find vagrants occasionally valorized as hermits and holy men, as pedlars and street sellers, as entertainers of all sorts, and as canny, ingenious ‘shifters’, unlikely precursors to our modern, composite, and fractured identities. We require a fuller appreciation of the complex roles that vagrancy played inside ‘the worlds of thought and feeling’ in which early modern people journeyed.63 Vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750 was also profoundly constructed in and around space. To be vagrant or ‘unsettled’ was to ‘make a home of homelessness’ in Patricia Fumerton’s memorable phrase.64 Andrew McRae has described how the sixteenth-century beggar was portrayed as ‘fundamentally placeless’, a character completely ignorant of the space through which they moved.65 McRae’s project was to chart how human mobility ‘posed fundamental challenges to the predominant models of social order’ as the seventeenth century progressed.66 Vagrancy was consistently represented as one such fundamental social challenge. The philosopher Henry Lefebvre posited that a traditional emotional and religious experience of space was created ‘by means of the representation of an interplay between good and evil forces at war throughout the world, and especially in and around those places which were of special significance for each individual: his body, his house, his land, as also his church and the graveyard which received his dead’.67 By definition, the

Introduction

17

vagrant only had access to one of those all-important sites with any regularity, that site being their own body. But of course the vagrant body was routinely appropriated and circumscribed, by impressment, the pillory, the cripple’s cart, and the bridewell, and this body was also deliberately assaulted with whipping, branding, incarceration, penal transportation, and likely other unknowable cruelties. To be vagrant was by definition to be without home, without church, and without land. If a vagrant entered a graveyard it was as an unnamed entry in a parish burial register. This enormous spatial disconnect between the vagrant and settled society surely helps to explain how easily vagrants were excluded from the body politic, but it does not explain why they were excluded. Vagrancy was also a gendered state and was heavily sexualized. Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s recent book on the ubiquity and decline of sexual discipline in England noted that London’s Bridewell, the first ‘house of correction’ and the model for a century of penal institutions, was ‘explicitly formed to deal with the city’s sexual miscreants: beggars, vagrants, and other petty criminals’.68 Rogues and vagabonds could perform sexuality and gender in ways not easily available to the settled sort of people. Sexual policing and the regulation of mobility overlapped in crucial ways: women who conceived out of wedlock were treated like vagrants and regularly sent to houses of correction, so too were run-away husbands. A 1690 bill supported by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners proposed to punish all ‘common strumpets’ as vagrants, though it never passed through parliament.69 By 1750, ‘most forms of consensual sex outside of marriage had drifted beyond the reach of the law’ but not beyond the reach of widespread moral opprobrium, and the vagrancy laws were more than vague enough to apply to pregnant women and single mothers apprehended on the road.70 Vagrancy was thus central to early modern English society’s shaping of itself, and people ‘constructed their own identities against what vagrants represented’.71 Despite revolution, war, financial and industrial innovation, and economic and social change, this facet of early modern social definition endures well into the nineteenth century and arguably still persists to this day. Do we not still construct our identities against what the vagrant represents, against a profound and almost absolute exclusion of the homeless from ‘settled’ society? This book aims to recover the cultural and social history of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, who the vagrant was and some of what they represented, so that we might better understand this troubling and seemingly timeless gap in our sympathies, between the settled deserving pauper and the unsettled ‘incorrigible rogue’ or ‘idle vagabond’, a gap we still fear to address.

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Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

A cultural and social history of vagrancy I have divided my project into four chapters. Chapter 1, on the ‘Assumption of Idleness’, offers the history of the one pervasive idea which imbricated all definitions and stereotypes of homelessness and also lays out the main intellectual, polemical, and legal contributors to a ‘discourse of vagrancy’ between 1650 and 1750. I argue that only two characteristics unite the disparate groups associated with vagrancy: vagrants were presumed idle by choice and mobile out of expedience. This first chapter also charts how between 1650 and 1750 the vagrant was forcefully pushed in two directions: out of the kingdom, via banishment and penal transportation, and indoors, into the dim and narrow corridors of bridewells and workhouses. It examines idleness and mendacity as economic and moral failings in a range of contemporary sources: projecting literature, legal advice and legislation, proclamations, and even central government records such as admiralty correspondence and the Board of Trade’s minutes and proposals. The simple principles of the stocks (or pillory) and the whipping post – to root the mobile body in place, to lay that body bare to public ostracism, punishment, and ridicule – now became the script of public policies and penal codes. Long before Jeremy Bentham invented – or Michel Foucault theorized about – the panopticon, the vagrant was taken inside a working version of it to be disciplined and punished.72 I dedicate a second chapter to ‘rogue ballads’, a distinct subgenre of popular song in early modern England that offers a nuanced and surprisingly detailed picture of attitudes towards vagrancy and the act of consistently moving to survive (what I would call subsistence mobility as opposed to migration). We meet beggar-kings, quack doctors, and prostitutes; revenging widows, pedlars, and shifty mendicants. An entire itinerant economy emerges from these songs, as does a rough taxonomy of its participants.73 Chapters 1 and 2 both largely explore the cultural representations of the vagabond, approached first from ‘above’ in proclamations, pamphlets, newspapers, and the musings of England’s elites, and then from ‘below’ in ballads, by far the most ubiquitous form of printed early modern popular culture that remains to us. The second part of the book offers both a social history of vagrancy and subsistence mobility in England, and a gendered history of female vagrancy, offered as part of a counterweight to the prevailing historiographical assumption that males were more likely to be vagrants than females (and the resulting imbalance in scholarly attention). This section of the book tells a story about the categorization of crimes of status, the gendering of charity and of punishment, and about individual encounters with law. Chapter 3 reconstructs a detailed

Introduction

19

‘typology of travellers’, and examines people who used subsistence movement and casual relief to ‘make shift’ in England between 1650 and 1750, and their interactions with local institutions and officers. It traces the local operations of the vagrancy laws, primarily using evidence from the administrative and judicial records of Warwickshire, Kent, Essex, Cheshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey, and London. It describes how parochial and county authorities responded to vagrancy, seeing it either as threatening mendacity or as genuine need, and charts the operation of a system of casual relief and summary punishment. It briefly examines ‘vagrant spaces’ such as the house of correction and the alehouse and listens to ‘vagrant stories’, found in the records of judicial examinations and notebooks, which rarely survive. The final chapter, ‘Masterless Women’, traces the ties between the rise of female domestic service after 1650 and the concomitant rise in the mobility and vulnerability of poor women. It is not a coincidence that the animating conceits of Roxana and Moll Flanders revolve around the dangers for women of going into domestic service or their desire to avoid it altogether.

The arguments Vagrancy was a culturally constructed and economically perpetuated crime of social status, a state in which primarily poor people and certain mobile and socially distinct groups in England’s past often found themselves. It was in turn a category designed to ostracize the mobile poor even as it reified them, solidifying the vagrant underworld as the dark mirror image of settled society, casting vagrants as fundamentally undeserving of assistance, as cut off from sympathy, from God, from good order, convention, industry, and the common wealth and well-being of the kingdom. It was a category predicated on an illusory choice, an assumption that vagrants chose not to work at proper occupations, if they chose to work at all. These assumptions, this cultural construction of the vagabond, affected the lived experience of mobile people in crucial ways: assumptions about idleness, mobility, sexuality, and poverty shaped vagrancy legislation, the poor laws, and the laws of settlement and thus materially influenced how thousands of poor people were treated by thousands of parishes and Justices of the Peace in their day-to-day encounters, for several centuries. Assumptions and stereotypes shaped Bridewell, the workhouse, hospitals for penitent prostitutes, and animated the incessant contemporary efforts to ‘re-settle’ and re-form the vagrant as a ‘productive’ member of society. These assumptions

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Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

were tightly connected to the ‘discretionary calculus of eligibility’ that informed relief of the settled and deserving poor in early modern England.74 The poor of town and parish were defined inversely against the spectre of the mobile ‘undeserving’. Sometimes they were also physically marked out as different, via badging, settlement papers, and other ‘technologies of identification’.75 However, the definition of vagrancy was more complicated than many historians have acknowledged because it was not constructed solely or even mainly by literary or legal elites. Ballads and other works of literature about rogues and vagabonds describe a complicated range of contemporary attitudes and perceptions of vagrancy; its depiction was often, though not invariably, either profoundly negative or jocularly condescending. However, genuine sympathy and Christian charity also feature prominently. The burgeoning imperial and fiscal-military state also played a role in the definition of vagrancy. The state responded to vagrancy with innovative punishments such as transportation, as well as with both punitive and remedial incarceration. These efforts attempted to make use of, or to ‘improve’, vagrants: to redefine them and thus to materially change their lives. Vagrants were some of the so-called Age of Improvement’s first victims. Finally and most importantly, I argue that the category of ‘vagrant’ was dangerously permeable and that during discrete moments of local engagement with the problems of pauper mobility, this category could dissolve entirely. Thousands of ‘poore passingers’, armed only with poverty and a pass, silently attest to this overlooked aspect of English social history. So let us explore the multifaceted story of the rogue, the vagrant, the beggar; let us recover the voices and experiences of vagrants wherever we can, and let us rescue the vagabond from the enormous reprobation of contemporaries.76

1

The Assumption of Idleness

In the winter of 1657, the Lord Mayor Sir Richard Chiverton and London’s recently reconstituted Corporation of the Poor issued a proclamation. The dark corners of the city appeared to teem with threatening vagrants: especially towards Winter the Evenings growing darke, many loose and vagrant persons harbouring in obscure places within this City and the Liberties thereof, have been found to wander about the Streets and Lanes, and to lurck in Corners, and under colour of begging in the day time, to pilfer and steale […] to the scandal of the Government of this City.1

The city’s constables were ordered to search for suspicious persons and for tippling every night from March to September, to post ‘able (not feeble) persons well weaponed’ as watchmen each evening, and to ‘make diligent search’ for ‘any idle, loose, lewd, or suspicious persons’ at least once a week. The constables were also ‘not to suffer any Ballets [ballads] to be sung within their said Precincts, nor any Children to lye under stalls and other places in the streets’.2 Vagrant children would commonly huddle under market stalls for warmth as they slept.3 And lewd ballads posted in public surely contravened the moral principles and reforming activities of a godly and republican commonwealth.4 Between 1650 and 1750 the definition of vagrancy and the state’s responses to ‘loose and idle’ persons encompassed far more than metropolitan efforts to control the chaotic effects of urban growth or the pursuit of agendas of moral improvement or social control. The English state as a whole, and certainly its most prominent public voices, also began to articulate, and then act on, a declared national interest in ‘improving’ vagrants, an interest in educating them in charity schools or workhouses, making some productive use of them overseas, or on the seas, or ‘setting them on work’ in various projects on home soil. In 1672, the London Gazette, the official public organ of the government of England and one of the earliest English newspapers, published a notice. It concerned one James Cropper ‘who for some years has gone about begging in

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a Clergy man’s Habit, and though he is not in any Orders, has taken upon him to Preach in many churches’.5 As a false, idle beggar, Cropper was ‘convicted as a vagrant at the Town-Settlement Reading, was publically whipt on the next Market day, and sent away with a Pass’. However, it seems he was a very determined soul, and the notice goes on to warn the reader that Cropper might change his name and that he could get up to his old tricks once again in another parish, as ‘he would not part with his Cassock and Gown at any price’. The only solution was to describe Cropper precisely, to fix his image in time if not in space, to hold him fast in the public realm so that he might be readily identified by a discerning readership: It is thought fit to give this Description of him; he is of a low stature, of a swarthy complexion, and short frizzled Hair, full Eyed, and thick Lipped, about 40 or 50 years of age. In his Travail in these parts he had a Woman and Child about with him.

This precise description of James Cropper’s dress, physical attributes, and companions is reminiscent of Thomas Harman’s meticulous descriptions of his vagrant interviewees in A Caveat for Common Cursitors, and it suggests the profound power of ‘public narratives’ to link individual people like Cropper to wider ideologies of social control and national improvement. The Gazette’s 1672 notice placed Cropper in front of the judgmental gaze of readers and gave them a precise physical description of him: his ‘Cassock and Gown’ and ‘short frizzled Hair’ were excellent identifiers, and such characteristics could help readers to identify him in person. Whoever he actually was, Cropper’s public image as a counterfeit vagrant preacher, and the injunction to an engaged, interested readership to watch for him and apprehend him, provides us with a taste of a profound change in the representation of vagrancy after 1650: it could become a brief, banal, ‘everyday’ expression in newsprint and public accounts that spoke to an activist middleand upper-class readership.6 The stories of real people taken up as vagrants could be an item of discussion at the coffeehouse.7 Fragments of vagrant lives became commonplace segments of the ‘classified’ sections of early newspapers and these brief accounts of vagrants as items of public interest typically related their physical description, crimes, and punishment. Vagrancy had made the news. Finally, in the year 1700, Josiah Woodward preached a sermon on the benefits of educating poor children and issued dire warnings about the deleterious effects of religious ignorance and idleness on the welfare of the English state. Woodward identified poor ‘Uncatechised’ rogues and beggars as a moral and economic drain on the body politic. His sermon is worth quoting at length:

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These Undisciplined and Uncatechised Persons usually prove ill members of the State; and the very Pest of the Neighbourhood, in which they live. One may indeed call them, the very Vermine of the Publick Body. Hence come those swarms of idle, pilfering and purloining People, of which we hear daily Complaints, and feel the dismal Effects. Some of which are so crafty in their Devices, and so hardened in their Wickedness, that they seem to be the very Black Guard of the Prince of Darkness; and a fruitful Nursery of a sort of People, which fill the Goals and load the Gallows. A very sad, but a very great Truth.8

Woodward’s contention that good catechism and didactic instruction would directly prevent poor children from becoming Satan’s wandering vanguard was not at all uncommon among contemporaries, nor was his wholesale conflation of disorderly ‘settled’ poor with vagrants; after all, his criteria for inclusion in this group of ‘Vermine’ were primarily moral and religious in nature. Vagrants were unrepentant ‘ill members of the state’ who brought up their offspring in sin. Full-throated defences of the workhouse were common in sermons.9 Josiah Woodward’s sermon also contained a fascinating reference to the transatlantic, newly imperial nature of fin de siècle responses to vagrancy and idleness: ‘many of them being bred up in no Employment at Home, are forc’d by their Necessities to seek their Bread abroad; and so they carry our Shame, together with their Villainies, into Foreign Parts’.10 These three stories are each fragments of a discourse of vagrancy: they are each part of, and producers of, a system of thought, an ideology. Each story reflected attitudes, practices and beliefs. This discourse provided ‘the solidarity essential to the exercise of authority’.11 Each story produced categories and stereotypes of vagrancy, and each story was also predicated on stereotypes: ‘loose, idle, pilfering persons’, a ‘false priest’, the ‘idle and uncatechised blackguard’. All texts – and I take a wide view of what the word ‘text’ can refer to – are both ‘reflections of ’ and ‘agents of ’ change.12 The spectrum of literature, taken to broadly include formal modes such as law and informal ones such as jokes, can imagine new identities into existence, but it can also redefine or reflect existing ones. And so in each of these short examples of vagrant discourse – a proclamation, a newspaper entry, and a sermon – we see simultaneously a reflection of the mental landscape of their times even as these sources helped to transform that landscape. The primary purpose of this chapter is to introduce one powerful assumption that shaped how contemporaries saw vagrancy throughout the early modern period. This assumption is also, simultaneously, vagrancy’s primary stereotype. It is an idea still taken for granted, and I believe that it lies at the heart of all moral debates over poverty, although it is not the sole frame of those debates. I argue that it

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also underpinned an immense legal framework of relief and punishment and nestled in the foundation stones of institutions of social correction: the asylum or ‘Bedlam’, the Bridewell, the workhouse, charity schools, even the state itself.13

Idleness, the ‘path of mistake’ All early modern definitions of vagrancy rely on the same fundamental, irrevocable, and pervasive assumption – that vagrants freely chose ‘the path of mistake’, that they chose to be idle.14 Early modern definitions of vagrancy presumed that the vagrant subject was the most wretched realization of their possible selves. Human life is based on labour, so the early modern thinking goes. Not since our beginnings in Eden has idleness been spiritually permissible. ‘Idle curiosity’ brings about the Fall, and idleness becomes the ‘Mother of all vices’.15 Adam and Eve were commanded to go forth and labour in the hard ground for their sustenance. ‘Good’ labour and work encompasses everything that we do to redeem our fallen state before final judgement.16 Vagrants, by ‘refusing’ to work, choose a mistaken life-path. From this ideological position it is possible to take in the entire vista of moral, legal, and normative rationales for how vagrants were treated in early modern Europe. Each new subcategory of vagrancy added to legislation, every new penal measure or proclamation merely required explicit reference to this ‘assumption of idleness’. Even the most spectacular, damaging, and public corporal punishments were, in this reading, a Christian attempt to reform the reprobate. How else can one morally justify whipping a poor person bloody across a market square or throwing people accused of no crime into jail for months? It is such a powerful assumption that, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence (as contemporaries certainly were) that the vast majority of the mobile poor moved in order to find work, it remained the unassailable, sanctioning keystone in the arch of early modern social control. It is also crucial to disaggregate the conceptual categories of ‘poor’ from ‘vagrant’ in this moment, as contemporaries so often attempted to do. In what follows I discuss how the discourse of vagrancy is singularly predicated on the assumption of idleness, but I do not assert that an entire discourse of poverty is solely based on it. Hundreds of economic pamphlets and ‘proposals for employing the poor’ in the second half of the seventeenth century recognized and engaged with the problem of underemployment or the ‘decay of trade’; authors like Sir Matthew Hale, Josiah Child, Sir Thomas Culpepper, and Francis Brewster noted that ‘the poor’ struggled to find work and that this struggle was

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tied to uneven and regional market forces.17 But there exists in this literature a kind of ‘point of no return’, past which the learned or ingrained idleness assumed of a specific subgroup of poor – ‘swarming, idle beggars’, vagrants – evicts them from the charitable imaginary. The tenable solutions rapidly narrow to corporal punishment, penal exportation, forced labour, and the education of vagrant children in order to ‘breed out’ the idle habits of a previous, reprobate generation. The assumption of idleness had profound cultural ramifications. Sarah Jordan has argued that the middle and upper classes shared an oxymoronic preoccupation with the ‘idleness’ of the poorer, labouring classes and that this intense focus on industry and idleness ‘needs to be seen as an important aspect of British national identity’.18 Speculation on how to solve the problems of poverty and vagrancy plaguing the kingdom seems to have become an intellectual pasttime of the politically engaged elite. For A.L. Beier, at least in 1985, the ‘leitmotiv’ that ran through all definitions of early modern vagrancy was ‘disorder’.19 But disorder is a term that immediately begs us to ask what people thought it was caused by. Contemporaries clearly took the sin of idleness to be a root cause of social disorder.20 Although idleness was a necessary component of the definition of vagrancy, contemporary views were not bereft of all ambiguity. Yes ballads spoke of the ‘lewd and idle’, of deceptive, lazy beggars, and of ill-gotten gains, but they also celebrated the social and sexual power of wanderers, vagrants, and beggar-kings at other moments and in other forms. Sermons and pamphlets expounded on St Paul’s famous advice to the Thessalonians that ‘He Who does not work, neither shall he eat’, but early modern constables, vestrymen and overseers also dispensed an enormous amount of casual charity to poor and mobile strangers and periodically hosted companies of gypsies on the move.21 Where contemporaries sought the conceptual clarity of clear separation between the idle and the industrious, instead they often found underemployment, the demands of everyday expedience, and a moral imperative to ameliorate distress and ease ‘the deep sighs of the needy’.22 Commentators struggled – and commonly, refused – to understand how poor people could be both unemployed and still ‘able’ to work. Daniel Defoe famously wrote that ‘No Man in England, of sound limbs and senses, can be poor merely for want of work’.23 There had to be some other cause. Some defect. When discussing ‘wandering and begging’, contemporaries typically located this defect in vagrants themselves. A small number of contemporary commentators did acknowledge the problems inherent in an intrinsic valuation of all vagrants as wilfully idle. The respected Chief Justice Sir Mathew Hale voiced misgivings in the 1670s, and when published posthumously in 1683, his Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor

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listed numerous defects, not only in England’s vagrancy laws, but also with the assumed definitions of vagrancy itself.24 Hale considered the legal category of ‘idle and disorderly persons’ to be profoundly ambiguous and unhelpful and he felt that the vague definitions of vagrancy in the statutes gave Justices ‘either too great or too little power’.25 ‘It is a difficult thing to determine who shall be said an idle person’, wrote Hale, ‘it is a reasonable answer to that, they are idle for want of such work as they are able to do, or for want of such wages as might give them reasonable support’.26 Perhaps the closer one got to the lived circumstances of vagrancy (JPs examined vagrants and unsettled paupers regularly), the more likely one was to recognize just how hard the mobile poor worked to stay alive. Sadly Hale’s clarity of perception, and his understanding of how work or living wages might not always be available to those who sought them, placed him firmly in the minority of contemporary commentators who discussed vagrancy and idleness. Hale’s training and experience as a veteran of the English legal system undoubtedly furnished him with a much richer understanding of how the criminal justice and welfare systems functioned and how they failed. But Hale’s tract seems almost solitary in its misgivings; most writing on the undeserving poor during the early modern period simply assumed that they were wilfully idle and began their discussions of improvement, charity, or reformation from that starting point. Vagrants, regardless of their economic activities, had to be represented as idle. If they followed a recognized but marginal profession, such as peddling, or if they subscribed to radical religious doctrine, such as Quakerism, this was simply idleness of a different sort; it was ‘rushing about doing the wrong thing’ as Linda Woodbridge has described.27 The projector Thomas Firmin thought that vagrants were so obstinate in their idleness that they must effectively be enslaved in public workhouses: ‘for Vagrants, and sturdy beggars, who have no habitation, and must be held to their Labour, as galley-slaves are tied to their Oars, such public workhouses are very necessary, and I wish we had more of them’.28

The argument This chapter is about the discourse of vagrancy between 1650 and 1750, about its fundamental rootedness in the assumption of idleness, and about how this assumption shaped state responses to vagrancy. It is an assessment of how vagrants were talked about and how the state attempted to treat them based on assumptions made about them. The sources examined may seem disassociated: pamphlets and wishful thinking by projectors, petty sessions and admiralty papers, newsprint,

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private letters, manuscript reports, court cases, even some philosophical musings. I posit three thematic responses to vagrancy that connect the material: indenture, improvement, and identification. Each response characterizes one discernible part of the wider discourse of vagrancy. ‘Indenture’ or unfree labour – alongside transportation and impressment, to which it was tightly connected – characterizes both central and local state policies. From as early as the 1580s colonial territories were envisaged as transformative spaces that could redefine vagrants and other undesirables as labour that was useful to the state, via ‘manning’ and ‘planting’.29 This policy has domestic connections to forced labour in houses of correction and to forced apprenticeship. ‘Improvement’ describes a new, idealistic discourse of social policy dating from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, characterized by a deluge of proposed private projects that were justified by their extolled public benefits. ‘Identification’ describes the core purpose not only of the genres of criminal biography and rogue literature, but also of newsprint, which began to regularly contain short, precise descriptions of vagrants and other petty criminals, often in addition to more voluminous reports of serious crime, again produced in the public interest. In all of these arenas vagrancy was forcefully defined as idleness chosen. This chapter thus charts a kind of social history of an idea and how this idea defined both real and imagined vagrants – in essence how vagrants were made and unmade by words. This definition of a vagrant as one who lacks some moral quality essential to settled living has origins in antiquity, if not before. One thinks of the gluttonous beggar Irus forcefully evicted from the Ithacan halls of Odysseus, or Diogenes stoically in his barrel, snarling his disdain for the petty material cravings of the ancient Greeks, who think him mad. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the cumulative social and cultural effects of this discourse and its diffusion throughout an increasingly public-minded and interconnected English nation were remarkably efficacious. England entered what some historians have called an ‘Age of Improvement’, a period of projecting, experimentation, and expansion, particularly with respect to the twin problems of poverty and idleness, of which vagrants were the particularly vexing symbol.30

Indenture and the unsettled state James C. Scott once commented on the road he did not take in his influential book Seeing like a State. When he originally conceived of the book, he ‘set out to understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of “people who

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move around,” to put it crudely’.31 Although ‘hunter-gatherers, gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run-away slaves, and serfs’ did not end up being the book’s primary subjects, the question remained. The more Scott looked at different state attempts to render these groups of people static and sedentary, to pluck the ‘thorn’ of their mobility and plant them safely, and visibly, into state structures, the more he came to see blindness and legibility as the central problems of pre-modern statecraft. One cannot ignore the influence of the state on both the historical experience of vagrants and on the very definitions of the category of vagrancy itself. In a legal sense, the crime of vagrancy was created wholesale by the state; it was a singular criminalization of particular methods of mobility as makeshift, and nothing else. The composition of the early modern English state relied on unpaid officials and structures of local, parochial governance in more than 9,000 different parishes. These ‘little commonwealths’ were profoundly participatory structures in and of themselves, and they were the constitutive elements of the central state. English state formation was thus a ‘sedimentary’ process, with many local individuals and structures claiming the mantle of state power at any given moment.32 And parishes often were the enemies of mobile people; the settlement regime enacted in 1662 rapidly became a method by which thousands of parishes physically excluded paupers ‘likely to be chargeable’ from their bounds in bids to re-settle them elsewhere, but the practice was common long before it was enshrined in law.33 Laws could create vagrancy, but they could also hide it or redefine it. Laws are discursive; they were and are ‘a means of knowing and making known’.34 They were also often proclaimed and posted in public spaces, ‘that none pretend ignorance’ as a 1692 proclamation puts it.35 Royal proclamations against rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars contain some of the most distilled evidence of the assumption of idleness, how it underpinned state responses to vagrancy generally, and each proclamation invoked the force of law. Proclamations were generally hybrid, idiosyncratic documents: ghosts of a speech-act, official propaganda, legal injunction, and printed notification all at once. One of the first royal proclamations by Charles II after his coronation in 1661 was about ‘the suppressing of rogues, vagabonds, beggers, and other idle persons’.36 Charles was crowned on 23 April; this proclamation was issued on 9 May. The Act of Settlement would pass through the Cavalier Parliament less than a year later. Quieting the social and political turmoil of the ‘late troubles’ was a priority of the new regime, and responding to ‘the great and unusual resort’ of vagrants and ‘Idle Persons of all Ages and Sexes’ in and about London was seen as a crucial part of the restoration of stability. Anyone caught wandering or begging without

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a London settlement after 24 May was to be whipped and sent to their home parish, ‘except those that are willing to go to the English Plantations’, and Charles rebuked parish overseers for their neglect of pauper apprenticeships, which ‘is a great cause of poor childrens idleness, wandring, and wickedness the whole course of their lives’. The state also intervened to control the flow of demobilized soldiers back into (or at least towards) their home parishes, another potential vagrancy risk, and even provided the occasional pension to war widows. James II’s government published a similar proclamation on 24 June 1686, this time against a particular type of vagrant activity: unlicensed peddling. What is particularly interesting about this proclamation is how it separates a sort of idealized, deserving pedlar: ‘the industrious and well disposed petty chapman’, from another sort of vagrant, ‘under the colour of using said trade, many Rogues and Idle Wandring Persons carrying about trifles in the habit of pedlars’.37 Not only were these false pedlars deceitful – disguised as legitimate mobile tradesmen to enable their schemes – but also dangerous; they were atheists and secret rebels: ‘many of them being of no Religion, carry abroad and disperse with Inspection Schismatical and Scandalous Books and Libells’. Having just put down the abortive Monmouth rebellion in 1685, a rebellion premised on opposition to his public Catholicism, James might well have been particularly sensitive to any further fermentation of rebellious or ‘Schismatical’ sentiment among his subjects. The liminal, vagrant trade of peddling, the ostensible vector of these ‘Scandalous books’, and a vulnerable conduit of ‘Schismatical’ information, thus became the targets of government licensing and control. The assumption of idleness clearly underpins the discursive formulation of vagrancy in these proclamations; ‘idle’ was not simply a word casually used. Vagrants were assumed to lie in the streets, to wander, steal, and beg in these documents, and even if they were not engaged in these activities – say if they were peddling small wares – their labours were still entirely suspect. William and Mary, like monarchs before and after them, also issued a series of proclamations against vagrancy in different forms. One of the most interesting was actually penned by the Edinburgh Secret Council on their Majesties’ behalf on 11 August 1692, and was in effect an attempt to map English settlement law onto the parochial context of Scotland.38 It also contained an unusually long section on pauper apprenticeship and child vagrancy. Children ‘found Begging, under the age of fifteen years’ were to be apprehended by any adult (apparently male) who saw them, brought before ‘the Heretors, Ministers, and Elders’, registered in the sessions book, and then obliged to serve the person who apprehended them ‘until he pass the thirtieth year of his Age’. It appears at least fifteen years

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of forced service awaited Scottish child vagrants, and this generous opportunity was also extended to orphaned children and the children of consenting poor parents. Punishment for noncompliance could be harsh: ‘If any of the young Ones so Educated shall disobey their masters when reasonably imployed, their Masters are hereby warranted to Correct them, as they judge expedient, life and torture excepted’, and anyone caught begging after 2 September 1692 was to be ‘Seized as Vagabonds, Imprisioned and Fed on Bread and Water for a Month’; if found ‘Vaging’ a second time, vagrants were to be ‘Marked with an Iron on the Face’. Proclamations, both royal and by urban authorities, relied on the assumption of vagrant idleness to describe regimes of punishment and control. So too did the state mechanisms that attempted to deal with vagrancy cases in practice. Between 1650 and 1750 the state increasingly made use of naval impressment, penal transportation and indenture to productively remove not just vagrants from English soil, but a host of other disorderly subjects: famously including 750 of the surviving Monmouth rebels in 1685, Jacobite rebels in 1715 and 1745, and numerous previous and subsequent shipments of petty criminals and dissidents, such as a shipment of 300 ‘malefactors’ from London and Middlesex to Saint Christopher Island in 1684. There these 300 people would presumably to be put to use in one way or another by the surveyor and colonial administrator William Blathwayt, who would later sit on William III’s reconstituted Board of Trade.39 By 1700, vagrants and petty criminals were routinely sent onto the seas, either as indentured servants or as impressed soldiers and sailors. Penal transportation would become the iconic method by which the English state disposed of the undesirable and undeserving, first with its Atlantic colonies, then its floating naval hulks on the river Thames, and finally the colony of Australia serving as penal institutions during the eighteenth century alone.

Transport and impressment The transatlantic context of penal transportation – the exportation of undesirable people in an act of colonial redefinition and redemption – was also wellestablished before it became a de rigueur punishment for petty theft, vagrancy, and other crimes in the middle of the seventeenth century.40 The association with vagrancy was immediate. Involuntary transportation in England stretches back to at least 1618, when London’s Bridewell shipped vagrant children, and later women, to Jamestown as indentured labour and as nominal breeding

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stock.41 Jacobean royal proclamations also allude to this colonial twist in vagrancy policy. A 1603 proclamation ‘for the due and speedy execution of the Statute against Rogues, Vagabonds, Idle and Dissolute Persons’ ordered vagrants banished from the realm. The proclamation figured the vagrant not only as a threat to ‘his Majesties loving Subjects’ but also, incongruously, ‘to his Majestie and his honourable household and attendants in and about his Court’ and listed where they could legitimately be transported on the orders of magistrates: ‘The New-found Land, the East and West Indies, France, Germanie, Spaine, and the Low-countries, or all of them.’42 Cynthia Herrup has argued that the redefinition of pardoning and transportation under the mid-seventeenth-century governments helped to ‘revolutionize the possibilities of transportation’ and that parliamentary deportations of prisoners of war, mainly Scottish and Irish, increased markedly during the 1650s, primarily to Virginia. From 1653, these centrally mandated transportations also included ‘at least 400 children’ and a large number of Irish poor.43 Court sentences commuted to transportation and indenture became much more common in the eighteenth century. At the Old Bailey, London’s busiest early modern court, approximately seven thousand different proceedings listed transportation and indenture as a punishment between January 1674 and December 1750.44 The vast majority of these cases were categorized as theft. Of the cases specifically about vagrancy, twenty-one cases used the word ‘idle’, fiftyfour defendants were called ‘rogues’, fourteen were ‘disorderly’, nine seemed to be gypsies, and many were simply caught ‘wandering’. The average entry was laconic and brief, but the vast majority of the defendants were discernibly impoverished, and almost everyone transported in these cases was punished for petty theft. The transportation of those specifically labelled as ‘vagrants’ would increase significantly after 1717, when legislation allowed JPs to punish recidivist rogues, vagabonds, and many other non-capital crimes with transportation, and again after amending laws in 1745.45 William Hoyles was tried at the Old Bailey in 1746 for stealing ‘two quilted petticoats’ when they were hung out over a hedge on Finchley-Common. The account notes that Hoyles seemed ‘a poor, Vagabond creature. He said he had serv’d his Majesty 25 years’.46 Hoyles was sentenced to transportation and a term of indentured service of seven years. Parliament was not the only state authority to transport vagabonds; the county records of Cheshire describe a policy increasingly common in the mid-eighteenth century of paying the masters of ships to transport Irish vagrants back to Ireland when they were apprehended in the county or when paupers identified as Irish were conveyed to Cheshire by other county authorities.47 Transporting the Irish poor

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back to Ireland was, again, not at all new, but this practice would grow steadily more popular as England’s parishes grappled with rising poor rates throughout the eighteenth century. Outside of naval lieutenants and the activities of press gangs in portside urban spaces, the phenomenon of vagrant impressment is rather understudied.48 There is some archival evidence that constables and local petty sessions routinely interacted with the army and admiralty and conscripted male vagrants into military service. Impressment seemed to grow rapidly in popularity as a local solution to vagrancy and the ‘idle and disorderly’, and it had support from contemporary commentators. John Locke perhaps put it best. Writing for the Board of Trade in 1697, Locke argued that ‘for the more effectual restraining of idle vagabonds’, England’s parishes ought to send all men between the ages of fourteen and fifty who were caught begging in ‘maritime counties’ to the closest available JP or ‘guardian of the poor’, and from thence directly by pass and constable to the nearest major port. There, these vagrant men were to be ‘kept at hard labour, till some of his majesty’s ships, coming in or near there, give an opportunity of putting them on board, where they shall serve three years under strict discipline… and be punished as deserters if they go on shore without leave’.49 Locke advised against sending vagrants to the local houses of correction because he believed these places to be ‘of ease and preferment to the masters thereof ’ rather than ‘of correction and reformation to those who are sent thither’.50 Some local magistrates, particularly in Kent during the War of the Spanish Succession, may have been doing what Locke proposed.51 Fascinating examples of how impressment and summary justice were used to deal with local vagrants can also be found in the petty sessions records of the Kent county bench during the early eighteenth century. Kent’s county records contain an unusually high number of surviving petty sessions notebooks, and the Kent bench has received considerable historical attention as a result.52 One manuscript notebook is particularly impressive; from 1708 to 1710, Paul D’Aranda kept an exquisitely detailed and richly ornamented judicial notebook for the Sevenoaks petty sessions.53 The main items of business during these two years appeared to be finding recruits for her Majesty’s armies and navy and identifying and punishing vagrants and servants who idly ‘lyve on their own hands’. Responding to a blend of domestic social concerns and burgeoning imperial needs, the Justices of Sevenoaks often discharged these twin duties simultaneously. Consider the entry of 19 February 1708: George Miller, from the parish of St George’s Southwark in Surrey, was brought before the Sevenoaks justices as a vagrant. George had been wandering ‘about the country on Pretence

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of RatKetching’ and being ‘a lusty man of about 30 years old was suppos’d a man fit to serve her majesty’.54 However, George had to be discharged because one Mr. Swaseland (probably the local naval procurer) and a ‘serjeant of foot’ both judged George unfit for service on either sea or land ‘by his having lost three of the fingers of his left hand’. George was let go, and he ‘promised to behave himself civilly and orderly in his Travelling to offer his service in his employ of Ratketching’. George Miller’s impairment kept him from years of hard and potentially lethal service in the name of Queen Anne. Defined, despite a clearly useful profession, as idle, he was lucky to be declared unfit for service. Others were not so fortunate. Of the thirty-four men entered into service by the Sevenoaks JPs in March and April of 1709, only seven were clearly listed as volunteers.55 D’Aranda helpfully listed the stated profession of each man enlisted, and only one of the seven volunteers was listed as ‘labourer’: shoemakers, tailors, joiners, and a ‘Horserider’ comprised the other men who chose to join up, whereas the majority of the men pressed into service, twenty-seven, were listed as labourers. However, such listed trades are problematic and not always indicative of the stories behind the impressment of poor men. ‘Labourer’, like ‘passinger’ and even ‘rogue’, could serve as a term of default and could disguise any number of poor, mobile people. The ‘labourer’ John Floyd, for example, was pressed into service on 19 March 1708, after William Peake, Borsholder of Westram, brought him before the Sevenoaks JPs. Floyd ‘pretended himself a freeholder of 40s in Sussex’, but unfortunately John’s testimony was not corroborated by his wife, and ‘he & she being wandring Fidlers’, John was ‘judg’d fit to be Listed’. For his assiduous endeavours in procuring the unwilling recruit, William Peake earned the tidy sum of twenty shillings as mandated by vagrancy law, and the Churchwardens of Westram were awarded three pounds to maintain John’s wife during his potentially prolonged absence. One wonders if he was allowed to take his fiddle with him. Procuring vagrants and other idle males for the army and navy became a very profitable business in the early eighteenth century. The state began to contract out the provision of men for the army and navy much like it had contracted out military provisioning. This privatization of procurement was mixture of individual interests and government needs, characteristic of the operation of the burgeoning English fiscal-military state.56 It was also in the financial interests of parishes to pass ‘idle’ men to petty sessions in maritime counties and around London in order to relieve any potential burden on their own poor rates and to collect money for the maintenance of any family or spouse left behind in parish

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care.57 This radical method of exclusion sat alongside other forms of banishment such as settlement appeals and vagrancy charges. The privatization and rapid monetization of vagrant conveyance quickly became another domestically lucrative outgrowth of this larger tendency to seek profit as well as military potential in the poor. John Floyd was conveyed away from his wife in Westram and furnished with an unwanted career at sea to serve a host of local, national, and imperial interests. A local organ of the state, the parish, removed him to as part of a policy of minimizing its poor rates and to safeguard a contextual division of their poor as deserving and undeserving. This removal depended utterly on John’s characterization as fundamentally idle. Wandering, entertaining, and fiddling were simply not good enough employments. Local agents of the state profited from physically moving John out of Westram and enlisting him, and central state agencies profited too, from a cheap and seemingly unending source of conscript manpower. The policy of impressing male vagrants and other undesirables swiftly became a standard feature of the eighteenth-century fiscal-military state.58 However, it could have unintended consequences. Co-opting men familiar with commercial sailing into the Royal Navy facilitated the provision of trained hands on-board, but impressing vagrants provided no such guarantee. Admiralty officers accordingly experienced difficulties with their conscripted personnel. On 6 March 1733, ten warrant officers in Portsmouth harbour petitioned the commissioner of the navy, and their superiors, complaining about the boys and men provided to be their servants.59 It was difficult, they claimed, to find servants above the age of thirteen and over five feet in height, both of which were requirements of service at sea. When the officers could get servants aboard, they ‘often prove[d] Vagabonds, Runnagates, or other Men’s servants’.60 When the warrant officers did manage to procure an appropriate servant, usually a youth of around fifteen, the boy would often run away, ‘as soon as they are Clothed and fitted’. Admiralty officials could also run afoul of constables looking to collect the lucrative reward for finding men fit to serve in the navy. Internal admiralty correspondence from Surrey in 1745 highlights how the desires of central and local officials could collide. John Giles, Headborough for Newington parish in Surrey, petitioned the commissioners of the navy in May of that year. Giles argued that he had procured five men fit for naval service as he was regularly requested to do and that when he approached two ‘Regulating Captains’ for remuneration, they ‘said they would not pay your petitioner, but Laugh’d at him, Which your petitioner conceives is oppressive and unjust’.61 Giles said that two of the men

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he had procured were previously accepted into the navy, one of them was even a deserter. Giles wanted his money, and he was willing to cause a great deal of grief for two admiralty officials to procure it. Giles’s petition was forwarded to the commissioners, who then asked the two captains why they had not issued the ‘usual certificate’ to Giles on this occasion. The reply from the two captains in question told a very different story about John Giles and the procurement of men for the navy. The captains noted that ‘an Officer with his Gang’ was always present at the Surrey quarter sessions and that this officer would take any man that the Justices thought fit for naval service and pay the appropriate constable’s expenses and fee. If there were ‘any time any Seamen, we always give the Constable whose care they were in, the proper certificate, according to our Instructions, but all the Landsmen we receive are sent as Vagabonds, the Constables having no warrants to Impress such men for sea service’. ‘This they all know’, but John Giles ‘was very troublesome at the Office’ and ‘told us we should never have another man brought by him’. It seems even humble parish constables could make lucrative use of the discourse of vagrancy on occasion, in this case by misrepresenting the fitness of the men they offered for naval service. Contested definitions of who was legitimately vagrant played out in this small-scale conflict between a constable and local admiralty officials. In fact it appears to have prompted some kind of internal inquiry, judging by the marginal notations on the correspondence.62 John Giles’s petition never mentions the words ‘vagrant’ or ‘vagabond’. It was in his interests to represent the men he procured as somehow fit and appropriate to serve in the navy, or as having served before, and Giles took pains in his petition to develop that narrative by highlighting the deserter status of one of his charges. It was in the interests of the two ‘regulating Captains’ to ensure that the men that were provided by constables were actually fit to serve. All the ‘Landsmen’ that these captains received were ‘passed as Vagabonds’, suggesting that parochial officials were still very much in the business of foisting undesired males of any stripe onto the navy and profiting from it. We have seen how thinkers such as John Locke began to conceive of vagrants as a potentially useful resource for the imperial ambitions of the English (and then British) state, principally as fodder in maritime conflicts. These later admiralty papers demonstrate both the wholesale, effectively privatized adoption of exactly that philosophy and some of the problems immediately apparent in its implementation. England’s wars against France and Holland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were impressively expansive and catastrophically expensive, and historians recount a familiar narrative of fiscal innovation and state expansion designed to respond to the newfound burdens,

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and vaulting ambitions, of a trading empire.63 Male vagrants played a role in these ventures principally as a source of disposable manpower, but the foregoing discussion of procurement and of parochial and judicial adaptations to these wider demands for manpower show how the needs, and the assumptions, of the state could reach easily into local communities and into impoverished, liminal lives. However, as some naval officials, justices, and constables learned, playing with the definitions of vagrancy could also cause real problems. The English state participated quite directly in defining who was and was not vagrant. By the eighteenth century, the state possessed both domestic and imperial tools for the identification and punishment of vagrants. Penal transportation, indentured servitude, and impressment featured as remedies that physically removed the body of the vagrant from English soil and ‘reformed’ them out of legal existence. Recall the effort to supply both labour and breeding stock to the struggling colony of Jamestown in the early seventeenth century – a practice which continued and which became effectively privatized. Private abuses of this system of paid transportation would actually create the crime of ‘kidnapping’ later in the seventeenth century.64 Domestically, vagrants were defined most directly by the state in proclamations and in parliamentary legislation, definitions which became completely untenable when applied to individual and local circumstance. Penal transportation was a relatively new arena in which assumptions of idleness underwrote state policy. But it was hardly an unjustified or unconsidered development. These connections between ‘Trade and Plantations’ and the quintessentially domestic problems of vagrancy were fleshed out fully in more than a century of ‘projecting’: printed proposals for the improvement of the nation, its peoples, and its laws. A new solution to the classical problem of employing the nation’s poor presented itself in the seventeenth century: create work, not just for the poor at home, but also in colonial spaces abroad.

Improvement and idleness Debates over what we would now term ‘public welfare’ in early modern England long predate the mid-seventeenth century. A language of the ‘common weal’ or commonwealth imbricated discussions of social policy in sixteenth-century England, and many of the solutions which were later favoured by men like John Locke or Josiah Woodward had long histories, particularly institutions like workhouses and charitable schooling.65 But in the mid-seventeenth century, there

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was a decisive shift towards the unifying concepts of ‘the public good’ and its ‘improvement’. These ‘new conceptual clothes’ fitted snugly onto the assumption of idleness; projectors could be uniformly positive about the potential benefits for the poor of their proposed charities, workhouses, and other improvements, while being universally condemnatory when writing about vagrancy, which was seen as a singular drain on public benefit systems, the public good, and the ‘real’ poor themselves. Vagrancy continued to figure as the ‘obverse of all that was acceptable’.66 Richard Dunning summarized the consensus of this literature in 1685: ‘work for those that WILL Labour, Punishment for those that WILL NOT, and Bread for those who cannot’.67 The volume of improvement literature on poverty and vagrancy after 1650 is enormous, and it would be difficult to produce a comprehensive account of it here.68 I am afraid that interesting examples will have to do. Sharp dichotomies of deserving poverty and undeserving vagrancy are ubiquitous in improvement literature: Rice Bush’s 1650 Poor Mans Friend begins with a vigorous scriptural justification of charity for the needy: God commands us to be ‘eies to the blinde, ears to the deaf, and that we cloath the naked, feed the hungry, and bring the stranger into our house’, and yet, less than a page later, vagrants and ‘counterfeits’ are characterized by ‘wickednesse and vile abuses’.69 We will encounter this assumption again and again: that vagrants were not real poor, that in their idleness they pretend to poverty in order to make claims to charity, and that they appropriate the image of poverty and thus steal time, attention, and alms from the truly deserving. Bush saved special ire for the counterfeiting of sickness and related a story in which a man was begging in Moorfields by claiming that ‘his heels grew to his buttocks’ and a local divine happened upon a group of milkmaids torturing him: ‘whipping the supposed cripple with nettles, to try if he would find his legs’. The vagrant endures this public whipping until the maids tire but is then whipped again by a ‘Carre-man’ several times on his shoulders: ‘in so much that some tender-hearted spectators were much displeased with the Carre-man for abusing the supposed cripple’.70 The Reverend tries his own hand at ‘discovering’ the false cripple by kneeling on his chest and extending his legs fully. This accomplished, he walks off to find the constable and commit the man to Bridewell, and the vagrant (understandably!) runs away. This episode reads like an entry in a rogue pamphlet, in this case imbued with verisimilitude by naming the parish and the clergyman involved in the story, and the anecdote could well be partially plagiarized from any number of them. Elites worried about the implications of poverty and vagrancy in private as well as in public and often discussed quite radical solutions. In a set of manuscript

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notations dated around the 1650s, John Egerton, 2nd Earl of Bridgewater, can be found musing over ‘The Multitude of Poore that dayly lie in every corner of the Streets notwithstanding the great Collections in every Parish’ in considerations he wanted to then set before Parliament.71 Egerton’s impression was that there was a widespread plague of vestrymen and overseers who were stealing money from parish rates, their ‘ille disposing of the aforesaid Collections is well known’ and he noted that ‘money going through many hands never encreaseth’. Egerton’s proposed solutions boiled down to handing as much power over the poor relief and settlement systems to gentlemen as possible. Step one, pack the vestries: ‘First that all Vestrys be dissolved and none but the ministers and Gentlemen of the best Estates Quality and Reputation be chosen into the said Vestrys and a certain number limited’ so that ‘the whole power and care of the Poore may be lodged in persons of the best Estates, Quality and Reputation’. Step two, reduce the power of overseers by making them ‘only Collectors for the Poor (as in the case of the King’s Tax)’ that ‘have noe power to dispose or distribute any of the money collected’; the parish body in charge of disbursement would instead become the newly gentrified vestry, where a ‘Receiver Generall’ would be appointed to take charge of accounts. Not content with reorganizing 9,000 parish vestries on the back of spare parchment, Egerton also jotted down a rebuttal to the principle objection he foresaw for his proposals, which was that it did nothing to solve the problem of poverty directly, only reorganized who controlled the money associated with relief. Bridgewater advocated slow change because ‘the Poor in all places are grown to so prodigious a charge it is not to be lessen’d all at once but by degrees’ and allowed that his proposals ‘will not presently’ fix the ‘charge of the Poor’ but would generate long-term savings for ratepayers from the frugality and enlightened business sense of local gentry. A strong undercurrent of moral opprobrium underpinned the literature on vagrant improvement. It is expressed clearly in the work of Thomas Firmin. Firmin’s 1678 Proposals for Imploying the Poor related his successes at employing and educating poor women and girls in St. Bishop’s Aldersgate.72 Firmin was one of the founding members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners and held a longstanding commitment to the principles of both religious reformation and to public improvement.73 He testified in front of the Board of Trade regarding workhouses and poor relief in 1696–97.74 His methods might be succinctly summarized as cloth-manufacturing and catechism. Firmin’s views on the prevention of begging showcased how thoroughly assumptions of idleness underpinned both moral and economic definitions of vagrancy. Firmin argued that public workhouses must be designed specifically with vagrants in mind, as

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institutions they should be designed to hold vagrants ‘to their Labour’, and strict supervision in workhouses was the best means available to root the vagabond productively in place.75 If the harsh charity of the workhouse regimen fails, Firmin drew on scripture to describe what treatment beggars then deserved: ‘if they will not work, nor be kept from begging, their Pensions should be taken away, and their persons secured as idle Beggars in a House of Correction; where they should be made to work or forbid to eat, according as the Apostle St. Paul adviseth’.76 John Bellers, a Quaker projector and successful merchant, proposed solutions even more radical than Firmin’s, though generally kinder in tone. Bellers’ 1695 Proposals for a College of Industry would later earn praise from Karl Marx in Das Kapital.77 In it he advocated establishing communes or ‘colledges’ of 200 to 300 people, two-thirds of whom knew a useful trade. Money would be of little or no internal use in such colleges, and the scheme would be supported by profits only for those who initially supported individual communes with seed investment. His proposals found only limited success in both Quaker and parliamentary circles, though they proved interesting enough that he was also invited to present to the Board of Trade in 1697.78 In a concise fifteen-page proposal clearly intended for the eyes of those in power, Bellers laid out his scheme for such ‘colleges of industry’ that would primarily serve as centres of employment and residence for the poor. This system, he argued, would minimize numerous disadvantages present in the current patchwork of bridewells and parish relief: the allocation of work would be rationalized, an absence of money would prevent the corruption of officials, numerous extraneous professions (such as lawyers) would be unnecessary, and begging would be eliminated. Bellers was also in favour of charity school education. ‘There is Three Things I aim at’, he wrote. ‘First, Profit for the Rich, (which will be Life to the rest.) Secondly, A plentiful Living for the Poor, without difficulty. Thirdly, A good Education for Youth, that may tend to prepare their Souls into the Nature of the good Ground.’79 John Bellers also advocated getting rid of the death penalty, establishing a nationally funded system of health provision and hospitals, and creating a kind of European council to shepherd international peace (seen by later scholars as a very early precursor to the League of Nations). Bellers clearly desired ‘nothing less than a total redesign of economic life, writ small’.80 There was no universal consensus about the most effective means to improve the vagrant poor, only about vagrancy’s root cause. Writers were also clearly distressed by the misery and destitution they personally encountered, and appeals for reform could become emotional and personal. Reformers often entered into combative dialogue with each other, particularly during

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the sporadic moments of energetic reform which characterized parliamentary responses to vagrancy. One interesting debate occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century, between Charles Gray and James Creed. Gray was a substantial landowner in Colchester, lawyer, and member of Parliament. Creed was less well-known, serving as a JP for Middlesex, Surrey, and Kent in the mideighteenth century. Gray’s Considerations, published in 1751, reflected on recent modifications made to the vagrancy laws in 1745. In it he made the now-classic argument that the existing Elizabethan statutes were more than sufficient for the rising numbers of beggars and mobile poor. Gray believed that significant reforms to the parish-based system would radically undermine the well-being of the ‘industrious poor’. Referencing proposals to dissolve parishes into larger administrative units, he wrote: ‘what despondency will it drive them into, to think, that they will now no longer have a home?’81 As for those already homeless, Gray considered the existing settlement regime ‘rational in itself ’ and capable of controlling pauper mobility if ‘properly executed’. A ‘great complaint, and a very just one’ was made against the ‘rambling’ of the poor, but would ‘destroying parochial settlement and provision prevent wandering?’82 Gray’s Considerations defended the status quo, his proposed changes boiled down to encouraging philanthropic gentlemen to play a greater part in the social regulation of their townships and parishes, a proposal we found the second Earl of Bridgewater making almost a century earlier, and it prompted a swift rebuttal from James Creed, himself clearly interested in wholesale parliamentary reform of the poor laws.83 Creed found the solution of having gentlemen simply watch over unpaid, overworked officials absurd and phrased his pamphlet as a disputation, rebutting Gray’s premises and conclusions line for line. At one particular point in the tract Creed’s narrative turns personal, when he described his first-hand experiences administering the poor laws as a Justice of the Peace: Creed had ‘frequently been Witness to the Insufficiency of the Laws’.84 He described the systemic abuses of the settlement system vividly: Miserable Wretches, who, though so spent with Illness, as not fit to be removed from a Bed, have yet been harassed about from Justice to Justice, in order only to the Signing an Order for their Removal. Another distressful and cruel Consequence of parochial Settlements, and the present method of Removals!

For James Creed and many others, anything less than wholesale reform of the poor laws was woefully insufficient. By 1750 the optimism of improvement literature had clearly waned, and the later decades of the eighteenth century would prove just how strained the system had become.85

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Improvement by the numbers

Figure 1.1 ‘Excerpt from a report on the vagrants held and discharged in the Bishops Gate Workhouse, 1705’, London work-house (London, 1705): p. 2. © The British Library Board.

During the later seventeenth century in England, poverty and vagrancy became problems of the ‘new science’ of political economy.86 Developing sixteenthcentury humanist thinking, contemporaries argued that the problem of vagrancy must be quantified in terms that related it to national interests and that it could only be solved didactically. The language deployed in this redefinition seemed new, characterized by the use of numeracy, statistics, and ‘political arithmetick’ in the pursuit of a stronger nation. The effect of this discursive shift on social policy is primary subject of Paul Slack’s book From Reformation to Improvement. This preoccupation with identification and accuracy also shaped wider political debates about national power and wealth. ‘Political Arithmetic’ became an increasingly fashionable method of political persuasion, particularly when attempting to convince those in power that economic action – particularly the sanction of private projects, monopolies, or patents – was necessary. One of the most ambitious attempts to deploy political arithmetic in the service of the national interest was Gregory King’s Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England.87 King made sophisticated use of hearth tax records and birth, baptism, and marriage records to arrive at a fairly accurate calculation of the nation’s total population. But he also attempted to count the number of souls in the many social classes of the country, vagrants included. Gregory King thought that approximately 80,000 soldiers, seamen, and vagrants existed in England around 1688, and he argued that just over half of a national population of 5.5 million souls were annually ‘decreasing the wealth’ of the kingdom.88 King’s interest in calculating precisely what the English nation could annually produce stemmed from a desire to inform William III’s government about the potential revenue and industry of his new kingdom, as he pursued an expensive continental war against Louis XIV’s France. King’s

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Tory sensibilities rendered him firmly opposed to further prosecuting the war, and his calculations were backdated to 1688 to show, using numbers, how the strength and wealth of the kingdom was suffering. Similar to his much-admired predecessor, Sir William Petty, King had a tendency to apply math to virtually any subject. In 1711 we find him calculating precisely how many flowers ‘Great’ and ‘small’ should make their way into the embroidery of Mrs King’s ‘fine Calico gown’.89 It comes as no surprise then that when calculating his national tables of income and population, King would express his blind guesses as solid mathematical estimates. What interests us here is the fascinating, and largely unexplained, figure of 30,000 vagrants that formed one part of his famous ‘Scheme’ of England’s population. If hearth tax returns, heraldry tables, and parochial registers were the evidence underlying the overall population estimate, what records suggested a total of 30,000 vagrants? Tom Arkell included King’s revised calculations in his excellent study of the scheme’s numbers and social context. In it, Gregory King estimated that 30,000 ‘vagrants, gypsies, thieves, beggars, etc’ lived in the England of 1688. They each earned £2 per annum (£60,000), each cost the nation £4 per annum (£120,000), and of all of the twenty-six specific social categories listed in King’s table, vagrants were the only group with no estimate of the number of families or the ‘heads per family’ included.90 King’s 30,000 vagrants were clearly a fictionalized construct, and the single line they merited in his scheme was rife with assumptions. A vagrant man could only be a ‘run-away’ husband; any family he actually did have could not legitimately be counted. Even in the seemingly objective world of numbers, the vagrant must be excluded from traditional structures of home and family. This desire to quantify England’s population for political purposes always had moral underpinnings, but the blank space left next to vagrants under the ‘families’ column seems as fascinating in and of itself as the larger project – and the reasons behind it – of quantifying national power and potential by accurately describing the contours of the nation’s population. Political arithmetic became a very fashionable way of forcefully arguing for social policies to ‘improve’ segments of the populace. John Bellers estimated precise monetary values for the health, labour, and work of the poor in an explicit attempt to link the moral and physical welfare of the poor with the economic welfare of the English state.91 ‘Every Able Industrious Labourer, that is capable to have Children, who so untimely Dies, may be accounted Two Hundred Pound Loss to the Kingdom’, he wrote.92 The use of mathematics to describe the potential of new social policies was most prevalent in recommendations made to Parliament and to the central administration of the monarch directly. This is apparent in the 1697 Board of

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Trade manuscript report on ‘Imploying the Poor’, which was sent to Whitehall in December of that year, which advocated a relatively conservative set of reforms but deployed radically new rhetorical tools to do so.93 William III had reconstituted a Board of Trade to advise him on both colonial mercantile policy and on ‘Trade Domestick’ early in the 1690s. The Board’s 1697 report to William on how best to employ the ‘idle poor’ has received only intermittent historical attention, presumably because Locke’s ‘Essay on the Poor Laws’, the original version of which was submitted as a recommendation to the Board on 26 October 1697, is generally found much more interesting. The substance of the Board’s recommendations to William can be found early in their report: Wee attribute the increase of the Poor to the relaxation of discipline, Corruption of Manners, and ill Education of the Poorer sort and more particularly to a Neglect of the Execution or rather a perversion of the intention and end of those most Excellent Laws made by Your Majesty and your Royall Predecessors for the relief and Imployment of the Poor, apprehending of Vagabonds and prevention of Beggars and Idle Persons.94

Public perceptions and private reports could interact in interesting ways. The Reformation of Manners and Charity schools campaigns were both immensely topical and popular during the later 1690s, and here we see the Board of Trade referencing their aims as worthy methods of combating idleness and poverty. The Board also echoed the eternal complaint of county magistrates about lazy parish constables when they mentioned the ‘neglect’ of the execution of existing poverty and vagrancy laws. However, none of the Board’s recommendations were particularly original; they argued mainly to reform and ‘put into good execution’ the existing legal system, and their rejection of Locke’s scheme for centralizing parish authorities and standardizing punishment and governance (which was notable for his recommendations to impress most able bodied poor men, and for his swift recourse to corporal punishment) suggests that their collective opinion was legislatively conservative. However, the report did deploy novel methods of arguing for old policies. ‘We received accounts from 4415 Parishes, by which it appears that the Tax to the Poor in many places had gradually increased, and that those Parishes for the year 1695 had paid £104735, 10s, 6d’, they wrote. ‘We conjecture that the whole Annual charge to the Poor paid by Taxes on the Severall Parishes, may amount to £400,000 per annum.’95 ‘Large numbers opened eyes to large possibilities.’96 The large possibility that the Board of Trade described in their report was that the material, and fiscal,

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effects of England’s moral decay, the ‘Corruption of Manners’, was a measurable statistic. Poverty apparently cost England’s parishes £400,000 per annum, and at a conservative estimate, 30,000 vagrants roamed the countryside, each one costing the state twice what they might possibly earn or spend. These are figures of concern to any monarch, but particularly to one in the midst of a war with a larger, more populous continental rival. Idleness and vagrancy had explicitly become concerns of the wartime state, and a multitude of voices promised ‘profitable’, and quantifiable, solutions. Idleness became such a concern even as legislative support for houses of correction – the sixteenth-century institution designed explicitly to penalize idleness – fell away as part of the larger ‘workhouse’ movement in the later seventeenth century.97 The discourse of vagrancy became increasingly commercialized, and vagrants became defined by their inverse relationship to the wealth and power of the state. The printed debates about vagrancy and idleness were thoroughly imbricated with moral assumptions about begging, poverty, education, and their effects on the nation. Proposals to improve the idle were also frequently underpinned by religious justifications. Most contemporaries of John Bellers would have agreed with his assertion that ‘Idleness is the Devil’s great Opportunity’ and that children could be educated most usefully only ‘when their Hands are usefully imploy’d’.98 Sir Matthew Hale’s Discourse touching provisions for the Poor mentions the necessity of good education for poor children in several places, and Thomas Firmin’s experiments with the education and employment of poor women in London relied on a didactic model of work in the morning and gospel in the evening.99 The classic humanist solution – education – was closely linked to positive ideologies of improvement; the first charity schools in England appeared in the 1680s, and Mary Jones calculated that by 1725 there were over 1,400 such schools throughout England.100 The charity schools movement represented another, in some ways novel, attempt to define vagrancy as a set of behaviours that idle parents taught to idle children and that could literally be educated out of existence. Contemporary moral reformers explicitly believed that the physical presence of a workhouse or charity school in a local parish would repel the vagrant poor, almost as if vagrants were allergic even to the symbols of work and parochial discipline: ‘No Vagabond Poor dare come into, or stay long in a Parish, where such a House is erected.’101 Workhouses and charity schools aimed to directly circumscribe the physical mobility of vagrants and of poor children before they became vagrant, as well as to didactically reform ‘idle habits’. The merits of workhouses and charity schools were frequently described and their

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efficacy was widely touted. The ninth edition of a detailed account of the charity schools established throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland was released by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in 1710. The account contains an exhaustive list of hundreds of charity schools, their bequests and finances, and the number of boys and girls that they taught.102 Only a few individuals disagreed with the broad consensus that charity schools and workhouses were the best domestically available solutions to idleness, poverty, and vagrancy. Two writers in particular argued provocatively against workhouses and charity schools. In Giving Alms no Charity, Daniel Defoe famously argued that the provision of work to one group of poor people merely deprived other paupers of employment elsewhere in the country, particularly since the most common employment in a workhouse was beating hemp, and no one was interested in buying any more badly made hempen rope. On that basis alone workhouses were hardly a solution to poverty or to idleness in England.103 And Bernard Mandeville offered a sustained and troubling attack on the assumption of such charity schools as even charitable at all in his 1723 Essay on Charity and Charity Schools. Both authors seemed to suspect that what was really at work in these projects was the vanity and social guilt of elites. Daniel Defoe often critiqued the wide-eyed idealism of projectors and workhouse reformers. In December of 1704 he ran a brief ‘history’ of EnglishFrench trade in his Review of the Affairs of France, as the War of the Spanish Succession raged on the continent. In it he responded to the common imputation that due to trade depression England’s poor were underemployed by offering three principal statements: (1.) We have no poor in England, but what we make our selves, for want of Conduct and Regulation (2.) We have no want of Employment for our Poor, but want Poor for our Employment. (3.) All our Public Workhouses in England, are mistakes in Trade, ruinous to our General Employ, and Encreasers of Our Poor.104

In the next issue of the Review, Defoe continued this line of thinking. ‘Begging is the present most Destructive Grievance to our Honest Trade’, he wrote. ‘If all the Beggars of this Nation had a Charter to form themselves into a Body, they would be the Richest Corporation in the Kingdom.’ Defoe had found himself ‘accosted already with some letters on this subject; and the Gentlemen are a little Haughtily Clamarous upon my reproaching their Charities to the Workhouses,

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&c’. Defoe argued that charity and workhouses essentially created vagrancy: ‘you Eat out the Bowels of your native Countrey, Starve the diligent Hands, that honestly labour for their Bread; that having first turn’d Numerous Families into the street, you may pick up their Ruin’d Orphans for Vagrants, and boast of Their Numbers, as an Instance of your Charity’. ‘Your Houses of Correction ought to be turn’d upon yourselves’, he concluded, ‘and you should there perform the Pennance due to your short-sighted Politicks; you are the Ruine of our Laborious Poor, the Discouragers of Industry, the Foundation of Poverty, and the Encrease of Vagabonds.’ The themes of poverty and vagrancy would continue to intermittently occupy Defoe all his life, and we certainly encounter them again in his fiction. Bernard Mandeville was also a vocal opponent of the charity schools movement and one of the only contemporary thinkers who did not assume that the undeserving poor were idle. Rogues were the same as everyone else to him – motivated by the same selfish passions and needs as every other soul in the commonwealth. Born in Rotterdam in 1670, and a physician by training, Mandeville’s naturalistic explanation of human society as a collection of egoists bound together by competition and envy elicited widespread antagonism and revulsion from contemporaries, and his satirical fables and proposals for public brothels, as well as his attacks on the charity school movement and the societies for the Reformation of Manners, earned the ‘Man-devil’ enormous public enmity.105 Paul Slack describes Mandeville’s 1723 interventions in the debate over improvement and luxury as striking ‘a raw nerve’ with ‘clinical accuracy’.106 When he showed that the ‘logical consequence’ of arguments for improvement and against luxury was in effect moral hypocrisy, Mandevillle ‘presented all advocates of improvement with a formidable challenge’.107 Mandeville’s philosophy proceeded from rigorous definitions of virtue and the nature of man found in the Jansenist strand of French philosophy of the mid-seventeenth century. He was heavily influenced by Pierre Bayle and Pierre Nicole, and his Fable of the Bees directly attacked civic humanist assumptions about the moral scaffolding of human societies. In the words of E.J. Hundert, Mandeville’s work ‘decisively shaped the Enlightenment’s encounter with […] the unique and uniquely disturbing paradoxes of modernity’.108 One of these paradoxes was the ‘necessity’ of poverty in a consumerist, materially wealthy commonwealth, an idea almost universally rejected by all other contemporary commentators.109 In his Essay on Charity and CharitySchools, Mandeville first argued that charity and pity were often confused and that projection and a form of guilt motivated by self-love motivated most acts of

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public compassion. He offered a psychological description of how beggars must ply the pity of passers-by to receive ‘charity’: A beggar asks you to exert that virtue for Christ’s sake, but all the while his great design is to raise your pity. He represents to your view the worst side of his ailments and bodily infirmities; in chosen words he gives you an epitome of his calamities real or fictitious. And while he seems to pray to God that he will open your heart, he is actually at work upon your ears.110

Mandeville argued that all of society actually revolved around more or less successful versions of this game of representation, of appeal to private vice. He was the only contemporary thinker to attack the basic definitions of poverty and vagrancy in this way. Of the many vices and ‘passions’ that he describes in society, pity is one of the few that Mandeville considers outwardly humane: it was ‘the most amiable of all our passions, and there are not many occasions on which we ought to conquer or curb it’. However, Mandeville did not think that charity schools were built, subscribed to, or governed out of any mixture of pity or other redeemable passions; he thought that ‘pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together’. Mandeville believed that his contemporaries also misunderstood their own criminal underclass. First of all, rogues were hardly stupid – they were, if anything, too smart. ‘Craft has a greater hand in making rogues than stupidity’, he wrote, ‘and vice in general is nowhere more predominant than where arts and sciences flourish’. And rogues were hardly the obverse of all respectability in a modern commercial society, since behaving like a rogue was exactly what allowed that society to function and prosper: ‘Rogues have the same passions to gratify as other men, and value themselves on their honour and faithfulness to one another, their courage, intrepidity, and other manly virtues, as well as people of better professions.’111 Quite simply, ‘the evils that we complain of are owing to quite other causes than we assign to them’. It was inconsistent to argue for education as a remedy to the evils of poverty and idleness while defending ignorance or selective knowledge as ‘the mother of devotion’. Rogues and vagabonds might be symptomatic of a larger problem, but they hardly existed as a discrete problem on their own: ‘there is as much wickedness as ever, charity is as cold, and real virtue as scarce. The year 1720 has been as prolific in deep villainy, and remarkable for selfish crimes and premeditated mischief, as can be picked out of any century whatever; not committed by poor ignorant rogues that could neither read nor write, but the better sort of people’. The speculative ‘South Sea bubble’ had collapsed in 1720, and a slew of corrupt political practices in Robert Walpole’s political machine came to light simultaneously.

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Mandeville’s entire point was that if contemporaries wished to enjoy the fruits of commercial enterprise, they would do well to acknowledge its true character and the morally suspect underpinnings of private gain. For Mandeville, commercial wealth literally relied on the presence of a large population of poor people willing to work long hours for almost no money, so would not a wise body politic ‘cultivate the breed of them with all imaginable care?’ Education and knowledge would be directly counterproductive to this end, as ‘the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities can be supplied’. Knowledge multiplies our desires; thus, in educating the poor while requiring them to remain poor, you do them a mighty disservice: ‘Hard labour and the coarsest diet are a proper punishment to several kinds of malefactors, but to impose either on those that have not been used and brought up to both is the greatest cruelty.’112 Bernard Mandeville’s examination of the dirty wheels of commerce and sociability was perhaps the most honest, and troubling, critique for a century or more. Mandeville did not offer solutions to vagrancy or poverty because he did not believe that they were separable problems to be solved, nor did he believe it was in his society’s interests to eradicate them completely. His characterization of the poor as both necessary and necessarily ignorant seems remarkably cruel to us today, but his attacks on charity schools were as motivated by his own pity as they were by his desire to expose hypocrisy. Charity schools were just another excuse to be dishonest about the contours of exploitation and vice in society, as they apprenticed reluctant pauper boys torn from poor families to ‘sots and neglectful masters’, thereafter to eke out a miserable existence beholden to the gracious parochial benefactors who had placed them there. To Mandeville, charity schools did nothing to reduce poverty, but everything to increase misery. Bernard Mandeville did not share in the widespread assumption that rogues and vagabonds were by definition idle; instead, he took great pains to point out how similar motivations and behaviours characterized rogues as accurately as they did other men and women. He challenged the contemporary definition of vagrancy as an improveable, didactically solvable social ill in much the same manner as he challenged the pervading understanding of social and commercial relations. He also thoroughly problematized commercial behaviour by pointing out that it was roguish behaviour and that the great economic and political crimes in recent recollection had hardly been committed by poor people or by vagrants. Perhaps Mandeville’s definitions of commercial and socially selfish behaviour aggravated contemporary opinion because they recognized the problems he identified while remaining profoundly unwilling to accept his conclusions about society as a whole.113 Mandeville’s unique definitions of

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human economic behaviour as fundamentally roguish behaviour set him at odds with the pervading perception of vagrancy and vice as sets of behaviours that must be purged from, or redefined out of, the English body politic.

Identification and vagrant news The final theme of vagrant discourse that I want to introduce in this chapter is ‘identification’: rooting out the false premises of vagrancy and exposing deception for the benefit of the public. This premise was the animating conceit of rogue literature, with its ‘discoveries’ of ‘cozenage’.114 These discoveries happened in a variety of ways in a variety of media; for example we have already seen how Rice Bush thought false cripples should be dealt with. In the later seventeenth century, the newest form of print to engage in this discursive process of exposure was ‘news’. The prosaic identification of vagrants, and the use of their biographies as single items of news, became a fairly regular feature of English newspapers and weekly journals between 1650 and 1750.115 These small ‘vagrant notices’ were printed as part of a wider, and growing, preoccupation with domestic crime as a newsworthy phenomenon and they traded heavily on the longstanding success of the Newgate Ordinaries’ calendars. The yearly number of news items about vagrants remained sporadic throughout the Restoration, and the practice only took off once amateur crime reporting in newspapers, penny posts, and thriceweekly journals became much more fashionable in the 1720s.116 The purpose of including vagrant news items in newspapers appeared to vary considerably depending on where the item was located in the broadsheet, or which newspaper was consulted, but all of the stories possessed the common aim of social identification. The gaze of newsprint could identify the deceptive vagrant and root him or her in place for the warning, edification, or entertainment of a public readership. The potential to recover essentially amateur additions to the discourse of vagrancy exists because newspapers took in an enormous array of submissions and information from their readers, as well as from correspondents, and they thus routinely filled their ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘London’ sections with these contributions. The submissions could be anything from personal advertising to a search for lost property or a missing person, to an argumentative letter rebutting an item of news or opinion printed on a previous day. The stories of vagrants that emerge from these sections are thus fascinating, composite narratives, unhindered by judicial formality, the conventions of pamphlet discourse, or

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the pursuit of ideological agendas of reformation, and yet here too we find the assumption of idleness. A man named Lee Barnaby was committed to the Southwark House of Correction as an ‘Idle Vagrant’ in 1733, and Parker’s Penny Post quickly had cause to report his story. ‘It seems they have no Allowance or any Sustenance but what they earn by Their Labour and the Fellow falling sick, and not able to work, and Having no Relief died in a few-days; and on Saturday Morning John King Esq the Coroner, having summoned the Inquest, Sat on his body, and brought their verdict that he was Starved to Death.’117 Fog’s Weekly Journal responded to the story, and hoped ‘for the Credit of our country, it will be made to appear, that the Fellow was not Sick; but Obstinate and Lazy’.118 The only acceptable explanation of Barnaby’s death was that he had chosen to be idle. Without this assumption of idleness to justify Lee’s incarceration and his death while in state custody, what the story represented about society simply proved far too unsettling to articulate. Even the briefest public submissions to newspapers which discussed vagrancy could tell interesting stories. One John Clark, aged twenty-one, apparently stole some valuable possessions from his family in London and fled ‘and has skulk’d since August last about Exeter, [and] Plymouth … leading a vagrant and inaccountable life’. The solution, argued his family, was clearly impressment: ‘His said relations, who have always found him incorrigible, desire that the said John Clark may be compelled to serve Her Majesty at sea, he being already [on] Several Voyages, and fit to serve only in Sea Affairs.’119 The classified ad taken out by Clark’s family described exactly where they knew him to be skulking, and these descriptions of individual vagrants remained consistently and strikingly precise throughout a century of reporting. An ad in the London Gazette of 1701 reported that ‘Henry Holland, tall, black, and swarthy, and Mary Holland, with black hair, and tawny complexion’ were recently taken as vagrants around Nottingham Manor in Yorkshire. They were ‘now in York Castle, where the Persons may be view’d’ and had been divested of a fine fifteen-hand grey gelding ‘(suppos’d to be stolen)’. Whether the Hollands were gypsies or not seems difficult to discern, but their physical difference and their social alienation from respectable English society were explicitly foregrounded by Hugh Bethell, who placed the ad, being ‘The Lord of Nottingham Manor aforesaid’.120 Bethell’s chilling invitation to ‘view’ the prisoners mimicked the function of his advertisement; he would hold these vagrants in place, and interested readers could come to Nottingham manor to gaze at them or to reclaim an apparently stolen horse. The illicit threat of foreign vagrants was also periodically raised in English newsprints. News from Cologne reached the London Journal in 1722 that ‘orders

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are given for dispersing and imprisoning a Band of Vagrants, who infest the roads of that Country’. This band was a group of wandering entertainers, with several bears trained to dance, but their show went awry in ‘Blankenheim, where one of the animals getting lose, devoured several Persons, and amongst them 6 Children’.121 Parker’s Penny Post also described the torture and execution of a ‘Head or Chief ’ thief in the city of Rouen in 1733, nicknamed ‘the Marquiss de Croc’. De Croc apparently confessed that 600 or more people belonged to his ‘Regiment, or Gang; and he advised, in order to destroy this Band, that they should take up all Vagrants and sturdy Beggars.’122 Foreign vagrancy could be a sensational spectacle: it mattered little whether 600 urban, mobile paupers had actually participated in underground thieving network in Rouen; contemporaries expected to read stories like these when they purchased a paper. At home, the vast majority of ‘vagrant news’ concentrated on London. By the 1720s there was a consistent trickle of news items pertaining to vagrancy and an enormous volume of reporting on crime, particularly robbery and murder. Newspapers also reflected the periodic moral panics over the sheer number of destitute people visible on London’s streets. These panics typically culminated in the news with the printing of Royal or Grand Jury proclamations and in practice with a crackdown on ‘strolling and begging’. Parker’s Penny Post printed a Grand Jury presentment on 19 January 1726; it seems that ‘great Numbers of beggars, Shoe-cleaners, and other idle and wandering persons’ were disrupting foot traffic and impeding shop-owners ‘by standing and lying continually at their doors, and disturbing them and their Customers in their Traffick and Business’.123 The solution was to sweep through the streets and commit any found begging or being generally disruptive to Bridewell. The Post reported on 15 April that 289 vagrants had been admitted to Bridewell in the previous twelve months; the following year (1727) the total came to 217.124 The Post also listed the number of people ‘cured of their Lunacy’ in Bedlam in 1725: apparently 65. The London Journal reported in 1731 that a committee ‘for suppressing of Night Houses, Night Cellars and other disorderly Houses’ met no less than forty-two times, suppressed twenty-six ‘such Houses’, and committed 127 ‘Rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and idle and disorderly persons’ to the House of Correction.125 Here we see the genesis of modern crime reporting statistics, then as now designed as a way to encompass the distressing, dirty problems of the city and render them legible to a cleaner, polite readership. Early English newspapers published stories about vagrants and vagrancy laws fairly often, including them in a longer litany of crimes committed, laws passed, and odd stories related. These news entries were predominantly retrospective,

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describing the characteristics of vagrants at large or the circumstances of vagrants that were apprehended. The primary purpose of vagrant news was to inform and entertain the readers of newsprint, but a secondary purpose, expressed clearly in many entries themselves, was to firmly identify vagrants, to remove pretence, and to expose deception. This need to properly identify and to categorize the mobile pauper and the petty criminal, to unmask their deceptions, can be found in ballads, novels, judicial examinations, court trials, pamphlets, and in the news as we have seen. This cultural preoccupation with mendacity seems to lie at the root of all early modern attempts to identify the deserving and undeserving poor and is central to the next two chapters of this book. Like a vagrant pass, or a settlement certificate, the ‘petty biographies’ of vagrants found in newsprint identified them and located them firmly in time and space. It seems that newspapers too could badge the poor.

Conclusions: The assumption endures This chapter has explored several permutations of the fundamental assumption of vagrant idleness. It introduced three themes or preoccupations related to the discourse of vagrancy which I believe characterized the period after 1650: indenture, improvement, and identification. We examined the shifts in the political and economic definitions of vagrancy, which was increasingly to be represented as a social problem which could be solved through the paternalistic provision of work and education while fixing the mobile pauper in place, a process that now aimed to make the vagrant profitable to the nation.126 State responses to vagrancy lost the characteristic centralization of Elizabethan and Jacobean efforts, and instead we find Justices of the Peace, petty admiralty officers, city Corporations for the Poor, and advisory boards dictating the contours of the state’s vagrancy policies. These two developments were tied tightly together by the emerging rhetoric of political economy and of England’s imperial wealth and power.127 Domestic problems became central to imperial power, and vagrants felt the physical effects of this transformation, particularly when they were transported overseas or forced to serve in the navy. The pace, and scale, of forced colonization would only increase as the eighteenth century progressed. The definitions of vagrancy and the most appropriate solutions to ‘idleness’ as a social ill were hotly debated in print by contemporaries. These printed debates provided the arena in which the vagrant could be culturally made or unmade, defined or destroyed, and where contemporaries could argue most forcefully,

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and preach most righteously, about the best way to improve the vagabond and therefore the nation. In addition, the genre of newsprint also emerged as a powerfully prosaic ‘technology of identification’, which allowed private readers to participate in the public definition and control of individual vagrants. Newsprint projected the stories of real vagrants into the public realm on a daily basis, inheriting the mantle of proscriptive identification from Thomas Harman, eventually transforming it into ‘crime reporting’ that we would instantly recognize today. Morality, idleness, luxury, and selfishness all played a role in these debates, and the rise of the reforming societies and the charity school movements added urgency to them, in addition to materially affecting the lives of thousands of poor men, women, and children. The poor, industrious, and sober inhabitant of the parish workhouse, diligently spinning her daily allotment of flax or learning his catechism, was a powerful symbol of how the poor, both deserving and undeserving, found their relationship to the state and to society profoundly changed. The employment of idle paupers and vagrants was a concerted effort to redefine them: as a new, and productive, economic asset that laboured for the benefit of the state, and even for private ‘shareholders’, and this necessity of profitable employment became an enduring theme of every subsequent effort to ‘improve’ the vagrant poor, even if that improvement entailed forced employment at sea or on a strange continent. Parish welfare became national ‘workfare’ and the ideology of the vagabond as morally and personally ‘improvable’ became enshrined in the collective consciousness of the body politic. No one bothered to ask the vagrant poor what they thought about being ‘improved’, conveyed, confined to a workhouse, whipped, transported, or impressed. For settled contemporaries, the route to increasing national wealth and power seemed clear, if only vagrants would stop wandering into the way.

2

Rogue Ballads

I am a lusty beggar, and live by others giving; I scorne to worke, But by the highway lurk, And beg to get my living –The ‘Cunning Northern Beggar’1

This chapter is concerned with the popular representation of begging and vagrancy in early modern England in sources not designed principally for literate elites. The novels of Daniel Defoe and the printed musings of Kings and Justices of the Peace are of little use to us for now; even if they could read, landless labourers and poor cottagers would not often have been exposed to texts of such expense. They would perhaps encounter a royal proclamation nailed to the market cross or the odd conversational reference overheard at the public house. Instead, we turn to other sources in order to reconstruct the contemporary attitudes, preoccupations, and worries of ‘the lower sorts’, those for whom vagrancy and destitution were very real threats, perhaps even reality. One such body of sources is English broadside ballads, assiduously gathered by collectors such as Samuel Pepys (1633–1703). These ballads, priced at a penny or two, and sung in alehouses or in the street, have already provided cultural and social historians with a window onto popular attitudes towards religion, courtship, marriage, and money.2 But ballads can also tell us about vagrancy: rogues, vagabonds, and ‘jovial beggars’ are distinct characters in many broadsides, and there is a specific subgenre of ballads which dealt directly with the subject of cunning vagabonds and their various adventures, criminal or otherwise. Tales of woe and caution also regularly feature the poor as characters, most often as examples of the consequences of ‘lewd living’. Ballads are ‘living artefacts’ of popular early modern culture; more than simply texts, they were performances; they filled the streets of market towns and the main rooms of alehouses and

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taverns with song and story.3 They were designed to be remembered, to be sung in chorus, to advertise wares, or to amuse onlookers; they could be both a visual and auditory experience. Ballads and other forms of cheap print are about as close as the early modern historian can get to the mental landscapes and central preoccupations of the ‘lower sort’, the sung reality of the street.

Cheap print and popular roguery Imagine that you are walking through a street market in a modern, western city, perhaps even an iconic one, such as the Spitalfields food market in London. Like street markets the world over, it is a noisy, bustling, vibrant affair, filled with human voices and human transactions. Now imagine that hawkers and street sellers are not simply crying their wares into the din but are instead singing or chanting to catch your attention. They might not even be singing about their own products: a fruiterer might sing about fish, a tailor might chant about trade, or a chapman might yell out the latest news. It is the act of performance that truly matters. It was ballads and other ‘cryes’ that filled the air of markets and streets in early modern England.4 They were the most quintessentially ‘vagrant’ form of print, located at the nexus between oral and literate cultures, so ephemeral that we cannot even measure how abysmal their rate of archival survival is. Old ballads were used as toilet paper.5 Ballads travelled along every highway and were pasted on cottage and tenement walls as decoration; the composition of their text, woodcut imagery and layout, was itself a ‘vagrant’ process, constantly on a peripatetic journey between author, printer, seller, singer, audience, and even collector.6 How can we best make use of such slippery sources? My own course through the representations of roguery is based on several principles. First, texts are selected and interrogated for their thematic relevance and their capacity to highlight the preconceptions of contemporaries. I can think of no better genre of text in which to unpack widely held preconceptions of vagrancy and roguery than early modern English ballads. Second, when studying the social imaginary which rogue fictions help to form, I am again drawn to the assumptions and justifications that these fictions contain; these help chart the clearest course towards a cultural understanding of vagrant lived experience. There is every reason to presume that the enormously powerful stereotypes of roguery, begging, and vagrancy on display throughout this book sat nestled in the laws, minds, and everyday experiences of ‘settled’ contemporaries.7 How far those stereotypes were internalized by the vagrant poor themselves is impossible

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to judge, though it is clear from evidence in popular literature and records of local justice that the mobile poor were aware of the nature of their characterization, and responded to it, particularly by choosing when to resist vagrant stereotyping and when to make use of it. Rogues have also been historiographically unifying figures.8 Art historians, social geographers, philosophers, literary scholars, and social and cultural historians, all are drawn to the essential energy of the archetype. Humanities scholars tend to see the rogue as totemic, capable of speaking to an almost endless array of social, cultural, and economic concerns, and this fascination is hardly limited to scholars of early modernity. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz argue that ‘because the rogue is, inescapably, both fact and fiction, this figure occupies an important space in the ongoing negotiations between various forms of historicism and literary culture’.9 The rogue is more than just a fictional figure; it is an aggregate category: it is consistent for the figure to contain both well-dressed highwaymen and destitute prostitutes. Rogues are ‘everybody’s bogeymen’.10 To study representations of ‘low’ culture is to encounter rogues. I personally see the rogue as a universal figuration of inequality, a cultural projection that justifies all manner of marginalization, even when it is used as a figure of protest or satire. To me, rogues always stand in front of real vagrants, attracting vociferous criticisms and absorbing troubling characteristics, but in their turn justifying otherwise indefensible treatments of real people, and historians interested in what lies behind this ‘shimmering image’ must find ways to chart their course through it.11 Popular literature itself is no longer a ‘sadly neglected’ facet of early modern history, far from it.12 Particularly good work has been done on popular literatures of courtship and marriage, as well as on popular piety, with an emphasis on the later-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century contexts.13 The social history of early modern crime is also beginning to fully explore the potential of popular literature’s depictions of crimes and of the ‘knaves and rogues’ that committed them, though practitioners still prefer to rely on the more robust, and putatively ‘factual’, Quarter Sessions records and court depositions.14 English social history more generally would be well served by increased attention to ballads and to popular literature as a whole, especially given that popular literacy rose steadily throughout the period, a trend which ensured that this literature had a wider readership than was once supposed.15 We should, however, be wary of the term ‘popular’. The French Annales historian Roger Chartier cautions us in The Culture of Print to ‘avoid the too convenient category of the “popular” – or at least not to rely on it as an a priori criterion for classifying printed matter’.16 Chartier argues that texts and books probably crossed social boundaries and

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drew readers far more widely than we think they did and recommends that avoiding the characterization of sources as explicitly popular ‘from the outset’ is thus an appropriate precaution. However, sources designed so explicitly to appeal to everyone, such as ballads, were deliberately composed and distributed with the intent of reaching semiliterate or illiterate people, who would only have the occasional extra penny to spend on such things in any case. Bob Scribner warns us that ballads, being ‘residues’ of oral storytelling, in fact ‘formalise and reify the human reality of any “oral culture”, often at more than two or three removes’.17 All sources that historians engage with will of course reify human activity to some extent, but Scribner wonders where the historian is compelled to draw the line and worries about the signal to noise ratio in sources of ‘popular culture’.18 Bernard Capp agrees that ‘it can be difficult to speak of a wholly distinct “popular” literature’.19 How can one separate popular culture from popular ritual or belief?20 A workable method of addressing these reservations may be to accept that ‘popular’ sources like ballads are ‘hybrid’ creations of both plebeian and elite attitudes and that the diffusion of cultural ideas and practices was in fact so common as to be unremarkable, both up and down the social scale. The mere fact that a relatively elite member of society like Samuel Pepys avidly collected so many ballads does not exclude them from also being a ‘plebeian’ source; in fact, distinguishing precisely which sources deserve the label of ‘plebeian’ is probably a red herring. Ballads were cheap, ubiquitous, a common diversion of all social classes. They were a ‘dirty business’, ‘meat for drunken gangs of men and women in alehouses or out on the street’.21 It matters little whether those gangs were comprised of rowdy apprentices or of noble young blades; these songs would have reached all ears. The popularity and diffusion of ballads from the metropolis outwards was virtually assured by their simple and accessible nature: ballads were easy to compose, to distribute, and to read aloud. They were the stock trade of poorer printers. Ballads may have declined in popularity during the Restoration and after, mainly due to the expansion of the chapbook trade during this same period.22 However, it is clear that ballads remained common even if this is the case, with over three thousand separate titles recorded by the Stationers’ Company alone from 1560 to 1710, and likely more than double that number of titles actually published.23 The authors of ballads and popular literature were themselves often of humble origins: one of the most well-known seventeenthcentury balladeers was Martin Parker, who may have been an alehouse keeper, an ideal trade to couple with his ballad-writing. Indeed in 1629 Parker was

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indicted as a vagrant under Elizabethan statutes naming ballad singers and sellers as such, and the pedlars, chapmen, and street-sellers who sold ballads were equally at risk.24

Ballads as a historical source and the problems of historical laughter The following discussion draws upon the work of several historians who have used ballads and popular literature to study concepts such as marriage and religion in order to construct a working methodology for the historical use of ‘rogue’ or vagrant ballads. How does the ballad’s status as a popular song impact what it can say, how was song unique in early modern England, and did forms of singing and oral diffusion change what the same ballad ‘said’ or ‘meant’ over time? Questions also emerge over where precisely the ballad was situated in contemporary social space: was it disseminated in increasingly ‘domestic’ spaces as the seventeenth century progressed, or did it remain primarily open and public performance and thus an intrinsically communal experience?25 Can the complex relationship between oral culture and cheap print be unpacked sufficiently to understand the ballad’s place in both of those social spaces? Simpler questions concerning dating and authorship are also important, since popular songs went through many print runs and changes over time, and the most common author of early modern ballads was simply ‘anonymous’. More often than not, dating a ballad exactly is not possible, and verifying its author improbable, as with ‘The Jovial Pedlar’, a mutilated copy of which rests in the British Library’s Roxburghe collection, and efforts at dating require subsequent publications of similar or edited versions; in this case an edited copy found in Wit and Drollery provides a date of 1661.26 Was this the first version of this particular song? Or perhaps the last? The authorship of ballads is another basic element of the genre which generates a thorny series of questions. Most ballads were published anonymously, and when we do know the author they were typically professional rhymesters like Martin Parker or occasionally a humble amateur. Almost all ballads became print (and were definitely published) in an urban context, but that does not mean that their stories, rhymes, or content originated only in towns or cities, which must also inform our assessment of them. Finally, we must admit that the simple question of popular reaction to ballads cannot readily be answered, as too much of contemporary oral and traditional culture is lost to us, in large part due to its very nature.

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Adam Fox summarizes the interpretive problems with ballads neatly: ‘In short’, he writes, ‘we have the texts but not the contexts’.27 Fox posits some additional unanswerable questions that we need to be mindful of: in what senses were ballads didactic and how did they inform people’s views; in what senses were ballads reflective of popular views that existed already; and precisely how was the printed ballad consumed by the illiterate or semi-literate – were they a passive audience or active agents reinterpreting the stories they heard? We can only guess at answers, but guessing is instructive. Since my intention is mainly to demonstrate the wide diffusion and significant variation of different attitudes and archetypes of begging and vagrancy, the problems of determining plebeian agency and what is truly ‘popular’ become less urgent for this project, because such powerful ballad-based evidence of those same attitudes effectively shows us what was popular enough to be purchased by even the poorest of contemporaries. Tessa Watt’s reconstruction of popular perceptions of religion in ballads offers further guidance. Her study encompassed the performers and sellers of ballads as ‘cultural conduits’, who existed on a continuum from simple pedlars and petty chapmen to minstrels with patronage, and who were thus exempt from the vagrancy laws.28 These highly mobile and often marginal people could learn and transmit ballads from any number of sources, including oral tradition, new broadsides read aloud in public spaces or read to them, or direct memorization from print if they were literate. Their social mobility invariably trended downwards, as demonstrated in Watt’s study of Richard Sheale’s journeys to London and Lancashire and many places in between, where she finds him increasingly desperate and eventually brewing ale to make ends meet.29 It bears repeating that the ballad was considered a performance, rather than only a printed text with accompanying images, and thus like early modern drama it cannot be easily detached from its oral and performative components.30 This complicates matters further, since ballads were sometimes sung ‘to a new tune’ that is not named or to a tune that we do not have musical notation for. Mark Hailwood has described the multifaceted contours of the performed ballad as ‘creative consumption’ – a form in which buyers’ predilections had an effect on the content and performance of ballads over time via their influence on what would be thought commercially viable and therefore over what was actually published.31 It seems clear that the various participants in the street theatre of balladry certainly were not ‘passive conduits in a fixed tradition’, as Watt’s examination of the recalibration of popular songs as local libels indicates.32 It does seem as if a detailed ‘reception history’ of printed ballads is an impossibility,

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as that reception was not commonly recorded, but perhaps instead we can catch glimpses at the norms and expectations of an enormous range of contemporaries contained in the texts that survive. We also need to consider the roles of laughter and its particular historical contingence. Humour can certainly translate badly across the centuries: one rapidly begins yearning to avoid the unending stream of early modern shit jokes. Laughing at misfortune and disability was also utterly commonplace in early modern Europe. Hundreds of jests and popular jokes revolve around cruelty towards dwarfs, hunchbacks, lepers, beggars, blind men, and so on. Jestbooks throughout the period are filled with such jokes; Simon Dickie recounts one about a Welsh beggar in his book Cruelty and Laughter: A Welchman begging upon the road came to a farm-house, where they fill’d his belly with whey, that it made his guts to ake: Hur prays to St. Davy for comfort; an owl being at roost in the barn, as he held up his head a praying, the owl shit in his mouth. O thank good St. Davy, for hur desired but a drop, but hur hath given hur a mouthful.33

When compared to some of the jokes about beggars and cripples, or even the unsettlingly common rape jokes of the period, the humour in many ballads seems almost gentle. But it covers identical themes. Ballads were often deliberately ribald; poking fun at the follies of love and the results of excessive drinking and reading them ironically is almost always possible.34 This humorous undertone adds yet another complication to interpreting the message of a ballad, because the events and attitudes expressed in it could simply be meant as a series of jests, drastically changing the reception and meaning. Laughter is problematic: it can be hard for historians to determine not only why something was funny, but in what manner it was laughed at and what that laughter might have signified. There is the raucous laughter of wholehearted enjoyment or perhaps the nervous laughter of polite disapproval. The same ballad could provoke both reactions. A Bakhtinian reading of ballad humour as ‘the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter’ also begs us to ask if the entire tradition of early modern balladry can be seen as emblematic of the ‘world turned upside down’.35 We are certainly as likely to find carnival grotesquery in the ballads of the seventeenth century as we are in pamphlets and prose. Bakhtin’s work on Carnival also provides us with the best definitions of both ‘Renaissance laughter’ and the laughter which replaces it in the seventeenth century and onwards. Renaissance laughter ‘has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it

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is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew’ and this was most universally expressed through the inverting and regenerating laughter of carnival.36 To attempt a banal summary: one laughed at people covered in shit because it represented how the world shits on all and sundry. One laughed at the misfortunes of one’s betters because it levelled the cosmological playing field, even if only for a moment. Conversely, laughter takes on different dimensions as the seventeenth century progresses: it is no longer ‘a universal, philosophical form’. It becomes self-circumscribing. Laughter begins only to refer ‘to individual and individually typed phenomena of social life. That which is important and essential cannot be comical’.37 The sphere of what is comical narrows drastically to private and social vice, with the result that ‘the essential truth about the world and about man cannot be held in the language of laughter’ any more. Did ballads produced in the later seventeenth century attempt to elicit the first kind of laughter or the second? Bakhtin’s two ways of laughing provide us with one possible framework for interpreting laughter in ballads, but the gendered dimensions of humour are not as prevalent in his work as a twenty-first-century reader might wish for. To approach the laughter of youth and early manhood, or humour in relation to patriarchal structures, we need to turn to more recent historical scholarship, especially since we are going to consider the role of laughter in rogue ballads, themselves heavily gendered texts.38 Elizabeth Foyster has argued that laughter was ‘a serious means of gender control’ and that it was most often a combination of cruelty and catharsis which motivated it in the context of ballad performance.39 However, Foyster’s contextual evidence for this argument is ballads about marriage and deviations from this social norm such as adultery and scolding. Can we apply Foyster’s insights to rogue ballads which, except in rare cases such as the ‘Jovial Tinker’, explicitly located their sexual narratives before or outside of marriage? Patriarchal and normative sexual control inside relationships instantly seems to be less of an issue in rogue ballads about seduction, being instead replaced with concerns about the loss of female virtue and innocence and the deception of unwitting males by prostitutes. Foyster does provide us with an excellent example of how to interpret the humorous nature of sexual deviance. Drawing on the psychologist Christopher Powell, she notes that the socially deviant itself is the source of humour in these ballads; this proves insightful when we remember that vagrancy and subsistence wandering were seen prima facie as deviant social conditions by contemporaries and that they could therefore immediately invite laughter when depicted in ballads.40 Feminine subversions of patriarchal structures also feature

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prominently. Tim Reinke-Williams points out that women were often sexually commodified in the spaces of ballad scenes such as alehouses or brothels, but that jests where females are the victims only marginally outnumber those where they emerge victorious over impotent husbands or other foolish men.41 In several of the sample ballads in this chapter, stereotypically sexualized female characters completely get the better of men, through cuckolding in marriage or trickery outside of it, and the derisive laughter which follows the cuckold was perhaps the most powerful sexual shaming possible in early modern England. This laughter marked a man as incapable of asserting his maleness, as utterly defeated in the one place that early modern patriarchal norms demanded he should have had control: his home. Jesting and laughter shaped the mental worlds of contemporaries and gave groups within contemporary society, such as women or male youths, avenues of resistance and expression. We find then that the motivations for laughter, it seems, cannot easily be reduced to ‘superiority’ or ‘sympathy’ in an early modern context, even if we agree that the two were not mutually exclusive, nor can we ignore the explicitly gendered elements of its meaning and construction, especially in printed sources. Consensus is easily reached over the cathartic value of laughing, but ambiguities remain, especially over precisely what kind of laughter we are dealing with in rogue ballads; is it Bakhtinian jest, some kind of educated Enlightenment chuckle, or an uncertain mix of both? And to what extent can notions of carnival serve to explain what was actually funny to English contemporaries? In ballads we shall see that the answers to these questions are far from clear, indeed that it might be wisest not to seek an answer at all to the meanings of humour in rogue ballads, because disparate narratives within the subgenre appear to call for different kinds of laughing and, occasionally, for no laughter at all. How do these general methods of approach apply to rogue ballads? First, it is important to note that begging or roguish protagonists or characters are spun out of a large context of earlier printed work, especially the rogue pamphlets of Thomas Harman and Robert Greene in the later sixteenth century. ‘Rogue literature’ deeply informs the construction of characters in rogue ballads, so much so that dialogue, canting terms, and key character tropes such as the ‘jovial tinker’ or ‘mumper’ are borrowed wholesale and then reused over and over. Although the interaction would be difficult to prove, there is every reason to suspect that ballads also informed the construction of rogue literature. There are at least five distinct narrative constructions in rogue ballads, and their form rarely deviates: the cunning beggar’s jovial ramble, the wandering pedlar or tinker hawking wares, the female vagrant prostitute’s trickery, the lusty

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beggar’s seduction of an innocent maid, and the warning of what befalls a ‘lewd liver’. Occasionally deserving paupers reduced to vagrancy appear in revenge ballads. Different ‘types’ of vagrant appear directly in different ballad narratives. Travelling seductions, begging rambles, and jovial tinker ballads most often feature career male vagabonds. ‘Lewd living’ tends to reduce previously wealthy characters to destitution and homelessness. Ballads about vagrant prostitutes revolve around the archetype of the sexually available ‘beggar wench’. Disguise and deception are often central themes; methods of economic or sexual success that are either embraced by the central characters or denied by humorous ‘discovery’. The cunning beggar-turned-highwayman either falsely convinces passers-by of his misery and gains their coin in sympathy or robs them once they have strayed too close. The ‘lusty beggar’ or pedlar deceives maids in a variety of ways, allegorically or directly, tricking them into giving over their ‘cony-skins’ (i.e. their virginity) with equal prowess. Despite a generally light-hearted tone to these ballad subsets, the theme of vagrants as wandering deceivers is central. The assumption of vagrant idleness is as powerful in rogue ballads as anywhere else that we confront it. ‘Jovial beggars’ are always depicted as choosing their vagrant life, a choice that frees them from social and spatial convention, a choice that invalidates any claims to sympathy or charity. Turning now to critical reading and direct engagement, I will attempt to recover vestiges of the cultural perceptions of vagrancy in its varying contemporary forms. The selected source material was primarily composed and sold in the seventeenth century but does extend into eighteenth-century ‘white-letter’ balladry. Two collections supplied the bulk of these ballads: the Pepys collection, held at Cambridge, and the eight printed volumes of the British Library Roxburghe collection. The Pepys and Roxburghe ballads, along with hundreds of others, are now also available electronically, and readers can read, and sometimes even hear, the entire text of thousands of early modern ballads online.42 Together these collections provide a reasonable sampling of ballads that would have been extant and accessible during the period 1650–1750. This sampling is by necessity incomplete and cannot represent the unquestionably larger range of rogue ballads that would have been accessible to contemporaries. Problems of selection, survival, and diffusion cloud our picture. First, collectors necessarily selected certain ballads to keep and others to discard, based on their own inclinations. Second, the survival rate of ballads in general is quite low and many ballads in the Pepys and Roxburghe collections are the only extant copies remaining. The ‘dark figure’ or number of irretrievably lost ballads certainly outnumbers what remains to us. Finally it is difficult to gauge the exposure of any

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given ballad to a popular audience, with only rare instances of multiple surviving reprints and anecdotal mentions in other texts as reasonable indications of popularity. The incomplete nature of the Stationer’s Company Register also disqualifies it as a potential solution to the problem of a given ballad’s popularity. These difficulties aside, it is hoped that this sample of ballads will provide some insights into popular early modern stereotypes of vagrancy. Rogue ballads held a mirror up to the face of both everyday and extraordinary experiences of poverty and mobility, and the stories they told about those experiences helped to shape their imaginative potential for contemporaries. Ballads help us to map the mental worlds of early modern subjects high up the social ladder, and much more importantly, on its lower rungs. I use four broad thematic categories based on primary narrative arcs to classify my ballad examples. These arcs rarely deviate and are often imitated, and as such they serve as excellent thematic signposts, especially given that ballads as a whole tended to mix metaphors, narratives, and archetypes often and freely. Despite significant narrative crossover, the rogue ballads under consideration here have been allocated into the following categories: ‘Carefree or Highway’ narratives; ‘Deception and Seduction’ narratives; ‘Warnings and Lamentations’; and finally ‘Deserving poverty and Revenge’ tales. We will also examine the intriguing representations of health, sexuality, and morality in some of these ballads and compare subject-specific woodcuts to the accompanying ballad texts.

‘Carefree’ by choice The ‘carefree’ category contains the most conventional and direct evidence of wandering vagabonds in ballads, but substantial references also arise in each of the other subgenres. Evidence of textual cross-pollination in the form of canting or ‘pedlar’s French’ terms, popularized by Harman’s printed works, also occurs most often in this first category. The archetypes of ‘carefree’, ‘cunning’, and ‘sturdy’ beggars also emerge most forcefully from these ballads. The typical narrator or subject is a healthy, happy beggar, or group of beggars, who deceive(s) others travelling along the road in various ways in order to gain their coin. These anti-heroic protagonists are successful tricksters and are not beholden to any master or attached to any community beyond their own small circle of compatriots. ‘Sturdy beggars’ are accordingly depicted as happily and utterly outside of social convention. The quote at the very beginning of this chapter

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comes from an excellent example of these characteristics, a ballad called ‘The Cunning Northerne Begger’.43 The ballad is from the pen of Martin Parker, and the narrator is a healthy, deceitful wanderer with an excellent ability to disguise his form: I have my shifts about me, Like Proteus often changing, My shape, when I will, I alter still About the Country ranging: As soone as I a Coatch see, Or Gallants by come riding, I take my Crutch, and rouse from my Couch, Whereas I lay abiding.44

The narrator describes the many disguises that he can adopt and how he uses each to beg money out of passers-by; sometimes he is a ‘wandring Souldier’, sometimes a ‘saylor’ who lost everything at ‘Dunkirk’, or a false ‘Criple’ of varying stripes – blind, burned, or gangrenous. He describes this dissembling existence as largely carefree, although occasionally the local authorities catch up with him: No other care shall trouble My minde, nor griefe disease me; though sometimes the slash I get or the lash, ’Twill but a while displease me

It is also notable that Parker makes use of some canting terms to describe the narrator’s companions: his ‘Trulls and Doxes/Lay in some corner lurking’ and would actually beg on his behalf, ‘to keepe my selfe from working’. This image blends the sturdy beggar with the archetype of the ‘Upright Man’ in rogue literature, and sexual power over and dominance of a silent group of female companions are often deployed as signifiers of the hidden nature of a beggar’s ‘crew’ or underworld society. The ‘Cunning Northerne Begger’ is a classic example of the ‘carefree’ rogue narrative ballad. The bare bones of the story that it tells and its unreliable narrator, the shirking, happy, dissembling vagabond, were enormously popular. It facetiously depicts this wandering existence of begging and makeshift deception as a free and successful lifestyle, with the price only of an occasional whipping.

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The beggar archetype depicted here is poor by an implied choice, perfectly capable of working honestly yet refusing to do so. Other ballads expand this trope into an entire ‘beggar lineage’, as in ‘The Beggar Boy of the North’, also likely by Martin Parker.45 Hailing from an ‘ancient pedigree, by due descent’, the narrator extols his virtues as a dissembling rogue and beggar: In ragged rayments I wander about, Both hot and cold weather I’m arm’d to endure; Though but a boy, I am sturdy and stout, A living by begging I easily procure:46

Citing several tricks in the same vein as the previous ballad, ‘The Beggar Boy of the North’ also makes use of extensive canting terms. The Beggar’s uncles, aunts, ‘and all my kindred,/Did maund for loure, casum, and pannum,/Then wherefore should I from the trade be Hindred?’ In Harman’s canting lexicon, ‘maunding’ is begging, and ‘loure, casum, and pannum’ are money, cheese, and bread.47 The description of an entire extended family of beggars, a ‘ragged lineage’ of canny predecessors borrows the powers of royal and gentrified bloodlines by associating the beggar boy’s prowess as a mendacious rogue with the ‘profession’ of his extended family. It seems clear that balladeers borrowed extensively from rogue literature’s invention and use of canting terms and rogue archetypes. Several carefree rogue ballads use the collective voice of ‘jovial crews’ of wandering beggars to narrate their events. The joke in these songs relies on the moral outrages implicit in begging by day to drink and celebrate at night. The ‘Merry Beggars of Lincolns-Inn-Fields’ tell their story from within the space of an alehouse, and the ballad juxtaposes day-time dissembling with night-time conviviality: Good Master spare a farthing, It is my daily cry, But when I’m at the alehouse, no man so great as I.48

Eventually a gentleman exposes the frauds of this group of beggars, but they easily outran him: ‘for we were strong and stout/And though we lost our Crutches/We could go home without’. This classic dichotomy of pitiable, miserable soul by daylight and ‘roaring’ rogue at night is repeated, modified, or copied wholesale by virtually every rogue ballad that describes the beggar’s art. This particular passage also elegantly elevates the ‘jovial’ narrator to a position of social pre-eminence in a liminal, contested space: the alehouse, a space already deeply distrusted by

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many contemporaries. Here, but only here, the beggar sits as King: ‘No man so great as I’, and freely spends the coin collected through his daytime duplicity. The romanticization of begging in ballads often stretched credibility to its limits in the interests of humour or storytelling. In ‘The Beggers Chorus’ the narrator tells us that he has lived quite happily as a beggar his entire life and that he served a remarkable apprenticeship: Seven Years I served, My old Master Wild, Seven Years I begged, Whilst I was but a Child.49

Seven years was the standard length of an apprenticeship in early modern England, suggesting an artificial form of legitimacy to the craft of begging relief from strangers. The narrator goes on to explain his begging strategy, just as this genre’s conventions demand, and happily informs us that he lives in a hollow tree, paying no rent for it, of course, and that he would prefer to be a beggar instead of a king: I fear no Plotts against me, but live in open Cell, Why who wou’d be a King, when a Beggar lives so well.

The ‘Plotts’ that kings fear could be a reference to significant events in recent history, namely the Popish and the Rye House plots of the later years of Charles II’s reign or the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. This reference might suggest that this version of this particular ballad had been edited and changed significantly over time, since the author, the playwright Richard Brome, died in 1652. Female vagrants feature in this song as silent, sexually available objects; at ‘Pimblico’ every man had ‘a Can in’s hand/and a Wench upon his knee’. When they were so ‘disposed’, our beggar and his companions could use their ‘long patch’d Coats/ for to hide a Pretty Lass’ while ‘we tumble on the Grass’. The misogynistic construction of silent female companionship in ‘carefree’ rogue ballads aligns them squarely with the tradition of sexual silence and exploitation that recurs consistently throughout other forms of rogue literature. These textual examples also show ballads and other forms of print effectively ‘pollinating’ each other; references to begging and roguery appeared in serious political tracts just as significant political events cropped up in humorous rogue ballads. This evidence further reinforces the arguments of Adam Fox and others about the

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interconnectivity of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ cultures.50 The ballad entitled ‘The Beggars Delight, As it was Sung at the Theatre-Royal’ perfectly encapsulates the complex nature of this pollination. The song begins with an address to the elite listener, in keeping with where it was initially supposed to be sung: Courtiers, Courtiers, think it no harm, that silly poor swains in love should be, For love lies hid in raggs all torn, as well as in Gold and bravery.51

Although some examples of ‘carefree’ or ‘highway’ ballads provoke more questions than they answer, several firm characteristics defined this subset of rogue ballads. The narrator or protagonist is always a beggar in good health and high spirits, both carefree and crafty in equal measure. The ballads usually contain exposés of varying length detailing several tricks or methods of ‘maunding’ for a living. The reader or listener is assured that begging on the road is a good life and invited to laugh at the lively antics of these dissembling cheats and rogues. Female voices and agency are diminished or marginal at best, completely absent at worst. Moreover, an even darker set of assumptions is implied by the contrast of such depictions of begging as ‘carefree’ with the reality as it was experienced in early modern England. The veracity of tales of woe produced by those who were actually unfortunate becomes easier to disbelieve; after all, they could be healthy, happy, deceptive rogues that drink away their ill-gotten gains at the alehouse every evening, and it is likely that some actual beggars in early modern England would have been visually similar to the imagery of this cultural stereotyping. On the other hand, this unsympathetic depiction of begging could be a red herring, leading us away from an understanding of early modern society as still deeply concerned with notions of deserving poverty and Christian charity. In all likelihood both possible interpretations of carefree rogue ballads contain some truth.

‘Mending kettles handsomely’ The second major category of rogue ballads here examined is the ‘Seduction’ subset. A darkly comic variant of the more traditional love ballads about pliant maids and lusty men, these seduction ballads prominently feature several archetypical representations of travellers, rogues, and unsavoury types. Prostitution and deception play central roles in these narratives, although occasionally tales of genuine love can still be found. Two main narrative arcs

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are repeated consistently: a roguish male of some variety seduces a woman and then runs away, or a prostitute deceives a man in some way and makes off with his worldly possessions, usually also leaving him to pick up an expensive tab in the alehouse where the deception inevitably occurred. Many of these ballads read like ‘good fellowship’ drinking songs gone humorously awry. However, variants of these stories exist: tales about ‘jovial’ tinkers and pedlars and the maids (or wives) they encounter were also certainly popular, and these narratives often revolve around the temptations of lust, the despoilment of female sexual innocence, and the cuckolding of unsuspecting, emasculated husbands. Often interchangeable with less fortunate wanderers, pedlars and ‘sturdy’ cunning folk represent the most commonly sexualized archetype of vagrancy, and ballads recounting their various conquests played into contemporary concerns about the transient and illicit nature of romantic relationships among vagrants on the road, but also among young people, and among that other suspected ‘group’: women. One of the finest examples of a wandering seducer in rogue ballads is found in ‘The Politick Begger-Man, who got the love of a pretty Maid’. The refrain of this ballad describes the beggar man as handsome and full of vitality: His cheeks were like the crimson rose, His forehead smooth and high, And he was the bravest Begger-man, that I ever saw with eye.52

The beggar wanders to a farm in hopes of collecting some alms, and a maid living there becomes instantly smitten with him. She invites him inside, gives him ‘nut-brown ale’ and food, and wishes that she too were a beggar, so that they could travel together: Tis pitty said this maiden fair, That such a lively Lad, Should be a Beggers only Heir, a fortune poor and bad: I wish that my condition, Were of the same degree, then hand in hand I’de quickly wend, throughout the world with thee.

Realizing that he has won the maiden’s heart, the beggar spends the night with her, and by sunrise he has vanished, leaving behind a broken-hearted woman who laments the loss of her innocence and her virginity. Rakish runaway

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male lovers and warnings to maids about their wiles are very common tropes in all English ballads about love and sex; however in this case it is particularly interesting how these conventions mesh with the stereotype of the healthy, handsome, yet deceptive beggar as well. These stories also predate the traditional chronology of male ‘libertine’ sexual culture by almost a generation, suggesting a much longer gestation of changes in sexual attitudes than current historical scholarship accounts for.53 These seduction narratives construct a romancing rogue archetype, picaresque in many respects, overlaid with specifically literary interpretations of poverty on the road. The male beggar of ballads is perfectly capable of tricking men out of their coin and women out of their sexual innocence. The physical health of this seductive beggar foreshadows his abandonment of the despoiled maid. The representation of health in rogue ballads inverted the traditional understanding that the external body would reflect the internal character of the individual and that moral ‘goodness’ and physical health were linked. The healthy, happy, thoroughly deceptive, ‘carefree’, and seductive beggars of these first two categories of rogue ballads completely upend this Galenic interpretation of health for humorous effect. The gender of the seducer also clearly plays a highly significant role in the construction of these narratives, since certain narrative arcs can only play out with male seducers, although as ballads about ‘Jovial Tinkers’ suggest, settled and propertied men were frequently deceived, emasculated, and sexually ‘surpassed’ by vagrant men in these songs. When vagabond women deceived ‘settled’ men, such stories become even more formulaic and presumably even funnier to contemporary listeners. Itinerant traders such as pedlars, tinkers, and petty chapmen routinely feature in ‘seduction’ rogue ballads and in ballads about trade and popular commerce. Other professions and trades were certainly also heavily associated with vagrancy, the trope of the veteran soldier as vagrant was particularly common.54 One set of paired ballads recounts the travels and activities of an itinerant ratcatcher: The Famous Ratketcher, with his travels and The Ratketchers returne out of France describe a successful, sexually potent vagrant man who professed a highly specific trade, ‘the soundest blade of all his trade/or I should him deepely slaunder’, one that required occult forms of herbal knowledge and specific practice to catch or poison various forms of vermin and a profession which also operated within a wider colonial context of rare provisions: He knew the Nut of India, That makes the Magpie stagger, The Mercuries, and Cantharies, with Arsnicke, and Roseaker.55

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Our rat-catcher is a vagrant with a clear and useful profession, and we have already been introduced to a real vagrant ‘Ratketcher’ taken up and considered for military service in Kent. This ballad is full of sexual euphemisms about ‘greensicke maides’, and it contains truly salacious puns on words like ‘baite’ and ‘poyson’; this rat-catcher was clearly an adept at ensnaring other prey: But on a time, a Damosell, did him so farre entice, that for her, a Baite he layed straight, would kill no Rats nor Mice… And on the bait she nibled, so pleasing in her taste, She lickt so long, that the Poyson strong, did make her swell i’th waste.

The rat-catcher is a proper seduction artist, ‘He can Collogue with any Rogue/ and Cant with any Gypsie’, but the ballad also puns on the catcher’s ‘painful bagge’ and suggested that he sought a cure for venereal disease in France. The rat-catcher’s sexual liaisons with various ‘Maydens’ are described as poisonous, the obvious double entendre being that he impregnated these women and also infected them with venereal disease, before fleeing to another county or even country. Male rogues are not the only deceivers in the ‘seduction’ subset of rogue ballads, although they are represented most frequently. Female prostitutes or ‘morts’ are also routinely depicted as cunning and deceptive. An entire group of ballads exists in the Roxburghe collection called the ‘Tom the Taylor Group’, which is characterized by amorous or drunken tailors who are ‘gulled’ out of their coin and clothing by prostitutes, who are often actually beggar women dressed up by their ‘bawds’. In ‘The Trappan’d Taylor’, a ‘bonny brave youth’ or ‘finickin’ vapouring Taylor’ fell in love with a beggar maid who had come to London and been taken in by an old female bawd as a prostitute.56 The young woman apparently took to the trade easily: She ‘liked the Trade far better,’ she said, ‘than abroad in the country to wander.’ She taught her the Trade to pass for a Maid, after she had been twenty times used; And silly Fools they are cheated like Gulls, being baffled and basely abused.

These lines crudely express a hard truth: it may indeed have been better for female vagrants to prostitute themselves than to wander the countryside.57 Judging by the ballad’s ending, this particular ‘Beggar-wench’ made the right

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choice, as the tailor was tricked into marrying her before discovering that she was poor and ragged. Despite the staging of her sexuality as a cheap commodity, this particular story ends happily enough for the female beggar. It turns out that the female vagrant’s economic status was not a sticking point, as ‘a Beggar-wench Bride, to lye by his side, may please him as well as a Lady’, and our ‘vapouring Taylor’ decides to continue loving his wife regardless of the ignoble circumstances surrounding their marriage. This ballad is as much a comment on the profession of tailoring as it is on the exploitation of rural migrant women as prostitutes in London. These ballads certainly seem troublingly misogynist to us today, but when compared to the stultifying silence and total lack of agency surrounding female characters in other rogue discourses, these seduction narratives actually emerge as a much more lively interplay of sexual expectations, transgressions, and relationships between the sexes than many other narratives allow for. Ballads about female vagrants who engaged in sex work at least occasionally allow those women a voice. For example, in ‘Debauchery Scared’, a homeless beggar woman is convinced by a gentleman’s servant to prostitute herself, ‘it being late, she fearing the watch/besides, it was very cold weather’, but when the drunken gentleman meets her, he says that she smells too much ‘of cheese’ and needs to wash. In the darkness she mistakes an inkwell for a bowl of rosewater, and as a result, when he wakes in the early morning the inebriated noble thinks that she is ‘The Devil of Hell’ and runs outside into the street in a panic, to the great amusement of onlookers, who ridicule his gullibility.58 The woman, frightened by his cries, had followed behind and thus exposes the gentleman’s slumming behaviour to public shame simultaneously. ‘Debauchery Scared’ was a very popular song in the later seventeenth century, with individual ballad copies surviving in the Pepys collection, the Roxburghe, and the Royal Library of Scotland.59 Ballads of this variety are likely composed to be publicly consumed in alehouses or on other occasions of sociability. Allegorical references to sexuality and femaleinitiated adultery are also common, especially in seduction ballads that feature wandering ‘jovial’ pedlars and tinkers. In ‘Room for a Jovial Tinker’, an amorous gentleman’s wife pays a tinker to ‘mend [her] kettle handsomely’, which the tinker manages to do in the dark, and then convinces her unwittingly cuckolded husband that the tinker’s services were a bargain: ‘Pray hold your peace, my Lord,’ quoth she, ‘and think it not too dear. If you cou’d doo’t so well ‘twould save you forty pound a year.’60

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The story is designed to encourage the audience to laugh at the husband’s ignorance as well as at his lack of prowess in the marriage bed, but it is also designed to poke fun at the conventions of marriage among elites. That the woman initiates the sexual encounter with the tinker and then adeptly outwits her husband should not be overlooked, nor should the association of female sexual satiety with the significant expense of a male paramour, as here both action and association successfully invert the traditional power relations of extramarital sex among elites.

‘Forlorn travellers’ A third category of rogue ballads deals with warnings and lamentations, primarily about the consequences of ‘lewd living’ and the decaying ‘state of trade’. Vagrancy in these ballads often appears as a consequence of earlier mistakes: misspending money on alcohol and fine living; not honouring the advice of one’s parents; or roving about the countryside in a ‘roaring’ fashion. In Martin Parker’s ‘Warning to all Lewd Livers’, the narrator was once a gentleman, but upon falling into the company of rogues he is reduced to a desperate state: The cards and dice were my delight; I haunted taverns day and night; Lewd women were my chiefest joys; And my consorts were cut-purse boys.61

The narrator’s dissolute lifestyle breaks his father’s heart and leads to his death, and then, even after swearing an oath not to, he reduces his mother to a state of vagrancy and near-starvation by stealing her worldly goods to sell. She too eventually dies from this treatment, and the narrator becomes a complete pariah: ‘My dearest kinsfolks do me chide;/My nearest friends mock and deride’. The narrator ends up lying in fields at night, and not a single soul provides him any relief. He dies un-mourned on a dunghill. That there is a drastically different archetype of vagrancy on display in this ballad seems clear: here we see vagrancy as a ‘fallen’ state brought on by a lifestyle of uncontrolled hedonism, and it was a condition that affected all of the characters involved in this narrative. Even in ballads, a routinely comic variant of popular literature, vagrancy could be deeply tragic. Despite not deserving her fate in any way, the mother of the narrator was reduced to almost the same extremities as her son, with the only difference being that she was able to receive some small measure

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of relief door to door. This depiction of vagrancy as an indiscriminating punishment for misdeeds is common in rogue ballads in this ‘lewd living’ category. Another ballad about the consequences of ‘lewd living’ was ‘The Forlorn Traveller’ by Richard Climsell. The song follows the same formulation as Parker’s ballad: the traveller ‘roars’ across England’s countryside and visits a long list of county towns. Having spent all of his coin, he enlists ‘Against England’s foe’, but upon his return he cannot find anyone to take him in, and his life also ends in a miserable state: ‘For in the open fields he dyed,/Being denyed/To come within doore’.62 Once again, an avoidable fall from grace results in homelessness and death. Often ballads specifically associate drinking and the physical space of the alehouse with the inevitable fall from grace. Alehouses are also depicted as the typical place of shelter and refuge for travellers of all degrees: Thus while you travel on the Road, Unto the Ale-House you must go, For drink and lodgings, this I know; Yet moderation always use, And don’t God’s Creatures there abuse.63

In the ‘Country Travellers Advice’, repudiation of excessive drinking leads to ‘happy days, peace, and plenty’. The consequences of ignoring the proffered advice – ‘woeful poverty’ and ‘sad distress’ – are familiar. Alehouses and beggary often seem to go hand-in-hand: ‘That man that haunts the Ale-house, and likewise the Drunken Crew,/Is in danger to dye a Beggar without any more ado.’64 This association of alehouses with the dangers of dying un-mourned (and unburied) as a vagrant meant that spaces that were linked to mobility were associated directly with moral and spiritual danger. These lamentations contrast sharply with the carefree narratives of the ‘highway’ ballad subset and the picaresque antics of wandering lovers. The vagrancy of lewd livers is depicted not as a masterless, romantic, and happy existence, but instead as a terrible condition brought on by bad choices, and here the assumption of idleness foreshadows terrible ends: the ruination of family, untimely and miserable death, and potential damnation. These thematic extremes tell us something very important about the perceptions of poverty and mobility in early modern England. Contemporary views on vagrancy were complex enough to generate a wide variety of distinct literary narratives and the circumstances in which to interpret their meanings. The same activity of begging alongside the roadside could be seen as evidence of a cunning and

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carefree life or as evidence of a reduction to misery via a lifestyle of excess, a determination partly dependent on which rogue ballads one had been reading or listening to recently. These constructions of vagrancy were not exclusive. Poverty and vagrancy could also be circumstances that one was reduced to by cruelty, misuse, or events outside of one’s control, and the next set of ballads demonstrates that contemporaries were well aware of such nuances, despite an overriding historical preoccupation with the dichotomous explanation of the poor as either deserving or not.

‘Revenge a widdowe’s wrong’ Narratives of deserving but vagrant poor, and their occasional revenge against those who mistreat them, comprise the smallest set of rogue ballads that survive. But the examples that do remain are intriguing, because they depict a contemporary appreciation of the varying circumstances that could force someone to leave their community and take to the road. These ballads also comment on which segments of society were most vulnerable to such dislocation and in doing so they introduce another gendered element into the depictions of deserving poverty in ballads. Poor widows are by far the most common object of pity in these stories, and they are typically shown as the primary figure of suffering. Children and the elderly also figure in several ballads, but women and particularly widows remain central to portrayals of the deserving poor. The most popular and detailed ballad is ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords’, in which a cruel and heartless landlord finds an opportunity to turn out a poor widow just after she had given birth to twins, because he did not want to provide them with relief. The master’s cruelty is captured in vivid verses: Her pretty Babes, that sweetly slept Upon her tender breast, Were forcèd, by the Miser’s rage, by nights in streets to rest.65

The landlord then sold the widow’s house and ‘left her scarce a ragge to weare’. However, before leaving her home to beg, the widow calls on God to ‘revenge a widdowes wrong’, initiating a terrible curse against the landlord who wronged her. Cast adrift to beg her living, the widow became a vagrant in the eyes of the communities she entered:

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At many places where she came, She knew the whipping post, Constrainèd still, as beggars be, to taste of such like rost.

Eventually her two children become separated from her and die of starvation in a wheat field, where they had been ‘gleaning’ or gathering the scattered leftover grains from a recent harvest. The full weight of this tragedy compels onlookers to convey her to her original home to prosecute the cruel landlord who turned her out. However, at this point the ballad describes ‘the judgement of the Lord!/ How hee, in fury great’ had utterly destroyed the landlord and his family in a fashion reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah. Fire from heaven consumed the man’s worldly possessions and reduced him to beggary, his wife was tried as a witch, his daughter became a prostitute, his eldest son was hanged for murder, and his youngest son ‘defilèd Nature’s bed’ and was torn apart by mastiffs. The landlord eventually drowned himself in a stream of water not even deep enough to drown a mouse, ‘and thus the ruine you have heard/of him and all his house’. There is a great deal to unpack in the ballad ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords’. The primary narrative centres on the tragic plight of the widow and her children, as well as on God’s retribution, but the archetype of vagrancy in this ballad is its most intriguing element. This story is one of the only extant early modern ballads I have found where we find a clearly deserving pauper whipped at the post and forced to ‘make shift’ as a vagrant. The ballad’s widow protagonist contributes to gendered ideas of vagrancy as well: the ‘cunning’ beggars of earlier ballads are predominantly male, and deserving beggars in unfortunate circumstances are most often female, even when such circumstances are designed to be humorous, as with the beggar-turned-prostitute in ‘Debauchery Scared’, who slept with the inebriated gentleman in order to get out of the cold. The material circumstances of life for many poorer English parishioners could easily have resembled those of the ‘Lincolne’ widow in this ballad, and contemporaries would certainly have had held strong views on ‘Mizer’ landlords. Outlier or not, this ballad narrates events that cut to the bone of female vagrant experience in early modern England. Whether it is a profiteering landlord or a penny-pinching parish that unsettles her seems almost immaterial, once it becomes clear that she is ‘likely to be chargeable’, she is cast adrift. Many entries in parish constables’ accounts allude to possible variations of this same story: ‘given to a poore woman and child and carriage… 1s’ reads an entry in a Warwickshire parish in 1693 and it is far from an anomaly.66 Approximately seven or eight pence from that shilling

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would have paid for the cart to carry the woman and her child onwards, and the silent implication of this otherwise laconic entry is that she (or her child) was too tired, too footsore, or too sick to walk. One might presume that the ballad story casts the widow adrift with two young children in a bid to increase dramatic tension, but of the twenty-eight vagrant women apprehended and passed by the borsholder Richard Tinker in Temple borough, Rochester, in 1714, eight of them were travelling with small children. One woman, Jane Evans, was travelling with two children.67 I think it would be unwise to underestimate the importance of schadenfreude and sympathy in ballads about misery, poverty, vagrancy, and revenge. ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords’ is a particularly fine example of how much nuance this seemingly simple genre of print can conceal. The representation of a widow’s miserable experience of vagrancy, and her eventual, well-deserved, and spectacular revenge, suggests a much more complicated understanding of subsistence mobility and desperation than contemporaries were often thought to possess. The depiction of vagrancy in ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords’, including the links made between predatory rent practices, the economic vulnerability of losing a spouse, and the demands of a young family, represents the causes and characteristics of vagrancy with far more accuracy and sympathy than the more elite variations of rogue literature ever had or ever would. Easily memorizable, cheap, and couched in poignant verses, this ballad arguably had a much greater ‘cultural reach’ outwards and ‘downwards’ along the social scale than any salacious pamphlet about the sexual peccadilloes of beggars, or descriptions of gypsy societies, would ever attain. All of these sources certainly contributed to a discourse of vagrancy, but if one only read rogue literature in pamphlet form, such sympathetic descriptions of vagrancy would be totally absent, and any attempted reconstruction of contemporary attitudes would be inadequate. So far I have separated various rogue ballads into discrete categories, mainly based on their tone and narrative arcs. But thematically, many different rogue ballads contained similar evidence of wider cultural attitudes towards gender, sexuality, health, deception, professional begging, and humour. The implications of some of these themes have been sketched out already, but I would like to turn to one theme in particular and discuss how ballads portray the relationship between the physical health of their vagrant characters and that characters’ moral value. Ballads contain unique evidence of vernacular medical attitudes and of attitudes towards health and wellness; however, the representation of health in rogue ballads does not conform to existing historical accounts of vernacular medical attitudes whatsoever.

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Health as morality Sometimes we find the narrative of salvation for the unfortunate told in very simple terms. In ‘The Bedfordshire Widow’, Queen Mary II happens across a poor widow and her children near the royal gardens and upon hearing her story, the queen provides food, lodgings, and a pension. The woman was clearly homeless and begging to survive: A widow, as likewise three children small, Who lay in the street without side of the wall, Begging for money for to buy them bread, Who with hunger and pining were almost quite dead.68

Such straightforward depictions of deservingness and relief beg the question: in these rogue ballads, could the most important indicator of the moral difference between an undeserving rogue and a deserving widow be the description of their health? Our merry and cunning beggars from the first group of ballads were stout, strong, and well-fed, sustained by the proceeds of their criminal lifestyle. The prostitutes and ‘red-cheeked’ tinkers from the seduction narratives were likewise hale and virile, or deceptively displayed as such, and were again associated with a form of moral dissolution. Country lasses who are ensnared by city bawds and pimped to unsuspecting ‘Taylors’ are often described as ‘stout’, ‘fine’, and ‘lusty’. Naturally then, since definitions of poverty relied on dichotomous exclusion, those poor truly deserving of assistance could not be healthy specimens; any signs of good health would indicate some form of deception was at work. When Queen Mary relieves the poor widow, this self-enforcing narrative demands that the widow be very close to absolute destruction in order to unequivocally be deserving of relief. The relative health of the different types of vagrant portrayed in rogue ballads appears to be the direct inverse of the depiction of their moral status or ‘deservingness’. The depiction of physical health and its relationship to poverty in ballads actually differs in interesting ways from wider, commonly held beliefs about how external indicators (such as someone’s visible state of health) always reflected internal ones (such as one’s moral character). In the existing historical reading of contemporary medical attitudes, the healthy, happy, ‘red-cheeked’ beggar found in rogue ballads should be an impossible figure, especially since this character is prone to moral lapses like theft, opportunistic deception, and the seduction of innocent farmer’s daughters.69 In a culture with a holistic understanding of moral and medical health, such a figure should be struck down with illness and ‘griefe’ at some point in the story, much like the ‘lewd livers’ in other rogue

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ballads. Yet the healthy, deceptive rogue of popular songs never conforms to these expectations. Given what we now know about the conventions of balladry as a cultural medium, we can expect ballads to destabilize contemporary expectations of both spiritual and physical health as often as they reinforce them. Historians of early modern medicine have engaged with the relationship between poverty and the provision of health care across Europe and throughout both the early modern period and the Enlightenment. It is commonly argued that the links between poverty and disease as a cause of poverty only began to be explored in the nineteenth century.70 Before the late eighteenth century, lay medical knowledge centred on the Galenic tenet that outward signs reflected inward states and that physical illness could thus manifest itself as evidence of moral illness.71 Sinful behaviour was to be avoided not just for the care of the soul, but also for the care of the body.72 Thus, when early modern medical knowledge and practice intertwined with moral judgements about the deserving and undeserving poor, the result was a compound institution: hospitals-cumworkhouses that attempted to both morally and physically reform the health and thus the productivity of poor inmates.73 However, cultural attitudes towards health remain problematic for historians of medicine. Louise Hill Curth’s study of the medical knowledge found in almanacs is one of the few studies of the popular literature associated with early modern medical beliefs. Although almanacs were as comparably popular as broadside ballads, and the cheaper versions of almanacs were priced alongside ballads and sold by the same vendors, as a genre they have been viewed by historians as a distinct vehicle of specific medical and astrological knowledge, knowledge that is separable from wider contemporary attitudes towards health in general.74 Ballads and almanacs offered competing visions of health which aligned with the nominal purposes and tone of each type of literature. Almanacs dispensed serious advice on personal health, animal and crop care, astrology and the seasonal calendar, and a host of other matters important to day-to-day rural existence. Many rogue ballads at least glance at similar themes, but the songs juxtapose attitudes towards health and the soul with representations of vagrancy and poverty that actually invert the conventional wisdom: that the state of the exterior material world reflects the state of the internal moral world. The most undeserving of ballad vagrants are depicted as the most physically healthy, and the most deserving objects of charity are depicted as the most grievously afflicted. This inversion accurately reflects wider cultural attitudes about the misfortunes of the deserving and the idleness of the undeserving poor. After all, if you were healthy you should have been able to work. This dichotomous

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conflation of health and deservingness plays out in many ballads with interesting and ambiguous effect. Consider ‘The Maunding Soldier’, a seventeenth-century ballad about a poor wandering veteran of England’s wars. The narrator bears multiple wounds and disabilities, each inflicted upon him during military service: ‘twice through the Bulk I have been shot/My braines have boyled like a Pot’, ‘At push of Pike I lost mine Eye/At Bergen Siege I broke my thigh’.75 His wounds compel the soldier to beg for coin, since he has quite clearly lost the ability to labour productively. Even so, the narrator is at pains to distinguish himself from ‘other rogues’, lest well-born passers-by scorn him as merely another dissembling cheat: I pray your worship thinke on me That I am what I doe seem to be, No Rooking Rascall, nor no Cheat, But a Souldier every way compleat, I have wounds to show, that prove tis so, then courteous good Sir, ease my woe

We have already seen how other ballads deploy the trope of the dissembling cripple or false veteran in stories of jovial beggar crews and canny rogues. The narrators of those ballads feign illness and disability and elicit true sympathy and true coin as a result of their false actions. The ‘maunding soldier’ has to distinguish himself as visually separate and morally separable from such rogues, and thus deserving of charity, and he does so by literally showing his wounds to passers-by and by listing exactly where and how he got them. ‘The Maunding Soldier’ can also be read against the grain. The narrator lays out a very improbable sequence of misfortunes, including being blown up by ‘those roguish mines’ no less than ‘at lest these dozen times’ and being made a slave thrice. Of course, ‘maunding’ is also the canting term for wandering and begging, and this ballad could well have been interpreted by a canny audience well exposed to roguish deceptions as a disingenuous cheat disguised as the lament of a deserving, disabled pauper. The unstable, fundamentally untrustworthy nature of male ballad beggars does indeed recommend that reading. The vernacular depiction of medical knowledge also features in several rogue ballads, although never in an uncomplicated way. The most common roguish figure thought to possess medical knowledge was the tinker or pedlar, who wandered about the country selling and trading necessities, primarily to women buyers. Here, the discourse of vagrancy is simultaneously one of sexual euphemism, economic exchange, and commercial medicine. Female characters often trade their ‘cony skins’ for medical goods. In ‘The Pedlar opening of his

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Packe, To Know of Maydes what tis They lacke’, we find a long list of medical and mysterious items for sale, all presented as aids for women attempting to preserve their health, or an image of it, or to cater to their beauty. Some of the pedlar’s remedies are even described with reference to the predominant medical theories of Galen, particularly the ‘naturals’ such as ‘ayre’ and water: From westerne Iles your Gummes to keep teeth from Infection, and from Rhewmes. Here is a water rare, will make a wench that’s fiftie, for to looke more fayre, than one that wants of twenty, stil’d from the Ayre.76

The pedlar also sold ‘a water [that] can restore/a Mayden head that’s vanisht’ and ‘Balles of camphyre made/to keep your face from pimples’, and a host of other ointments and articles of clothing designed to disguise illness, disfigurement, or pregnancy. Rogue ballads such as the ‘Maunding Soldier’ and ‘the Pedlar’s Packe’ contain layers of humour, representation, and understanding, and touch on a host of associated themes despite their central construction around the well-being and medical knowledge of specific individuals. Early modern Europe described health morally and socially. Rogue ballads mapped sickness and vitality onto satirical and sympathetic protagonists in intriguing ways that associated good health with deception and undeservingness and bad health with genuine objects of charity. But even here, the meaning of many rogue ballads remained ambiguous: we still are not sure whether the ‘maunding soldier’ deserves our charity or not, despite his repeated protestations and entreaties, and I would argue that the ballad is deliberately designed to leave its audience with that ambiguity. One of the enduring effects of these ballads may well have been to firmly establish a broad-based popular scepticism regarding the economic necessity of ‘wandering and begging’ and a familiarity with how even the appearance of sickness could be a deception.

Vagrancy in ballad woodcuts We have covered a range of vagrant representations in the text of ballads so far but have not yet unpacked one of the most complicated parts of many ballad sheets: their woodcut imagery. Let us return for a moment to Richard Brome’s

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Figure 2.1 Title and central woodcut for Richard Brome, ‘The Beggers Chorus’ to the tune of A begging we will go (London: 1672–96?); EBBA: 21911. © The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

‘The Begger’s Chorus’, printed after his death in the later seventeenth century, and to that ballad’s striking central woodcut (Figure 2.1). Most ballad woodcuts bear only a generic relationship to the particularities of their accompanying text, but the exceptions to this rule tend to be spectacular: depictions of killer whales, astrological phenomena, natural disasters, theological figures, and instantly recognizable human stereotypes, such as beggars and deserving poor widows.77 One often finds unending reuse of the same clothed male and female figures, but of these key stereotypical images, the ‘beggar image’ was one of the strongest visual stereotypes. Bespoke woodcut designs with a clear message, like the ‘Beggar’s Chorus’ woodcut, involved ‘a great deal of investment and labour’: finely grained wood like cherry or beech, and then very sophisticated carving to produce the block.78 They could then be reused for more than a century. Tom Nichols has argued that the image of the beggar in early modern Europe possessed enormous discursive force, it was a ‘negative image of production’ allowing viewers to see themselves as comparatively industrious, morally upstanding, or wise.79 Such images were ubiquitous, beggars were

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carved into the built urban environments of cities, their bodies represented caritas or charity in elaborate and enormous devotional paintings, the humbler printed images seemed almost as endless as the streams of poor migrants they represented. Beggar imagery was ‘essentially iconic’.80 It was one of the ‘books of the common folk’.81 The subgenre of rogue ballads seems to have a higher density of woodcuts connected directly to the accompanying verse content, particularly songs that mark out and describe the undeserving, ‘roguish’ poor. This makes sense; the beggar was such a visually powerful sign to all social classes that including imagery related to beggary could only increase the saleability of the ballad print. The main woodcut from ‘The Beggers Chorus’ (Figure 2.1) features two undeserving rogues confronting a deserving poor woman accompanied by two small children and carrying an infant. It is filled with symbolic imagery that reinforces the dichotomy of deserving and undeserving. We have the traditional crutch or staff and ‘maimed soldier’ garb of the beggar on the left of the woodcut. The beggar on the right has a leashed dog, posed ‘in point’ with foreleg raised, and his hat in hand outstretched. Both staff and dog are symbols of undeserving poverty, the staff was ‘a well-known symbol of exile’ and is ubiquitous in vagrant imagery, particularly of male vagrants, and dogs were traditionally associated with blindness, but printed imagery routinely features them leading men who can clearly see as an intimation of pretended disability.82 The strongest visual signifier of the moral wrongness of the woodcut is the juxtaposition of dress. The two undeserving beggars are actually much better dressed for roadside life than the poor woman. She and her children are travelling barefoot, both beggars are wearing shoes. Both have hats to keep off the sun, coats to endure cold nights, the man on the left carries some kind of backpack (only the strap is visible) and the right-hand vagrant even has a cloak. The spatial arrangement of the woodcut reinforces the threat of false beggars: in this image they literally surround the poor deserving woman and children, each mirroring the supplicatory position of the other, but each also blocking the road. All six vagrants pictured are set against an empty rural backdrop, their expulsion from the traditionally urban contexts of begging and streetside charity is complete, and the woodcut imagines a predatory encounter occurring in the unpoliced emptiness of the countryside.83 Contrast the threatening picture painted by this woodcut with the text of the ballad itself.84 Making Merry at ‘Pimlico’, to ‘tumble on the grass’, long patched coats, ‘for to hide a pretty lass’. ‘A bag for my Bread,/another for my Cheese,/A little Dog to follow me,/to gather what I leese:/And a Begging, etc.’ Whether deliberate or not, the woodcut image savagely undercuts the valorized

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Figure 2.2 Pair of Woodcuts for ‘The braue English Jipsie’ (1597–1626?), EBBA ID: 30360. Shelf: C.20.f.7.544–545. © The British Library Board.

begging invoked in the verses, in effect compounding the dark irony of the entire ballad. Both text and image combine to re-present vagrancy as ‘jovial’ in occasional excess, but this excess is predicated on predatory exploitation of the deserving poor. This woodcut was reused for several other ballads about begging, in particular for ‘The Beggars Song, Both in City and Country, Shewing the Contentedness of their lives’, where it serves a similar satirical purpose, as the bulk of the ballad details how crews of beggars steal anything they come across: ‘if we spy something we do like,/we pluck and do not spare,/till we are fully satisfy’d,/and every one takes a share’.85 Where connections between woodcut and verse make it possible, this juxtapositional reading of the image and text of ballads highlights just how forcefully they could communicate key stereotypes, in this case, the fundamental untrustworthiness of ‘wandering and begging’ vagabonds. Woodcuts were also an effective method of typecasting entire visually distinct groups, like pedlars or gypsies. The pair of woodcuts for the ballad of the ‘Brave English Jipsie’ do this (Figure 2.2) in two distinct ways – in the first woodcut by placing an improbable number of women on a single horse, led by a man with a staff, and in the second by highlighting the stereotype of exotic gypsy dress. Both groups are large, with seven people clearly identified as gypsies in the first image and three adults with two children in the second. The accompanying song is sung in a plural first-person, ‘We can paint when we command/and look like Indians that are tand’.86 Once again the essential otherness of vagrant life and its threatening implications are highlighted by both text and image. Based on the slim records we do have of gypsy movements between 1650 and 1750, they did seem to travel in larger and likely family-based units, groups large enough to give

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Figure 2.3 (Left to right) Woodcut from ‘Cupid’s Revenge’ (1675–1696?); EBBA ID: 21038, and woodcut from ‘The Bedford-shire Widow’ (1694); EBBA ID: 20699. © The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

any single constable or local official pause.87 The ballad lays out a standard bill of gypsy and ‘false gypsy’ stereotypes: the centrality of fortune-telling, the painted deception of their skin colour, even the efficacy of gypsy cursing is alluded to: ‘for we can plague our mortall foe/Yet he the actors never know’. It also appears that those down on their luck attempt to pass as gypsies: ‘Some decay’d mongst Gallants, strives/to leade the English Jipsies lives’. The woodcuts crudely render the exotic dress of gypsy bands via the strange, almost eastern design of the hats that several women wear in the left woodcut, and more conventionally through the feathered dress of the men, children, and woman in the right woodcut. Once again we find staves, and undeserving ‘shirking’ people, together in abundance. The beggar imagery displayed in these ballad woodcuts firmly presents single and specific representations of vagrancy, whether they be layered symbols of deception and ‘false begging’ or inked as stark misery and deservingness. These images combine with and reinforce the stories told in the songs. Woodcuts that seem to be designed particularly for the songs they accompany are rarer than simply finding stock imagery reused over and over, but when this kind of bespoke ballad construction does occur, the interactions between text and image are revealing. Woodcut imagery of vagrancy would also have been even more accessible than ballad text, and contemporaries would require no literate neighbour in order to intimate the meaning of these images. Ballad woodcuts also display the deserving poverty of poor female vagrants and widows ‘out of doors’. Figure 2.3 shows woodcuts from two different ballads about interactions between charitable royalty and begging women. The right-hand

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woodcut is from the story of the ‘Bedfordshire widow’, and the ballad’s woodcut emphasizes the providential nature of the widow’s deliverance from misery and starvation. The left-hand woodcut is from the ballad ‘Cupid’s Revenge’, which presents the well-known story of King Cophetua, who ‘slights all women’ until he falls in love with a female beggar that he sees on the streets outside his palace windows. Shakespeare’s works mention the story in no less than four different plays, including Romeo and Juliet.88 The ballad woodcut simply presents a woman in ragged clothing, barefoot, with hand outstretched. In the story, once the beggar women sheds her ragged clothing she also instantly shrugs off her vagrant identity: ‘She in marriage shew’d a carriage,/As if she’d been a Queen before’.89 Both the text and imagery of these ballads tell a story of redemption and redefinition. Clearly deserving souls reduced to a state of vagrancy will, at moments of crisis, be relieved and cared for, either by God, as in the ‘Lanthorne for Landlords’ ballad we examined earlier, or by their charitable (or amorous) betters. However, the positive denouement of these stories demands a kind of ‘Cinderella’ erasure, not just of the suffering and impoverishment just previously expounded on in the story, but also of the poor and vagrant people who lived that suffering, whose bodies, minds, and comportment would have been altered by that experience, by a whipping, by starvation. A vagrant woman can only transform into a queen via the king’s touch. One wonders if that touch can erase the scars on her back.

Conclusions Rogue ballads are composite texts that display, and reconfigure, widely held perceptions of poverty, sexuality, deception, deservingness, health, and disability. This chapter has suggested that early modern English ‘rogue’ ballads are best read as allegorical texts which present to us only fragments of a complex contemporary appreciation of the themes of criminality and sexuality in general and of vagrancy in particular. Rogue ballads are an important part of the early modern ‘discourse of vagrancy’, and it is important to reflect on just how ballads represent vagrant archetypes when they simultaneously assisted to an uncertain degree in the process of constructing them. Ballads always partially disclose their subjects, because they are always simultaneously engaged in a slow process of reconfiguring those subjects. Just like the text, tune, and materiality of ballads themselves, the representations of vagrancy contained within them were always on the move. Historians cannot reconstruct the extent to which ballads were didactic, the extent to which they were examples of informal ‘instruction

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manuals’ for their audiences; we do not have enough anecdotal evidence of their reception.90 However, we can comment with greater confidence on the reflective role of ballads, both as mirrors of popular attitudes, because reflecting those attitudes made them easier to sell, and as cross-pollinated texts – indicators of an integrative early modern print culture. This was a culture that was slowly blending what many have termed ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ narratives, and it was a culture which was constantly borrowing from itself. This was a culture where popular attitudes mixed with literate and elite interpretations of those same attitudes to produce texts that were a muddied reflection of both. Rogue ballads are an intriguing example of this cross-pollinating process. Some of the first examples in this chapter show an extensive use of canting and a working knowledge of Harman and Greene’s rogue archetypes; the rogues in ballads appear to us as echoes of the rogues in the Highway to the Spital House, Liber Vagatorum, or Richard Head’s The Canting Academy, and they often speak in the same language.91 Yet the construction of the vagabond in rogue ballads problematizes any privileging of the ‘literature of roguery’ as the primary shaper of contemporary cultural perceptions of vagrancy. For one thing, the canting language and ‘lineage’ of rogues was complete invention. A.L. Beier’s study of canting concluded that its use as an ‘anti-language’ was just as ephemeral as the ‘anti-society’ it falsely presupposed and that in fact canting was itself merely a jargon, invented and changed over time by authors relatively high up the social scale.92 We also find that a wide range of vagrant characters live out a much more complicated existence in ballads than one might initially have expected, and only a few specific narrative arcs actually borrowed heavily from canting jargons or rogue literature. Authors and consumers of rogue ballads participated in an ongoing dialectic, constantly renegotiating the core narratives of deception, dissolution, seduction, and salvation with their readers, singers, and consumers in incremental steps. Rogue ballads help us by providing remnants of contemporary attitudes towards vagrancy and begging, by complicating those attitudes and by informing us that the early modern mental landscape was not as unchangeable or as easily categorized as was once assumed. Unlike other media, such as the early modern printed image or the moralizing sermon, there is no easy dichotomy of deserving and undeserving poverty in rogue ballads; instead we find both tropes forcefully expressed but just as often diluted, with vagrant characters reconfigured into ambiguous stand-ins for everyday concerns.93 Not all who begged deserved scorn, as alms places, traditions of petitioning, and revenging poor widows attest. Perceptions of poverty and vagrancy existed on a continuum, from the

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deceptive roadside beggar to the widow near starvation, and the innumerable variations of the historical reality eked out a life between those literary extremes. This complex and often contradictory mix of attitudes explains why one ballad could portray beggars as highwaymen in disguise: ‘thus all day long he beg’d for reliefe,/and late in the night he plaid the false Theefe’,94 who were worthy only of the ‘hue and cry’ and the tree at Tyburn, while another ballad praised charity to all the poor as the work of God: ‘For those that are loving and good to the poor,/A Blessing will always replenish their store’.95

3

Hidden Histories: Vagrancy, Migration, and Crisis in Local England, 1650–1750

Introduction On 11 July 1728 an aging William Bromley, retired Tory MP and Speaker of the House during a high-point of partisan dispute, and also a long-time Justice of the Peace for Warwickshire, examined Edward Price to determine his place of settlement, and he wrote an account of it in his judicial notebook.1 It seems that Price’s wife had recently given birth to a male child, and Bromley had to determine where to send the new parents and which community would ‘bear their charge’. Price was a fascinating character. Bromley tells us that he was ‘a vagrant who wandered about the country shewing Tricks of Dexterity, or sleight of hand, commonly known by the name of the Fire-Eater’. Having apparently once served out a seven-year apprenticeship to a smith in Wolverhampton (Staffordshire), Bromley ordered Edward Price returned there. Bromley’s final note on the matter was that Price’s wife had produced a genuine certificate of marriage, which located the place of their wedding in Northampton. Price (and presumably his wife) had travelled at least forty-six kilometres from Wolverhampton to Coventry and had clearly travelled elsewhere on several occasions. It thus seems that Edward Price – fire-eater, vagrant, and new parent – truly had ‘wandered about the country’. Particular circumstances make the story of Edward Price unique, but the fates of the Prices were absolutely typical of what happened to many vagrants and numerous poor migrants in early modern England. Social historians often strive in vain to learn more about their subjects, and the case of the Prices is no different: Bromley’s notes do not tell us what became of them and their newborn son. Indeed, we do not even know whether or not the Prices were actually punished as vagrants during their journey home – punishments which could have taken the form of whipping and incarceration in a series of bridewells if

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they had been deemed ‘incorrigible’ or ‘disorderly’.2 Even to contemporaries, the offence was ambiguous and hard to pin down, and the sources referred to in the following discussion will further complicate matters.3 It is useful to briefly reiterate some of early modern vagrancy’s essential characteristics. Drawing upon a series of statutes from the 1563 Statute of Artificers and onwards, vagrants were to be defined several ways, and A.L. Beier’s Masterless Men summarized five in particular. First and foremost, vagrants were poor. Second, they were ‘sturdy’; that is, able-bodied and capable of working. Third, they were unemployed or ‘masterless’ in contemporary parlance. Fourth, they were mobile: vagrants were ‘runnagate’, wanderers, and rootless. Finally, they were lawless and thus a danger to the social order. Successive Acts of Parliament added various other groups to the category of ‘vagrant’: some occupations (such as bear-wards, unlicensed minstrels and healers, and indeed fire-eaters), and the Irish, Scots, and Gypsies.4 Vagrants were therefore supposed to be clearly distinct from the settled poor of the town and parish. Paul Slack has noted that ‘the vagabond class was in practice a limited one even if its boundaries were roughly defined and based on ready social prejudices’ and that it excluded both widows and orphans who comprised ‘the recognized domestic poor of a town’.5 Slack’s identification of vagrancy as a construction of social prejudices is absolutely crucial, even though such prejudices are not always easy to situate textually. This chapter will argue that the separate definitions of vagrant and pauper migrant are insufficient to describe the historical realities of vagrancy in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; they are not broad enough to include the vast array of poor, sick, and needy migrants who should have been apprehended, whipped, and incarcerated, but who never were. This separation can imply that vagrancy was a static state of being. For example, Peter Clark’s study of migrants in southern England in the later seventeenth century aptly describes the causes and contours of subsistence migration while largely neglecting to mention any relationships that migration might have with vagrancy.6 These separate understandings of vagrancy and migration have polarized historical scholarship on the nature of mobility in early modern England. Contemporaries either wandered (as vagrants) or they travelled (as poor migrants). And yet we know that vagrants frequently travelled purposefully and that travellers of substantial means often ‘wandered’.7 I am interested in the understudied space between these two historiographical paradigms. The first part of this chapter studies the role of deliberate ambiguities in the practice of local justice and interrogates the languages of social description that were employed by constables and magistrates. I will argue that the definitions of poor migrant and vagrant

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should be at least partially collapsed. Vagrancy was simply the most visible and most socially threatening variety of migration by the poor, regardless of whether it was in search of subsistence or betterment, and it was a state in which many poor travellers might eventually, if only occasionally, find themselves. This chapter will argue that vagrancy and subsistence migration in early modern England were both symptoms of the same social and economic problems, and both subject to the same legal, social, and cultural pressures. In effect, they were two sides of the same battered copper penny – the common currency of want, of dearth, and of personal disaster. So our subject is not simply those who ‘wandered and begged’ but is rather vagrancy, migration, and local justice taken together. I interrogate legal sources such as constables’ accounts, vagrant examinations, justices’ notebooks, house of correction calendars, and quarter sessions order books in order to map a continuum of hazy definitions, deliberate imprecision, and wide powers of discretion which allowed constables and Justices of the Peace to define migrants as they saw fit; arguing that in effect officials employed a typology of travellers in their distribution of relief and in their pursuit of justice in the local context. This will also be seen in the printed manuals of those same officials, such as the well-known Countrey Justice by Michael Dalton.8 The second part of this chapter explicitly aims to recover ‘vagrant voices’. My aim here is to demonstrate how tightly vagrancy was tied to individuated narratives of crisis. Social historians have certainly not neglected this connection, but it tends to become subsumed in larger explanations of macroeconomic dislocation, demography, and social change. For the past three decades, the social history of vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750 has not received much attention at all because conventional wisdom has dictated that the overall number of vagrants declined and that therefore the problem of vagrancy itself must have been less pressing for contemporaries.9 There are several faults with this explanation. First, vagrancy rather clearly was a pressing problem, and a huge array of statutes, presentments, pamphlets, sermons, accounts, and legal records make this perfectly clear. Second, the total number of vagrants between 1650 and 1750 is a number that is, and shall remain, unknown. Third, the total number of vagrants at any given time is not a statistic necessarily relevant to the contemporary historical experience of vagrancy, and relying on such a broad and superficial characterization of this pressing social problem risks downplaying its importance in the period. In addition, recent scholarship has pushed back against the historical consensus that the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw rising living standards, a higher availability of employment and

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rising real wages, as we shall see.10 Finally, a narrative of population stability and its relationship to vagrancy is too deterministic. Why do the outlays on vagrant conveyance and incarceration in numerous county order books and accounts rise consistently throughout the early eighteenth century if vagrancy was so tightly tied to demography? Surely such increasing costs were not solely the product of zealous Overseers of the Poor removing and resettling potential burdens on their parish rates. If broad explanations like demographic stability or the enactment of a settlement regime are insufficient characterizations of vagrancy after 1650, we are left with only the most timeless reasons of all for the miseries of the mobile poor: dislocation, crisis, abandonment, cruelty, and exclusion. I draw several conclusions in this chapter: first, that the two historical subjects of vagrancy and migration by the poor are even more ambiguous and closely linked than previously supposed and that they change colour and form based entirely on the context studied. When the context is the enforcement of justice in a parish; the simultaneous maintenance of community ties and boundaries; the careful collection and disbursement of poor relief; and the subsequent reactions to strangers and ‘outcomers’, then those who wandered and begged must be studied alongside those whose circumstances did not at that moment force them to such desperate necessity. Second, I contend that the incidence of constables’ account entries and quarter sessions cases verifiably concerned with vagrants conceals a significant ‘dark figure’, a much larger, unprosecuted multitude of poor and needy travellers, separable from those deemed ‘lewd and idle beggars’ only by dint of a few pence in a ledger book, and sometimes not even by that slim margin. I also conclude that we must recover the personal narratives of the mobile poor as best we can, in order to understand the experience of vagrancy, and I devote the second part of this chapter to examples of vagrant voices in the judicial record and to vagrant spaces. The wider causes of vagrancy and subsistence migration in the later seventeenth century first require our consideration before we turn our attention to a ‘typology of travellers’ and to recovering the voices and histories of the poor migrants so judged.

Settlement, migration, and demography The Settlement Act of 1662, passed by an obedient and conservative Parliament in the wake of the return of the Stuart dynasty to the throne, has been justifiably treated by historians as a formal codification of many practices already extant

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in England’s localities, including the removal of paupers ‘likely to be chargeable’ to their current parishes of residence.11 However, there were some significant innovations in the statute, and Paul Slack in particular suggests that the Act was novel in that it finally distinguished between poor migrants and vagrants and made provisions in turn for both.12 Whether or not these distinctions between migration and vagrancy held up in practice is another matter. Regardless, the Act has had a profound effect upon the periodization of the problem of vagrancy among scholars, since the codification of the existing informal processes of relief and resettlement created new varieties of documentation – settlement certificates, removal orders, and pauper examinations – which have subsequently become crucial sources of information for social historians.13 Much of what we have learned about the lives of the poorer sorts in England from 1662 until the reforms of the nineteenth century has been teased from records created by the poor laws, and settlement papers have proven especially illuminating.14 Moreover, the patterns of local migration, especially into and out of parishes, were deeply affected by the Settlement Act. The Act stipulated that parish officials could petition two Justices of the Peace for the removal of any pauper deemed ‘likely to be chargeable’ to the poor rate in the near future, as long as they rented property valued at less than ten pounds per annum and did not fall under any of the other ‘heads’ of settlement, of which the two most important were year-long employment in the parish, or marriage to a person with a settlement there. Pauper migration in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was inextricably and tightly bound to the Settlement Act, and unsurprisingly the forms of migration permitted by the statute bear little superficial resemblance to vagrancy. However, the preamble of the act itself is revealing: a combination of ‘want of a due Provision of the regulations of reliefe and employment’ and a general ‘neglect’ to enforce the laws concerning the ‘apprehending of Rogues and Vagabonds’ were cited as the causes of the ‘want and misery’ of the poor in England.15 The preamble also accuses rogues, vagabonds and ‘Strangers’ of severely depleting parish ‘Stocks’ and woods and then of moving on to prey on another unfortunate community. The existing historiography posits a primarily demographic explanation of these contemporary concerns when they arose earlier between 1580 and 1640, but this demographic impetus was latent or absent during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Scholars who have studied vagrancy or migration in England from the Tudors onwards have agreed that the rate of population growth – which influenced the availability of employment and the price of foodstuffs – played an enormous role in either

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motivating or suppressing subsistence migration and vagrancy. The most common cause of vagrancy cited by historians of early modern England is demographic expansion in periods of economic stress.16 That said, many authors are also careful to note that neither demographic pressures nor economic stresses alone can account fully for the problem of vagrancy in early modern England. Still, the current conventional wisdom appears to be that in periods of relative demographic and social stability the incidence of vagrancy ‘must surely have declined’.17 However, the evidence of subsistence migration in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries does not appear to reveal any correlation between long-term demographic stability and a lower incidence of less socially threatening forms of migration.18 Although this same period generally witnessed stagnant population growth, slowly falling prices, and small rises in real wages across England, large-scale migration nevertheless remained one of its principal demographic characteristics, which implies that frequent relocation and movement were actually inherent and structural elements of English society during this period, premised as much on local crises and imperfect labour markets as on any large-scale demographic trends.19 Why then, should vagrancy be any more tied to demography than other forms of migration? The orthodox explanation cites economics: periods with stable or falling real wages as well as population growth are bound to see an increase in individuals and even families forced onto the road, due to a lack of employment opportunities or parochial resources, and Beier’s study of the sixteenth century amply demonstrates this.20 It is not an incorrect conclusion, only an incomplete one. This chapter takes a different approach and contends that emphasizing broad economic and population structures as the primary engine of subsistence migration (and thus of vagrancy) in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries under-represents the influence of legislative and life cycle pressures, especially in local contexts. In rural parishes, long-term demographic pressure could not be the first-order cause of migration, because crisis was. Hidden from sight in the public and legal records of migration are the many acute and distinctly local periods of dearth and small-scale crisis which propelled individual paupers away from their parishes in an effort to use their mobility to survive.21 For example, consider the 1690s: despite average wages when compared to other decades, the 1690s witnessed the worst period of aggregate purchasing power in the 100 years between 1650 and 1750, as well as a series of punishing harvest failures from 1693 to 1699.22 When we also account for depressions in trade, the economic strain caused by William III’s war with France, and the

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dearth of specie which prompted re-coinage, then the 1690s presents us with an economic landscape dire enough to compare to another decade a century beforehand, even though ‘demographic pressures’ had eased off completely.23 Brodie Waddell calls this crisis ‘a disorder that affected both [England’s] polity and her economy’.24 Predictably, the level of migration recorded in constables’ accounts rose substantially through this decade.25 The nature of migration and of vagrancy more broadly is also problematic after 1662. The Settlement Act could be used to effectively re-define paupers, either as vagrant in order to place the charge of their removal on the county rate or as ‘likely to be chargeable’ in order to fob the cost of their welfare onto their home parishes. The poor used migration as a survival strategy (historians characterize this as ‘subsistence migration’), but they could also migrate in an attempt to better their economic or social circumstances (‘betterment migration’).26 If we deployed a conventional understanding of vagrancy as genuinely separate from migration, then vagrants would simply be migrants whose efforts to make shift by using their mobility had failed, and our definition of failure would be based on their indictment as vagrants in the legal records of the period, in effect an archival tautology. The evidence considered here does not support such a separation. Demographic pressures were clearly a strong undercurrent which influenced a host of decisions about welfare, wages, labour, and exclusion that clearly related to vagrancy, but it does not explain the whole picture: a host of idiosyncratic, individual, but still devastating circumstances could and did force migration. These included parish settlement disputes, seasonal unemployment or underemployment, wedlock pregnancy, familial or household crises, impressment, inadequate wages, and localized industrial depression. Changes in the nature of available employment also profoundly impacted pauper mobility. In the final chapter of this book we will look at one powerful example of this, in the relationship between the growth of domestic service and the rise of female vagrancy. The many pressures of labour, subsistence, and life cycle which compelled individuals, couples, and even whole families not just to migrate, but to be mobile should not be underestimated. It is these exact same pressures, transmitted through the reluctance or outright hostility of parish officials, which could prolong a period of vagrancy and keep people on the road, shifted incessantly between parishes, in receipt of barely enough to make ends meet for a single evening. The incidence of ‘great bellied’ women travelling alone, in constant fear for their well-being, and in receipt only of casual aid from constables, is indicative of the vagaries of settlement and vagrancy law, and the manifold ways in which one could be forced from community and kin.27

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Constables’ accounts and their ambiguities Recall that vagrancy was a crime of status; its burdens of proof grounded in appearance, behaviour, and individual narrative. More specifically, recall that vagrancy was the crime associated with a particular state of existence which contemporaries would frequently describe as ‘wandering and begging’, asking for alms and making claims on the public spaces of a parish. Although its prosecution often coincided with indictments for petty theft or ‘wandering and begging’ without a license, any traveller could be apprehended and held as a vagrant at the discretion of the local constable. Even settled but socially transgressive individuals could find themselves ‘made vagrant’, prostitutes, rowdy apprentices, nonconformists, and recalcitrant or run-away husbands were often labelled vagrant and disorderly before their incarceration in a bridewell. Since we are concerned here with recovering the lived experience of different varieties of subsistence mobility in early modern England, we must interrogate a wide variety of sources related to local justice and its execution by JPs and parish constables. The contours and characteristics of local justice and enforcement during the later seventeenth century could vary wildly in different geographical contexts, but enduring similarities in prosecution and practice remained. Enforcement of the statutes against vagrancy and idleness fell to the JPs and the high constables as the representatives of central government in the localities. Their vigorous, or lethargic, pursuit of vagrants in their various communities was a discretionary activity, evidence of the pre-eminence of local considerations in the administration of justice. The eighteenth century in particular has provided scholars with good evidence of the powerful role of discretion in local justice; not just the discretion of JPs, but also of juries, who often found themselves ‘piously perjured’ and reluctant to apply the draconian penalties of written law, which was popularly nicknamed the ‘Bloody Code’.28 The sources considered here indicate that such discretion extended still further down the scale of enforcement, to the petty constables and the ordinary inhabitants of the parishes of England, each of whom could choose to prosecute, apprehend, or turn a blind eye to the actions of their neighbours when a crime was committed.29 However, when dealing with strangers, travellers, and ‘outcomers’, these same inhabitants were far less likely to be understanding, even if they still readily dispensed small sums and sent ‘passingers’ of all stripes onwards down the road. Local oligarchies of the ‘principal inhabitants’ occupied the parish offices each in turn, and every officer had a hand in the

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regulation of both ‘settled’ paupers and the needy strangers passing through. No local officer was more active in this respect than the petty constable, usually a man of husbandman status or greater, free from debts and of good reputation, the type of man described by the Jacobean vicar Godfrey Goodman as ‘the great governor among us’.30 Michael Dalton informed his readers that the term ‘constable’ itself was derived from two ancient Saxon words meaning ‘King’ and ‘stability’, which he took to mean that ‘these ancient officers were reputed to be as the stability or stay of the King and Kingdom’.31 As the lowest rung in a series of agents sworn to the crown, the office of the constable embodied particular tensions between the demands of government and the communities in which the officeholders lived and prospered. These tensions are evident in the frequent interactions between constables and JPs and in their detailed account books. Among their myriad duties and powers, constables had the ability to summarily arrest and punish suspected vagrants, but records detailing how frequently they did this between 1650 and 1750 are sparse, being largely limited to small sets of extant vagrant passes and certificates and to the occasional calendar of prisoners held in the county house of correction. While we thus cannot extrapolate with any confidence from the sources which survive, petty constables were clearly occupied on almost a daily basis with the casual relief of travellers and the apprehension of people they deemed vagrants. The office of constable also came with many additional duties, including collection of county rates for road and bridge maintenance; the carrying of ‘Hue and Cries’ about offenders at large; the execution of warrants; and as constables’ accounts routinely show, the casual relief of travellers.32 Constables were also all too human and routinely appeared in front of county benches to be fined and disciplined. John Thomas, constable of the Hertfordshire parish of Chipping Barnett, was fined £1 on 10 January 1731 for ‘neglecting his duty’, which in this particular case involved selling William Buckle of Chipping Barnett a horse, which Thomas had removed from the possession of a vagrant that he had apprehended. It was presumed that the horse had been stolen by the vagrant.33 Henry Norris and his fellow Middlesex Justices reproved and fined Richard Lloyd the Headborough of Hackney in 1733 after Lloyd for ‘willingly suffering one Lionel Theed to Escape out of his custody whom he was to have conveyed to a House of Correction’, Theed, a Hackney local, had been committed as a disorderly vagrant after running away from his wife and child.34 A problem arises when the historian interrogates those local sources concerning vagrancy which survive in relatively large quantities, such as

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constables’ accounts. Constables’ accounts are the written records of their levies and expenditures during their single year of office, and these documents are routinely signed and verified by the ‘principal inhabitants’ of the parish. They are generally as common as parish registers, but accounts of any serial length, quality, or revealing detail are substantially rarer. A sustained and useful run of well-kept accounts, such as the thirty years of the Grandborough series used here, are very uncommon indeed. Vagrants explicitly identified as such are, contrary to what might be expected, distinctly unusual in these accounts. This is because the primary punishments associated with vagrancy – whipping and commitment to a House of Correction – did not directly cost the constable money, and they thus do not appear in their account books. These costs, and a more accurate presentation of the number of vagrants passing through a village, would have been found in constables’ presentments, but these records largely ceased being kept in the late seventeenth century; the likely interpretation being that settlement certificates, removal orders, and vagrant receipts ‘masked’ and slowly took over the function of personal presentments to the bench.35 Moreover, the costs of conveying vagrants back to their parishes of origin were frequently invoiced on the backside of vagrant passes, primary sources with a predictably atrocious survival rate.36 However, constable’s accounts are still invaluable reservoirs of description; each line contains the written categorization of a person or group of people, and the sheer volume of traffic permits a quantitative analysis of this proscriptive language. The accounts of one Warwickshire parish have been examined in the most depth here, but the language employed in other parishes in England seems reasonably consistent, and it appears that a significant grey area existed in the written identification of travelling strangers – a deliberate vagueness of social description which left enough room for local constables to ignore or ‘miscategorise’ persons otherwise legally vagrant if they were not causing any trouble in the parish.37 Defining a stranger as a migrant or as a vagrant clearly had a great deal to do with the boundaries of parish and community. Several cases from the Warwickshire quarter sessions that involved vagrants should also serve to bolster this interpretation. By examining the ambiguous terminology found in contemporary legal manuals, and then by using Warwickshire as a case study for the application of these descriptions, I will argue that the incidence of cases verifiably concerned with vagrants conceals a much larger and deliberately unprosecuted multitude of poor and needy travellers, and it would not have been easy to differentiate between them and ‘sturdy beggars’ for contemporaries.

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Quantifying social description One of the key methods deployed in this chapter is a very basic quantification of social description. I used the term ‘typology’ to describe what amounts mainly to contemporary patterns of description and classification, and by examining such descriptors I have attempted to follow the lead of historians such as Keith Wrightson. In his work over several decades, Wrightson has paid particular attention to the vagaries of social description and to its relationship to power and local status, and his efforts, alongside the incorporation of a ‘linguistic turn’ into social history, have informed a subsequent generation of social and cultural historians, several of whom have offered new approaches to social description and differentiation.38 The aims of Wrightson and others who have studied social description in early modern England are echoed here.39 When we look at the descriptive terms in these records, what we are seeing are the identities that others gave to the poor.40 The terms of description considered here were applied to poor migrants from above and were explicitly linked to the authority, powers, and concerns of local officials. These records are about discretionary charity and local power. Steve Hindle’s idea of a ‘discretionary calculus of eligibility’ which was applied to the relief of settled paupers is thus of particular interest.41 In the construction of this calculus, Hindle begins with Michael Dalton’s 1618 manual for JPs, which defined who in the parish deserved poor relief; ‘those for whom the granting of pensions should have been unambiguous’.42 This calculus was applied by local officials, and its main components were sobriety, deference, church attendance, industriousness, and the ‘duties of parenthood’. By adopting, and adapting, the idea that local officials weighed and measured the recipients of the relief which they disbursed, and often found these people wanting, a modified form of the discretionary calculus can be applied to a different subset of the poor: those who were ‘unsettled’, mobile, ‘out of doors’.43 Changing the subject slightly reframes the idea, and thus it seems more appropriate to say that petty constables and local Justices of the Peace made use of a calculus of relief and punishment when they interacted with poor transient migrants, after all there were no questions of eligibility here, and this calculus could be proscriptive or pragmatic as circumstances warranted. These decisions were most often based on protecting the parish rate (and ratepayers) from additional burdens, even if those burdens were very temporary, as well as on the maintenance of community boundaries, and the enforcement of settlement and migration laws. The following analysis of the language deployed

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by contemporaries to describe migrants will be divided into two main parts: a consideration of the descriptions found in contemporary printed treatises and an examination of the descriptions found in constables’ accounts, coupled with a brief juxtaposition of the constable’s descriptions with those employed in the Warwickshire Quarter Sessions. The typology of travellers thus constructed reflects the ambiguities of discretionary justice in the English locality, and its ultimate aim is to describe aspects of the early modern experience of mobility as reflected in contemporary social description.

Dalton’s Countrey Justice and Gardiner’s Compleat Constable Social description and distinction imbricates every aspect of this story of mobility and casual relief. Historians have argued forcefully that by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘middling sort’ of England had generally removed themselves from the ‘popular culture of their neighbours’ and had become allied with the interests of their magistrates and ministers and that this social division reflected a ‘hierarchy of belonging’.44 These sharpening distinctions were reflected in the burgeoning corpus of moral and legislative literature which ostensibly guided and informed the ‘substantial’ inhabitants of every parish when they were required to hold parochial office. Two treatises in particular were deeply influential: Michael Dalton’s Countrey Justice, first printed in 1618, and reprinted at least seven times between 1650 and 1700, and Robert Gardiner’s Compleat Constable, issued in 1692, and reprinted throughout the early eighteenth century. By the later seventeenth century, Dalton’s text had undergone substantial (and often politically motivated) revisions since it first emerged, but as the de facto manual for practising JPs for over 128 years, the text can justifiably be taken as a representation of the opinion of the English legal establishment in the localities during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.45 Gardiner’s text, although less well known to posterity, served as a manual for constables and parish officers such as vestrymen and Overseers of the Poor. Each of these didactic legal texts contains a substantial section on vagrancy, including the punishment of vagrants. Taken together, these texts provide us with a formal and pervasive typology of who was ‘officially’ vagrant during the seventeenth century. Their express purpose was to abstract and render legible the immense weave of laws that parish officials and JPs interacted with. As one might expect, the injunctions to zealously apprehend, examine,

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and punish vagrants are severe and frequent in both texts, but several interesting grey areas emerge when the language is interrogated closely. Dalton’s Countrey Justice listed fifteen headings of persons defined as legally vagrant under the terms of a range of Elizabethan and Stuart statutes. The majority of these categories are standard fare: pedlars, tinkers, gamesters, and ‘players of interludes’ each make an obligatory appearance, but the overall emphasis is decidedly on those who could work and who refused to do so, as well as those who begged.46 Migrants ‘unable to give good account of themselves’ and travelling strangers ‘without sufficient testimonial’ were also liable to be punished as vagrants.47 However, travellers with a pass or with a credible reason to be on the road were not to be molested, and despite frequent contemporary suspicions about forged passes, these largely unmolested migrants appear to make up the bulk of the ‘passingers’ in contemporary constables’ accounts. The Compleat Constable left even more room for a constable’s personal discretion, noting that while the apprehension of rogues and vagabonds made up a ‘large branch’ of the constable’s responsibilities (a branch which required explication over ten subsequent pages), the constable was not to ‘hastily post away’ sick or pregnant vagrants, nor was he to punish young children who were found wandering. In practice, however, we shall see that both the sick vagrant and the expecting mother were usually removed quite quickly beyond the parish boundaries. More intriguing still, Gardiner considers an entire section of the law which dealt with departing servants who had no testimonials as ‘often diluted’ and largely unenforced.48 Night watchmen, who were officially expected to detain every stranger arriving after sunset, actually did nothing of the sort; instead ‘by custom’ they briefly questioned approaching travellers. If they found ‘no cause for suspicion’, the traveller could continue onwards or into the town.49 The language of social description in both Dalton and Gardiner’s treatises is familiar to us. Both authors employ well-worn phrasings such as: ‘sturdy beggar’, ‘idle and disorderly person’, and ‘rogue’. Both posit an explicit link between the ‘suppression’ of such people, and the repression of ‘idleness’, which ‘of itself is the root of all evil’.50 The Assize Justice Francis Harvey perhaps put it best when he wrote that the ‘punishment’ of vagrants was ‘all the charity that the law affordeth them’.51 However, both Dalton and Gardiner explicitly leave the precise definition of who was and who was not to be apprehended as a vagrant in the hands of the local officials, and both remained content with merely reprinting the exhaustive Elizabethan list of distrusted professions and trades as assistance in that endeavour. Moreover, although both authors articulated a very specific set of actions which must be taken against each vagrant (first, a whipping; second,

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the manufacture of a pass and testimonial; third, a journey to their parish of origin), both Dalton and Gardner seem to recognize that this formula was not assiduously followed. In the 1697 edition, Dalton’s editor exhorts JPs to avoid sending vagrants to the Houses of Correction until they arrive in their parish of settlement, and yet we know that it was common practice to do so regardless. The Countrey Justice also acknowledged that it was up to the Justice, rather than the constable, to determine whether any given ‘rogue’ should be whipped, although in practice constables themselves could still decide to administer or withhold punishment. It seems that while both Dalton and Gardner were at pains to provide as exhaustive a guide as possible to the handling of vagrancy cases, both authors also deliberately left a discretionary space open to JPs and constables, which the laws of the time did not explicitly grant. Given such a wide range of possible exemptions in the official literature, it is little wonder then that constables appear to have enforced vagrancy and migration laws entirely according to their own discretion and in the context of the needs and preferences of their local communities. One such community, the Warwickshire parish of Grandborough, will provide a specific location in which to interrogate the ambiguous definitions of ‘vagrant’ and ‘poore passinger’ and how casual relief could collapse the distance between them.

A case study of Grandborough, Warwickshire: 1671–1704 The parish of Grandborough is found in Knightlow Hundred in midWarwickshire, on a tributary of the river Leam. The parish lies on the road from Coventry to Daventry, and this geographical placement may partially account for the very large levels of annual migration through the parish. The pattern of land ownership in Grandborough as we find it during the late seventeenth century seems typical, with significant Priory holdings dissolved in the late 1530s and only a few substantial landowning families remaining by 1670.52 Sir William Dugdale wrote that Grandborough was a small village old enough to appear in the Domesday Book and that the parish contains ‘lands of good value’ which had initially belonged to the local monastery.53 The Hearth Tax returns for Warwickshire in 1670 listed a total of 122 households in the parish, with eighteen of them exempt from the tax.54 This suggests that Grandborough would have had an approximate population of 525 at this time.55 The particularities of its location on a well-travelled road in the West Midlands must make us cautious about drawing conclusions about overall numbers or rates of migration through

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Grandborough. Instead the excellent series of constables’ accounts which survive enable us to attempt something arguably more interesting: the quantification of social description at the local level. The Grandborough constables’ accounts from 1671 to 1704 indicate that the parish witnessed a total of approximately 6,000 migrants recorded as passing through in roughly thirty years, plus 217 additional ‘companies’ of passengers, the membership of which the constables did not enumerate precisely.56 These records are difficult to interpret quantitatively, because they hide a very significant ‘dark figure’: an unknown number of migrants who passed through Grandborough and who were neither relieved nor recorded. The calculations which follow are based on the entries in the account books of Grandborough; they thus tabulate a minimum number of migrants at best and offer no real accounting for the membership of uncounted ‘companies’ in the records. The vast majority of the men, women, and ‘poore passingers’ mentioned in the accounts received relief from the purse of the local constable, most often in the form of very small cash payments. The annual variations in the volume of migrant traffic are quite significant: the average year saw roughly 175 migrants relieved, but in years of high grain prices or war – such as 1696–97 – the parish could see totals as high as 550.57 Recall that the later half of the seventeenth century sees no national population growth in England. Large-scale demographic pressures are therefore of very little help when explaining these numbers. This high level of migration through Grandborough meant that approximately one third of the parish’s population travelled through it and received relief every year during an average year. Larger sums were also frequently spent on ‘carriage’ or a horse for a single traveller of either sex. Moreover, the total annual expenditure by the constables is impressive indeed. In years like 1686–87, the total could reach as high as £18 in annual expenses, of which at least 80 per cent was disbursed to migrants or travellers.58 Expressed another way, each household paid approximately 2s. 6d. per annum to relieve poor migrants who travelled through the parish. The actual itemized entries in the constables’ accounts frequently contain some incidental elements of interest in addition to a more generic social description. Terms such as ‘poore cripel’ and ‘poore woman’ are frequently employed, and often the more assiduous constables would note the destination to which poor migrants were headed, as in 1693 when the constable John Goode noted that he had spent 1s. 1d. on ‘carr[y] ing a poor boy to Dunchurch and relief ’.59 Table 3.1 shows the total number of entries in the Grandborough accounts which used frequently recurring social descriptions.

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Table 3.1 Quantifying social description: Grandborough 1671–1704 Description Passengers

Number of entries

Per cent

4,472

74

217

3

79

1

Crippled or sick

151

3

Single men

232

4

Single women

113

2

Women and children

117

2

‘Companies’ of passengers Families

Soldiers or seamen

539

9

Vagrants or gypsies

104

2

6,004

100

Total

Source: Warwickshire RO: DRO 111/22, Grandborough Constable’s Accounts, 1671–1704.

Despite appearances, the most interesting number here is the one associated with simple passengers, many of whom had passes and were guided to another parish down the road. When we compare the large number of passengers to the drastically smaller sums of ‘poore cripels’, single men and women, and soldiers, we see how widely applied the term must have been. The broad and ambiguous nomenclature of ‘passinger’ was applied to 74 per cent of the migrants who travelled through Grandborough between 1671 and 1704, and of those, a significant majority were considered ‘poore’ passengers. One important caveat concerns ‘companies’ of passengers – entries where the constable has neglected to record the number the migrants travelling together. Estimates on the numerical composition of the 217 ‘companies’ in the Grandborough accounts can be made by looking at the amount of money they were paid, but this method is still quite imprecise. However, the number of migrants quantified here is clearly an underestimate, since even if each company contained merely three persons, then approximately 651 additional migrants moved through Grandborough over thirty years, bringing the total to around 6,438. Of the 104 verifiably vagrant travellers, I found only one that was clearly caught and punished. On paper at least, Grandborough’s officers seemed content to let vagrants pass on through. The various descriptions in these accounts are significant in several ways. Firstly, the remainder of migrants not classified as ‘passingers’ were categorized far more clearly and more information was usually provided concerning them. Secondly, it seems that the constables were generally content to refrain from more precise descriptions unless circumstances warranted them, perhaps partly owing

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to the constraints of time and space but also partly because deliberately vague social descriptions allowed the best exercise of discretion based on community norms. It’s also unclear from these records precisely when the constables drew up the accounts. Were entries added daily? Weekly? Recounted from memory at the end of the month? With these caveats in mind, the accounts begin to divulge truly interesting data once they are broken down using an adaptation of the constable’s own ‘language of social description’.60 The accounts tersely disclose some undoubtedly tense moments where the boundaries of ‘parish and belonging’ were sorely tested.61 In three consecutive years between 1688 and 1690, several huge companies of gypsies passed through Grandborough, often staying overnight. The first year this occurred must have been truly dramatic, as the constable’s entry for his expenses reads as follows: ‘a company of passingers in the habit of gipsis about 26 from Saturday til Monday and t[w]o horsis’, and the listed expense was the enormous sum of ten shillings.62 The fact that the constable described the ‘company’ as both gypsies and passengers in the same entry is telling: legally, all gypsies had been punishable as vagrants since at least the 1572 Vagrancy Act, but one can easily imagine why this particular constable chose to exercise some personal discretion. Smaller bands of gypsies passed through the parish in subsequent years, never numbering less than twelve persons, and it seems that all of these ‘companies’ passed through unmolested and that they received a measure of relief from successive constables in a manner that was comparable to any other poor migrant. It seems clear that it was often in the constable’s interests to avoid the rigorous enforcement of the vagrancy statutes and that the ambiguities of the descriptive terminology they employed resonated with the necessity of configuring local justice to meet the demands of the moment, especially if that moment involved one constable and a very large and highly organized band of men, women, and children. It is also striking that these encounters between constable and gypsy band seem like limited but accurate historical evidence of a vagrant stereotype: here are gypsy vagrants travelling in a large, well-organized band. Perhaps the roots of widely held cultural attitudes towards vagrancy, and the associated fears of disorder, stem from dramatic encounters such as these which impressed themselves upon local memory. Constables’ accounts also permit the consideration of gender in the disbursement of casual relief, and it might be more appropriate to say that two typologies of travellers existed: one for men and one for women. Taking the year 1675–76 as an example, the constable handed over ninety-seven discrete cash payments to 210 travellers of all varieties, amounting to £4 1s. 3d. from a total levy of £11 7s. 15d., that is, approximately 42 per cent of the constable’s total expenditure for

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that year. The average individual payment was 2d. per person, but an interesting subset of migrants received substantially more money: single women. Solitary female travellers and single mothers with children received approximately 1s. each in relief each from the constable, often because they were conveyed away from Grandborough by a horse or cart, likely pregnant or fallen ill. Thus, although only fourteen payments in 1675–76 were to migrants explicitly listed as single women, compared with over thirty-two discrete payments to single men, the total amount spent by the constable on both men and women is comparable: 12s. 6d. on men and 12s. 3d. on women. This data suggests that women migrants were more frequently in a state of acute distress when encountered by the constable and that there was a gendered aspect to the distribution of casual relief.63 It is highly likely that the Grandborough constable unofficially dealt with substantially more ‘idle and disorderly’ persons between 1670 and 1700 than were listed in the accounts. The ‘hidden’ nature of vagrancy cases in the localities thus presents a stringent limit on the amount we can learn about these marginalized migrants through quantification of surviving records. When we try to reconstruct the fate of many vagrants during this period, and indeed of many poor migrants, our looking glass remains dark indeed. However, despite the occluding tendencies of constables’ accounts, one occasionally finds rare moments where the Grandborough constable explicitly describes vagrants and their treatment, including the solitary man ‘taken wandring’ in 1675, whose pass and subsistence cost the constable 11d. to secure, or the vagrant of unspecified gender in 1690, who was ‘whypt and sent away with a gyde’ as well as with 6d., a sum three times what the average ‘poore passinger’ would receive.64 Do we see here a small measure of guilt? Parliament never enacted a statute allowing constables to give charitable relief to vagabonds, who were always supposed to be punished and moved on without payment, though food provision was to be made for them when they were conveyed to their parishes of settlement. Several laws and frequent injunctions exhorted constables to be more rigorous in their prosecution of people that they found ‘wandring and begging’, but these brief account entries illuminate the poignant tensions between the necessities of local justice, the maintenance of community boundaries, and a very human impulse to be charitable.

The paid private contractor The story of the Grandborough constables’ accounts stops rather abruptly as the eighteenth century begins. The accounts themselves quite simply dry up,

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Grandborough constables’ entries go from over seven pages per single year of detailed accounting about the expenses of casual relief, to laconic, one-page entries about the occasional ‘hue and cry’ and the price of the small beer that was provided for a monthly meeting. What drastic shift occurred to occasion such a change in the records? There were surely still substantial numbers of poor migrants passing through Grandborough, and so a historical puzzle emerges: why did Grandborough’s constables not continue to record their interactions with these people? A partial explanation suggests itself. In 1704, coincidentally the last year that the Grandborough constable’s accounts contain much detail, the Warwickshire Quarter Sessions released the first standardized remuneration rates for conveying vagrants and other poor passengers, a set of rates likely inspired by the 1700 Vagrant Costs Removal Act.65 These rates were set at one penny per mile both ‘forwards and backwards’, three half-pence a mile on horseback, and three pence a mile if a wagon or cart was used. The county began to consolidate and collect parochial ‘vagrant rates’, money that had normally been raised by constables for the casual relief of travellers and Justices of the Peace were allowed to authorize direct payments from this rate to constables upon receipt of their costs. Constables in Warwickshire began to approach the bench quarterly to be reimbursed by the county, and the parish rates raised for casual relief rapidly fell into disuse. However, these county rates, which could run as high as £150 per annum, were also soon put to another use in addition to reimbursing constables. By 1709, the county had decided on a different approach to the problem of conveying vagrants altogether. A former constable, one Will Wright of Willoughby (a Warwickshire parish very close to Grandborough), was paid an enormous sum, the entire annual vagrant rate of £150 in fact, to ‘convey vagrants across the county’.66 Wright might actually have been the very first private vagrant contractor hired by any English county. Audrey Eccles’ examination of the Middlesex vagrant contractors suggests that the phenomenon of paid private conveyance only really took off after mid-century but Warwickshire’s records show clear evidence of the practice in 1709.67 When contracted conveyance did become the most common method of passing vagrants on, it did so with a vengeance. Eccles used the lists and records of the Middlesex contractors to calculate that between 1777 and 1786, over 15,000 vagrants were conveyed by them alone.68 Private conveyance rapidly became both de rigueur and a highly sought after contractual position. A series of individuals began to underbid each other in an attempt to win the bench’s annual or quarterly contracts, including

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one widow named Mary Pottifor and a young man named Thomas Hunnyborne, of Sutton Coldfield parish, each of whom managed to secure conveying contracts in 1711. Hunnyborne’s first contract paid him only £37 per annum; when compared to Wright’s princely sum of £150 this must have seemed troubling.69 It is highly likely that the contracts were subdivided, with Hunnyborne’s contract for just the town of Birmingham (the parish of Sutton Coldfield lies adjacent to it), and Mary Pottifor assuming control of the remainder of Will Wright’s countywide contract.70 The salaries and rates of remuneration for these vagrant contractors were quickly standardized. Thomas Hunnyborne conveyed vagrants for the county of Warwickshire until his death in 1728, after which his eldest son took up the business. Hunnyborne settled into a role as a salaried employee of the county earning a quarterly wage of £25, and he left considerable wealth and property to his widow and family upon his death.71 Along with Thomas Walker, hired in 1716, Hunnyborne was responsible for conveying an untold number of vagrants through, into, and out of the county of Warwickshire for over twenty years. Unlike the bench, he didn’t keep detailed records, or if he did, they do not survive. He appeared in front of the bench on a quarterly basis for close to two decades and claimed the same amount of money almost every time. Although regular presentments and quantifiable records thus largely cease, the occasional claims for extra money which these contractors brought before the county still provide us with fascinating fragments of vagrant lives. In 1718, Thomas Walker (contract successor to Mary Pottifor) was reimbursed an additional £2 14s. for ‘maintaining Mary Smith a vagrant and her two children and for the Charge of the said Mary Smith’s lying in’. Walker was also granted a further £20 ‘for his Extraordinary trouble in Conveying vagrants this last year over and above his settled allowance’.72 We cannot know what extraordinary troubles are here referred to, but the simple fact that the bench saw fit to disburse one fifth of the total vagrant rate straight to Walker over and above his normal contract suggests that 1718 saw a particularly large number of destitute travellers and vagrants take to Warwickshire roads. Roadside births like Mary Smith’s were extraordinarily dangerous and Walker later claimed a further £4 in 1718 for his expenses incurred while burying Mary Hugh, another pregnant vagrant, and to cover Mary Clarke’s ‘lying in’. The bench also reimbursed Overseers of the Poor when they maintained vagrants; £3 11s. was given to the Overseer Richard Smith of Ladbroke in 1723 to repay him for maintaining an infant ‘vagrant child’ who had been left in the parish and for his expenses incurred trying to find the woman who had left her child there and fled. These laconic county

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reimbursements reveal desperate individual circumstances, and paid private conveyance became a hallmark of how the vagrant was treated in the eighteenth century. Other counties quickly adopted similar arrangements, some of which reeked of patronage and nepotism. In Hertfordshire on 6 October 1718, the county bench simultaneously standardized all of the rates for the conveyance of vagrants and ordered that a Mr Thomas Richards, gentleman of St. Albans, was to be paid the very large sum of £200 per annum for ‘the reliefe, conveyance and passing of vagrants in this county’.73 It seems clear that well-placed individuals quickly recognized the financial opportunities of employment as private vagrant contractors and that men such as Richards could capitalize on their positions and connections to secure lucrative contracts. Contractual vagrant conveyance was indicative of a wider trend towards voluntary and privatized systems of charity, relief, and punishment which characterized England’s responses to poverty and vagrancy in the eighteenth century.74 The Masters of ships were paid to transport vagrants back to Ireland, or across the Atlantic; the Keepers of ‘Gaols’ and Masters of houses of correction were expected to derive profit from their positions; workhouses were erected and governed on the premise that such institutions could profitably employ the poor; constables earned money by ‘procuring’ poor men for naval and military service; and private contractors profited from transporting the poor across county lines. The very body of the vagrant had become a commodity, purchasable through indenture and profitable as cargo. These private contractors existed in a symbiotic relationship with local government, and particularly with the county benches and Justices of the Peace, who had slowly accrued enormous power over the operation of both the poor laws and the carceral system in the century before 1650. Their proscriptive classification and misclassification of mobile paupers could and did radically change the trajectory of people’s lives.

Quarter sessions, petty sessions, and (mis)classification Let us return briefly to the languages of social description specifically deployed by the Warwickshire county bench. From the 1680s onwards, the bench issued blanket injunctions to put all the vagrancy laws into full effect, likely in an effort to motivate local constables and to increase the volume of presentments that they gave to the commission.75 These pronouncements became a routine and annual fixture of the Warwickshire Order Books and persisted well past 1750.

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The large, and increasing, number of subsistence migrants moving through the county remained a constant and pressing concern.76 Studying the languages of social description deployed by the magistrates in Warwickshire (and elsewhere) is by necessity impressionistic rather than quantitative. Additionally, the language used in cases concerning vagrants was morally charged and stern in a manner that the rather more laconic entries in constables’ accounts were not. The very nature of the records of the sessions also complicates any comparison of the responses to vagrancy and the language used by constables and JPs, since entries in the quarter sessions order books and manuscripts are generally formulaic and short.77 However despite all of these caveats, comparing constables to magistrates does provide us with a broader picture of the administration of justice in the county, and it highlights the tendency of parochial tensions and concerns to filter up through the judicial system and to affect the business of the bench. In the Easter Sessions of 1674, a formal order on the ‘late increase’ of ‘rogues’ and vagabonds was read out in court. In it, the assembled Justices chastised the constables of the county for their ‘general neglect’ in enforcing the vagrancy statutes, and they ordered the constables to conduct ‘privy’ searches and to report all of their efforts concerning vagabonds at every monthly meeting. The ultimate aim of these tighter controls was that ‘the real poor of this county may be better relieved and maintained, trades and tradesmen encouraged, and the county in some good measure eased and secured from this growing and so justly complained of mischief of rogues, vagrants, and sturdy beggars’.78 No mention was made of how constables were to differentiate between the mischief of the ‘real poor’ and the activities of ‘sturdy beggars’, identities which were imposed from above on those at the bottom of the social and economic order. We will find the descriptive language employed by JPs in the quarter sessions to be far more formal and proscriptive than the classifications used by constables in Grandborough. However, despite the tendency to use a formal language of punishment when dealing with vagrancy cases, the quarter sessions still made use of a broad range of social descriptions of migrants. Consider the linguistic differences, and compare the outcomes, of the cases of Thomas Savage and Edward Conduit. Thomas Savage, his wife Elizabeth, their three daughters, and a large company of additional men and women were apprehended as vagrants and tried in the Trinity sessions in 1677. They had refused to confess their places of birth, and they were quickly committed to the Warwick house of correction, there to receive ‘daily correction and to be set on work and there to remain till they are delivered by due course of law’.79 A more

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textbook example of all of the stereotypes of vagrancy would be hard to find: the people apprehended were travelling in a large band and therefore constituted an unmistakable emblem of social threat; they all refused to cooperate with authority, doubly reinforcing their dangerous status as social outcasts; and they required ‘daily correction’ until the court decided that they had reformed. They were clearly idle and certainly disorderly. In contrast, an order in 1680 stipulated that Edward Conduit and his family were to be returned from Warwick to Arnesby in Leicester and to be provided for in that parish as settled poor, despite his previous apprehension as a vagrant. The court found that Conduit was never whipped and that there was no testimony under oath about his status as a vagabond, and thus that his treatment had not been ‘well warranted by law’.80 It seems that Conduit and his family had not been subject to the full rigour of the vagrancy laws, although we do not know if they were ever confined to a house of correction. It seems that Conduit had actually made a living as a shepherd in Arnesby for many years and had ‘lived by his labour’. Perhaps Conduit and his family were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or perhaps they were the unfortunate subjects of a parochially motivated process of exclusion, one that ultimately led to them becoming mis-labelled as vagrants and removed from their parish via the machinery of the vagrancy laws. Conduit was given three shillings by the court and the overseers of the poor were instructed to convey the family back to their home, a directive which wholly embodied the Conduit family’s move out of a vagrant identity and into the social and economic space provided for the ‘real poor’. Justices did occasionally encounter individuals that seemed to embody the stereotypes of vagrancy. Robert Doughty, a Norfolk JP during the early Restoration, certainly met one when he interrogated ‘Adam Binsly of Beeston’ who was ‘a rogue taken up out at Colby with another who had a counterfeit pass’.81 Doughty’s intercession began reasonably enough; he noted that the two men had to acquire a new pass ‘or be whipped or sent to gaol’. Binsly choose freedom and defiance it seems, as ‘he would rather be whipped than go to gaol, I appointed to be whipped & sent away’. The second man quietly ‘ran away this morning’. A small number of vagrants were truly dangerous rogues. In 1664 Doughty issued a warrant to apprehend a ‘Thomas of William Bedingfield & another person’, who both ‘pretend themselves seamen & had a pass pretended from me’; the two men were suspected of stealing one horse out of a local stable and breaking down a stonewall to steal yet another horse and make their escape.82 The social prejudices of justices could inform their willingness to label poor itinerants as vagrant and to make use, or threaten to make use, of their powers

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of summary incarceration. In 1732 Henry Norris and his fellow Middlesex Justices found themselves disturbed at their tavern of choice in Hackney by a vagrant player of interludes and his fiddling partner. On Monday 28 February 1732,‘Rowland Child of Lambeth attended upon his Sumons for keeping a Puppett show at the Mermaid ale house contrary to Law’; Child admitted that ‘he began to Shew on Fryday last’ but he still ‘desired leave’ from the Justices ‘to show for three or four dayes’.83 This puppet show was, after all, his livelihood. Norris and his fellows were not impressed; the Mermaid tavern was where local JPs held their petty sessions and unseemly ‘shows and interludes’ could not be permitted. The three justices present ‘adjudged him [Child] to be a Vagrant and charged him immediately to desist from Acting and told him if he acted again they would commit him to the House of Correction as the law directs’. Child was not alone in experiencing judicial reproach, both the innkeeper of the Mermaid and Child’s show partner ‘Palmer the Fiddler’ were also summoned to appear on Monday, and Palmer was reprimanded for ‘also going about Towne with the said Rowland Child playing upon his Houghboy contrary to law’. Abasement and the re-inscription of hierarchy and order seemed apropos: Palmer made ‘proper submission’ and begged pardon ‘for what he hath Done and promising never to be Guilty for the future, the said Justices forgave him’. The stark contrast between the proscriptive identification and punishment of vagrants such as the Savages, Rowland Child, Palmer the Fiddler, and Adam Binsly on the one hand, and the retrospective reclassification of Edward Conduit and his family on the other, nicely encapsulates the range of reactions to mobility, migration and social disruption in early modern England. It seems that the heavily encoded, culturally laden, and morally charged category of ‘vagrant’ could be levelled at or lifted from the mobile poor based on the social prejudices of officials, the local needs of communities, or the discretion of constables or JPs. Neither the control of migration nor the punishment of vagrancy was an easy duty, and real people often suffered as a consequence of the deliberate imprecision of officials and the shifting boundaries of the typology of travellers. In 1680, Sarah Johnson fell ill and died while travelling back from Oxford, where she had been conveyed as a vagrant. She left behind a three-year-old boy named William Johnson, and this ‘poor infant’ was then shuffled from pillar to post due to parochial reluctance to care for him out of the poor rates.84 One parish official had gone as far as to perjure himself in front of the quarter sessions in order to remove the Johnsons from his parish of residence. Sarah Johnson had been unable to prove that she belonged in Oxford, and she had been cast out of a parish in Stafford because its chief inhabitants wanted to restrict their own

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arena of belonging. As a ‘vagrant woman’, Sarah had no place there. The noworphaned William Johnson was eventually carried back to that same Stafford parish, and by order of the Justices, he was to be provided for and settled there.

Vagrant stories, vagrant spaces The analysis of the Grandborough constables’ accounts and of judicial records in Warwickshire and elsewhere has hopefully proven instructive. We have hard evidence of how local magistrates and officials deployed a ‘typology of travellers’ in their routine, and extraordinary, interactions with the mobile poor. These case studies of constables’ accounts, private conveyance, and judicial discretion have filled in several gaps in our working knowledge of local, parochial, and legal responses to vagrancy. However, we are still often lacking the vagrant’s own story, and we have heard few details about precisely where vagrants could be found.85 The following discussion focuses on several rare sets of records to recover as much of vagrant lived experience as we can. The first set is an excellent run of vagrant examinations from the county of Kent, dating to the year 1714–15 and to the activities of one constable, or ‘borsholder’, the aptly named Richard Tinker of Temple Borough, who kept receipts for the passage of fifty-seven vagrants through one parish in the city of Rochester, in one year. Such a high level of activity might not be representative, but it does give us some idea of how many vagrants a single urban constable might take up in one year of his accounting. Vagrant examinations rarely survive, especially before the advent of double record-keeping for vagrancy and settlement law in 1740, and those that do are often remarkably hard to find and identify because the apparatus of the 1662 Settlement Law has invariably led to their classification as settlement examinations, when in fact these appearances before JPs would have served a dual purpose. Richard Tinker assiduously collected receipts for the conveyance of fifty-seven men, women, and children passed as vagrants by him in 1714: twenty men, twenty-eight women, and nine children.86 Tinker was reimbursed six shillings and three pence per person, and the majority of these individuals were conveyed to St. Olave, Southwark, and from thence onward to their parishes of settlement. The examinations of only six of these vagrants survive today, but every single one of the fifty-seven would likely have endured a similar interrogation. Their experiences reinforce the argument that vagrancy and subsistence migration shared numerous characteristics, and these stories

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illuminate the cracks and gaps in the edifice of classification which had hitherto dominated their lives. John Fraiser’s examination on 3 August 1714 was the first in the series to survive. It reveals that he had been born in Dolligan, Murriland, in Scotland, and apprehended in Temple borough by Richard Tinker himself. Fraiser swore that he had never gained a legal settlement anywhere else, which means that on his 440-mile journey from Scotland, he was never once hired as a servant for more than a year, nor did he rent a house for more than £10 per annum. He was not asked his age, nor was he asked about how he had managed to travel so far from home.87 His examination was extremely brief. The ‘Singlewoman’ Elizabeth Cleever was twenty years old when she was brought before the Kentish magistrates as a vagrant woman on 13 August. Cleever was from St Paul’s Shadwell in Middlesex, and she had been bound out as an apprentice by the Overseers of that parish, to one Lydia Snow, fruiterer, an inhabitant of that same parish, ‘with whom she lived and served as an Apprentice for about two years’. ‘By Reason of ill usage from her said mistress’, Elizabeth ran away. Thereafter she maintained herself by selling odds and ends, begging, and wandering about.88 An apprenticeship gone awry, perhaps characterized by an abusive or overly harsh mistress, ruined Elizabeth Cleever’s first chance to learn a trade and ‘settle’ into life. She was conveyed back to Middlesex, and perhaps she got a second chance. Mary Knowles, aged twenty-three, was examined on 19 August. Knowles travelled down to London from Christ Church in York by ‘carrier’, looking for work. ‘One month past’ she was advised to travel into Kent ‘For the Hopping season’, and she was eventually caught when she ‘beg’d Alms’ in Chatham. It seems that paid work continued to elude her.89 An unsuccessful or only partially successful search for work characterized the testimonies of many vagrants, though after 1650 it is perhaps more common to see single women without children caught in such a cycle of casual and seasonal employment and subsistence mobility.90 Igdelius Starling, aged seven, accompanied his mother to London from Bury in Lancashire. His mother died in London, ‘since whose Death’ five years ago, he had ‘wandered about begging and further saith not’.91 How this child managed to reach Rochester – and what he went through in the five years it took him to get there – was left unsaid, and it is unclear from the examination whether or not the JPs who examined him on 4 September 1714 planned to send him to a charity school or hospital for orphans. Starling was conveyed back to London, presumably to be cared for by the parish where his mother had passed away.

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Anne Moore was a widow, aged thirty-nine, and a native of Crayford in Kent. She ‘hath heard her late husband Robert Moore Say that he was borne in the Kingdom of Ireland, but in what parish town or place there she knows not’. Her seven-year-old son, John Moore, was ‘born in a Barn, this Examinant is informed and verily Believes is situated in the parish of Erith’, and Moore told the magistrates that she was ‘in Sick and poor Condition’.92 Her husband lost, her only child delivered in a barn in a parish she barely remembers, and sick herself, Anne Moore and her son must have seemed a picture of human misery. Her records do not indicate where she was sent, but one can hope that she was returned to Crayford and cared for there. Richard Stephens was a 33-year-old blacksmith from Berkshire, a man in the prime of his life, who had left behind his family. He was interviewed by Rochester JPs on 16 September 1714. Stephens had been a blacksmith in Cumnor parish in Berkshire for sixteen years. ‘He had a Wife and two Children which he had left behind him at the said parish of Cumnor about three years ago, by reason of Debt.’93 Richard Stephens was at least partially literate and actually signed his name to his examination. We do not know to whom Richard owed money or whether he had left his family in a bid to carry his debts away from them or simply to avoid the issue altogether. Six examinations tell six very different stories. A.L. Beier once noted that early modern vagrants reminded him much more of unemployed workers during the Great Depression than they did of modern-day down-and-outs.94 These are individuals separated from ‘settled’ existence by personal crisis (illegitimate pregnancy, ‘ill usage’ by their master, debt, the untimely death of a parent or spouse), and they generally sought some way back into settled life or at least a steady income. They were not ‘jovial tinkers’ nor ‘sturdy beggars’, they did not travel in large groups, and none of them were indicted for any crime other than vagrancy. This sample size is far too small to extrapolate to larger patterns and conditions of vagrancy in Kent, or in England properly, but it is striking how varied the ages, occupations, and life circumstances were of even these six people: two men, one boy, and three women, only one of whom actually hailed from Kent. Variations of ill circumstance and long-distance mobility characterize their stories, findings which seem to confirm my earlier emphasis on local crisis and immediate personal circumstances as key causes of vagrancy. There were as many reasons for vagrancy as there were vagrants themselves. Vagrancy examinations survive in much greater numbers in archives of London and Middlesex, though the vast majority of those that survive date from after 1750. One run of examinations taken in Westminster in 1740 survives in the

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London Metropolitan Archives. Again, the fragments of lives that we encounter describe people living hand-to-mouth on the margins of London society: domestic servants, apprentices, casual labourers, who for one reason or another simply fell through society’s cracks. William Simpkins worked as a live-in servant to the Widow Bodington for two years in St Leonard parish, Shoreditch, and was paid £8 yearly.95 The widow did not hire him back after two years, and Simpkins was instantly street-bound and seemingly had little or no recourse to any parish system of poor relief. Mary Lynn’s husband John ran away and abandoned her; she had been married to him five years, and they wed in the ‘rules’ of Fleet, suggesting that Lynn had been a debtor.96 John had, it seems, been a pipemaker and served his apprenticeship in St Olave, Southwark. Abandoned by her husband, Mary had found lodging in St Giles in the Fields, ‘at the Crooked Billet in Hog Lane’, hardly an auspicious accommodation.97 Elizabeth Mackcarter was the widow of John Mackcarter, a recently deceased soldier in ‘Colonel Bing’s Third Foot’; she had a thirteen-year-old daughter, and both were found begging.98 The fifteen-year-old James Evans got by as a ragpicker. He and his parents had migrated from Bristol to London seven years earlier, and both of his parents had died.99 Suddenly, Colonel Jack’s childhood experience of sleeping in the warm ashes outside a glass blowing house does not seem at all like Defoe’s far-fetched invention. Individual narratives of exclusion, abandonment, poverty, and crisis: here are the contours of vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750.100 Part of the project of recovering the past experiences of vagrancy must be a thorough appreciation of the sheer, distressing variety of ways in which individuals living on the margins could be reduced to ‘begging their bread’ and also an historical understanding of what made these experiences similar.101 Much more research needs to be done to assess the wider changes in the patterns of vagrancy and the composition of individuals affected by it, but two rather profound developments stand out in these sources. First, women outnumber men, a theme to which we return in the final chapter, and second, these narratives are characterized as often by familial breakdown, crisis, or abandonment as they are by strictly economic circumstances.102 We are clearly not dealing only, or even mainly, with the histories of ‘Masterless Men’ any longer. We are not dealing only with demographic pressures or economic crises writ large. We have looked at the numbers involved in subsistence movement and at the stories behind those numbers. But we have not examined ‘vagrant spaces’, the barns, and alehouses where vagrants could stop moving, at least for one night. We have previously considered some cultural attitudes towards specific ‘vagrant spaces’ such as the alehouse in popular literature, but how do the experiences

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of real vagrants compare to those literary representations? When A.L. Beier quantified the locations found in his larger sample of vagrant examinations, 41 per cent of the places which vagrants stayed when travelling were alehouses and 33 per cent were houses owned by those below gentry rank.103 Some constables even kept an alehouse and doubled as tipplers who took in vagabonds.104 The practice seems to have continued, as in 1688 Thomas Search, then constable for Whichford (Warwickshire), was indicted for entertaining vagrants in his inn ‘and other wandering persons contrary to statute’ and was heavily fined.105 But it seems clear that a much larger cross section of individuals participated in this casual housing economy: the Hertfordshire bench suppressed at least 222 alehouses between 1658 and 1700, thirty-six of them for being ‘disorderly’, but it also upheld the fines levied on various individuals for harbouring vagrants, including several widows, two gentlemen, a victualler, and another constable.106 We can safely presume that numerous similar cases appeared before manorial courts and in Hertfordshire petty sessions and that many other fines were never appealed. Some ‘vagrant spaces’ are remarkably difficult to reconstruct historically. In order to learn about the experience of travelling England’s roads on foot we rely on contemporary personal narratives, travelogues, ‘tour’ literature, maps and memoirs, and only a tiny number of such sources mention how the experience of walking the roads might be different for the mobile poor.107 Other vagrant spaces produced enormous amounts of documentation, and this was particularly true of the great domestic penal institutions of early modern England – London’s Bridewell and its imitators in every county.108 This documentation tended to be financial. The governors of houses of correction were county appointees, and their finances subject to supervision and control by JPs. For a brief window while they were incarcerated in a space dedicated to holding them still, and to reforming them, vagrants were assiduously counted, and the costs of ‘correcting’ them carefully tallied. Around Christmas time of 1740, the Hertfordshire county bench addressed numerous outstanding debts associated with the conveyance of vagrants across the county and from the operation of their four houses of correction. First, the Hertfordshire chief constables were reimbursed £18 for relieving vagrants travelling without permits over the previous few years, and the bench noted primly that ‘this application of the Public Mony ought to be prevented for the future’. Then the bench addressed the outstanding debts of their houses of correction. Each governor of the four houses of correction, Hertford, Hempstead, Buntingford, and Hitchin, reported one year of their costs for ‘passing’ vagrants to the bench in 1740 (Table 3.2).

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Table 3.2 Vagrants passed by Hertfordshire Houses of Correction House of Correction

# of vagrants passed (one year)

Total cost

Hempstead

429

£129 11s.

Hertford

153

£73 15s.

Buntingford

163

£63 17s. 6d.

Hitchin

197

£40 3s. 6d.

Total

942

£307 7s.

Source: William Le Hardy (ed.), Hertfordshire County Records, Volume VII: 1700–1752, pp. 283–285.

It is highly probable that many of the 942 vagrants who were passed by these houses of correction were the same people and that the total number of discrete individuals who made their way through Hertfordshire’s carceral system was only about half of the listed total. Even if only 500 people described as vagrants were passed by Hertfordshire in 1740, doing so still cost the county over £1 10s. a head, and such numbers point to considerable annual levels of subsistence mobility and vagrancy in the county. Other carceral institutions kept more detailed records. One particularly poignant source records the short and tragic biographies of the vagrant children staying in a London workhouse in 1708.109 This unique document, laid out like an accounting table, listed the name of the child, the date when they had entered the workhouse, and a brief summary of their history. In 1709, twenty-two orphan boys and one girl were listed as ‘vagrant children’. The girl, Elizabeth Hays, had been in the workhouse for three years. ‘Her mother in law brought her up to London and dropt her’, and she ‘knows not where they lived the last place they were at she says was Windsor’. Richard Jones’s parents also ran away from him, and ‘he lay about the streets for four years he says’: Jones had been in the workhouse since 1705. Samuel Green was born in Dublin and his father had been a soldier. While taking a ship across to England with his father and mother, ‘they were both thrown overboard’, and Samuel was brought to London by another woman on the ship and then left there. Some children were abandoned; some simply became disconnected from settled lives. James Friendly’s master was a shoemaker in Hampton, and he had lived there with his grandmother while apprenticed. He and his uncle had made a journey to London by wagon, but it seems as if the uncle died in London and James was quickly without any means of support. He had been in the workhouse seven years by 1709. Successfully leaving the workhouse as an apprentice with a trade was no guarantee of a settled life either. The seventeen-year-old James Bishop

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found himself brought before the Hackney justices of Middlesex in October of 1732 for a settlement examination.110 He testified that his parents were settled in ‘St Margaret Westminster’, but that his father has died when he was a year old, and his mother when he was six. Before she died, James’s mother endured a protracted sickness and voluntarily committed her child to the St Margaret workhouse, where he ended up learning the trade of ‘Chimney sweep’ and within a year was unofficially, or ‘upon liking’, bound out as an apprentice. The seven-year-old James swept chimneys for one year and then ran away. He had been unsettled and mobile ever since. These sad biographies were the product of personal crisis, not broad demographic or economic changes. They are, in many respects, timeless narratives, and yet they also provide a snapshot of the changing contours of social policy in the early eighteenth century. Many of these ‘vagrant children’ were abandoned, ‘dropt’, or run away from. Many more simply lost their kin or connections to disaster, as in the case of Samuel Green. But it was to the workhouse or the charity school that these children were sent, and both institutions were innovations of the later seventeenth century, as we discussed in Chapter 1. It is entirely possible that being sent to the workhouse was one of the better potential outcomes of such miserable circumstances – it would almost certainly have seemed better than being alone on the street, and several children were listed as apprenticed to tradesmen who were resident in the London workhouse. Then as now, even institutional incarceration could sometimes be preferable to cold paving stones. To conclude then, this chapter has attempted to complicate our understandings of mobility, migration, and vagrancy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It has been, in the main, a project of recovery, aimed at rescuing snatches of forgotten experience from legal records. I have argued that the survival strategy of subsistence mobility in its varying forms could lead to many of the mobile poor being treated as vagrants when they clearly were not or as migrants even when they actually were ‘idle and disorderly’. Local demands and the discretion of JPs and constables created the need for a calculated way to properly disburse or deny relief and to handle prosecution and punishment. This proscriptive (or pragmatic) ‘calculus of relief and punishment’ found form in the language deployed by officials and the actions they took in response to increasing rates of migration, whether socially threatening or otherwise. It seems clear that historians need to further examine the cloudy relationship between vagrancy and migration after 1662. One of the important characteristics of vagrants in the previous period does appear to be missing, that of ‘permanent’

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or ‘semi-permanent’ mobility, and it could be that this form of movement remains hidden from historians by the edifice and operation of the Settlement Act.111 Perhaps ‘permanent vagrancy’ (which presumably means that one dies as a vagrant), in so far as that is a useful term, is the variety that ‘declined’ after 1650. What we have found instead is that the categories of vagrant and migrant were deployed almost interchangeably based on the demands of the locality, the discretion of officials, and the needs of the moment. The historical experience of vagrancy has emerged in this chapter as a story characterized by personal crisis, exclusion, and uncertainty, softened only by the small mercies of casual charity. Each vagrant story and each vagrant space has reinforced not only this heavily individualized characterization of vagrancy, but also its ambiguous status as the most visible or socially threatening form of subsistence mobility. The words ‘debt’ and ‘run-away’ separated husband and blacksmith Richard Stephens from his settled contemporaries, and this is arguably a facet of vagrancy that early modern men and women did appreciate but were reluctant to acknowledge. The poignant word ‘dropt’ separated young Elizabeth Hays from other girls her age, each of whom had families and homes, and she thus became a ‘vagrant child’, but hardly by choice. Can we ever assume idleness here? Could contemporaries? A ‘typology of travellers’ clearly existed in early modern England, although attitudes towards vagrancy and migration remained heavily mediated by the necessity of the moment. Poor migrants surely felt its effects, which could still come in this period as the sting of the constable’s lash and a bloody back or as the crucial two-penny relief dispensed so regularly from the very same hands which had held the whip not long ago. Vagabonds and subsistence migrants could be one and the same, and ultimately all ‘poore travellers’ were ‘passingers’ on the same road.

4

Masterless Women: The Female Vagrant in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750

Picaras and precarity There are many ‘Molls’ both real and imagined in the annals of early modern English literature and popular culture: Mary Frith, or ‘Moll Cutpurse’, Jacobean and Caroline London’s most infamous cross-dressing thief-taker and receiver of stolen goods, and a guest star in a Dekker and Middleton play about her life called The Roaring Girl; Mary Carleton, the bigamist confidence trickster and affected ‘German Princess’ of late-seventeenth-century fame; and Moll King, one of early eighteenth century’s most accomplished London pickpockets.1 The mid-seventeenth-century bawd and highwaywoman Susan Higgs also likely belongs in this colourful company. In addition there are countless sensational but fictional female rogue characters: the ‘rum morts’ and ‘doxies’ of the literary roguish underworld, Polly and the rambunctious prostitutes that tease Macheath in the Beggar’s Opera, the bawdy women and belle dames sans merci of ballad literature. Each of these female characters partakes of, and helps to construct, a cultural stereotype of female vagrancy as a sexually fallen state. But none of these women captured the collective imagination of the English reading public as thoroughly as Moll Flanders, the fictional anti-heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 eponymous novel about her life and exploits. Moll’s origins as our archetypal picara are standard fare. A Newgate birth, her mother transported to the colonies for stealing draperies, Moll’s earliest memories revolve around travelling briefly with a group of gypsies and then running away to be apprehended as a vagrant child at Colchester in Essex.2 Moll was ‘on the parish’ from a very young age, and we are plainly told that it was her fear of entering into domestic service that propels her away from her pauper education as a seamstress and into the orbit of, and affectations of, gentility. ‘All I understood by being a gentlewoman’, Moll tells us, ‘was to be able to work

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for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bug-bear (of going into service)’.3 Only briefly as a toddler does Moll actively inhabit the cultural spaces of vagrancy, and her entire subsequent life is animated by her intense desire to avoid these spaces. The turning point in the life of our ‘young Betty’, as Moll tells it, is when she is seduced and eventually ‘Ruin’d’ by the eldest brother of the gentle family she boards with. Moll’s fall is a classic ‘rake narrative’, her despoiling and the eventual ruin of her honest teenage life are stereotypical fare. But even as a fiction and a stereotype, Moll falls foul of a perennial and very real danger confronting young women in early modern England – seduction, loss of virginity, and abandonment by a man. The potentially terrible results of this gendered threat are evident throughout this chapter. Even the expected protestations of marriage are duly made to Moll and duly forgotten. Her situation comes to an unhappy climax when the family comes to the verge of discovering the illicit relationship. Moll is now forced to make a choice: marry the younger brother and accept a hefty stipend from the eldest, or be ‘dropped by both of them’, ‘turn’d out to the wide world, a meer cast off whore, for it was no less’, in effect becoming a vagrant and a prostitute by default in one fell swoop.4 She chooses the forced marriage and takes the money; Moll had been ‘trick’d once, by that Cheat call’d LOVE, but the Game was over, I was resolved to be married or Nothing, and to be well Married or not at all’.5 Moll Flanders is deathly afraid of vagrancy and destitution, and she goes to incredible lengths to avoid it. Moll does not have an authentic home for any considerable length of time during her story, but when fate or folly deprives her of a residence or a man, she wastes no time in procuring the safety of another. Despite this, Moll remains consistently peripatetic throughout the novel, moving from man to man and even across the ocean several times. In striving to avoid the unfortunate results of vagrancy, Moll engages in many of its literary (and sometimes real) practices: deception, thieving, prostitution, and a form of economic opportunism occasioned by frequent and often forced migration. The only varieties of vagrant activity she refuses to consider are actual begging and the unlicensed ‘playing of interludes’, and her short stint disguised as a beggar doubly reinforces my interpretation of vagrancy as Moll’s primal social terror. She could not abide how people looked at her.6 It is debatable whether anyone other than a fictional character like Moll Flanders could have experienced birth in Newgate, a relatively genteel upbringing, serial (and generally catastrophic) marriages, transportation to the colonies, multiple hidden pregnancies, a successful thieving career, and eventual retirement as a new world planter, though many contemporary readers would

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have been able to relate to individual episodes in her life story. J.P. Hunter has argued for significant similarities between Moll and her creator: both were peripatetic Londoners, both lived by their wits, both were perennial outsiders and skilled in deception, and both had experience of prisons and with public shame.7 Siân Rees notes how Defoe’s own life resonates through his novels: ‘he brought to his fiction the advantage of a rich, fully lived and rackety life, spent sailing close to political winds and upsetting powerful people’.8 Hunter also points out that novels such as Moll Flanders strove to chronicle something new to literature – the banal, everyday experiences of individuals – and he notes a strong relationship between these ‘new histories’ and their milieux. Novels like Moll Flanders were providers, and shapers, of social and cultural context; they ‘explicitly render manners, habits, customs, and beliefs that differ from culture to culture, and they depend heavily on the particulars of time and place’.9 It is this dependence on details, and the aura of credibility which it created, that granted to Moll the character, and to Moll Flanders the book, the power to help reshape the cultural silhouette of the vagrancy. As the seventeenth century came to a close and the eighteenth century began, this vagrant silhouette increasingly took on feminine characteristics, not just in literature, but in lived experience. Moll’s experiences of insecurity, sexual threat, and the spectres of domestic service and vagrancy map in intriguing ways onto the narratives of actual masterless women in England between 1650 and 1750. Moll and other picaresque fictions stood tall in the imaginations of settled contemporaries when they considered the predicament of masterless women, but under the skin of this stereotype, what was it actually like to be female and vagrant?

The gendering of homelessness In the 1976 edition of Hidden from History, Sheila Rowbotham famously wrote that ‘women are hidden from most history in the same way as the lives of men of the poor are obscured, because of class’.10 But on top of this initial, material form of elision, Rowbotham identified another critical element that enabled historical inattention: women are also ‘hidden as a sex’. This final chapter intertwines fictions about, and fragmented experiences of, female vagrants in early modern England in a bid to redress an enduring imbalance in how the social history of vagrancy has so far been pieced together. It buttresses female vagrant examinations found in Surrey, London, and Essex record offices with literary representations of the dangers of domestic service and female mobility.

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Historians of poverty in early modern England have assiduously recovered the experiences of being female, settled, and poor, and of being vagrant, unsettled, and male, principally for the period between 1550 and 1640.11 These historical accounts of settled poor women often gesture at vagrancy as a very real circumstance that women could find themselves in but interrogate the matter no further. The actual experience of being female, unsettled, and vagrant remains a marginal story in the historiography.12 A.L. Beier’s seminal monograph on early modern vagrancy before 1640 was titled Masterless Men, after all, and was sceptical of the disruptive potential of vagrancy in the period immediately after 1660, arguing that ‘permanent’ vagrancy declined significantly.13 Beier attributes this decline to the confluence of steadying demographic trends, impressment for military service, the settlement regime, rising real wages, and effective social policy, all of which are certainly real considerations. I have argued against a few aspects of such ‘demographic determinism’ elsewhere in this book, so let us instead turn to redressing the relative absence of women in the limited accounts of vagrancy that we do have after 1650, an absence that strikes one forcefully when numerous different archives suggest a consistent increase in the number of female vagrants, tightly tied in all likelihood to the rise of the female domestic servant in English urban life. Several historians of eighteenth-century England were never entirely convinced by the argument that vagrancy remained principally a problem of men in search of work. Nicholas Rogers thought that the numerical majority of vagrants apprehended in early-eighteenth-century London were female, and female vagrants feature equally prominently in Tim Hitchcock’s book-length exploration of vagrancy in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century capital.14 Audrey Eccles began her study of vagrancy by looking exclusively at female vagrants ‘lying in’ (giving birth) by the roadside, an occurrence seemingly more common from the early eighteenth century.15 In Eccles’s enormous sample of over 15,000 vagrants conveyed by the paid private contractors of Middlesex county between 1777 and 1786, women and children outnumbered men more than two to one: 5,710 men, 6,696 women, and 3,316 children were conveyed.16 Even in a much earlier period, the runs of vagrancy orders and examinations I have found in places such as Kent, Surrey, Warwickshire, Cheshire, and Middlesex all suggest a dramatic uptick in the number of women apprehended as vagrants and in the number of vagrant children accompanying them after 1650. Recall that where I could identify gender in previous samples we found that female poor travellers slightly outnumbered males in Warwickshire constables’ accounts in numerous years in the late seventeenth century and that 50 per cent of those women were

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travelling with children.17 Women also made up more than half of the vagrants counted (twenty-eight women to twenty-two men) in the 1713–14 receipts of the Rochester Headborough Richard Tinker, and nine were accompanied by one or more children.18 Women outnumbered men almost 2-to-1 in the run of orders and examinations that survive in London for 1740, again almost half of them were accompanied by one or more children.19 In Surrey, where a significant run of examinations and orders survive for the period 1719–50, female vagrants comprise approximately 85 per cent of adults apprehended.20 In Essex between 1650 and 1750 the numbers seem more balanced, though interestingly the counties’ House of Correction calendars listed mainly male inmates while the miscellaneous removal orders show a significantly higher number of female vagrants and poor migrants, suggesting that punishments for vagrancy, and the location where those punishments were to be meted out, were as gendered as the category itself.21 Whether enormous samples or small runs of receipts from a single constable, the archival records of vagrancy after the English Civil War consistently show a dramatic increase in the number of masterless women on the road. We undoubtedly have a smaller overall number of examinations, passes, and orders for the period between 1650 and 1750 in comparison to the records available in both A.L. Beier’s period and in the later eighteenth century, but those we do have consistently reflect this increase. Statutory changes to, and interpretations of, settlement law, including the inventive and superficially cruel parochial practice of defining single mothers as ipso facto vagrant, certainly contributed to this new gender balance after 1650 but that alone is insufficient to explain the surge in masterless women who took to the road. The crux of the problem lies in the simple fact that vagrancy was an easily mutable legal category and a profoundly gendered social category. Assumptions surrounding female sexuality and ‘women’s work’ contributed to this mutability. In a famous essay called ‘the double standard’ Keith Thomas argued that sexual purity was the foundation stone upon which early modern female reputation rested and I would contend that in the case of female vagrants that purity was assumed to be absent.22 The signifiers of beggary were just as powerfully gendered: just as male beggars needed ‘obvious signs’ of masculine tragedy such as missing limbs, scarring, and other physically obvious disabilities, so too did female beggars need distinctly feminine signs of tragedy, such as a ‘big belly’ or a pitiable child.23 This was true of begging in the context of both large urban spaces, filled with strangers, and in the parish, where localized begging would have been associated with the familiar faces of the ‘ancient poor’. The relationship between women and work was equally mutable and suffered a

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degree of historical obscurity until relatively recently.24 The types of work that might initially have been available to populations most vulnerable to vagrancy charges changed at the same time that the legal regimes surrounding pauper mobility shifted. It is unlikely that the incidence of vagrancy as a percentage of deep poverty significantly decreased or, more importantly, that it was seen as less of a social threat, simply because a smaller number of poor and mobile people were rendered ‘permanently’ vagrant by gradually – and temporarily – improved economic conditions for labourers. It is equally unlikely that vagrancy became a less visible part of the lived experiences of English streets and public spaces. If anything the visual record of London streets in the early eighteenth century suggests the opposite.25 Furthermore the idea of ‘permanent vagrancy’ is itself very problematic; the Settlement laws of 1662 simply codified the existing parochial tendency to pass on poor ‘outcomers’, and the idea had always been to transport unsettled paupers of all sorts back to their parishes of origin, with or without incarceration and corporal punishment.26 It also bears asking whether vagrancy could ever actually be ‘permanent’, short of dying while homeless and ‘out of doors’ in the open streets. The experience of being a masterless woman could also be entirely atypical. For instance, the Quaker woman Barbara Blaugdone recounted how she was thrown into jail as a vagrant in Exeter in the 1650s, and many midcentury Quaker pamphlets relate stories of women treated similarly harshly by authorities.27 But generally, when women became vagrants, they ‘did so for particular, female-specific reasons: and when vagrants were female, their crimes had particular cultural resonances for a society that was persistently concerned with mobile women’.28 Laura Gowing writes that conceptually ‘poor women were peculiarly susceptible to vagrancy. By definition, vagrants were landless, workless, and masterless: it was all too easy for poor or single women to fit all those categories’.29 But whether in the context of a vagrancy examination or in a pauper petition, individual women did make use of the gendered expectations surrounding labour, abandonment, children, and their ideal position in a settled household when they sought relief. For instance, women feature prominently in pauper petitions that invoke the spectre of vagrancy if they receive no relief. In Jonathan Healey’s analysis of Lancashire pauper petitions we find the pauper Mary Kennison, who petitioned that she was ‘greately abashed & dismayed to beg, for the disgrace of her friends’.30 If male vagrancy was fundamentally considered a problem of labour, either its lack of availability or the unwillingness of men to seek it out, then female vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750 was seen as a problem of the life cycle and it was represented as such in many different genres

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of contemporary text. Here the ‘assumption of idleness’ has become a gendered narrative of sexual bad choices, about unmarried women choosing to sell the work of their bodies instead of just the work of their hands. This assumption is also about the wrong type of labour, prostitution, a form of work not often recognized as such during the early modern period or today. The Restoration justice Robert Doughty wrote that ‘secret whoredoms all the yeare’ characterized the flight of female domestics away from their places of service.31 Cultural representations of unmarried women seeking service echoed this stereotype. In the ballad ‘Dolly and Molly’ two young women travel to London in search of either a marriage or a place in service, and it takes merely ‘a kiss and a guinea’ to beguile Molly into the life of pampered mistress while Dolly finds a place as a Ladies’ servant. Molly ends up with venereal disease, abandoned by her suitors, poor, and ‘shamefully miscarried’; Dolly was of course eventually ‘richly marry’d’.32 The assumptions about female beggars were as stark: ‘quite simply’, writes Tim Hitchcock, ‘young women forced to beg for a living were assumed to be sexually available’.33 Female vagrancy was not generally ‘permanent’, not only because of a more robust legal regime after 1662 which aimed to return all vagrants to their parishes of birth or settlement, as Beier correctly surmises, but also because female vagrants themselves made vocal and creative use of their moments of legal exposure in order to better their own conditions. This often came at a cost however, and a price often associated with escaping vagrancy as a woman was forceful separation from her children. Archival evidence suggests that women became vagrant often in the first instance via the breakdown of personal, labouring, and service relationships between themselves and masters or mistresses or through the failure of those relationships to even form in the first place, and in the second instance by disruptions in the patterns of marital and courtship relationships that often defined their social networks, with prospective or actual husbands dying, running away, or impressed into military service. In typical cases parish and county authorities attempted to prevent the descent into destitution caused by run-away husbands by locking them in place in Houses of Correction and making them work there; Henry Chandler was committed to the Chelmsford House of Correction in 1665 for running away from his wife and children in the parish of Bocking and had to find a way to pay 12d. a week in maintenance, in his case clearly by working inside the bridewell until he found sureties of good behaviour.34 The number of absentee husbands caught never seemed to meaningfully alleviate the problem, and issues such as naval impressment, which rapidly increased in frequency as the seventeenth century progressed, compounded this problem of abandoned wives and children.

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This shift in the raisons d’être of female vagrancy has some interesting implications for the arguments of Dabhoiwala, Stone, and others who have written that the later seventeenth century witnessed profound transformations in gender relations, changes that increasingly eroded the force of the ‘promissory marriage tradition’ and (according to Stone) the economic value of virginity in early modern English society.35 In many of these arguments, the assumption has been that the rise of male ‘rakes’ and libertine culture, a sex-for-payment economy in the metropolis, and shifting cultural and medical understandings of female desire played crucial roles in fermenting a ‘first sexual revolution’. They surely did if we speak solely of the sexual concerns of the elite, but what if the main driver of change in the first instance was simply the increasing precarity of the employment, marriage, and service prospects of poorer women, who might well eventually find themselves destitute in the capital and engaged in prostitution, a duplicitous marriage market, begging, or indeed all three at once, simply as survival strategies? A word about the evidence. The bulk of the archival evidence in this chapter is from Surrey county, whose JPs had jurisdiction over several parishes in the London borough of Southwark. Surrey’s records for the early eighteenth century are unusual in several respects. Female vagrants were a very high proportion of those examined by Surrey JPs in the sample evidence: of fifty-two Surrey vagrant examinations (longer runs of simple removal orders do survive) from the period 1719–50, forty-five listed single women travelling alone or with small children. Such numbers suggest Surrey was a conduit through which poor and unsettled women exited, or were evicted from, the metropolis. The Southwark area held many of the poorest parishes in early modern London and was widely considered to be a tenement slum full of poverty, prostitution, illicit entertainments such as bear-baiting, and disease.36 The famous brothel Holland’s Leaguer, which was reputed to have served royalty such as James I and his favourite George Villiers, was situated beside the Thames river near Blackfriars Bridge, but numerous other, less prosperous ‘stews’ were also located in the same general area.37 Prostitutes and vagrant women were incarcerated in the same ‘gaols’ and punished the same ways: with whipping or, much more commonly by 1650, hard labour for a span. In much of the archival documentation, the connections between vagrancy and prostitution remain assumed and implicit, but the two categories of ‘disorderly women’ were closely associated together in literature, art, and popular culture, as we have seen in examples such as ‘Debauchery Scared’, a popular early modern ballad about a beggar-woman-turned-prostitute.38 This preponderance of poor and vagrant women in the Surrey records extends to the house of correction calendars of prisoners as well. The 1734 Michaelmas calendar for the ‘Surrey bridewell’ in

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Guildford listed twelve inmates committed between October and January, of which eight were women, including one woman, Sarah Blunstedd, who ‘pretended she was with Childe and hastened to charge the same to several persons’.39 Blunstedd was to stay in the bridewell for at least three months. The April 1742 calendar for the Southwark house of correction listed forty-two total prisoners that month, of which only three were male.40 By far the most common reason listed for committal was because a woman had been deemed ‘loose and disorderly’, which was a euphemistic phrase that denoted her suspected trade as a prostitute.41 Surrey and Southwark thus form a large part of the urban backdrop against which the examinations of female vagrants in this chapter should be read. Southwark’s particular role in London’s sexual geography as a slumming destination and its material roles as a main entry point for poor female migrants in search of places likely explain at least in part why Surrey judicial authorities were so attuned to the problem of masterless women, and in turn more likely to apprehend, examine, and pass on female vagrants as quickly as they could do so. That said, not every vagrant woman apprehended or examined by Surrey justices was a poor migrant ejected, or fleeing, from the city. Elizabeth Cox, aged fifty-three, was from Hertfordshire and was apprehended and examined on 19 March 1732. She told Surrey magistrates that she married her husband Francis twenty-four years previously ‘and ever since that time she has travelled about, sometimes with her said husband & sometimes without him, selling Ballads, Certain Laws, & other things’.42 Elizabeth apparently had a home near Aylesbury that she periodically returned to. A much younger Elizabeth Cox, aged seventeen and also from Hertfordshire, was picked up a few days later, and told justices that she ‘has travelled abroad with her father and mother at several places ever since she can remember till last Christmas, and ever since she hath wandered’.43 In 1720 the entire family of Thomas Clark, Elizabeth Clark, and their three children were apprehended, and they had to patiently explain that mobility was integral to Thomas’s job and thus to the family livelihood: ‘he hath travelled about the country as a Tinker about 7 yeares last past’.44 Although we will find that many of the stories of female vagrants seem to follow the same patterns of abandonment, precious employment, sickness, and danger, it behoves us to remember that not all mobile women were as vulnerable, or even particularly interested in regaining settlement inside the confines of parish, place, and patriarchy. The ballad seller Elizabeth Cox was perfectly content to travel with her husband or without, and she hopefully left Surrey largely unmolested after her brush with magistrates in 1732. This final chapter offers scattered pieces that fit into the complex mosaic of female vagrancy, organized generally around the most common themes that

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feature in the stories of masterless women themselves, stories that often centre on children and childbirth, absent fathers or husbands, and the precarious prospects associated with domestic service and apprenticeships, and it is to the relationship between domestic service and female vagrancy that we now turn.

Vagrancy, sex, and domestic service In the first scene of William Hogarth’s famous series of 1731–32 engravings called A Harlot’s Progress, a young, innocent, and attractive Moll Hackabout arrives by carrier in London, in search of gainful employment. She is fatefully greeted by a pox-scarred bawd and procured as a mistress for a gentleman looking on. Her social and moral descent is rapid. By the third plate Moll is a common prostitute who hangs pictures of Macheath from the Beggar’s Opera below attempted cures for syphilis; in the fourth she beats hemp in Bridewell. She is dead by age twenty-three.

Figure 4.1 ‘Moll arrives in London’, Plate 1 of Hogarth’s 1731–32 Harlot’s Progress engraving series. Shelf: 11661.b.27. © The British Library Board.

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What is particularly striking about Hogarth’s print is that we can see other young women piled inside the carrier wagon, potentially awaiting similar terrible fates. Francis Charteris, an infamous sexual predator, watches the disembarkation eagerly with his hand suggestively in his pocket, a dire hint that eighteenth-century London’s appetite for the labour of young women was, in all senses of the word, ravenous.45 It is very likely that placement as a domestic servant in a good household was the gainful, legitimate employment that Moll Hackabout and her nameless female fellow travellers would have attempted to procure in eighteenth-century London. By the end of the seventeenth century, female domestic servants were a ubiquitous figure in British urban workforces. The conservative estimate for the number of domestics in London in 1750 is 52,000 people, with a figure approaching 90,000 often touted as more likely, and approximately 80 per cent of domestic servants were female.46 Female domestics were comparatively a very mobile labouring population, often rapidly moving on from short-term positions in pursuit of better alternatives or to escape undesirable working conditions. As an occupation, domestic service was ‘defined prescriptively by contemporaries as a premarital phase of female life’, ‘masters and mistresses sought to limit their domestics to behaviours appropriate to wifely proxies and farm servants’.47 When domestic servant behaviour was seen to transgress those limits, servants were let go and the consequences were often catastrophic. In Southwark, the young singlewoman Elizabeth Colter was apprehended as a vagrant and examined on 8 November 1742. She had ‘lived a yearly hired servant with Mr Thomas Harcourt an Undertaker in Easter Exchange in the parish of St. Mary Le Strand in the liberty of Wesminster’ for the space of ‘fifteen months together at the yearly wages of three pounds’.48 It is unclear what caused Elizabeth’s descent into vagrancy from domestic service, but she was travelling alone and her tenure of above a year in service meant she was passed back to St. Mary Le Strand. Apprenticeships could fail for young women and cause similarly distressing circumstances. In 1749, Mary Wood was apprehended as a vagrant in Guildford in Surrey and had at one point served five of the requisite seven years of her apprenticeship to a ‘Mrs Kindrick’, a ‘pye woman’ in the parish of St Thomas Southwark.49 Mary was then removed from the adjoining parish of St Olave Southwark ‘about four years ago’ by her reckoning, and had wandered ever since. Although she does not admit it explicitly in her examination, it seems clear that Mary’s apprenticeship was cut short by two years in 1745, and this dramatic rupture in her settled existence resulted in her swift eviction of the boundaries of St Thomas. Whether let go from service before or after a year’s

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term, or from an apprenticeship prematurely, young women’s prospects were dim: ‘maidservants out of service were unlikely to be able to live on their savings for more than a few days or weeks, and might fall into vagrancy and thievery if they could not find work. For them, prostitution may have been a necessary makeshift’.50 How did one avoid the fates of Elizabeth Colter or Mary Wood? The first and most important piece of advice that the conduct writer Eliza Haywood gave to aspiring maidservants was to avoid suspicious houses and placements, to in effect check the character of prospective masters and especially mistresses, as ‘there are some houses which appear well by Day, that it would be little safe for a modest Maid to sleep in at Night’, where ‘under the sanction of women such as I have described, are too frequently acted such scenes of Debauchery as would startle even the Owners of some common Brothels’.51 Haywood then laid out the terrible consequences of service in such a household: Then by continued Prostitution withered in her Bloom, she becomes despised, no longer affords any Advantage to the Wretch who betrayed her, and is turned out to Infamy and Beggary, perhaps too with the most loathsome of all Diseases, which ends her miserable Days in an Hospital or Work-house, in case She can be admitted, tho’ some have not had even that favour, but found their Death-bed on a Dunghill.52

Sex was – either by implication or in reality – a frequent part of the economies of domestic service. Laura Gowing describes how some masters actually saw sexual services as part of the purview of domestic labour.53 Sexual relationships did not even have to form between master and servant for trouble to potentially find either person; placement for a year or more as a domestic servant granted settlement rights by the early eighteenth century, bastardy depositions were tightly tied to the demands of ascertaining the appropriate settlement of the child, and the tensions between young women searching for economic stability, the prospects of a good marriage, and the exploitative double standards of early modern sexual culture were most often resolved to the detriment of female servants themselves. Even with the voluntary (or quietly coerced) support of numerous London parishioners, the young domestic Susan Moore still ended up as a vagrant, who ‘could not get a place to lie in [for] a great while, but lay abroad in the streets’ after she was impregnated by her master’s business partner Thomas Creede, who, as it turns out, had quite a history of seducing domestic servants with promises to marry them.54 Some historians argue that domestic service was ‘more hazardous than the life of a vagrant’, and while I strongly

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disagree with the contention that household service was more dangerous than homelessness, the two states clearly possessed strong connections.55 In her chapter on ‘maidservants adrift’ in early seventeenth-century London, Eleanor Hubbard relates the story of Emme Finch, a maidservant to victuallers Alice and Richard Robinson, whose service ‘amounted to virtual slavery’ and coerced prostitution. Emme fled her master and mistress, and when examined by Bridewell’s court of governors she related how ‘Alice Robinson her mistresses would oftentimes force her to go up into a room to be naught with divers men’; in one case after being prostituted to a bricklayer, Emme’s earnings of eighteen pence were confiscated ‘as soon as the bricklayer had gone away’.56 Emme Finch’s circumstances darkly mirror the humour of ballads such as ‘The Two-Penny Whore’, in which a wandering spendthrift wishes to spend his last meagre coins on the services of a prostitute and is repeatedly refused.57 Unlike the woman in the ballad however, who ‘scorn[ed] to be counted’ so cheaply, Emme was clearly not in a position where she could refuse the transaction. Variations on Emme Finch’s story of coerced prostitution were common in reforming literature. In his 1696 serial pamphlet The Night-Walker, John Dunton relates the account of a sixteen-year-old female domestic who is initially enticed into prostitution by a bawd who offers to find her a place with wages of £6 a year and ‘fine Cloaths’.58 Agreeing, she swiftly finds herself unwillingly pimped to a ‘young Spark’; when ushered into an adjoining room after dinner, she had ‘scarcely well sat down till I heard a Clinking of Money, which I understood since was the Price of my Chastity’. The man enters the room, the bawd locks the door after him, and this sixteen-year-old girl, whether fictional or factual, is raped. Like Moll Hackabout, once ‘ruin’d’, her descent is rapid. Within months she confesses to sleeping with corrupt constables or magistrates if bribes will not serve to avert their attention and to stealing the possessions of her customers. Sophie Carter argues that Dunton’s other routine attacks on the practice of wives helping to advertise storefront wares in London shops as akin to prostitution demonstrates ‘the profound difficulty – perhaps even impossibility – of separating infamous commerce from the legitimate kind’.59 Part of the problem was that men like John Dunton saw no moral difference between painted wives in the shopfront and whores, or between desperate, vulnerable young women and mistresses more secure in the affections of their clientele. Dunton’s NightWalker pamphlets were prurient, pseudo-pornographical entries in the literature associated with the late-seventeenth-century campaign for a ‘Reformation of Manners’, but they occasionally and unintentionally acknowledged the terrible bind that poor women forced into prostitution might find themselves in.60 The

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young domestic he ‘interviews’ (or likely invents) ‘was reduced to the necessity either of Complying with the further direction of the Old Bawd, or of being stript of all I had, and either murdered or turned out of doors naked in the night time, and at best be exposed to shame and disgrace; so that I was forced at last to turn one of her Wenches in Ordinary’. Dunton’s unnamed young prostitute ends up in Bridewell, much like Mary Hilton, an actual prostitute who in January 1695 was committed to the original English house of correction ‘to Labour’, charged as a ‘lewd idle and Notorious Whore being lately delivered of a Bastard Child’.61 Prostitution, domestic service, and vagrancy clearly shared unsavoury connections and contemporaries were well aware of this. Tim Hitchcock describes the relationship thus: ‘from service to prostitution to beggary were two very short steps indeed’.62

Masterless women with children If domestic service was the most common occupation that risked vagrancy for women, pregnancy and children seem to have been the most common complicating personal circumstances. ‘Being single and pregnant in an urban community almost inevitably made women, at least in the eyes of the law, vagrants.’63 David Postles labelled lone motherhood ‘the most extreme impact’ of patriarchy and effectively the ‘worst case scenario’ for women with children.64 The consequences of an emerging libertine sexual culture fell hardest on women. The playwright Aphra Behn wilfully imagined her rakish male characters as ‘less than the sum of their parts’, as either transient lovers or as emasculated older men, so that her female characters could, for a moment, experience female sexuality ‘without its material consequences – shame, suffering, and pregnancy’.65 In novels, rogue pamphlets, ballads, and plays, lone mothers also often find ways of giving away children that they cannot care for; one thinks of the several un-named children of Moll Flanders that are spirited away by ‘Mistress Midnight’, a character that quite possibly inspired the bawd represented in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress.66 Ballads such as ‘The Distressed Mother’ even wishfully envisioned leaving poor babies to the care of the Court at Whitehall, with a note detailing the poor circumstances of the now-absent (and widowed) mother pinned on to the child’s clothing.67 However, in the records of the lived experience of female vagrants, this willingness to give up children to alleviate the circumstances of vagrancy seems much rarer. In the examinations and removal orders that survive for Surrey county between 1719 and 1750, out of the fifty adult female vagrants examined,

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twenty-two were travelling with small children when they were apprehended, six with more than one child.68 Most of these children were under the age of seven. We find the consequences of pregnancy, the double standard, and the breakdown of the domestic ideal etched into the narratives of these masterless women, but we also see that a very high proportion of masterless women who kept their children with them at whatever cost. When parish overseers confronted the double (or higher) burden of a poor single woman and her child, their response was often to make that woman and her family vagrant if they were not already. In 1734 the overseers and vestrymen of Horley parish in Surrey ‘persuaded’ Elizabeth Jones ‘alias Willis’ to ‘carry away Jane Jones her bastard child who was a little time before legally removed by an order of two Justices of the Peace from Newdigate in this county to Horley’; the officials gave her the sum of ‘five shillings for so doing and that the said bastard child is now chargeable to the said parish of Newdigate’.69 Elizabeth and her child clearly had the right to be settled in Horley, and the parochial pressure to leave which accompanied the five shillings she received is left unspoken in the record of her experiences, but she and her child were examined in Guildford, thirty kilometres from Horley, and at least four months after her very unofficial removal took place. The Guildford Justices sent her and her child back to Newdigate, and not to Horley, in effect reversing the original decision of Newdigate’s JPs and confirming the legitimacy of Horley’s exclusion. Historians such as Keith Snell have documented the parochial coercion and constant wrangling common in cases of Settlement law removal, so it comes as no surprise to find similar pressures exerted on women who ended up vagrant.70 It was also not always even the male ‘Chief Inhabitants’ that forced single women into vagrancy; Patricia Crawford writes that it was the women of the parish of Ryarsh in Kent that dragged singlewoman Joan Jacquett across the parish boundaries while she was in labour, so that she ended up giving birth ‘in a little straw, under a tree, in the common highway’ within the bounds of the neighbouring parish.71 Examples of parochial coercion that stopped just short of causing vagrancy are also very common. Mary and John Rogers were living in Stowe parish in Buckinghamshire in the 1690s when John was caught ‘committing a felony’ in 1695.72 John’s punishment would be remitted ‘if the said John Rogers would goe for a soldier [which] he did’. John had been an apprentice and yearly servant before his enlistment, and his departure left Mary and the couple’s young child at the suffrage of the parish ratepayers. Parish officials, ‘Refuseing to contribute to its maintenance’, would not relieve Mary unless her child was removed elsewhere, and it is unclear where in Buckinghamshire the baby was sent.

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Potentially sick, malnourished, and alone, pregnant female vagrants were often in extreme danger, as were their unborn children. On 25 April 1750, the midwife Mary Bitter of Endfield parish in Middlesex told the story of Elizabeth Browne’s pregnancy and roadside birth to a JP.73 Bitter had been sent to ‘Nurse and look after Elizabeth Browne’ by the constable Henry Long; Browne had been ‘sent to him as a Rogue and a Vagabond by a vagrant pass’ from a Justice in the ‘north riding of Yorkshire’. Bitter described how ‘the said vagrant by a fall from a Horse in her journey (which caused her sudden labour) was so ill that she this deponent was obliged to set up with the said vagrant almost three weeks’. Mary Bitter requested payment of eighteen shillings, by her estimation ‘a very reasonable bill’ given the circumstances. Ann Bentley, ‘a Wanderer and Beggar’, fell into labour and gave birth to a boy in the ‘open street’ of Saint Paul Shadwell parish on 27 January 1750.74 Bentley was taken to the Shadwell workhouse and provided with a midwife and ‘other necessaries’, but on 16 April ‘Ann Bentley’s Child dyed in the said Workhouse’ and was buried at parish expense. The Saint Paul Shadwell overseers kept Bentley in the workhouse until 9 April ‘by reason of her being very sick and weak’, but she was then separated from her infant, immediately hurried off to a Justice, and swiftly committed to the house of correction shortly thereafter. The infant remained in the workhouse and died there seven days later. Saint Paul Shadwell parish wanted nothing to do with Ann Bentley and petitioned to be reimbursed for all the costs associated with her and the death of her infant son, which amounted to three pounds, twelve shillings, six pence; the price placed, it seems, on the horrific experience of roadside birth, incarceration, separation, and the loss of a child. Perhaps no story better illustrates the connections between the perils of domestic service, pregnancy, female vagrancy, and parochial exclusion than the case of Judith Mansfield, who was taken as a vagrant in the Essex parish of Great Baddow ‘with a child in her arme’ in early 1669.75 Mansfield told the Essex Justices that she had been a ‘covenant servant with Richard Harding in Sea Church [Southchurch]’ and that ‘there she was gat with child by Lazarus Musgrove her fellow servant and that five weeks after Michaelmas last her time came out’, and she travelled to Rochford and gave birth in ‘Widow Dawson’s house’, and ‘there continued for three weeks, at which time Wm. Allison one of the constables of Rochford gave her 3s to be gone out of their parish’, and parish officials also told Judith to ‘leave her child at some rich man’s door but she durst not return to Southchurch for fear she should be punished’. Her former master Richard Harding ‘being one of the constables of Southchurch did force her out of the parish’. Harding was eventually examined regarding his role in the exclusion

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of Judith from Southchurch and admitted that he, ‘perceiving she was with child did route her out of the parish for fear she would be a charge in regard she was a settled person’. Such a bald admission of parochial exclusion – an admission in effect of making Judith homeless when she clearly had a right to settlement – is a rarity even among the casual cruelties of vagrancy orders and house of corrections calendars. Harding’s role in forcing Judith out of Southchurch shows just how easy it was to exclude vulnerable women from parochial communities. It seems clear that the ‘double standard’ of sexual behaviour clearly had a role to play in the lives of many vagrant women like Judith. The assumptions surrounding Judith’s shattered sexual purity and the looming financial burden of supporting her and her baby caused two different parishes to push Judith out of doors, both using highly dubious methods, since birth in the parish of Rochford bestowed settlement rights on her child there. I have serious doubts that the erstwhile father Lazarus Musgrove was treated as terribly as Judith and her child were. However, parochial officials were not always or uniformly the enemies of masterless women. Almost a hundred years after Judith met such harsh treatment, Diana Harris was examined in Guildford only days after giving birth to a male child ‘of which she was delivered in the open street of Egham’ in Surrey in June of 1748.76 Harris had been born in Cornwall and was hired as a domestic to a shopkeeper in Newlands in the north of the county five years before she was examined, but ‘ever since her service she has wandered into several Counties’. At some point during these five years of vagrancy Harris became pregnant, and ‘one Friday the tenth of this June She wandered into Egham in the County of Surrey and laid herself down in the Common Highway in Egham aforesaid, and being Big with Child was within four hours delivered of a Male Child’. Either during or just after this ordeal, Harris ‘was supported by one Thomas Plim one of the Overseers of the Parish of Egham’. Plim’s kindness faded once immediate danger had passed, since ‘as soon as the Vagrant was able [he] brought her before Adrian Moore’, a local JP, and on 23 June she was examined and swiftly committed to the Guildford House of Correction until the next Quarter Sessions. That said, if some form of post-natal medical care was available at Guildford’s House of Correction, then Diana’s stay there was likely a boon. The financial implications of childbirth, single motherhood, and female vagrancy were clearly tightly tied together, so much so that in many cases, women were only apprehended as vagrants after they gave birth in vulnerable circumstances. Audrey Eccles notes how it was not uncommon for a woman to be described as ‘beggar’ or ‘vagrant’ in Quarter Sessions petitions by the parish

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dealing with her charge, but as a ‘poor travelling woman’ in baptism registers where her child’s name would have been entered or in the bill of expenses for her lyingin.77 Until a 1744 vagrancy statute changed the law, birth in a parish, including a vagrant birth, conferred settlement rights and therefore access to relief, and it was this access that parish officials worked to curtail. However, poor travelling women were not out of danger after childbirth: churchwardens, constables, and overseers were still eager to pass on the significant charges of lone mothers with one or more children, regardless of whether those children had any claims to settlement in their parishes. The appropriate settlement of female vagrants with children could also become quite complicated, particularly if their current or former husbands possessed claims to settlement different from their parishes of birth and if these claims were in turn different from the settlement of their children. Sarah Jones was apprehended in March 1731; her husband Owen Jones had died ‘about three weeks ago in Croydon’ and had told her that he was ‘born at Cork in Ireland’ but he did not know if he had acquired any legal settlement while working in London. Sarah herself was from Elham parish in Kent and had a son aged seven named Robert Cox, presumably from another marriage, who had been born in a different Kentish parish, Greenwich, and who was ‘now sick at Effingham in this county’. The examination was taken by the JP George Ballard in Guildford, Surrey, but makes no mention of where Sarah was to be sent. Ballard most likely passed Sarah back to Elham, and if so it was a decision that the parish could appeal.

Absent husband: Vagrant wife Another quite common characteristic shared across the stories told by masterless women was the absence of their husbands. Of the fifty adult women actively examined by Surrey JPs between 1719 and 1750, thirty-two said they were married or quite recently widowed. Given that at least ten of these fifty women were aged seventeen or younger and unlikely to be married, we can say that approximately two-thirds of marriage-age women in these records were married or at least were willing to consistently claim that they were, perhaps in order to present their settlement as a particular parish when interviewed by a JP. Dead or absent husbands also figured prominently in the stories of female vagrants apprehended in London parishes such as Westminster and St George Hannover Square; of seventeen women who were examined in 1740 whose examinations survive in the records, nine women were clearly listed as married or widowed, four of their husbands were away at sea, two had died recently, and two ran away

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from their wives.78 Mary Lynn, 46, had her husband abscond from her in 1740; he was a pipemaker of an age comparable to hers and fled from her seemingly only a brief time before her apprehension as a vagrant in October.79 Mary Tilly’s husband Joseph, an apprentice carpenter, had run away from her ‘about nine or ten years ago’, about the same time their son Thomas was born. Bereft of support, Mary travelled from Warminster to London, ‘and thence from there to Surrey, and hath several times begged by ye way & lain in several barns’ before she and her son were apprehended in Cobham.80 Mary Brandford’s husband travelled to Kent from Buckinghamshire in search of work, leaving her and a seven-year-old son, John, behind. When she was apprehended she had spent the previous night ‘at a broken kilnhouse’ and in desperate search of medical attention for her son, who ‘last night was taken ill in the said broken kilnhouse and she believes the same to be smallpox & therefore she prays relief ’.81 Patricia Fumerton’s article on vagrant/absent husbands aesthetically located them no farther away than their parish alehouses, seen by Fumerton as replacement homes with none of the burdens of wives, children, responsibility, or sobriety.82 Men spending coin in the alehouse that should go to maintaining the early modern family was an enormously common trope in popular representations of drink and sociability and widely considered a grievous social ill.83 But husbands could be much more radically absent from the lives of poor women as well, either by choice, chance, or force. The prolonged absence of husbands caused by army or navy service, or by the search for work in other counties, appears to have been a common cause of vagrancy among slightly older women, who likely experienced a relatively settled life in a barracks town up until the point where they became separated from their partners. Rather unusually, the vagrant Eleanor Aldridge could sign her name (as ‘Ellinnor Alldridge’). Her husband William was a soldier from Ireland ‘who has gone and left her’. As it turns out in the subsequent conveying order, the court made the unusual decision to put Eleanor on a ship and pass her back to St John’s parish in Dublin, where she had married her absent husband three years ago.84 Audrey Eccles charts how Westmorland county in particular saw an unusual number of vagrant women whose circumstances owed to the military service of their husbands; the parish of Shap, along a north–south army marching corridor, saw no less than fifteen women lying in the early 1750s, almost all of whom appeared to be soldiers’ wives whose husbands were then absent.85 Farther from common marching corridors we still see the rupturing effects of their husband’s military service on masterless women; Mary Ayres and Ann Evans were apprehended in St George Southwark as vagrants travelling together in September 1746, both

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were soldier’s wives and both had last been relieved at Portsmouth.86 Mary and Ann had children travelling with them; Ann’s child Elizabeth was listed as two years old. Their husband’s sea service, when combined with parochial unwillingness to relieve them, caused two women and three children to become vagrants. Ann Stewart’s husband Alexander was ‘a Scotchman, now beyond [the] sea’, but she had been born in Rochester and Kent became her destination.87 In 1757 Elizabeth Jones was found in acute distress ‘laying in the Open Air in the Great Road in the Hamlet of Hammersmith […] not able to travel farther’.88 When examined she explained that her husband John had been a soldier in the first foot regiment, and then ‘an inpensioner’ at ‘Chelsea college’, meaning he had surrendered his army pension to gain a place in the Royal Hospital. Jones and her two children Grace, 7, and Sarah, 4, had been maintained by the Gloucester parish of Kings Stanley ‘as their own Parishioner and yet by the Consent of the officers of the said Parish she was suffer’d to come from thence about 3 months past’. She and her children had travelled approximately 143 kilometres by the time she was taken up in desperate circumstances in Middlesex. Interpreting what the ‘Consent’ of the Gloucester parish officers means in this context is difficult, but it seems that rather than continue to relieve her and her children, Kings Stanley’s chief inhabitants sent Elizabeth and her children towards her husband in the Chelsea Royal Hospital and towards a grimly uncertain fate. Widowed women were also a common face of vagrancy. The widow Elizabeth Gibbons was sent back to the city of Gloucester in January of 1749, after being apprehended by a constable ‘wandering and begging’ in Leatherhead parish in Surrey. Her Irish husband John Gibbons had recently died in Portsmouth ‘this day five weeks ago’ and they had been married four years.89 When queried about her husband’s settlement, Elizabeth replied that she ‘hath heard him say something of Cork’, but transporting her to Ireland was deemed untenable. Contemporaries were acutely aware of just how vulnerable widowed poor women could be to the dangers of eviction and parochial exclusion. Recall the powerful ballad ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords’ in Chapter 2. The awful circumstances of the song’s protagonist are brought on by the death of the woman’s husband, ‘a labouring man’ from ‘Lincolne’, who serves and dies in war in Ireland.90 When she curses the evil landlord who evicted her, the widow channels for us the laments of vagrant women whose husbands died or were carried away in military service: Quoth she, my husband in your cause, In warres did lose his life, And will you use thus cruelly

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his harmless wedded wife? Oh God revenge a widowes wrong, That all the world may know, How you have forst a Soldiers wife a begging for to goe.

‘Why Do You Not Take Us Up?’ Ann West, Mary Davis, and one vagrant family The story of the vagrant family of Ann West, Mary Davis, and their twelve children is found in a remarkable run of settlement examinations and conveyance orders in Surrey from 1740.91 It seems that a vagrant matriarch, Ann West, was apprehended and examined about 17 June and came from an actual ‘beggar lineage’ akin to the mocking verses of the ‘Beggar Boy of the North’ ballad. West’s ‘mother was brought to bed with ye examinant at Hampton and she was a beggar and she took the aforesaid and went a begging with her’. Ann’s whole life had been shaped by vagrancy. Her age was indeterminate, she ‘knoweth not how old she was’, her six children had each been born in different parishes around Surrey, her two eldest daughters Ann (17) and Jane (13) were ‘both born before marriage’, and when they were delivered, the elder Ann did as her mother had done, she ‘took them the said Ann and Jane with her a begging’. In 1732 the elder Ann had gotten married in Fleet Ditch to a Thomas Cobham, ‘he being a Travelling Beggar when he married this examinant and hath so continued ever since’. Presumably several or all of her remaining four children, Thomas and Martha (seemingly twins), Sarah, and Richard, were conceived with Cobham on their mutual travels. Thomas and Martha appear to have been born at a bridewell in Woking, which would fit with Ann’s explanation that she ‘hath been Travelling about and begging and hath never been taken up or apprehended but once by any parish officers till she was apprehended last night’. The ‘but once’ appears to have been in Woking. Aside from Jane and ‘Ann the younger’, the children were all under the age of seven. Ann West also had an independent streak, she couldn’t provide a certificate of marriage when asked for it, and she ‘hath most usually gone by her own name’ when travelling.92 West was clearly resilient: she could, and had, taken care of herself and numerous children for almost two decades on the roads of eighteenth-century England. Ann West was apprehended while travelling with one other adult: Mary Davis. West said that Davis was actually her sister. West’s mother had several

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children, and before she ‘dyed about eleven years ago’ she had begged at some point with all of them in tow. It seems that this tradition, this familial ‘economy of unsettlement’, to bend a famous phrase, was then continued by the two sisters once their mother died.93 Davis was born in Thorpe in Surrey, married to Charles Davis in Southwark about 1727, and they ‘were both beggars when they married and have ever since combined so to be’.94 Mary was travelling with four children of her own, John, Sarah (listed as one year old), Francis, and Charles. Both husbands, Thomas Cobham and Charles Davis, were conspicuous by their absence. West and Davis travelled and travailed, begged with their children, and generally made ends meet for a long but indeterminate amount of time before their apprehension in Surrey, and the circumstances that led to their appearance before JPs on 17 June 1740 were both unusual and illustrative. West was examined first and gave the longest testimony; in it she said that the entire West/Davis vagrant family was apprehended the previous evening in the Surrey parish of Horsell ‘by a person whose name [she] understands to be Martin Beauchamp and by him this examinant was delivered to the constable’.95 So far, so unexceptional. But it turns out that West, Davis, and their children have been actively encouraged by the parishioners of Woking to travel to Horsell in order to be apprehended there instead and when West continued speaking this story emerged: the last place she and her Children begged at unapprehended was at Woking & when she begg’d for Relief there the Inhabitants told this examinant that they were forewarned from giving any relief, upon which this examinant said what must she doe why do you not take us up & this examinant was answered that they had not orders as yet but at Horsel they had & there they would take this examinant up or to that Effect.96

What must Ann West ‘doe’? Why was she not taken up? We are told that Woking’s inhabitants ‘had not orders as yet’ which, almost 300 years later, still sounds quite clearly like an attempt to avoid responsibility, to pass on the problem of this enormous family of vagrant women and children to another place and another parish. Woking’s inhabitants were correct at least that Ann West and her family would be taken up at Horsell, but their efforts to rid themselves of the burden of care represented by these fourteen vagrants proved at least partly ineffectual. When examined West and Davis both enumerated precisely where and when their children were born, and of the twelve accompanying them, four (Thomas and Martha West, both under seven, and Charles and Francis Davis, eight and

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seven respectively) were eventually sent back to Woking to be cared for there, by order of the Guildford Justices.97 The effect of being taken up at Horsell on the West/Davis family was to separate Ann and Mary from all of their children. A 1740 order survives that commits both Ann and Mary to the Guildford House of Correction, ‘there to be kept to hard labour until the next general Quarter Sessions’ at least, because they ‘have been beggars and Vagabonds & brought up their several children to be beggars and vagabonds also’.98 Their children were dispersed to their ostensible parishes of birth, most of which were in Surrey: Cranly, Cobham, Woking, Whitley, and Horsell parishes were all to receive at least one vagrant child. The orders for their transport are all dated only days after Ann and Mary were examined; daughters Jane West and Ann West the younger were both conveyed on 19 June, suggesting the haste with which the Surrey bench wished to resolve this case. There are several interpretations of the story of Ann, Mary, and their children. The most plausible is one governed by habit: West, Davis, and their children were relatively well-known beggars in at least some of the Surrey parishes mentioned in the records – Woking and its bridewell certainly seem to feature prominently – and we can imagine a walking circuit between numerous Surrey parishes, begging and living hand-to-mouth on the casual charity of parishioners for a limited time before moving on, in effect a kind of tacit sharing across numerous communities of the burden of care of West, Davis, and their children. This vagrant cycle might be interrupted or paused by pregnancy or illness but the essential pattern of shifting about the county stayed in place, and this vagrant family stayed largely ‘off the books’ until parishioners in Woking refused to apprehend them in 1740. Why Ann West asked to be taken up is a mystery, and more information about that encounter between West, Davis, and Woking’s inhabitants would be enormously instructive, but I suspect that Ann and Mary would know enough about how vagrant families were treated to be aware that around the age of seven they could reasonably expect their children to be removed from them and apprenticed out in some fashion, effectively as soon as they were apprehended again. In other words, Ann and Mary may well have made a decision to be apprehended at a time of their choosing in order to change the essential pattern of their children’s life cycles, at a critical moment when several of them could be apprenticed out. This would help to explain why so many different Surrey parishes were listed as birthplaces for their children. Even if Ann and Mary’s account of the parishes of settlement of themselves and their children was entirely correct, it nevertheless conveniently distributed the burden of caring for twelve young vagrants across at least six parishes fairly evenly, a

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result that Surrey justices and parish inhabitants could grudgingly live with. We cannot know if this interpretation of West and Davis choosing to have their family broken up is true, but if it is then their decision fits with the contentions of Tim Hitchcock and others that vagrants could and did make creative use of vagrancy policy and local responses to their presence to push for outcomes like subsidized transport or medical care.99 It seems clear that vagrant parents would also use the poor laws to attempt to give their children brighter and more stable prospects, just as settled poor parents did.100

Conclusions Several common experiences of female vagrancy have emerged in this chapter, such as the connections between vagrancy and domestic service, the destabilizing potential of martial abandonment, and the frequently harsh reactions to pregnancy out of wedlock. But many exceptional examples of poorer and mobile women certainly also existed. The Quaker Barbara Blaugdone was one very unusual ‘masterless woman’. During the 1650s she was thrown into jail for interrupting a church service in Exeter; such public displays of religious disputation were a common tactic of early Quaker proselytizing. In a later account of her travels, Blaugdone recounted how the civil and church authorities in Exeter had disagreed over how she should be treated, and indeed whether she was a vagrant at all, and Blaugdone herself fought back against the label of ‘vagabond’: ‘the Mayor was moderate, and loath to send me to prison, but the Priest was very eager, and said I ought to be Whipt for a Vagabond. And I bid him prove where ever I askt any one for a bit of Bread’.101 But in the end, she was committed to jail and punished: the Beadle ‘whipt me till Blood ran down my back, and I never startled at a blow’. Blaugdone’s story demonstrates just how arbitrary the assignation of ‘vagabond’ could be in early modern England, she clearly was not ‘wandering’, and she rejected any suggestion that she begged as well. But Barbara’s life was profoundly unsettled: here is a woman who, after her experiences in Exeter, will soon be ‘moved by the Lord’ to sail to Ireland to preach there and who will stand on deck in the middle of a punishing Atlantic storm and pray for the souls of the ship’s crew, who only hours earlier wanted to throw her overboard.102 Masterless women have emerged from the pages of this chapter largely as a desperate group, often with terrible experiences of deprivation and exclusion acting to propel them away from home or keeping them adrift. The burdens of

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sickness and young children were much more evident in the records of female vagrants than in those about masterless men, and the assumptions clearly made about the sexuality of female vagrants were much more toxic. It was not widely regarded as a serious crime to sexually assault a female beggar, a distressingly revealing attitude towards the poorest and most marginalized in early modern society, and one reflected in a wide array of popular literatures.103 But simultaneously, we have also seen how creative and assertive female vagrants could be in their interactions with law and with settled contemporaries. In a system of punishment and removal that privileged the ratepayer, that listened closely to the opinions of elite male magistrates and officers, and that could often seem designed to unmoor vulnerable women from what safety and settlement they possessed, masterless women like Anne West, Mary Brandford, Barbara Blaugdone, and the unnamed vagrant woman (with her stone, and her wilful silence) who has been with us from the very beginning, have each managed to chart a course through exclusion, apprehension, incarceration, and often punishment, towards a modicum of sympathy and stability. This journey was fraught and often had terrible consequences: sick or injured, separated from children, incarcerated in bridewell after bridewell, subjected to the caprice of hostile parishioners intent on protecting their poor rates, these women still made shift, and some even managed to play the system in order to obtain medical care, subsidised transport, and a measure of stability, perhaps even a better future, for their children. Three hundred years later, I read their stories and am humbled still.

Conclusion: ‘But Words Will Never Hurt Me’

In the first place, it is difficult in many cases to determine, who are real Paupers, or Proper Objects of Parish Charity. It is so easy to personate Misery and feign Distress, that you are oftentimes at a Loss to know, whether a Man’s Wants be real or pretended, and whether you ought to relieve him as a Pauper, or punish him as an Impostor. –Thomas Alcock, 17521

‘But words will never hurt me.’ We know how the saying begins. There is perhaps no other proverb so often disproven by our collective experience.2 Words are each themselves little worlds; language is our quintessential human gift. But they can break bones, and often as not our words carve out dark worlds indeed, places and spaces which in turn become harsh social and economic fact. ‘Vagrancy’ is one such term, a word and a world either at the bottom of our social and economic hierarchies or outside of them altogether. This book has charted the historical experience of vagrancy, and its cultural construction in a range of sources, through 100 years of tumultuous history in England. It has argued that by reading a range of literary and popular sources, we can access a broad spectrum of contemporary attitudes and perceptions of vagrancy and describe its many cultural permutations: jovial tinkers, dashing highwaymen, sick widows, and callous, deceptive rogues. Assumptions of idleness, an absence of moral worth, and forms of marginalized industry and personal ingenuity characterize the cultural construction of the vagabond in England between 1650 and 1750 and arguably over a period much longer than that. These archetypes of the vagabond were enshrined in English culture: they informed contemporary law-making; they became the stock-in-trade of entire genres of literature; their representatives jested, disobeyed, and wandered onstage, off-cue; they underwrote massive projects for national ‘improvement’, imperial expansion, and social reform; and they justified sustained punitive and penal responses to vagrancy for hundreds of years. Vagrancy was not always described as a crime

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of the thoroughly undeserving, but despite some surprising ambiguities found in both popular and elite literature, the early modern assumption of vagrant idleness was overwhelming. But I have also argued that distinctions between the poor migrant and undeserving vagrant could, and did, collapse. I described how real people could be proscriptively categorized by constables and JPs, but also how terms such as ‘poore passinger’ and ‘poore man with a pass’ could be used to conceal the complex identities and circumstances of all manner of impoverished or marginalized migrants. I have charted the historical experience of vagrancy as an economic, social, and cultural experience of displacement, as a label that was broadly and often misleadingly applied to specific and socially threatening groups and also as a ‘problem’ that contemporaries insistently attempted to either ameliorate or to solve. New forms of identification such as the newspaper disseminated images and descriptions of vagrancy to an increasingly literate, and separate, ‘middle class’. The increasing public purchase of ‘political economy’ and of the rhetoric of improvement, the rise of the workhouse, the charity school, the private vagrant contractor, and of penal transportation, each had powerful effects on real homeless people. I recovered some ‘vagrant voices’ and attempted to weave the personal stories of those deemed vagrant between 1650 and 1750 into the larger social history of England – a history they have often been excluded from or marginalized in. I linked the history of vagrancy in the century after 1650 to emerging imperial projects, to the increasing ‘privatization’ of charity and of social policy, and to enduring social and cultural anxieties.3 These two worlds of literary construction and social experience seem artificially divorced from each other because this is how we so often choose to study them. But I believe that literature and lived experience should never be separated too absolutely. In Thomas Harman’s descriptions of vagabonds, or in Defoe’s biography of the rogue Moll Flanders, art could imitate, and re-present, life. In the language of vagrancy laws, and in the incarceration, transportation, and punishment of vagrants, life imitated art. The historical experience of vagrancy bears a unique relationship to its own cultural construction: it is not inconceivable, indeed it was probably very common, to find unlicensed petty chapmen and -women travelling the roads of England, hawking ballads about rogues, beggars, and ‘lewd livers’.4 Like Edward Price, the fire-eater, or the ‘Pedlar opening of his Packe’, vagrants carried their own stories with them. Important changes characterize the social and cultural history of the vagabond between 1650 and 1750, but enduring continuities also remain. In

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popular literature, the vagabond retains ambiguity, profound comic potential, and complex representational capability: tinkers, beggars, and doxy dells were represented as sexually powerful, cunning, humorously subversive, and poor. The experience of vagrancy was assuredly influential on these representations: whipping remained a common punishment in rogue ballads, death by exposure and ill-health characterized the stories of many characters, and the effects of poverty were assiduously, if not always accurately, documented. It bears repeating that such representations were not artificially divorced from the real experiences from which they emerged. Vagrancy remained a socially threatening crime of status and vagrants themselves seemed like incarnations of disorder, the most visible tears in the fabric of a threadbare social tapestry, and while early modern rogue ballads and rogue literature often mocked the threat of vagrancy, in so doing those texts also reliably reproduced it. We might also characterize the operation and experience of local justice and casual relief as another broad element of continuity across the century. The rural experience of being vagrant changed in only a few ways between the Act of Settlement and the reform acts of the early nineteenth century. The symbols of ‘passinger’ and vagrant pass persisted. Constables were slowly replaced by private contractors in our mental image of the ‘cripple cart’ and its minder slowly trundling across county lines, but these men looked no different from each other (and were often in fact the same people in the first instance), and while the whip might have fallen into disuse ‘out-of-doors’, increasingly insistent carceral regimes and ‘improving’ programmes of enforced labour carried punishment inside, where fewer souls could ‘view’ it.5 The urge to ‘re-settle’ the unsettled vagrant persisted, and the conveyance of thousands of poor and mobile men and women back to any parishes they named as their own remained a consistent feature of the age. The assumption of idleness also remained the central characteristic of the representation of vagrancy throughout the early modern period and beyond, and so it remains today. But changes in the cultural construction and lived experiences of vagrants between 1650 and 1750 should not be discounted. In literature, the rogue came to inhabit a new role characterized by problematic, often satirical, success. Narratives of mobility, both social and physical, became personalized and adopted individual, novel, voices, both masculine and feminine. The stark social inversions of an ‘Elizabethan Underworld’ gave way to the smooth, ironic social mimicry of ‘Newgate pastorals’, Defoe’s or Richardson’s verisimilitude, and Hogarth’s evocative prints. Bewigged, brandishing wit, occasionally pistols, and educated diction, eighteenth-century rogues imitated gentlemen while

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simultaneously demonstrating how all gentlemen were already rogues. Success in the problematic and uncertain new culture of the early eighteenth century demanded self-invention and deception, chameleon exercises with which the vagabond was assuredly familiar. The lived experience of vagrancy also changed in character. ‘Improving’ carceral and penal regimes increasingly redeemed or corrected vagrants in transatlantic spaces far from England’s shores or in enclosed places – out in colonies, inside the workhouse, or both. Vagrancy also emerged as a problem which urgently demanded quantification, and the rhetorical justifications of political economy began to describe the vagrant as an undeveloped national asset, part of a larger shift towards an understanding of national populations as a resource to be tapped by the state. New forms of identification such as the stock conveyance order (Justices needed only to fill in the blanks by hand) and the newspaper advertisement emerged. Alongside older documents such as the vagrant pass, these forms of identification all relied on assumptions of mendacity – of deception through movement – in order to justify their material existence. Only unmasked, only settled, could the rogue be improved, re-formed, and redeemed. Much more remains to be done, and the coverage of the full history of vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750 is by no means complete. The doubly hidden story of female vagrancy and subsistence migration requires more explication and more scholarly attention than what is present in this volume, particularly coverage beyond England’s shores. Historians also continue to presume that the numerical majority of vagrants in many countries tended to be male; but as I have suggested that between 1650 and 1750 such an assumption about England was likely inaccurate, and even if it is not, the assumption disguises a uniquely gendered experience of vagrancy and subsistence mobility that my fourth chapter has attempted to unpack. War, impressment, demographic stagnation, the rise of the female domestic servant, industrial boom and depression, and increasing dislocation caused by the breakdown of promissory marriage traditions may all have contributed to a period where masterless women merit more historical attention than masterless men.6 It is no accident that our archetypal eighteenthcentury rogue is Moll Flanders, that most famous of pícaras with that most precarious and mobile of lives. A larger, transatlantic, history of vagrancy remains to be told.7 The physical removal of vagrants from English soil and their transportation and indenture in the colonies became an exceptionally common penal practice as the eighteenth century progressed, but even the earlier foundations and simple survival of

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colonies such as Jamestown were predicated on the forced transportation of vagrants, particularly children.8 Indentured service was also a popular reprieve from capital punishment from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The history of vagrancy can and should be concretely linked to the wider history of empire, particularly to the ‘first’ English empire in the Atlantic and to the establishment of the penal colony of Australia in the later eighteenth century. For instance, some scattered evidence seemingly exists of early efforts to transport vagrants to India, of all places, in the eighteenth century. An undated document in the British Library East India Company holdings contains a list of ‘Vagabonds to be sent on board the Pigot – Captain Richardson’ which was bound with company records from the second half of the eighteenth century.9 This document lists seven men who were transported out of the country by what appears to be an East Indiaman vessel, accompanied by ‘French and Sepoys’, and probably bound for Bombay (modern-day Mumbai). Two names on the list, Robert Holliday and John Chaplin, had the word ‘constable’ written beside them, perhaps indicating that parishes close to East India Company ports in England had found yet another way to rid themselves of unwanted, mobile poor. My explorations into the cultural and social history of vagrancy have also highlighted a number of powerful and startlingly resilient ideas which I am keen to interrogate in future work. For instance, I think the affect of poverty remains largely underexplored; I envision a study of the relationship between social distance and the emotions in the early modern past, once again with a principal focus on those most marginalized by early modern society. I am also interested in the connections between the histories of vagrants and other profoundly marginalized people, not just in a domestic sense but in the wider global history of ostracism. Global and Atlantic histories emphasize connections, networks, and movement, and when reading about the destructive experiences of social exclusion and inequality which dominated early America and which were encouraged in the far reaches of empire, I am always struck by the similarities between domestic responses to vagrancy and imperial responses to other groups considered ‘undeserving’. A cultural commonality seems to persist across time and space: societies define themselves by adopting the characteristics of those that ‘deserve’ to be members, and by excluding the unworthy, societies construct the excluded as the social obverse of all acceptability. Does homelessness still exist because we still need the vagrant to exist? Because we still define ourselves principally by what we are not and what we do not wish to be? It seems to me as if the social exclusions of our post-modernity are remarkably similar to those of the ancient and early modern worlds.

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‘The beggar-king of Ithaca’ I would like to finish my discussion of vagrancy by expanding our range of vision farther afield, to concepts and representations of vagrancy that seem timeless, and which still resonate strongly even today.10 In Homer’s Odyssey, the tired hero Odysseus finally arrives on his home island of Ithaca after a decade of wandering, lost after the siege of Troy. Odysseus faced many challenges to reclaim his kingdom and to reunite with his wife Penelope, but perhaps one of the strangest occurs in Book 18, when the hero is confronted by a fellow wanderer and mendicant, who is known by the name of Irus.11 Great of stomach, but not sound of limb, his very appearance a deception, the ‘beggar-king’ confronts Odysseus on his doorstep: Now along came this tramp, this public nuisance who used to scrounge a living round the streets of Ithaca – Notorious for his belly, a ravenous, bottomless pit

Irus challenges Odysseus and insults him, and the hero’s first reply identifies both men as fellow travellers: ‘You’re another vagrant, just like me, I’d say,/and it lies with the gods to make us rich or poor.’12 However, it quickly becomes clear that Odysseus and Irus are archetypal opposites – when Odysseus accedes and stands to box with the beggar, ‘Athena stood beside him’, and when he wins, Odysseus tosses Irus out of the hall that was once his own, to cheers from the assembled Greek nobility: ‘“You’ve knocked him out of action, that insatiable tramp –”, “That parasite on the land!”’ ‘You’re another vagrant, just like me, I’d say.’ These hardly seem like the words of a Greek hero, a legend of the Trojan War and the finest general of Agamemnon’s armies. Yet Odysseus is the only Greek hero who can identify with the terrible dislocations of being well and truly lost, of wandering for years, and of losing home, son, wife, reputation, and worldly power. But even here his pathos only serves to juxtapose the nobility he carries within him against the crass ‘professional’ beggary, and essential laziness, of Irus. By now these tropes of idleness, undeservingness, and deception must surely seem familiar. We find them echoed everywhere that we find vagrancy. Why is it that the figure of the vagrant most fully embodies these stereotypes throughout human history? The cultural construction of vagrancy has always rested on assumptions of idleness and deception, across time and space. Vagrants never truly were

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what they appeared to be: deception and mistrust always seemed central to their cultural construction. Laws and literature in Western societies from Ancient Hellas to the modern United Kingdom have described the beggar as fundamentally mendacious and intrinsically idle. Traditions of sacred mendicancy and monasticism endure in India and in other Near-Eastern countries, but the effects of colonialism and empire have elsewhere almost eradicated the vestiges of sacred mobility. In modern Japan, studies of homeless people describe them as profoundly problematized, as people who ‘clearly disrupt what it is to be Japanese’. Homeless men and a few women are removed monthly, willingly it seems, from Ueno national park when the Imperial family visits, but they then always return.13 In communist China after the end of civil war, Chinese vagrants were rounded up and forcefully ‘re-educated’ out of existence. In Tsarist Russia, vagrant Brodiagi were exiled to Siberia.14 Levels of vagrancy and poverty and their close relationship to widespread famine in colonial India were ‘unimaginable’ to the colonial sensibilities of the British, but they were reluctant to interfere with ‘traditional’ almsgiving and social practice.15 In nineteenth-century America, ‘tramping’ became associated with transgressive sexuality, transient male workers, and with the International Workers of the World or ‘wobblies’.16 Perhaps the vagrant, just like the settled poor, will always be with us.17 In Cast Out, Paul Ocobock concluded his overview of vagrancy across many historical times and spaces by noting that ‘as long as there is, in some, a desperate need to escape poverty and willingness to wander, and, in others, a desire for safety and orderliness, there will be vagrancy laws and vagrants to prosecute’.18 I would expand this argument: as long as societies valorize social stasis and stability and glorify inequality and its results, there will be vagrants, mobile paupers, ‘rogues’, and many other marginalized figures who will absorb the troubling characteristics, and experience the worst consequences, of our dysfunctional preoccupations. As long as we feel socially motivated to exclude, we will easily find those to cast out. Despite variations in experience and in cultural representation, vagrancy has been a consistent ‘problem’ for human societies throughout historical time, since Odysseus confronted Irus at Ithaca and well before that. We often seem unable to come to grips with poverty and mobility when they present themselves to us, and so instead we bury the challenges of vagrancy in allegorical construction, in fantasies of underworlds, in subversive roguish fraternities. Vagrants, rogues, and other ‘undesirables’ still have much to tell us about ourselves and our histories. Vagrancy should bear a special significance for

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social historians: the silences and marginalization which the vagrant represents and which real people, still ‘cursed’ to wander endlessly, have experienced and continue to experience; these silences are precisely what we push back against when we speak out, recover their voices and experiences, and when we tell their stories.

Notes Introduction 1

The record of Thomas Wright’s Information and the subsequent examination of the vagrant women are held in the Quarter Sessions papers at the Centre for Kentish Studies (KHL): Q/SB/22, f. 129, 16 June 1691. 2 I have added three punctuation marks to this quote. 3 WCRO, Q/SB/22, f. 129. 4 Jean Khalfa, introducing History of Madness, though this phrase is Derridian. See: Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): p. xxiii. 5 CKS, ‘The examination of a vagrant, unnamed’, Q/SB/22, f. 129, 16 June 1691. 6 Anon, The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, the Noted Devonshire Stroller and Dog-Stealer; as Related by Himself,… Containing, a Great Variety of Remarkable Transactions in a Vagrant Course of Life (London: printed for the Farleys, for Joseph Drew, 1745): p. 47; Huntingon Library rare books edition, 143653; also see: Anon, A Brief Relation of the Adventures of Mr. Bamfyeld Moore Carew, for More Than Forty Years Past the King of the Beggers (London, 1800); and, Anon, An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew,… Commonly Known Throughout the West of England, by the Title of King of the Beggars… (London, 1745). A second edition was revised by the publisher in 1749 and contains the Delaware river story. 7 C.H. Wilkinson (ed.), The King of the Beggars: Bampfylde-Moore Carew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931): p. vii. 8 Tim Hitchcock, ‘“All Besides the Rail, Rang’d Beggars Lie”: Trivia and the Public Poverty of Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay’s Trivia (1716) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): p. 80. 9 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman Higher Education, 1983): p. 74. 10 Paul Slack, ‘Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1664’, The Economic History Review, 27:3 (August 1974): p. 360. 11 The social history of poverty and vagrancy has a long pedigree; see early historiographical staples such as: Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the 18th Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History (New York: Routledge and

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21

22

23

Notes Kegan Paul ltd, Reprinted 1969); C.J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy, and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887); Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act; Volume 7: English Poor Law History: Part 1. The Old Poor Law (9 volumes, London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1906); J.F. Pound, ‘Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England’, Past & Present, 71 (1976): pp. 126–134; and Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (Harlow : Longman, 1986). A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985): p. xxi. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., quoting John Gore in 1626, p. 6. Ibid., pp. 171–172. Ibid. Peter Clark and David Souden (eds.), Migration and Society Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987): p. 36. Brodie Waddell, ‘The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702’, English Historical Review, 130:541 (April 2015): pp. 319–322. There is a considerable historiography of migration in this period to back up this contention; see: Steven King, ‘Migrants on the Margin? Mobility, Integration and Occupations in the West Riding, 1650–1820’, Journal of Historical Geography, 23:3 (1997): pp. 284–303; James Stephen Taylor, Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution: Sojourners’ Narratives (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science & Scholarship, 1989); Roger Anthony Edward Wells, ‘Migration, the Law and Parochial Policy in Eighteenth and Early NineteenthCentury Southern England’, Southern History, 15 (1993): pp. 86–139; Ian D. Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Joan Kent, ‘Population Mobility and Alms: Poor Migrants in the Midlands during the Early Seventeenth Century’, Local Population Studies, 27 (Autumn 1981): pp. 35–51. See: Nicholas Rogers, ‘Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration’, Histoire sociale/Social History, 24 (1991): pp. 127–147; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Nicholas C. Rogers and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds.), Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World: Studies in Slave and Post-slave Societies and Cultures (London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co Ltd., 1995): pp. 102–113. See in particular the work of Audrey Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law (London: Ashgate, 2012), and her article ‘The Adams’ Father and Son, Vagrant Contractors to Middlesex 1757–94’, Transactions of the London and

Notes

24 25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

33

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Middlesex Archaeological Society, 57 (2007): pp. 83–91. Also see: ‘Vagrancy in Later Eighteenth-Century Westmorland: A Social Profile’, Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, 89 (1989): pp. 249–262. Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Hambledon and London, 2004): p. xvi. See: Hitchcock, ‘All Besides the Rail, Rang’d Beggars Lie’, p. 77. Also see: Tim Hitchcock, ‘Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 44:3 (2005): pp. 478–498. See: Alannah Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723-82: Parish, Charity and Credit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Indicative texts on migration and law are: Taylor, Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution; Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain; K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity, and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). The commons or ‘lower sort’ were routinely characterized as a monstrous hydra across the Atlantic world in this period; see: Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and a Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). This is the summary of Michael Dalton’s list from the reprinted version of the Countrey Justice. See: Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice: Containing the Practice of the Justices of the Peace Out of Their Sessions (London: William Rawlins and Samuel Roycroft, 1677): pp. 208–209. The statutes most in use to classify vagrants throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were: 21 Jac. c.28 and 39 Eliz. c.4, though these laws were periodically subject to some modification, particularly after the 1662 Act of Settlement and after the 1700 Vagrant Costs Removal Act. See: Tim Hitchcock, ‘Vagrant Lives’, in Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): p. 128. The legislation Hitchcock refers to is the 1744 Vagrancy Act. See: Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds.), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The three Elizabethan statutes are: 14 Eliz. c.5 in 1572, 39 Eliz. c.4 in 1597, 43 Eliz. c.2 in 1601, 1 Jac. c.77 in 1604. The Act of Settlement is 14 Car. II c.12, passed in 1662. Audrey Eccles appended a very useful list of all relevant vagrancy statutes to the end of her book; see: Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law, pp. 219–222. 11 & 12 William III c.18: ‘An Act for the more effectual punishment of vagrants, and sending them where by law they ought to be sent’.

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34 See: Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. 35 Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000): pp. 163–164. 36 Eccles, ‘The Adams’ Father and Son, Vagrant Contractors to Middlesex 1757–94’. 37 See the recent study of Bridewell by Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 38 Elna Green, This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740– 1790 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003): p. 14. 39 Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 31–32. 40 The Examination of Mary Knowles, CKS: Q/SB/32, f. 364. 41 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2013): p. xxv. For a summary of the general climate conditions for this period, consult pp. 17–20 as well. 42 See Peter Bowden’s price variation table series in the Appendices to Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume 5.2 1640–1750: Agrarian Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), particularly p. 856 for the summative table. 43 ‘Sad News from Salisbury,/And other Parts of the West of ENGLAND./Being an Account of a most sad and Dreadful Frost and Snow, which hapned on the 23d. of December, 1684’ (London: P. Brooksby, 1685). EBBA ID: 31877. 44 Waddell, ‘The Politics of Economic Distress’, pp. 319–322. 45 Much more on this in my final chapter, ‘Masterless Women’; for the gender balance (predominantly male) in the preceding period; see: Beier, Masterless Men, p. 216, Table III: ‘Family Structures among vagrants, 1516–1644.’ 46 Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001): pp. 15–16. 47 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001): p. 16. 48 Ibid. 49 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012): p. 17. 50 This, at least, is the conclusion of Linda Woodbridge on the etymology of the term ‘rogue’; see: Vagrancy, pp. 41–42, and p. 76, n. 6; the Oxford English Dictionary also suggests that the term might have migrated from the French adjective ‘rogue’ meaning ‘arrogant’, and links the term to ‘roge’, seen as early as 1489 in the work of William Caxton: ‘rogue, n. and adj.’ The Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press: Accessed June 2014). 51 14 Eliz. 5 c.5 is the statute in question, which made vagrancy a felony on the third offence, which used the term ‘rogue’ in English law for the first time; see: ‘The Journal of the House of Commons: May 1572’, in The Journals of All the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), British History Online, pp. 205–221.

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52 This graph was created using the EEBO N-gram browser designed by Anupram Basu and made possible by the Early Modern Print text mining project, running out of the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University, St. Louis. Spellings are set to ‘original’, and the ngramSize is ‘unigram’. © Creative Commons. 53 Although I have found it was used as an adjective in early modern pamphlets and sermons of varying stripes, see: J. Ovington, Christian Chastity; or, a Caveat against Vagrant Lust: A Sermon Preach’d at LEE in Kent, May 18th 1712 (London: John Morphew, 1712). 54 See Paul Ocobock’s introduction in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008): pp. 2–9. 55 See both the OED entry: ‘vagrant, n. and adj.’, OED Online. Accessed June 2012. Oxford University Press; and the entry in the Middle English Dictionary: ‘vagraunt, n.’ The Middle English Dictionary Online. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec. 56 See ‘vagabond, adj. and n.’, OED Online. Accessed June 2012. Oxford University Press; ‘vagrant’, and ‘vagabond’ adj. and n., in Webster’s Online Dictionary, accessed June 2012, which also contains over sixty-five synonyms and translations of the terms into forty languages. 57 Anon, The Vagabond-Tories: To a Well Known Tune (London: 1715). A scurrilous verse printed during the final years of the ‘rage of party’ and the same year as the first Jacobite rebellion, in which some Tories were implicated. 58 Richard Head, The English Rogue Described, in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant. Being a Compleat Discovery of the Most Eminent Cheats of Both Sexes (London: Printed for Francis Kirkman, 1668): p. 37. 59 Examples include: Patrick Collinson, ‘The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth Century English Culture’, in P. Collinson (ed.), From Cranmer to Sancroft (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Anne Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1989); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Bernard Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Age of Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Mayall (ed.), Gypsies: The Forming of Identities and Official Reponses (London: Frank Cass, 1992). 60 Tim Hitchcock, ‘The Streets: Literary Beggars and the Realities of Eighteenth Century London’, in Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005): p. 80.

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61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., p. 84. 63 The phrase belongs in the first instance to Joanna Brooks, Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): p. 3. 64 See: Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006): p. 4. 65 Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): p. 91. 66 Ibid., p. 2. 67 Ibid., p. 79. 68 Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, p. 15. 69 Ibid., p. 53. 70 Ibid., p. 77. 71 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, p. 5. 72 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection House (London: Printed for T. Payne, 1787); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon: Vintage Books, 1977). 73 Other taxonomies certainly exist; see the critical introduction to Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (eds.), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004): pp. 12–13. 74 Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004): p. 379. 75 Steve Hindle, ‘Technologies of Identification under the Old Poor Law’, Local Historian, 36:4 (2006): pp. 220–236. 76 Alluding to E.P. Thompson’s seminal formulation, see: The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968): p. 12. Thompson’s larger project informs this book in substantive ways; see additional work such as: ‘EighteenthCentury English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, Social History, 3:2 (1978): pp. 133–165; Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971): pp. 76–136; ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social History, 7:4 (1974): pp. 382–405.

Chapter 1 1

The British Library: (BL) 21.h.5.(18.) By the Mayor… Many Loose and Vagrant Persons Harbouring in Obscure Places within This City and Liberties Thereof… (London: Printed by James Flesher, printer to the Honourable City of London, 1657).

Notes 2 3 4

5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15

163

Ibid. Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 22. The early eighteenth century also witnessed several sustained campaigns and petitions against ballads and the pedlars and hawkers thereof. We have some evidence of these petitions from newspaper reports; see the order printed in the Daily Courant, 16 May 1715 (Issue 4230, London): p. 1. The London Gazette, 17–21 October 1672 (Issue 722, London), accessed online: The Burney Collection. There is a massive literature on the development of public readership and the public sphere in later seventeenth-century England. For an overview, see: Brian Cowan, ‘Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post-Namierite to the Post-Habermasian’, Parliamentary History, 28:1 (2009): pp. 166–178; also see: Anthony Pollock, Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere 1690–1755 (New York: Longman, 2009) and Mark Knights, ‘How Rational was the Later Stuart Public Sphere?’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). See: Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). On Petty, see: Harold Love, ‘Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration “Leonine”’, The Seventeenth Century, 22:2 (Autumn 2007): pp. 381–394. Josiah Woodward, The Great Charity of Instructing Poor Children. A Sermon Preached at St. Botolph Aldgate; Upon Lord’s Day, Mar. 24, 1700, On the Occasion of a Charity-School Newly Erected in that Parish (London: K. Astwood, 1700): p. 14. Some sermons were even explicitly preached as defences; see: Thomas Troughear, The Best Way of Making Our Charity Truly Beneficial to the Poor. Or the Excellency of Work-houses in Country Parishes: To Prevent the Evil Effects of Idleness (London: J. Downing, 1729). Woodward, The Great Charity of Instructing Poor Children, p. 15. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978): p. 5. Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): p. 9. See: Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Banishment in the Early Atlantic World: Convicts, Rebels, and Slaves (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Introducing the recent edition of Foucault’s History of Madness, Jean Khalfa described it thus: the mad, vagrants, prostitutes, the unemployed, all: ‘were considered as having freely chosen the path of mistake’. See: Foucault, History of Madness, p. xv. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): p. 9.

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16 Rice Bush’s Poor Mans Friend begins with a short abridgement of this exact line of thinking; see: Rice Bush, The Poor Mans Friend, or a Narrative of What Progresse Many Worthy Citizens of London Have Made in That Godly Work of Providing for the Poor (London: Thomas Underhill, 1650). 17 Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, p. 140. 18 Sarah Jordan, The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (London: Bucknell University Press, 2003): p. 17. 19 Beier, Masterless Men, p. 4. 20 It seems Beier’s later work suggests this. See: A.L. Beier, ‘“A New Serfdom”: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350-1800’, in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008): pp. 35–63. 21 The saying is part of Paul’s epistle to the Thessalonians; see the Bible: II Thessalonians 3:10. John Bellers and Thomas Firmin placed the quote on the front pages of their improving pamphlets, and Josiah Woodward’s sermons mention it frequently. 22 William Pryor, The Outcries of the Poor, Oppressed, and Imprisoned; or, a Safe Way to Free the Poor of This City and the Whole Nation of England from Begging and Starving (London: Francis Smith, 1659): p. 1. 23 Daniel Defoe, Give Alms No Charity and Employing the Poor, A Grievance to the Nation, Being an Essay upon This Great Question (London, 1704): p. 7. 24 Sir Mathew Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (London: William Shrowsbery, 1683). 25 Hale, A Discourse, p. 4. 26 Ibid., p. 5. 27 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, p. 254. 28 Thomas Firmin, Some Proposals for Imploying the Poor, Especially in and about the City of London, and for the Prevention of Begging, a Practice Dishonorable to the Nation, and to the Christian Religion (London: Brabazon Aylmer, 1678): p. 5. 29 Richard Hakluyt’s terms; see: Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labour, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): pp. 21–23. 30 Two overviews of England’s economic transformation, integration, and specialization can be found in E.A. Wrigley’s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Chapters 7 and 8; and in Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): pp. 229–245. 31 Quotations in this paragraph are from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): pp. 1–3. 32 Hindle, The State and Social Change, p. 16.

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165

33 For the definitive account of settlement law and its effects on the poor, see: Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor; for very early examples of settlement exclusion, see: Marjorie McIntosh, Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547–1600 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2013): p. 101. Snell and Landau debated the operation of the law in the pages on Continuity and Change in the early 1990s; see: Norma Landau, ‘The Laws of Settlement and the Surveillance of Immigration in Eighteenth-Century Kent’, Continuity and Change, 3 (1988): pp. 391–420; ‘The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England’, Historical Journal, 33:3 (1990): pp. 541–571; and ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context of the Laws of Settlement’, Continuity and Change, 6:3 (1991): pp. 417–439; K.D.M. Snell, ‘Pauper Settlement and the Right to Poor Relief in England and Wales’, Continuity and Change, 6:3 (1991): pp. 375–415; and ‘Settlement, Poor Law and the Rural Historian: New Approaches and Opportunities’, Rural History, 3:2 (1992): pp. 145–172. 34 Tomlins, Freedom Bound, p. 5. 35 William and Mary, A Proclamation, Anent the BEGGERS (Edinburgh: Printed by the Heir of Andrew Anderson, Printer to their most excellent Majesties, Anno DOM, 1692); Huntington Library Rare Books: 180298. 36 Charles II, By the King. A Proclamation, for the Due Observation of Certain Statutes Made for the Suppressing of Rogues, Vagabonds, Beggers, and Other Idle Disorderly Persons, and for the Reliefe of the Poore (London, 1661); Huntington Library Rare Books: 435743. 37 James II, By the King. A Proclamation Inhibiting All Persons after the Four and Twentieth Day of June Next to Use the Trade of Pedlar or Petty Chapman, Unless They be Licensed According to a Course Lately Taken by Us in That Behalf (London, 1686), Huntington Library Rare Books: 142939. 38 William and Mary, A Proclamation. 39 My thanks to Benjamin Sacks for this reference: William Blathwyt, Committee for Trade and Plantations, ‘Report concerning the 300 malefactors [to be transported to St Kitts]’, 11 June 1684, Huntington Library Manuscripts HM 32268, West Indies Box L4-J2. 40 See: Cynthia Herrup, ‘Punishing Pardon: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Penal Transportation’, in Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths (eds.), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): pp. 121–137. 41 See: ‘Records of Individuals ordered to be sent to Virginia, ca. 1618–37 from Bridewell Royal Hospital’. Library of Virginia, Accession 26237. 42 James I, By the King. A Proclamation for the Due and Speedy Execution of the Statute against Rogues, Vagabonds, Idle, and Dissolute Persons (London: Robert Barker, 17 September 1603), held at: The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC: STC 8333 sheet 1 and 2. 43 Herrup, ‘Punishing Pardon’, p. 130.

166

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44 Records start in 1674. This was a simple verdict statistic collated from an Old Bailey Online search; see: www.oldbaileyonline.org; search parameters were: January 1674 to December The OBO’s records start in 1674. All verdicts, punishment of transportation. 45 The 1717 law is: 4 Geo. I, cap. XI, Statutes of the Realm, British History Online. 46 ‘May 1746, Trial of William Hoyles’, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Ref: t17460515-9. 47 See the Cheshire Quarter Sessions Order Books, and the presentments and Indictments: CRO QJB 3/1, ff. 15 and QJB 3/5; and G.W. Place, ‘The Repatriation of Irish Vagrants from Cheshire, 1750-1815’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, 68 (1986): pp. 125–141. 48 The most relevant article remains: Nicholas Rogers, ‘Vagrancy, Impressment, and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 15:2 (1994): pp. 102–113. Also see: Peter King, ‘“Press Gangs Are Better Magistrates Than the Middlesex Justices”: Young Offenders, Press Gangs, and Prosecution Strategies in Eighteenth and EarlyNineteenth Century England’, in Norma Landau (ed.), Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): pp. 97–116; and Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007). 49 John Locke, ‘An Essay on the Poor Law (1697)’, in Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): pp. 185–186. 50 Ibid., p. 185. 51 Investigated in more detail below; see the petty session notebook of Wingham: Kent History and Library Centre (KHL): PS/W1a, and the notebook of Paul D’Aranda, JP of Sevenoaks: PS/SE/1. 52 See the work of Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkley : University of California Press, 1984). Landau has also commented on the development of the penal law and its relationship to summary conviction, but not to vagrant removal; see: ‘Summary Conviction and the Development of the Penal Law’, Law and History Review, 23:1 (2005): pp. 173–190. 53 KHL PS/SE/1. 54 KHL PS/SE/1, f. 16. 55 CKS PS/SE/1, f. 39. 56 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988): p. xvii. 57 And the Petty Sessions of Kent record many interviews and orders relating to servants ‘lyving at their own hands’, and males were then impressed into military service; see: CKS PS/SE/1, f. 45, and also see the early Wingham Petty Sessions CKS PS/W1a, 1705–1715. 58 See Nicholas Rogers on impressment as a de rigueur state policy in wartime: The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and Its Opponents, pp. 3–9.

Notes 59 60 61 62

63

64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73

167

‘Petition of Warrant Officers, 6 March 1733.’ Kew: ADM 106/853/161, f. 101. Kew: ADM 106/853/161, f. 101. Kew: ‘The Petition of John Giles, May 1745’, ADM 106/1015, f. 168. Kew: ‘Response of the Two Admiralty Officers to the Commissioner of the Navy, 1745.’ ADM 106/1015, f. 167, Marginalia on the back indicates that Giles’ petition caused an internal admiralty inquiry into why he had not been paid by the two officers. See: Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Regulation, Rent-seeking, and the Glorious Revolution in the English Atlantic Economy’, The Economic History Review, 63:4 (2010): pp. 882–884. Zahedieh links William’s pursuit of war with France to colonial mercantile ambitions, and with the desire of planters and merchants in England’s Atlantic colonies to circumscribe French economic power. Siân Rees, Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders (London: Vintage, 2012): p. 21. See Chapter 1 of Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); pp. 54–63, on Cecil as Elizabethan ‘Improver’, and Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, pp. 25, and pp. 36–37, p. 79, and p. 80 for the newer uses of the term ‘improvement’ beyond simply land usage. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1988): p. 25. Richard Dunning, A Plain and Easie Method Shewing How the Office of Overseer of the Poor May Be Managed (London, 1685), in ‘the prefatory dedication’. Readers can find a much fuller account of this literature in Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, Chapter 7: ‘The Public Good’, and in Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Chapter 6: ‘The Poor as a Productive Resource’. Bush, Poor Mans Friend, pp. 2–3. Ibid., p. 10. John Egerton, undated (1650s). Proposals for dealing with the ‘multitude of the poore that daily lie in every corner of the streets’, The Huntington Library and Archives: MSS Ellesmere and Bridgewater: EL 8571. Firmin, Some Proposals. See: Robert Shoemaker, ‘Reforming the City: The Reformation of Manners Campaign in London, 1690–1738’, in Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Kleim, and Robert Shoemaker (eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): pp. 99–120; Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies’ Campaign against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690-1720’, Journal of Social History, 37:4 (2004): pp. 1017–1035; and Martin Ingram, ‘The Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996): pp. 47–88.

168 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82 83 84

85 86 87

88

89

90 91

92

Notes Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, p. 106. Ibid., p. 5. Firmin, Some Proposals, p. 9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Fredrick Engels and trans. Smauel Moore and Edward Aveling (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1971); see part I, p. 515. See: A. Ruth Fry, John Bellers 1654-1725: Quaker, Economist and Social Reformer (London: Cassell and Company, 1935). John Bellers, Proposals for Raising a College of Industry (London, 1695): p. 1. Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): p. 131. Charles Gray, Considerations on Several Proposals, Lately Made, for the Better Maintenance of the Poor (London, 1751): p. 5, Huntington Library Rare Books: 328788. Ibid., p. 3 and pp. 5–6. Egerton, undated (1650s). Proposals for dealing with the ‘multitude of the poor that daily lie in every corner of the streets’, ff. 1–2. James Creed, An Impartial Examination of a Pamphlet Intitled, Considerations on Several Proposals Lately Made for the Better Maintenance of the Poor: With Some Serious and Occasional Animadversions on This Important Subject … (London, 1752): pp. 19–20. See: Tim Hitchcock, ‘The London Vagrancy Crisis of the 1780s’, Rural History, 24:1, special issue (April 2012): pp. 59–72. Slack, The Invention of Improvement, pp. 47–48. For an edited version of his unpublished ‘observations’, see: Joan Thirsk and J.P. Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972): pp. 765–770. The following short discussion of King’s figures is indebted to two articles: G.S. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., 27 (1977): pp. 41–68; and Tom Arkell, ‘Illuminations and Distortions: Gregory King’s Scheme Calculated for the Year 1688 and the Social Structure of Later Stuart England’, The Economic History Review, 59:1 (2006): pp. 32–69. 230 flowers both great and small, apparently. King thought that his wife could purchase them at 2d. and 3 farthings each respectively. See King’s papers held at the National Archives: T64/302, 21 April 1711. See Table 4 in Arkell, ‘Illuminations and Distortions’, p. 48. Detailed calculations of the value of pauper labour can be found in John Bellers’ Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, And Immorality… (London, 1699): pp. 5–8. John Bellers, An Essay Towards the Improvement of Physick (London, 1714): p. 3.

Notes 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110

111 112 113

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The 1697 Report of the Board of Trade is held at: The National Archives (Kew), CO 389/14/127-38. Kew: CO 389/14, f. 129. Kew: CO 389/14, f. 128. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, p. 94. Alannah Tomkins, ‘Almshouse versus Workhouse: Residential Welfare in 18th-Century Oxford’, Family and Community History, 7:1 (2004): pp. 45–58; Parliament’s shift towards supporting workhouses and specific private efforts has been considered by Richard Connors: ‘Parliament and Poverty in Mid-Eighteenth Century England.’ Parliamentary History, 21:2 (2002): pp. 207–231. John Bellers, An Epistle to Friends, Concerning the Education of Children (London, 1697): p. 3. Hale’s works were not published until after his death; see: A Discourse, pp. ii and 14–15. Mary G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938): p. 71. Anon, An Account of Severall Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor (London: Printed for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1725): p. v. Anon, An Account of the Charity Schools Lately Erected in Great Britain and Ireland: With the Benefactions Thereto; and of the Methods Whereby They Were Set Up and Governed (London, 1710). Defoe, Giving Alms No Charity. The debate plays out over Issues 83, 84, and 85. See: Daniel Defoe, Review of the Affairs of France, 19–26 December 1704 (London). Gale Cengage NewsVault. E.J. Hundert (ed.), Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997): p. xv. Slack, Invention of Improvement, p. 208. Ibid., p. 210. Hundert (ed.), Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, p. xix. For a collected and edited compilation of Mandeville’s most sustained critics and their numerous objections, see: J. Martin Stafford, Private Vices, Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville (Solihull, 1997). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The Second Edition, Enlarged with Many Additions. As Also an Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools. And a Search into the Nature of Society (London, 1723): p. 291. For the full series of quotes above this reference, see: Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, p. 312. Ibid., p. 329. See the responses of Francis Hutcheson, particularly the Essay on the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728), and his 1726 letters in Stafford, Private Vices, Publick Benefits? pp. 383–407.

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114 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): p 50. 115 For the origins of the newspaper in the 1640s, see: Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 116 See: Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987): pp. 165–170. 117 Parker’s Penny Post, 14 April 1733 (Issue 1244, London): p. 3, Eighteenth Century Journals Online. 118 Fog’s Weekly Journal, 14 April 1733 (Issue 232, London): p. 1, Eighteenth Century Journals Online. 119 The Flying Post or the Post Master, 26 May 1702 (Issue 1101, London): p. 1. The Post then reprinted this classified ad as ‘news’ on 2 June. Burney Collection 120 London Gazette, 27–31 March 1701 (Issue 3692, London): p. 2, Burney Collection. 121 The London Journal, 25 August 1722 (Issue 161, London): p. 3, Burney Collection. 122 Parker’s Penny Post, 8 June 1733 (Issue 1269, London): p. 1, Eighteenth Century Journals Online. 123 Parker’s Penny Post, 19 January 1726 (Issue 113, London): p. 1, Burney Collection. 124 Issues 150 and 301 of Parker’s Penny Post, 15 April 1726 and 7 April 1727 (London), Burney Collection. 125 The London Journal, 24 April 1731 (Issue 613, London): p. 1, Eighteenth Century Journals. 126 This trend gathers strength and continues well past the end of my period; for an early example from the later eighteenth century, see: Anon, Considerations, Humbly Offered to Parliament, Relative to the Heads of a Bill for Promoting Industry, Suppressing Idleness and Begging and Saving Above One-million Sterling Yearly… (London: A. Millar, 1758). 127 For a fuller discussion of population as an index of national power, see: Paul Slack, ‘Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Economic History Review, 57 (2004): pp. 607–635; and Paul Slack, ‘Plenty of People’: Perceptions of Population in Early Modern England (Reading: University of Reading, 2011).

Chapter 2 1

The opening lines are from ‘The Cunning Northern Beggar, Who all the Bystanders doth earnestly pray, To bestow a penny upon him today’, in J.W. Ebsworth (ed.), The Roxburghe Ballads, Volume I (New York: AMS Press, 1966): p. 187. There are numerous versions available in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). EBBA ID: 30034.

Notes 2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

171

For the use of ballads to discuss religion, see: Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For marriage, see the article by James A. Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England: Some Evidence from Popular Literature’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 36 (1986): pp. 69–90. Brooks, Why We Left, p. 20. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (eds.), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): p. 2. For the various unconventional uses of ballads in the early modern period, see the introduction to Angela McShane Jones, ‘“Rime and Reason.” The Political World of the Broadside Ballad, 1640–1689’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2004). Patricia Fumerton, ‘Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32:3 (2002): p. 479. With respect to laws we obviously have direct and easy evidence of this, interiority and experience are harder to directly ‘prove’ in an historical fashion. For a more detailed assessment of ‘settled’ vs ‘unsettled’, see: Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. 1–11, ‘Mobilising the Poor’. The phrase ‘towards a Rogue Studies’ is found in Dionne and Mentz (eds.), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, p. 11. Ibid. Woodbridge, Vagrancy, p. 13. Hitchcock, ‘All Besides the Rail, Rang’d Beggars Lie’, p. 80. Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England’, p. 71. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): pp. 47, 65, 82, 87. Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008): p. 20. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Methuen, 1981): p. 15. Roger Chartier (ed.), The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989): p. 4. Robert W. Scribner, ‘Is a History of Popular Culture Possible?’ History of European Ideas, 10:2 (1989): p. 176. Ibid., p. 177. Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985): p. 198. Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994): pp. 59–60.

172 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Notes McShane Jones, ‘Rime and Reason’, p. 5. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture, p. 198. Ibid., p. 199. See: Joad Raymond, ‘Parker, Martin (fl. 1624–1647), Ballad Writer’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture, p. 203. For example, did the ballad move into the same spaces occupied by ‘old wives tales’? J.W. Ebsworth (ed.), The Roxburghe Ballads, Volume VII (New York: AMS Press, 1966): p. 51. Adam Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past & Present, 145 (November 1994): p. 48. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 25. Mark Hailwood, ‘Sociability, Work and Labouring Identity in Seventeenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History, 8:1 (2011): p. 5. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, p. 37. Adam Fox has an entire article on the interrelationship between ballads and extemporized libels as well. See: Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule’. Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, p. 17. Angela McShane, ‘Ne Sutor ultra crepidam: Political Cobblers and Broadsides Ballads in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in Fumerton and Guerrini (eds.), Broadside Ballads, p. 209. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Second edition, Bloomington, 1984), p. 8. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Elizabeth Foyster, ‘A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England’, Rural History, 4:1 (1993): pp. 5–25. Foyster, ‘A Laughing Matter?’, p. 18 for ‘gender control’ quote, and see pp. 10–11. Foyster, ‘A Laughing Matter?’, p. 9. Tim Reinke-Williams, ‘Misogyny, Jest-Books and Male Youth Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, Gender & History, 21:2 (August 2009): p. 334. Both the Pepys collection and the Roxburghe are now fully accessible online via EBBA, hosted by the University of California Santa-Barbara. The EBBA has been assiduous in the development and sourcing of its collections, which now include the Roxburghe, Huntington, Euing, and National Library of Scotland ballads as well as external search capability for the Bodleian ballad collections. Many songs now have an associated voice recording, and reasonable publication date ranges are suggested to viewers. Most of the ballads discussed in this chapter are now available online through the EBBA and are associated with an ‘ID’ which points readers to a stable copy of the ballad’s facsimile, which is included in my references to them.

Notes

173

43 ‘The Cunning Northerne Begger, Who all the By-standers doth earnestly pray, To bestow a penny upon him today’ To the Tune of Tom of Bedlam (London: F. Coules, 1624–1680?); EBBA ID: 30034. 44 Ibid. 45 Martin Parker, ‘The Beggar Boy of the North: Whose linage and calling to th’ world is proclaim’d, Which is to be sung to a Tune so nam’d.’ To the Tune of Beggar Boy of the North (London: F. Grove, 1623–1661?) Roxburghe Vol. 3, pp. 323–328. EBBA ID: 30359. 46 Ibid. 47 Thomas Harman, A Caveat for Common Cursetors (London, 1565): pp. 14, 83. An edition can be found in: Gamini Salgado (ed.), Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). 48 ‘The Merry Beggars of Lincolns-Inn-Field; Or, The Beggers Art to get Money’, To the Tune of a Begging We Will Go (London: C. Dennisson, 1685–1688?); EBBA ID: 21912. 49 Richard Brome, ‘The Beggers Chorus, in the Jovial Crew.’ To the Tune of a Begging We Will Go (London: P. Brooksby, 1672–1696?); EBBA ID: 21911. 50 Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule’, p. 53. 51 ‘The Beggars Delight: As It Was Sung at the Theatre-Royal’, To the Tune of Courtiers, Courtiers Think It No Harm (London, no estimated publication date); EBBA ID: 21913. 52 ‘The Politick Begger-Man, Who Got the Love of a Pretty Maid,’ To the Tune of a Begging We Will Go (London: 1674–1676); EBBA ID: 21072. 53 Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex. Dabhoiwala locates libertine justifications and defences of seduction later in the same period, with his best examples emerging for the court of Charles II, and the early eighteenth century. While he does not discount preceding traditions of seduction, he argues that they would have been more effectively ‘policed’ in practice than the sexual practices of men and women in later periods. 54 Linda Woodbridge has examined the literary depictions of maimed or veteran soldiers in a recent edited collection; see: Linda Woodbridge, ‘The Neglected Soldier as Vagrant, Revenger, Tyrant Slayer in Early Modern England’, in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008). 55 ‘The Famous Ratketcher, with his travels into France, and of his returne to London’ To the Tune of Tom a Bedlam (London: John Trundle, 1616?); EBBA ID: 20214. 56 This ballad was popular enough that multiple copies of several versions survive. In Pepys: J.P., ‘The Trappan’d Taylor: Or, A Pretty Discovery, how a taylor was cheated, and Married to a beggar-wench’, To the Tune of the Loving Lad and Coy Lass, or, Wanton Willy (London: W. Thackeray, T. Passinger, W. Whitwood, 1678–1688?); EBBA ID: 21074, and in the Roxburghe ‘Tom the Taylor Group’, To Various Tunes, see: Roxburghe Ballads, Volume 7, pp. 466–468.

174

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57 A vast historiography exists on the subject of prostitution as subsistence. In the European and French context, the best examples come from Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Volume 1: 1500–1800 (London: Fontana, 1997); and Hufton’s The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). In early modern England, see scholars such as Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999). Also see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 58 ‘A New Delightful Ballad called, Debauchery Scared; Or, the Beggar-wench turn’d into a Devil: Together with the policy of Bumpkin’, To the Tune of Ladies of London (London: J. Bissel at the Bible and Harp, 1685–1688); EBBA ID: 21968. 59 EBBA ballad IDs: 33566, 21968, 30567. 60 Another enormously popular rogue ballad, ‘Room for a Jovial Tinker: Old Brass to Mend,’ Unknown Tune (London: F. Coles, T. Vere, &c, 1680–82); EBBA IDs: 21026, 33237, 30872. The Roxburghe version (30872) is quoted here and dates from around 1658. 61 Martin Parker, ‘A Warning to all Lewd Livers. By the example of a disobedient Child, who riotously wasted and consumed his Father’s and Mother’s goods, and also his own, among strumpets and other lewd Livers, and after died most miserably on a Dung-hill’, To the Tune of Sir Andrew Barton or Come, Follow, My Love (London: F. Grove, 1623–1661?); see: Roxburghe Volume 3 for various editions of the ballad, p. 24, EBBA IDs: 30976, 20838 (Pepys). 62 Richard Climsell, ‘The Forlorne Traveller: Whose first beginning was pleasure and joy, but his riotous spending wrought his decay’, To a Dainty New Court Tune (London: F. Coules, 1624–1680?); EBBA ID: 30350. 63 ‘The Country Travellers Advice. Being an Admonition to his Fellow-Travellers to Avoid the Sin of Drunkenness, which is the forerunner of all other evils’, To the Tune of Logan Water (London: E. Tracy, 1695); EBBA ID: 20684. 64 ‘The Bad-husband’s folly; Or, poverty made known.’ To the Tune of Come Hither, My Own Sweet Duck (London: J. Deacon, 1671–1702); EBBA IDs: 30994, 21741. 65 ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords.’ To the Tune of I am the Duke of Norfolke (London: John Wright, 1630?); EBBA IDs: 20064, 31108. 66 Warwickshire County Record Office (WRO), Nether Whitacre Constables’ Accounts 1691 to 1702, DRB 27/11, for the year 1693. 67 Kent History and Library Centre (KHL): Receipt for Jane Evans is Q/SB/32, f. 144. The tabulated receipts run from f. 131 to f. 366, with gaps. 68 Again, strong survival rate in three different ballad collections suggests immense popularity: ‘The Bedfordshire Widow; Or, The poor in distress Reliev’d’, To the Tune of Let Caesar Live Long by Tom D’Urfey (London: P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, &c, 1694); EBBA IDs: 20699, 33318, 30148.

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175

69 Many extant works in the history of medicine point to this holistic understanding; see: Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1997); and John Hinnells and Roy Porter (eds.), Religion, Health and Suffering (London: Kegan and Paul International, 1999). 70 Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Robert Jütte (eds.), Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Northern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002): p. 6. 71 Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor, p. 10. 72 Louise Hill Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine: 1550–1700 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007): p. 136. 73 See: Anne Borsay and Peter Shapely (eds.), Medicine, Charity and Mutual Aid: The Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006): pp. 91–134, for two interesting case studies of Manchester and Bristol institutions. Of course a much larger literature on London hospitals could also be cited, each institution has its own history, character, and scholars; for examples, see: Paul Chambers, Bedlam: London Hospital for the Mad (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2009), Alyssa Levine, Childcare, Health and Mortality at the London Foundling Hospital 1741-1800: ‘Left to the Mercy of the World’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 74 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). 75 Martin Parker, ‘The Maunding Soldier, or The Fruits of Warre Is Beggary’, Unknown Tune (London: F. Groue, 1623–1661?); EBBA ID: 30317. 76 ‘The Pedler Opening of his Packe, To know of Maydes what tis they Lacke’, Unknown Tune (London: E.A., 1620?); EBBA ID: 20109. ‘Ayre’ or air was one of Galen’s ‘naturals’, and bad air was to be avoided; places like bogs and battlefields were thought to be able to cause illness. See: Curth, English Almanacs, pp. 141–142. 77 Here the investigative potential is endless, but for an enormous killer whale woodcut, see: Timothy Granger, ‘A Moste true and marueilous straunge wonder, the lyke hath seldom ben seene, of. XVII. Monstrous fishes, taken in Suffolke, at Downham brydge, within a myle of Ipswiche. The.XI. daye of October. In the yeare of our Lorde God. M.D.LX.VIII,’ Unknown Tune (London: Thomas Colwell, 1568), EBBA ID: 32270. 78 Simone Chess, ‘Woodcuts: Methods and Meanings of Ballad Illustration’, in Patricia Fumerton (ed.), Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings (Arizona: ACMRS, 2012): p. 36. 79 Tom Nichols, The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-Century Beggar Imagery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007): p. 80. 80 Ibid., p. 9 for ‘essentially iconic’ which was an observation made by C.S. Pierce, and pp. 18–19 for the ubiquity, even necessity, of the beggar image.

176

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81 Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, p. xiv. 82 Nichols, The Art of Poverty, p. 56. 83 Ibid., pp. 18–20, regarding the act of visually expelling beggars from urban contexts. 84 Brome, ‘The Beggers Chorus,/In the Jovial CREW’. 85 ‘The BEGGARS Song,/Both in City and Country./Shewing the Contentedness of their Lives, the little Care they take, and how/Merrily they Live,’ To the Tune of Under the Greenwood Tree (London: UU. Thackeray and T. Passinger, 1686–88); EBBA ID: 21910. 86 ‘The braue English Jipsie.’ To the Tune of the Spanish Jipsie (London: John Trundle, 1597–1626?); EBBA ID: 30360. 87 David Hitchcock, ‘A Typology of Travellers: Migration, Justice, and Vagrancy in Warwickshire, 1670-1730’, Rural History, 23:1 (April 2012): p. 32. 88 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and Henry IV. 89 ‘Cupid’s Revenge: OR, An Account of a King who slighted all Women, at length was constrained to Marry a Beggar’, To the tune of I often for my Jenny Strove (London: P. Brooksby et al., 1675–1696?); EBBA ID: 21038. 90 Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule’, p. 48. 91 Awdeley’s Spital-house can be found reprinted in Salgado (ed.), Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets; and see: D.B. Thomas (ed.), The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars with a Vocabulary of Their Language and a Preface by Martin Luther (London: Penguin, 1932); Richard Head, The Canting Academy, or, The Devils Cabinet Opened Wherein Is Shewn the Mysterious and Villanous Practices of That Wicked Crew (London, 1673), EEBO. 92 A.L. Beier, ‘Anti-Language or Jargon? Canting in the English Underworld in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds.), Languages and Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995): p. 90. 93 Nichols, The Art of Poverty, pp. 11–12. Here one thinks of the ‘Maunding Soldier’ ballad, or vagrant women in some ballads on prostitution. 94 We have no less than eight surviving copies of this ballad; the first dated edition appears to be the Roxburghe version: ‘A new ballad intituled: The stout cripple of Cornwall, wherein is showed his dissolute life, and deserued death’, To the Tune of Blinde Begger (London: Thomas Symcock, 1619–1629); EBBA IDs: 30300, 31790, 20003, 31791, 33203, 30262, 20243, and 31316. Different tunes are mentioned: Fortune my foe, Blind Begger. 95 ‘The Bountiful Knight of Somersetshire; Who Dayly Relieved the poor in those Parts’, To the Tune of Packington’s Pound (London: P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, &c, 1685); EBBA ID: 20681.

Notes

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Chapter 3 1

Warwickshire County Record Office (hereafter WRO), CR103, f. 99. Bromley’s judicial notebook covers the period between 10 October 1685 and 6 December 1728 and is therefore an extraordinary example of JP business and note-taking in manuscript. See also his (DNB) entry: ‘Bromley, William (bap. 1663 d. 1732)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online.

2

Recall the slew of relevant statutes from the reign of Edward III onwards: 23 Ed. c.3, and 14 Eliz. c.5 in Statues of the Realm: Volume 4 (London, 1819): p. 590.

3

Beier, Masterless Men, p. 3, and for vagrancy as a ‘protean concept’, see p. 4.

4

Beier, Masterless Men, p. 4. The 1572 Vagrancy act (14 Eliz. c.5) provides the list of trades and persons that were considered vagrant, a list repeated verbatim in the preamble to the 1662 Settlement Act (14 Car 2. c.12).

5 6

Slack, ‘Vagrants and Vagrancy’, p. 367. Souden and Clark (eds.), Migration and Society, pp. 213–252. David Souden’s chapter in the same volume does interrogate overseas migration in the form of indentured servitude.

7

For vagrants with destinations and a purpose, see: Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1984). For ‘wandering’ outside of the context of vagrancy, see McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel. Part II examines the travels of royal progresses, and of John Taylor, Celia Fiennes, and Daniel Defoe.

8

Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1697).

9

Beier, Masterless Men, p. 172, and see the ‘rump’ argument found in Souden and Clark, eds., Migration and Society, p. 36.

10 Waddell, ‘The Politics of Economic Distress’, pp. 318–351. My thanks to Brodie for allowing me to read an advance copy of his article. 11 14 Car 2. c.12. in Raithby (ed.), Statues of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628–80 (London, 1819). 12 Slack, Poverty and Policy, p. 31. 13 Philip Styles, Studies in Seventeenth Century West Midlands History (Kineton, 1978): p. 175. 14 A great deal of path-breaking work has been done in the last few decades. K.D.M. Snell’s Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660– 1900 made perhaps the most thorough use yet of settlement documentation in 1985, but additional work by scholars such as Steve Hindle, Alannah Tomkins, Peter Clark, and many others has made innovative and often exhaustive use of settlement documentation subsequently. 15 14 Car 2. c.12, Raithby (ed.), Statues of the Realm, p. 401.

178

Notes

16 Many studies (correctly) cite a well-known ‘crisis-point’ in the two decades between 1610 and 1630, alongside rapid and sustained population growth from the late Elizabethan period onwards. See: Paul Slack, ‘Vagrants and Vagrancy’, in Souden and Clark (eds.), Migration and Society, pp. 49–76. The introduction to that same volume also makes a similar contention regarding demographics. A.L. Beier’s argument in turn also revolves around the pressures of economics and population, although he is careful to note that these causes are certainly not exclusive; see Beier, Masterless Men, p. 172. Also see: J.A. Sharpe, The History of Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1999): p. 142. 17 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 171–172. 18 Souden and Clark (eds.), Migration and Society. In particular, Peter Clark’s chapter on Kentish migration, see pp. 213–252. 19 See: Peter Laslett, ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in P. Laslett (ed.), Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): pp. 50–101. 20 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men, p. 172 outlines Beier’s conclusions on demography and its impact. 21 Such local periods of dearth have been discovered and commented on most insightfully by E.A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield in The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Arnold, 1989): p. 332 and onwards. 22 See: Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England, p. 879. 23 D.W. Jones, War and the Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Blackwell: Blackwell, 1988): pp. 127–134. 24 Waddell, ‘The Politics of Economic Distress’, p. 321. 25 See the accounts for the 1690s in Warwickshire RO, DRO 111/22. Totals as high as 550 persons annually passing through were reached in this decade. 26 Souden and Clark (eds.), Migration and Society, pp. 30–31. Also see the introduction of Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain. 27 For a treatment of what this dire experience could be like, see: David Postles, ‘Surviving Lone Motherhood in Early-Modern England’, Seventeenth Century, 21:1 (2006): pp. 160–183. See also the case of Sarah Johnson discussed later in this chapter, and my final chapter, ‘Masterless Women’. 28 For the importance of discretion in the administration of local justice in England, see: Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Douglas Hay et al. (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); and Krista Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 29 See: Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Routledge, 2003): p. 62. For a more specific look at the discretion of local constables, see: Kent, ‘Population Mobility and Alms’, pp. 35–51.

Notes

179

30 Quoted by Hindle, The State and Social Change, p. 204. 31 Dalton, The Countrey Justice, p. 56. 32 For a much more complete treatment of the English constable and the tensions of the office, see: Joan Kent, ‘The English Village Constable, 1580-1642: The Nature and Dilemmas of the Office’, Journal of British Studies, 20:2 (Spring, 1981): pp. 30–31. 33 William Le Hardy (ed.), Hertfordshire County Records, Volume VI: Sessions Books 1700 to 1752 (Hertford: Hertfordshire County Council, 1931): p. 236. 34 Ruth Paley (ed.), Justice in Eighteenth Century Hackney: The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris and the Hackney Petty Sessions Book (London: London Record Society, 1991): p. 105. 35 Beier, Masterless Men, p. 171. 36 For an example of a surviving vagrant pass, see: Cheshire RO: QAV-1/1701. For several issued and signed by a JP, see: Cheshire RO, PC 16/5 ff. 126–149. 37 For examples of another parish’s constables’ accounts, see: Cheshire RO: P241/7/1 Capesthorne with Siddington. 38 For Wrightson’s key work on this subject, see: ‘Estates Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P.J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): pp. 30–52. 39 See: Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 201 (2008): pp. 51–95. 40 Similar to the ‘labelling’ found by Paul Griffiths, see the introduction to Lost Londons. 41 See: Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change, and On the Parish?, for Hindle’s ‘discretionary calculus’, see p. 379. 42 Hindle, On the Parish? p. 380. 43 See: Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. 3–12. 44 See: Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, p. 235; Henry French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Hindle, The State and Social Change. 45 See: L.R. Mcinnis, ‘Michael Dalton: The Training of the Early Modern Justice of the Peace and the Cromwellian Reforms’, in Jonathan A. Bush and Alain A. Wijffels (eds.), Learning the Law: Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England, 1150–1900 (London: Hambledon, 1999): pp. 255–272. 46 Although begging could be licensed by JPs under the 1598 poor legislation, it should be noted that begging was technically illegal in England after the 1601 reforms to the law, except in several very specific circumstances such as the awarding of formal ‘alms places’ or in case of fire or other personal disasters. 47 Dalton, The Countrey Justice, pp. 202–205. 48 Robert Gardiner, The Compleat Constable (London: Richard and Edward Atkins, 1692): pp. 30 and 43 for servant testimonial legislation.

180 49 50 51 52 53

54

55

56

57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Notes Ibid., pp. 30–31. Dalton, The Countrey Justice, p. 204. Ibid., Francis Harvey in the 1630 Assize Resolutions, as quoted in Dalton, p. 212. R.B. Pugh (ed.), The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Warwick, Volume VI (London: Victoria County History, 1951): pp. 94–97. Sir William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated; From Records, Leiger-Books, Manuscripts, Charters, Evidences, Tombes, and Armes, Volume 1 (London, 1730): pp. 312–313. Tom Arkell and Nat Alcock (eds.), Warwickshire Hearth Tax Returns: Michaelmas 1670 with Coventry Lady Day 1666 (Stratford-Upon-Avon: Dugdale Society, 2010): pp. 280–281. This estimate uses the multiplier of 4.3 suggested in Tom Arkell, ‘Multiplying Factors for Estimating Population Totals from the Hearth Tax’, Local Population Studies, 28 (1982): pp. 51–57. The following discussion is based on WRO: DRO 111/22, ‘Constables Accounts 1671-1720’, and DRO 111/23: ‘Constables Accounts 1720-1750’; QS 40/1/8 ‘Quarter Sessions Order Book 1709–1720’; QS 40/1/9 ‘1720 onwards’. WRO: DRO 111/22. The rest of a constable’s expenses were typically administrative or associated with the maintenance of roads and bridges. WRO: DRO 111/22, f. 82–84. Accounts for Year 1686–87. WRO: DRO 111/22, f. 113. Accounts for Year 1693–94. Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts’, pp. 30–52. For the phrase ‘Parish and Belonging’, and its fuller formulation, see: Snell, Parish and Belonging. WRO: DRO 111/22, f. 90. Accounts for Year 1688–89. See: J. Walter, ‘Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 203 (Supplement 4, 2009): pp. 96–127. WRO, DRO 111/22, Years 1675 and 1690. WRO: QS 40/1/7 f. 172, Easter Sessions 1704. WRO: QS 40/1/8, f. 19. Eccles, ‘The Adams’ Father and Son, Vagrant Contractors to Middlesex 1757–94’, pp. 83–91. Ibid., p. 86. WRO, QS 40/1/8, f. 153. The parish of Sutton Coldfield is very close to Birmingham, and I am guessing here based on Hunnyborne’s reduced salary and geographical location. The Will of Thomas Hunnyborne survives in the Lichfield Diocese Record Office: B/C/11, Hunnyborne, Thomas, d. 1728. WRO: QS 40/1/10, f. 571. Le Hardy (ed.), Hertfordshire County Records, Volume VII (1931): pp. 170–171.

Notes

181

74 Paul Slack also discusses this trend; see: From Reformation to Improvement, Chapter 6: ‘Bodies Politic’. 75 These injunctions were issued in Warwickshire in 1670, 1674, 1677, 1684, 1687, routinely in the 1690s, and yearly in the early eighteenth century. See: Warwick County Records (Volumes V, VII, VIII, and IX). For orders in the eighteenth century, see: WRO: QS/40/8/1 ‘to 1720’ and QS/40/9/1 for post 1720. Other counties document similar levels of concern; see: Le Hardy (ed.), Hertford County Records, Volume VI: 1658 to 1700 (1930), and Volume VII for 1700–1752. 76 Here the statistical indices of Peter J. Bowden are highly illustrative; see: Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England, p. 879. 77 WRO: QS 40/1/8 for 1709 to 1720 and QS 40/1/9 for 1720 onwards. 78 S.C. Ratcliff and H.C. Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records Volume VII (9 vols., Warwick: L. Edgar Stephens, 1937–1954): p. 4. 79 Ratcliff and Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records, Volume VII, p. 93. 80 Ibid., pp. 184–185. 81 James M. Rosenheim (ed.), The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665 (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, Volume 54: 1989): p. 26. 82 Ibid., p. 33. 83 Paley (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris, p. 86. 84 Ratcliff and Johnson (eds.), Warwick County Records, Volume VII, p. 195. 85 In ‘Vagrant Lives’, Tim Hitchcock has recently attempted to recover similar extracts of the historical experience of vagrancy in the eighteenth century, largely by mining the excellent records of London’s Old Bailey court and the testimonies found in London newsprint. See: McEwan and Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty, pp. 123–128. 86 I have tabulated Tinker’s receipts, certificates, and examinations, held at the Kent History and Library Centre in their Quarter Sessions bundles: Q/SB/32, ff. 100–370. 87 ‘The Examination of John Fraiser’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 339. 88 ‘The Examination of Elizabeth Cleever’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 342. 89 ‘The Examination of Mary Knowles’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 364. 90 See: Beier, Masterless Men, p. 23, where he discusses the changes to the dependency wage system, changes that were steadily undermining it. By my period, servants in husbandry were typically hired for less than a year to avoid giving them any legal settlement. 91 ‘The Examination of Igdelius Starling’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 347. 92 ‘The Examination of Anne Moore’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 348. 93 ‘The Examination of Richard Stephens’, CKS Q/SB/32, f. 350. 94 Beier, Masterless Men, p. 3. 95 The London Metropolitan Archives (LMA): MJ/SP/v/01/005, f. 05, the examination of William Simpkins, 1740.

182 96

97 98 99 100

101

102

103 104 105 106

107

108

109

110 111

Notes London’s debtors’ prison, Fleet Prison, had an area surrounding it called the ‘rules’ where many of the ‘prisoners’ actually lived, mainly to escape their creditors. It could also have been a clandestine marriage, as these were performed in locations similar to the Fleet ‘rules’; see: R.B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London: Continuum, 1995). LMA MJ/SP/v/01/005, f. 07. LMA MJ/SP/v/01/005, f. 13–14. LMA MJ/SP/v/01/005, f. 12. This is also explicitly a project of Tim Hitchcock’s; see: ‘Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth Century London’, pp. 478–498, and ‘Vagrant Lives’, in McEwan and Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: pp. 125–144. We can also draw comparisons with the marginal experiences of the poor who have been studied solely as subsistence migrants; see: Kent, ‘Population Mobility and Alms’, pp. 35–51; King, ‘Migrants on the Margin?’, pp. 284–303; and Steven King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700-1850: A Regional Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). In the London examinations alone, there were fifteen women and eight female children, compared to fourteen men and three male children, the date range was 1740–57, with one additional examination from 1703. Beier, Masterless Men, p. 80. Ibid., p. 82. H.C. Johnson (ed.), Warwick County Records Volume VIII: Sessions Order Book 1682–1690 (Warwick, 1954): p. 227. Le Hardy (ed.), Hertfordshire County Records, Volumes VI–VIII (1930–32), Volumes VII (1930): pp. 140, 141, 240, 492 and 516, and VIII (1931): pp. 3, 135, 171, 243, 246. Andrew McRae’s chapter on roads is highly instructive and makes use of the sources mentioned to describe early modern roads and those on them; see his section on commoners travelling the roads, in Literature and Domestic Travel, pp. 91–121. Paul Griffiths makes thorough use of Bridewell’s records up until the point where their regularity and detail ceases, and they become intermittent (the later seventeenth century, coincidentally). See the introduction to Griffiths, Lost Londons. The original record is highly sensitive to light and handling and could deteriorate rapidly. A miniature image negative was taken in 1990, which is held at the London Metropolitan Archives: ‘Short Account of Vagrant Children in the London Workhouse, 9 March 1708/09’, LMA COL/AC/17/648. Paley (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris, p. 14. Beier, Masterless Men, p. 172.

Notes

183

Chapter 4 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14

Rees, Moll, p. 6. And for a detailed study of Carleton, see: Mary Jo Kietzman, The Self-Fashioning of an Early Modern Englishwoman: Mary Carleton’s Lives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (London: 1722, reprinted as a Penguin Classic, 1989): p. 45. All cited pagination is from the Penguin Classic edition. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 326. J.P. Hunter, ‘The Novel and Social/Cultural History’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): p. 31. Rees, Moll, p. 128. Hunter, ‘The Novel and Social/Cultural History’, p. 10. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History from the 17th Century to the Present (London: Vintage Books, 1976): p. xxxi. A full account of the work on early modern female paupers is far too lengthy to list out here, and numerous crucial works are listed in other notes, but see for reference: Tanya Evans, Unfortunate Objects: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender, and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9:3 (December 1994): pp. 391–419; Paula Humfrey (ed.), The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (New York : Oxford University Press, 2005); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, MA: Yale University Press, 2003); and Laura Gowing, ‘Giving Birth at the Magistrate’s Gate: Single Mothers in the early modern City’, in Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin (eds.), Women, Identities and Communities in early modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008): pp. 137–152. That said, Audrey Eccles’ recent book contains a short chapter dedicated to roadside vagrant births; see: Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law, pp. 87–103. Beier, Masterless Men, pp. 171–175. Rogers, ‘Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London’, p. 133; and Hitchcock, Down and Out.

184

Notes

15 See: Eccles, ‘The Adams’ Father and Son, Vagrant Contractors to Middlesex 1757–94’; and ‘Vagrancy in Later Eighteenth-Century Westmorland’, pp. 249–262. 16 Eccles, ‘Adams’ Father and Son, Vagrant Contractors to Middlesex 1757–94’, p. 86. 17 See footnote 59 in Chapter 3: Hidden Histories. Source: Warwickshire RO: DRO 111/22. 18 KCRO Q/SB/32, ff. 131–366. 19 LMA MJ/SP/V/01/005/03-28, and /006/01-02. 20 The run is SHC QS2/6/1719/Xms/64–QS2/6/1749/Mic/21-22. 21 As indicative of this trend, see: Essex RO Q/SR/426/55 (1674) and Q/SR/404/93 (1665) for typical HoC calendars with mainly male inmates, with mainly female subjects of removal orders in similar periods: Q/SR/491/61 (1669) and Q/SR/427/6 (1674). 22 See: Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20:2 (April 1959): pp. 195–216. 23 Hitchcock, Down and Out, p. 117. 24 See: Peter Earle, ‘The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, The Economic History Review, 42:3 (August 1989): pp. 328–353; Tim Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Jane Whittle, ‘The House as a Place of Work in Early Modern Rural England’, Home Cultures, 8:2 (2011): pp. 133–150. For an earlier period, see: Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 25 See: Hitchcock, ‘Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth Century London’, pp. 478–498. 26 See: David Feldman, ‘Settlement and the Law in the Seventeenth Century’, in Steve King and Anne Winter (eds.), Migration, Settlement, and Belonging in Europe 1500–1930s (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013): pp. 29–53. 27 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Early Modern England, 1558–1689 (Harlow : Longman, 2000): p. 153. 28 Gowing, ‘Giving Birth at the Magistrate’s Gate’, p. 139. 29 Ibid. 30 As quoted in Jonathan Healey, The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014): p. 164. 31 As quoted in Steve Hindle, ‘Labour Discipline, Agricultural Service and the Households of the Poor in Rural England, 1640–1730’, in Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe (eds.), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): p. 181. 32 ‘Dolly and Molly/OR,/The Two Country Damosels Fortunes at London’ (London, 1672–1696) EBBA ID: 32891. 33 Hitchcock, Down and Out, pp. 92–93. 34 ‘Calendar of the Prisoners in the House of Correction in Chelmsford, 13 April 1665’, Essex RO: Q/SR 404/93.

Notes

185

35 See: Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, pp. 55–77, and contextually, see the arguments regarding the ‘third’ type of family unit in: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1977), particularly Stone’s fatally flawed discussion of sexual norms when one was ‘propertyless’, p. 641. 36 On Southwark’s location in the sexual geography of London, see: Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The Pattern of Sexual Immorality in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury London’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 37 Edward Walford, ‘Southwark: Winchester House and Barclay’s Brewery’, in Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford (ed.), Old and New London: Volume 6 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878): pp. 29–44. British History Online: http://www .british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol6/pp29-44. 38 ‘A New Delightful Ballad Called, Debauchery Scared; Or, the Beggar-Wench Turn’d into a Devil: Together with the Policy of Bumpkin...’ To the Tune of Ladies of London (London: dated 1685–1688); EBBA IDs: 21968, 33566, 30576. 39 ‘Surrey Michaelmas bridewell calendar, October–January 1734/5’, SHC QS2/6/1734/Mic/16. 40 ‘April 1742 House of Correction Calendar of Prisoners’, SHC QS2/6/1742/eas/11. 41 The wider context of prostitution and the cultural representations of it in eighteenth-century London have very recently been examined in an unpublished PhD thesis; see: Jessica Steinberg, ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Prostitution: Perceptions of Prostitutes and Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century London’ (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 2015). 42 ‘The examination of Elizabeth Cox, 53’, SHC QS2/6/1732/Eas/42. 43 ‘The examination of Elizabeth Cox, 17’, SHC QS2/6/1732/Eas/40. 44 ‘The examination of Thomas and Elizabeth Clark’, SHC QS2/6/1721/Eas/53. 45 See: Sarah Lloyd, ‘“Pleasure’s Golden Bait”: Prostitution, Poverty and the Magdalen Hospital in 18th Century London’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996): pp. 50–70. 46 Paula Humfrey (ed.), The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011): p. 12. 47 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 48 ‘The Examination of Elizabeth Colter’, SHC QS2/6/1742/Mic/11a&b. 49 ‘The examination of Mary Wood, 11 July 1749’, SHC QS2/6/1749/Mic/21-22. 50 Hubbard, City Women, p. 107. 51 Eliza Haywood, A Present for a Servant-Maid. Or, the Sure Means of Gaining Love and Esteem. Under the Following Headings… (Dublin, 1744): p. 6. Huntington Library Rare Books: 28835. 52 Ibid., p. 7. 53 Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 61. 54 Hubbard, City Women, p. 84.

186

Notes

55 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550– 1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): p. 107. 56 Ibid., pp. 107–108. 57 ‘The Two-Penny Whore; In a Dialogue Betwixt a Spend-Thrift and a Whore. Or, a Relation of a Two Penny Bargain’ (London, 1678–1688); EBBA ID: 30980. 58 John Dunton, The Night-Walker; Or, Evening Rambles in Search After Lewd Women, with the Conferences held with Them (London, 1696); October Issue. EEBO. 59 Sophie Carter, Purchasing Power Purchasing Power: Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century English Popular Print Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): p. 54, and see also: Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in EighteenthCentury British Literature and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 60 For the context of the wider campaign to reform manners after 1688, see: Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 46:2 (2007): pp. 290–319. 61 ‘Bridewell Minutes of the Court of Governors, 18 January 1695’, accessed using London Lives (www.Londonlives.org), LL ref: BBBRMG202010451. 62 Hitchcock, Down and Out, pp. 92–93. 63 Gowing, ‘Giving Birth at the Magistrate’s Gate’, p. 140. 64 Postles, ‘Surviving Lone Motherhood in Early-Modern England’, p. 161. 65 Robert Markley, ‘Behn and the Unstable Traditions of Social Comedy’, in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): p. 115. 66 Defoe, Moll Flanders, for the intriguing nickname ‘Mistress Midnight’, see p. 223. For the quote on vice and necessity, see p. 182. 67 ‘The Distressed MOTHER’ (London, 1690); EBBA ID: 20938. 68 The run of examinations used to gather this data begins at: SHC QS2/6/1719/ Xms/64, and continues to QS2/6/1749/Mic/21-22. 69 ‘The Examination of Elizabeth Jones alias Willis’, SHC QS2/6/1734/Mic/33. 70 Most recently in Snell, Parish and Belonging, see Chapter 2: ‘The culture of local xenophobia’, particularly from p. 39 onwards. 71 Patricia Crawford, Parents of Poor Children, 1580–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): p. 42. 72 ‘Stowe: August 20 1695: Order re settlement of Mary Rogers, and Draft of an order for contribution etc re settlement of John and Mary Rogers’, Huntington Library and Archives: STTM Box 6, Bucks. 1668–1699, Fos. 47–48 (Temple Manorial and Local Affairs). 73 ‘The Deposition of Mary Bitter’, 25 April 1750, LMA MJ/SP 1750/04/14. 74 ‘The Examination of Ann Bentley’, LMA MJ/SP 1750/04/023. 75 ‘The examination of Judith Mansfield’, 2 April 1669’, ERO Q/SR/419, f. 61. 76 ‘The Examination of Diana Harris’, SHC QS2/6/1748/Mid/69.

Notes 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103

187

Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law, p. 90. The run of examinations consulted: LMA MJ/SP/V/01/005/02 to /006/04. ‘The examination of Mary Lynn’, LMA MJ/SP/V/01/005/08. ‘The examination of Mary Tilly’, SHC QS2/6/1742/Eas/56a-b. ‘The examination of Mary Brandford’, SHC QS2/6/1742/Eas/7a,b. Fumerton, ‘Not Home’, p. 508. On the fraught sociability of the alehouse and the financial consequences of ‘good fellowship’, see the work of Mark Hailwood, particularly Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2014). ‘The examination of Eleanor Aldridge’, LMA MJ/SP/V/01/005/02. Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law, pp. 93–94. ‘The examination of Mary Ayres’, SHC QS2/6/1746/Mic/37, and ‘The examination of Ann Evans’, SHC QS2/6/1746/Mic/38. ‘The examination of Ann Stewart’, SHC QS2/6/1746/Mic/17. ‘The examination of Elizabeth Jones’, LMA MJ/SP/V/01/009/14. ‘The examination of Elizabeth Gibbons’, SHC QS2/6/1749/Eas/71. ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords.’ To the Tune of the Duke of Norfolk (London, 1630?) EBBA ID: 20064. The examinations and conveyance orders of the West and Davis family, June 1740’ SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23a-k. ‘The examination of Ann West’, SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23a. I refer here of course to the ‘economy of makeshifts’ a phrase pioneered first by Hufton in her book The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, 1750–1789; and in turn to the use of the term ‘unsettled’ by Fumerton, Unsettled. SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23g. ‘The examination of Ann West’, SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23a. ‘The further examination of Ann West’, SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23b. ‘The examination of Mary Davis’, SHC QS2/6/1740/Mid/23g. ‘Mittimus to House of Correction, Guildford, 17 June 1740’, SHC QS2/6/1740/ Mid/23k. See: Hitchcock, ‘The London Vagrancy Crisis of the 1780s’, pp. 59–72. See: Crawford, Parents of Poor Children, pp. 3–9 and pp. 113–115. Barbara Blaugdone,’ An Account of the Travels, 1691’, in Mary Garman et al. (eds.), Hidden in Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s Writings, 1650–1700 (Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill, 1996): pp. 277–278. Ibid., p. 279. Tim Hitchcock discusses several cases where homeless women were raped in eighteenth-century London: see: Hitchcock, Down and Out, p. 95, and also see the work of Garthine Walker: ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability in Popular Crime Reports in England, c.1670–c.1750’, Past and Present, 220:1 (April 2013): pp. 115–142.

188

Notes

Conclusion 1

Thomas Alcock, Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, and the Causes and Consequences of the Great Increase and Burden of the Poor (Oxford: R. Baldwin, 1752): p. 8. 2 The etymology stretches to at least 1450 in English; see the shorter phrase: ‘Foul words break neay Banes.’ G. Meriton, Yorkshire Ale (London, 1697): p. 84, and see the entry for ‘hard words break no bones’ in John Simpson and Jennifer Speake (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, fifth edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/ acref/9780199539536.001.0001/acref-9780199539536-e-1013?rskey=ALbkFr, accessed 10 December 2015. 3 For a more in-depth discussion of the privatization of social policy in the eighteenth century, see: Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, Chapter 6. 4 See: Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. 5 See the famous thesis of Michel Foucault in: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 6 For references on the changing contours of plebeian marriage, including its depiction in popular literature, see: Evans, Unfortunate Objects, pp. 51–53; and Gowing, ‘Giving Birth at the Magistrate’s Gate’, pp. 137–152. 7 See, for example: Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (eds.), Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth, 1999); Hay and Craven (eds.), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955; Billy G. Smith (ed.), Down and Out in Early America (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2004); Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Tim Lockley, ‘Rural Poor Relief in Colonial South Carolina’, The Historical Journal, 48:4 (2005): pp. 955–976; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; and see Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith (eds.), Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 8 Rees, Moll, p. 21. 9 The British Library (BL): MSS EUR G37/18/5, f. 125. 10 Fagles’s title for Book 18 of Homer’s The Odyssey is ‘The Beggar-King of Ithaca’, which tells the story of Irus the professional beggar and his confrontation with Odysseus, King of Ithaca. For my brief discussion of this story, I use Fagles’s powerful and very readable translation of The Odyssey; see: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996). It should be noted that the final modified line of this book is in the first instance Fagles’s translation of Homer. 11 Homer, The Odyssey, 18.8–10. Odysseus has spent the previous two books disguised as a beggar and wandering the hills of his native Ithaca, in order to avoid a pack of dangerous suitors who would have him killed if they discovered he was alive.

Notes

189

12 Ibid., 18.23–24. 13 Abby Margolis, ‘Subversive Accommodations: Doing Homeless in Tokyo’s Ueno Park’, in A.L. Beier and Paul Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008): p. 359. 14 Svetlana Stephenson, Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, Homelessness, and Social Displacement in Russia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 15 In other words, with the caste system and with spiritual mendicancy, see: David Arnold, ‘Vagrant India: Famine, Poverty and Welfare under Colonial Rule’, in Beier and Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out, p. 121. 16 Frank Tobias Higbie, ‘Between Romance and Degradation: Navigating the Meanings of Vagrancy in North America, 1870–1940’, in Beier and Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out, pp. 264–265; Cresswell, The Tramp in America; Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 17 A reference to Matthew 26.11, Mark 14.7, or John 12.8 in all English editions of the Bible. 18 Paul Ocobock, ‘Introduction’, in Beier and Ocobock (eds.), Cast Out, p. 27.

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The British Library (BL) Egerton MS/2986: Heath and Verny Papers, Vol. IX, ff. 404. Misc. Papers related to Rutlandshire, 1550–1683. ‘The bulk of the volume consists of assessments for, and orders relating to levy of subsidies, warrants from J.P.’s to High and petty Constables, etc., examinations of suspects, and other papers rel. to local administration within the county’. General Reference Collection 4474.aa.11: ‘A Sermon preached at the Church of St. Mary in Nottingham, to the Society for Reformation of Manners, etc.’ By Daniel Chadwick, 1698. General Reference Collection 4473.c.4.(4): ‘The Advantage of Employing the Poor in Useful Labour, and Mischief of Idleness, or Ill-Judged Business.’. By Samuel Johnston, 1726. MSS EUR G37/18/5, f. 125: Undated, Late Eighteenth Century. ‘List of Vagabonds to be Sent on board the Pigot, Captain Richardson.’

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The Friends Library and Archives Anon., ‘An account of the rise, progress, and present state, of the school and work-house maintained by the people called Quakers’ (London, 1746), Vol. 235/7. John Bellers, ‘An Abstract of George Fox’s Advice… in the year 1657, concerning the poor’ (London, 1724), SR1/133/4/4/21–6. Thomas Lawson, ‘An Appeal to Parliament, concerning the poor, that there may not be a beggar in England’ (London, 1660), Vol. 96/8.

The Huntington Library and Archives Charles II, By the King, A Proclamation, for the Due Observation of Certain Statutes Made for the Suppressing of Rogues, Vagabonds, Beggers, and Other Idle Disorderly Persons, and for the Reliefe of the Poore (London, 1661), Huntington Library Rare Books: 435743. Charles Gray, Considerations on Several Proposals, Lately Made, for the Better Maintenance of the Poor (London, 1751), Huntington Library Rare Books: 328788. James II, By the King, A Proclamation Inhibiting all Persons after the Four and Twentieth Day of June Next to Use the Trade of Pedlar or Petty Chapman, Unless They Be Licensed According to a Course Lately Taken by Us in That Behalf (London, 1686), Huntington Library Rare Books: 142939. John Egerton, undated (1650s). Proposals for dealing with the ‘multitude of the poore that daily lie in every corner of the streets’, MSS Ellesmere and Bridgewater: EL 8571. William Blathwyt, Committee for Trade and Plantations. ‘Report concerning the 300 malefactors [to be transported to St Kitts], 11 June 1684’, Huntington Library Manuscripts HM 32268, West Indies Box L4–J2. William and Mary, A Proclamation, Anent the BEGGERS (Edinburgh, 1692), Huntington Library Rare Books: 180298.

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The London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) CLA/047/LR/06/044: Order of Court of Aldermen for apprehending Children found vagrant at night; to be confined in the Watch-house until brought before a justice, 28 November 1732. CLA/AC/17/648: ‘An Account of such Children as are in the Workhouse that came in by Benefactors, with the tyme when and the places from whence, they came. March 9th 1708/9’ together with ‘An Account of Vagrant Children in the Workhouse, 9 March 1708/9’. MJ/SP/1730/08/025-049: The Petition of Anne Nash to Be Released from Bridewell, 1730. MJ/SP/v/02/003: A Petition Against Chapmen and Pedlars, 1747. MJ/SP/1750/04, f. 014: April 1750, Affidavit: Mary Bitter re-expenses of lying in of Elizabeth Browne, vagrant, while being passed through Enfield. MJ/SP/1750/04/23: Shadwell Overseers Expenses for Ann Bentley Lying in, Vagrant, 1750. MJ/SP/v/01/005, ff. 01-022: Vagrant settlement certificates, passes, and examinations, 1740, George Howard and Thomas Ellis, JPs. MJ/SP/v/01/009, ff. 02-015: Vagrant settlement certificates, passes, and examinations, 1757, John Cox, J Bever, T Dyor, JPs.

The Warwickshire County Record Office (WCRO) CR/103: The ‘Justicing’ Notebook of William Bromley, JP, Warwickshire. CR/136/V/144: Parish of Chilvers Coton Constables Accounts and Vagrancy Injunction. DRO111/22: Parish of Grandborough Constables’ Accounts 1672–1720. DRO111/23: Parish of Grandborough Constables’ Accounts 1720–1750. DRB27/51/1-4: Vagrancy passes 1719–1802. DRB/27/9-12: Parish of Nether Whitacre Constables’ Accounts, 1650–1750. DRB/39/35: Parish of Shustoke Constables’ Accounts, with Marginalia by William Dugdale. DR(B)/3/155-161: Kingsbury Parish Accounts for 1666, and 1670–1675. QS/40/1/7-10: Quarter Sessions Order Books 1696–1750.

Ballads Formatting key for ballads: [Author, if Known][‘Title’][‘To the Tune of ’][Publisher if Known][Year published if known, date range if known][Collection Volume, pagination]

194

Bibliography

Printed and Edited Collections Ebsworth, J. Woodfall. The Roxburghe Ballads, Vols. 1–7. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. The Pack of Autolycus, or Strange and Terrible News… 1624–1693. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1927. Weinstein, Helen. Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge: Volume II, Ballads, Part ii: Indexes. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Day, W.G., ed. The Pepys Ballads: Facsimile Volumes I-V of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Most of the following ballads can now be accessed electronically, particularly the Pepys Collection ballads and the Roxburghe Collection ballads, using: The English Ballad Broadside Archive. The University of California Santa-Barbara. Consulted at: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

The Pack of Autolycus Francis Shenton. ‘A Notorious Cheater: A True Relation of a Notorious Cheater one Robert Bullock, Lately done in Oxford, to prevent the like.’ To the Tune of And for my Offence I shall die, or, For the losse of my goods. Oxford, November 1663 (date of the cheat described in the ballad.) Pack of Autolycus, pp. 127–131.

The Roxburghe Collection Robert Wild, D.D. ‘Alas poore Scholler! Whither wilt thou go? Or, Strange Alterations which at this time be, There’s many did think they never should see.’ To the Tune of Halloo, My Fancy, etc. London: Booksellers inn, before 1668. Composition: 1641. Roxb. 6, pp. 456–457. ‘The Bad-husband’s folly; Or, poverty made known.’ To the Tune of Come Hither, my own Sweet Duck. London: J. Deacon. Roxb 6, pp. 434–494. Martin Parker. ‘The Beggar Boy of the North: Whose linage and calling to th’ world is proclaim’d, which is to be sung to a Tune so nam’d.’ To the Tune of Beggar Boy of the North. London: F. Grove. Roxb. 3, pp. 323–328. ‘The Bedfordshire Widow; Or, The poor in distress Reliev’d.’ To the Tune of Let Caesar Live Long by Tom D’Urfey. London: P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, &c. Subject: Queen Mary II, dating: Post reign of W&M (?). Roxb. 3, pp. 443–445. ‘The brave English Jipsie.’ To the Tune of the Spanish Jipsie. London: John Trundle, 1598– 1628. Roxb. 3, pp. 329–333. Ben Jonson. Reprinted and edited by Tom D’Urfey. ‘A Caveat for Cut-purses. With a warning to all purse-carriers, shewing the confidence of the first, and the carelesnesse of the last.’ To the Tune of Packington’s Pound. London: W. Gilbertson, range: 1640–1663. Roxb. 3, pp. 491–495. ‘The Cunning Northerne Begger, Who all the By-standers doth earnestly pray, To Bestow a penny upon him today.’ To the Tune of Tom of Bedlam. London for F. Coules. Roxb. 1, pp. 187–192.

Bibliography

195

‘Cupid’s Revenge; Or, An Account of a king, who slighted all Women, and at length was forced to marry a Beggar.’ To the Tune of I often for my Jenny strove. Reprinted from J. Roberts, Collection of Old Ballads, volume I, p. 141. ‘A New Delightful Ballad called, Debauchery Scared; Or, the Beggar-wench turn’d into a Devil: Together with the policy of Bumpkin…’. To the Tune of Ladies of London. London: J. Bissel at the Bible and Harp, dates between 1685 and 1688. Roxb. 4, pp. 20–22. R. Climsell. ‘The Forlorn Traveller: Whose first beginning was pleasure and joy, but his riotous spending wrought his decay…’. To a Dainty New Court Tune. London: F. Coules. Roxb. 3, pp. 273–279. Martin Parker. ‘John and Joan: Or, a mad couple well met.’ To the Tune of The Paratour. London: Thomas Lambert. Early 17th Century. Roxb. 2, pp. 132–137. ‘The Joviall Pedler: or, A merry new Ditty, which is both harmless, Pleasant, and Witty.’ To a Pleasant New Tune. London: Richard Harper, an edition in Wit and Drollery in 1661. Roxb. 7, pp. 46–50. ‘The Knight and the Begger-Wench.’ To the Tune of The King’s Delight, or, Turn-Coat, &c. London: F. Coles, T. Vere, &c. Circa 1660. Roxb. 7, pp. 376–378. ‘A Lanthorne for Landlords.’ To the Tune of The Duke of Norfolke. London: John Wright. Roxb. 2, pp. 182–190. ‘The Map of Mock Begger Hall, with his situation in the spacious Countrey, called Anywhere.’ To the Tune of It is not your Northerne Nanny: or Sweet is the Lass that Louves Me. London: Richard Harper. Roxb, 2, pp. 449–453. Martin Parker. ‘The Maunding Souldier; Or, The fruits of Warre is Beggery.’ To the Tune of Permit Me, Friends. London for F. Grove on Snow-hill. Roxb. 3, pp. 111–116. ‘The Merchant’s Son and the Beggar-Wench of Hull.’ To the Tune of The Friar well-fitted. London: Unknown. Roxb. 7, pp. 379. Martin Parker. ‘A Messe of good Fellows: or, The generous spark who roundly, doth call, and sayes for his part, Tush, we have and shall have abundance, Come fill us the other od quart.’ To the Tune of Ragged and Torne. London: Thomas Lambert. Early 17th Century. Roxb. 2, pp. 469–474. ‘The Poet’s Dream: Or, the Great Out-cry and Lamentable Complaint of the Land against Bayliffs and their Dogs…’. To the Tune of Sawny will ne’er be my Love again by Tom D’Urfey. London: P. Brooksby, date range: 1679–Sept. 1680. Roxb. 7, pp. 10–14. ‘The Proud Pedlar.’ Tune: Slip-Song. London: Unknown, White letter. Rough dating: 1750. Roxb. 7, pp. 51, 54. ‘Room for a Jovial Tinker: Old Brass to Mend.’ To the Tune of Behold the Man with a Glass in his hand. London: F. Coles, T. Vere, &c. Circa 1656. Roxb. 7, pp. 74–75. Richard Johnson. ‘A Song of a King and a Beggar.’ Reprinted for comparison. London: John Wright, 1631. Roxb. 6, pp. 659–660. ‘The Sorrowful Lamentation of the pedlars, and petty Chapmen, for the hardness of the times, and the decay of Trade.’ To the Tune of My Life and my Death by William Turner. London: J. Back. Date range between August 1685, and 1686. Roxb. 7, pp. 46–47.

196

Bibliography

‘The Tom the Taylor Group.’ Various Tunes. Collection of related ballads. Roxb. 7, pp. 466–483. ‘A True Character of sundry Trades and Callings; Or, a New Ditty of Innocent Mirth.’ To the Tune of Old Sir Simon the King. London: Licensed according to Order, date range: 1672–1684. Roxb. 7, pp. 17–19. Thomas Deloney, doubtful. ‘The Wandering Jew; Or, The Shooemaker of Jerusalem. Who lived when our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was Crucified, and by him Appointed to Live till his Coming again.’ To the Tune of the Lady’s Fall. London for W.O., 1612 or 1620. Roxb. 6, pp. 693–694. ‘The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle; Or, the old Historian, his brief declaration, Made in a mad fashion, of each Coronation…’ To the Tune of Our Prince is welcome out of Spain. London: F. Coles, T. Verre &c, 1662, with successive editions up to George II. Roxb. 6, pp. 696–699. Martin Parker. ‘A Warning to all Lewd Livers. By the example of a disobedient Child, who riotously wasted and consumed his Father’s and Mother’s goods, and also his own, among strumpets and other lewd Livers, and after died most miserably on a Dung-hill.’ To the Tune of Sir Andrew Barton or Come, follow, my love. Various Editions, London: F. Grove, Early 17th Century. Roxb. 3, pp. 23–28. ‘A New Ballad intituled, A Warning to Youth, shewing the lewd life of a Merchant’s Sonne of London…’. To the Tune of The Lord Darley. London: Thomas Symcocke. Roxb. 3, pp. 36–41. R. Climsall. ‘A Warning for Maides; Or, The false dissembling, cogging, Cunning, cozening young man…’. To A Dainty New Tune Called No, no, not I. London: John Wright. Roxb. 3, pp. 41–46.

The Pepys Collection ‘A Mad Crue; Or, That Shall be Tryde.’ To the Tune of Pudding-Pye Doll. London: John Trundle. Pepys 1: pp. 444–445. ‘The Beggars Delight; As It was Sung at the Theatre-Royal.’ No Tune Mentioned. London. Pepys 4: p. 253. ‘The Beggers Chorus, in the Jovial Crew.’ To a Pleasant New Tune. London: P. Brooksby. Late 17th Century. Pepys 4: p. 251. William Hockom. ‘The Beggers Intrusion, or the World’s illusion.’ To the Tune of Sallingers Rownde. London: E.W. Pepys 1: pp. 216–217. ‘The Beggars Song, Both in City and Country. Shewing the Contentedness of Their Lives, the Little Care they take, and how Merrily they live.’ To the Tune of Oh, how they did firk it, caper and jerk it, under the Greenwood tree. London: W. Thackeray and T. Passinger. Pepys 4: p. 250. ‘The Bountiful Knight of Somersetshire; Who Dayly Relieved the poor in those Parts…’ To the Tune of Packington’s Pound. London: P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, &c. Pepys 2: p. 57.

Bibliography

197

‘The Crafty Scotch Pedler; Or, the Downfall of Trading.’ To the Tune of Mary Live Long. London: E.M. for C. Bates. Pepys 4: p. 326. ‘The Country Travellers Advice. Being an Admonition to his Fellow-Travellers to Avoid the Sin of Drunkenness…’ To the Tune of Liggan Water. London: E. Tracy. Date range: William III’s reign. Pepys 2: p. 60. ‘Cupid’s Revenge: Or, An Account of a King who Slighted All Women, at length was constrained to Marry a Beggar.’ To the Tune of I Often for My Jenny Strove. London: P. Brooksby. Pepys 3: p. 42. ‘The Doctor and the Beggar Wench Or, The Barkshire Frollick.’ To the Tune of the Ladies of London. London: J. Back. Pepys 3: p. 280. ‘The English Fortune-Teller; Or A Merry New Ballad I have Here to Shew, Come Pence a Piece for Them, I Tell You But So.’ To the Tune of You’d Doe so, Would You not, Yes I Warrant you. London: F.G. Pepys 3: p. 152. ‘The Gowlin: Or, a pleasant fancy for the Spring. Being an Encounter betwixt a Scotch Leard and a buxome begger-wench.’ To a New playhouse Tune; Or, See the Gowlin, &c. London: W. Thackeray, J. Wright, J. Clark. Pepys 3: p. 108. Martin Parker. ‘Knavery in All Trades, Or, Here’s an age would make a man mad.’ To the Tune of Ragged and Torne and True. London: F. Grove. Pepys 1: pp. 166–167. ‘The Knight and the Beggar-Wench. Which doth a wanton prank unfold, in a as merry a story as ever was told.’ To the Tune of the King’s Delight or Turn-coat. London: F.Coles, T. Vere, W. Thackeray, J. Clarke, J. Wright. Pepys 3: p. 222. ‘London’s Ordinarie, or Every Man in his Humour.’ To a Pleasant New Tune. London: John Wright. Pepys 1: pp. 192–193. ‘A Love-sick maids Song, lately beguild, By a Run-away Lover that left her with Childe.’ To the Tune of In Melton on a Day. London: I.W. Pepys 1: p. 371. ‘The Merry Beggars on Lincolns-Inn-Field; Or, The Beggers Art to get Money.’ To the Tune of A Begging We will go. London: C. Dennisson. Pepys 4: p. 252. ‘Merry Tom or All Trades.’ To the Tune of Behold the Man. London: W. Thackeray, T. Passinger, J. Clarke, J. Wright. Pepys 4: p. 261. ‘ The Naked Truth: Or, A brief Collection of the Poor Mans Cares in this Hard and Dull Season.’ To the Tune of The Touch of the Times. London: P. Brooksby. Pepys 4: p. 314. ‘The Pedler Opening of His Packe, To Know of Maydes what tis they Lacke.’ To the Tune of Last Christmas was my chance. London: E.A. Pepys 1: pp. 238–239. ‘A Pleasant New Songe of a Iouiall Tinker.’ To a Pleasant New Tune called Fly Brasse. London: J. Trundle. Pepys 1: pp. 460–461. ‘ The Politick Begger-Man. Who Got the the Love of a Pretty Maid.’ To the Tune of There was a Jovial begger. London: F. Coles, T. Vere, J. Wright, J. Clarke. Pepys 3: p. 73. ‘Robin Hood & the Beggar. Shewing how Robin Hood and the Beggar fought, and how he changed cloaths with the Beggar, and how he went a begging to Nottingham…’

198

Bibliography

To the Tune of Robin Hood and the Stranger. London: J. Clarke, W. Thackeray. Pepys 2: p. 113. ‘The Sorrowful Complaint of Susan Higgs, a Lustey Countrey Wench… who for twentyyeeres, most gallantly maintained herselfe by robberies…’. To the Tune of Lusty Gallant. London: H.G. Pepys 1: p. 113. ‘The Silver Age, or the world turned backward.’ To A Pleasant New Court Tune. London: G.E. Pepys 1: pp. 154–155. ‘The Trappan’d Taylor: Or, A Pretty Discovery, how a taylor was cheated, and Married to a beggar-wench.’ To the Tune of the Loving lad and Coy Lass, or, Wanton Willy. London: W. Thackeray, T. Passinger, W. Whitwood. Pepys 3: p. 74.

The Bodleian Ballads Collection The Bodleian Ballads Project Online. Oxford: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm. ‘The joviall crew: or, Beggars-bush.’ To the tune of: From hunger, and cold. London: Printed for W. Thackery, T. Passenger, and W. Whitwood. Dated between 1666 and 1679. Don. b.13(47). ‘A new ballad intituled: The stout cripple of Cornwall.’ To the tune of the blind beggar. London: F. Coles, T. Vere, and J. Wright. Dated between 1663 and 1674. Douce Ballads 2(270ba).

Online Databases ‘17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers’, The British Library and Gale Cengage. Consulted at: http://find.galegroup.com/bncn ‘British History Online’. Consulted at: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ ‘Connected Histories’. University of Hertfordshire, University of London, University of Sheffield 2012. Consulted at: http://www.connectedhistories.org/ ‘Early English Books Online (EEBO)’, Gale Cengage. Consulted at: http://0-eebo .chadwyck.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/ ‘Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)’, Gale Cengage. Consulted at: http:// find.galegroup.com/ecco/ ‘The English Ballad Broadside Archive (EBBA)’, The University of California SantaBarbara. Consulted at: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ ‘The Making of the Modern World’, Gale Cengage. Consulted at: http://find.galegroup .com/mome/ ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913’, Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard and Jamie McLaughlin, et al. Consulted at: www .oldbaileyonline.org ‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Oxford University Press. Consulted at: http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/

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199

Published Contemporary Books, Pamphlets, Plays, and Sermons Note: The majority of these contemporary pamphlets were accessed multiple times using Early English Books Online (EEBO), or Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and that unless multiple editions are cited, then the year of publication listed is the edition consulted herein. Major reprinted works such as Shakespeare’s plays and Defoe’s novels were consulted in modern edited editions, in some cases in addition to EEBO or ECCO copies. Alcock, Thomas. Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, and the Causes and Consequences of the Great Increase and Burden of the Poor (Oxford: R. Baldwin, 1752). Anon. An Account of Severall Workhouses for Employing and Maintaining the Poor (London: Printed for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1725). Anon. An Account of the Charity Schools Lately Erected in Great Britain and Ireland: With the Benefactions Thereto; and of the Methods Whereby They Were Set Up and Governed (London: Joseph Downing, 1710). Anon. An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, Commonly Known Throughout the West of England by the Title of KING of the BEGGARS… the Whole Taken from His Own Mouth (London: R. Goadey and W. Owen, 1759). Anon. A Brief Relation of the Adventures of Mr. Bampfyeld Moore Carew, for More Than Forty Years Past the KING of the BEGGARS (London, 1801). Anon. Considerations, Humbly Offered to Parliament, Relative to the Heads of a Bill for Promoting Industry, Suppressing Idleness and Begging and Saving Above One-Million Sterling Yearly… (London: A. Millar, 1758). Anon. Observations Upon the Vagrant Laws; Proving That the Statutes in Queen Elizabeth’s Time Are the Most Proper Foundation for a Law of That Nature (London, 1742). Anon. The Cries of London, as They Are Daily Exhibited in the Streets; With an Epigram in verse Adapted to Each (London: E. Newbery, 1796). Bellers, John. An Epistle to Friends, Concerning the Education of Children (London, 1697). Bellers, John. Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality (London, 1699). Bellers, John. An Essay Towards the Improvement of Physick (London, 1714). Bellers, John. To The Criminals in Prison (London, 1725). Bush, Rice. The Poor Mans Friend, or a Narrative of What Progresse Many Worthy Citizens of London Have Made in That Godly Work of Providing for the Poor (London: Thomas Underhill, 1650). Creed, James. An Impartial Examination of a Pamphlet Intitled, Considerations on Several Proposals Lately Made for the Better Maintenance of the Poor: With Some Serious and Occasional Animadversions on This Important Subject (London, 1752).

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Dalton, Michael. The Countrey Justice (London: William Rawlins and Samuel Roycroft, Editions in 1661, 1666, 1677, 1682, 1690, and 1697). Defoe, Daniel. Giving Alms No Charity and Employing the Poor, A Grievance to the Nation, Being an Essay Upon This Great Question… (London, 1704). Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (London: First published 1722, reprinted as a Penguin Classic, 1989). Defoe, Daniel. The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild; Not Made Up of Fiction and Fable, But Taken from His Own Mouth… (London, 1725). Dugdale, Sir William The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated: From Records, LeigerBooks, Manuscripts, Charters, Evidences, Tombes, and Armes… Volume 1 of 2, History and Geography (London: Thomas Warren, 1730). Dunning, Richard. A Plain and Easie Method Shewing How the Office of Overseer of the Poor May Be Managed (London, 1685). Firmin, Thomas. The First New Persecution; or, A True Narrative of the Cruel Usage of Two Christians by the Present Mayor of Cambridge, As It was Certified by an Eminent Hand (London: Giles Calvert, 1654). Firmin, Thomas. Some Proposals for Imploying the Poor, Especially in and About the City of London, and for the Prevention of Begging, a Practice Dishonorable to the Nation, and to the Christian Religion (London: Brabazon Aylmer, 1678). Gardiner, Robert. The Compleat Constable (London: Richard and Edward Atkins, 1692). Gay, John. The Beggar’s Opera (London: William Heinemann, reprinted, 1921). Hale, Sir Mathew. A Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (London: William Shrowsbery, 1683). Head, Richard. The English Rogue Described, in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant. Being a Compleat Discovery of the Most Eminent Cheats of Both Sexes (London: Printed for Francis Kirkman, 1668). Hubberthorne, Richard. A True Testimony of Oxford-Professors… (London: Printed for Giles Calvert, 1654). Hutcheson, Francis. Essay on the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728). Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The Second Edition, Enlarged with Many Additions. As also an Essay on Charity and Charityschools. And a Search into the Nature of Society (London, 1723). Ovington, J. Christian Chastity; or, A Caveat Against Vagrant Lust: A Sermon Preach’d at LEE in Kent, May 18th 1712 (London: John Morphew, 1712). Pryor, William. The Outcries of the Poor, Oppressed, and Imprisoned; or, A Safe Way to Free the Poor of This City and the Whole Nation of England from Begging and Starving (London: Francis Smith, 1659). Smith, John Thomas. Vagabondiana; or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers Through the Streets of London: With Portraits of the Most Remarkable, Drawn from the Life (London: J. and A. Arch, 1817).

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Troughear, Thomas. The Best Way of Making Our Charity Truly Beneficial to the Poor. Or the Excellency of Work-Houses in Country Parishes: To Prevent the Evil Effects of Idleness (London: J. Downing, 1729). Woodward, Josiah. The Great Charity of Instructing Poor Children. A Sermon Preached at St. Botolph Aldgate; upon Lord’s Day, Mar. 24, 1700. On the Occasion of a CharitySchool Newly Erected in That Parish (London: K. Astwood, 1700).

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Newspapers Fog’s Weekly Journal Flying Post or the Post Master The London Gazette The London Journal Parker’s Penny Post

Edited Collections of Primary Documents Anon. ‘The Parish Constables’ Accounts of St. Mary Tavy, 1672–1709’. Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 82 (1950): pp. 311–319. Bennett, J.H.E. and J.C. Dewhurst, eds. Quarter Sessions Records, with Other Records of the Justices of the Peace for the County Palatine of Chester, 1559–1760, Together with a Few Earlier Miscellaneous Records Deposited with the Cheshire County Council, Vol. 94 (Chester, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1940). Cobbett, William, ed. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, from the Norman Conquest, in 1066 to the Year, 1803: From Which Last-Mentioned Epoch It Is Continued Downwards in the Work Entitled, ‘Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates’ (Volume 8: 1722–1733) (London: Printed by T.C. Hansard, 1811). Cockburn, James Swanston, ed. Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments: Charles II, 1676–1688 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997). Coldham, Peter Wilson. The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1661–1699: A Comprehensive Listing Compiled from English Public Records of Those Who Took Ship to the Americas for Political, Religious, and Economic Reasons; of Those Who Were Deported for Vagrancy, Roguery, or Non-Conformity; and of Those Who Were Sold to Labour in the New Colonies (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1990). Coldham, Peter Wilson. The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1751–1776: A Comprehensive Listing Compiled from English Public Records of Those Who Took Ship to the Americas for Political, Religious, and Economic Reasons; of Those Who Were Deported for Vagrancy, Roguery, or Non-Conformity; and of Those Who Were Sold to Labour in the New Colonies (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1993).

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Cole, Jean Audrey, ed. Vagrants and Deserters Apprehended in Marlborough During the 18th and Early 19th Centuries (Devizes: Wiltshire Family History Society, 1996). Doughty, Robert. The Notebook of Robert Doughty 1662–1665, ed. James M. Rosenheim (Vol. 54, Norwich: Norfolk Record Society, 1991). Fox, Levi, ed. Coventry Constables’ Presentments 1629–1742 (Printed for the Dugdale Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Fuller, John, ed. John Gay: Dramatic Works: Volumes I and II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Hayton, David William. The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Richard Cocks, 1698–1702 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996). Hundert, E.J., ed. Bernard Mandeville: The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). Judges, Arthur Valentine. The Elizabethan Underworld: A Collection of Tudor and Early Stuart Tracts and Ballads, Telling of the Lives and Misdoings of Vagabonds, Thieves, Rogues and Cozeners, and Giving Some Account of the Operation of the Criminal Law (London, 1930). Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Stuart Literature (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). Le Hardy, William, ed. Hertfordshire County Records, Volumes VI–VII: Sessions Books 1658 to 1700 and 1700–1752 (Hertford: Hertfordshire County Council, 1930–1931). Paley, Ruth, ed. Justice in Eighteenth Century Hackney: The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris and the Hackney Petty Sessions Book (London Record Society, 1991). Price, F.D., ed. The Banbury Historical Society Volume 11: The Wigginton Constables’ Book 1691–1836 (London: Philmore, 1971). Ratcliff, S.C. and H.C. Johnson, eds. Warwick County Records Volumes III-IX (Warwick: L. Edgar Stephens, 1937–1954). Salgado, Gamini, ed. Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1972). Shakespeare, William. King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Shakespeare, William. The First Part of King Henry IV, eds. Herbert Weil and Judith Weil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Stafford, J. Martin. Private Vices, Publick Benefits? The Contemporary Reception of Bernard Mandeville (Solihull: Ismeron, 1997). Thirsk, Joan and J.P. Cooper, eds. Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Thomas, D.B., ed. The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars with a Vocabulary of Their Language and a Preface by Martin Luther (London: Penguin, 1932).

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Wake, Joan, ed. Northamptonshire County Records, Volume I: Quarter Sessions Records, 1630, 1657, 1657–8 (Hereford: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1924). Walford, Edward. ‘Southwark: Winchester House and Barclay’s Brewery,’ in Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, eds. Old and New London: Volume 6 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878): pp. 29–44. Wilkinson, C.H., ed. The King of the Beggars: Bampfylde-Moore Carew (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931). Wootton, David, ed. Political Writings of John Locke (New York: Penguin, 1993).

Published Secondary Literature Andrew, Donna T. Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the 18th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Anon. ‘The Parish Constables’ Accounts of St. Mary Tavy, 1672–1709’, Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 82 (1950): pp. 311–319. Arkell, Tom. ‘Multiplying Factors for Estimating Population Totals from the Hearth Tax’, Local Population Studies, 28 (Spring 1982): pp. 51–57. Arkell, Tom. ‘Illuminations and Distortions: Gregory King’s Scheme Calculated for the Year 1688 and the Social Structure of later Stuart England’, The Economic History Review, 59:1 (2006): pp. 32–69. Appleby, Joyce Oldham. Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Ashcroft, Richard. ‘Revolution, Legitimacy, and Lockean Liberalism’, in Stephen F. Englehart and John Allphin Moore Jr., eds. Three Beginnings: Revolution, Rights, and the Liberal State: Comparative Perspectives on the English, American, and French Revolutions (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994): pp. 141–162. Bahlman, Dudley. The Moral Revolution of 1688 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1968). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, Second edition). Barker, Hannah. Newspapers, Politics, and English Society, 1695–1855 (New York: Longman, 2000). Barrell, J. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Barry, Jonathan., ed. The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1530–1688 (Harlow : Longman, 1990). Barry, Jonathan. ‘The “Great Projector”: John Cary and the Legacy of Puritan Reform in Bristol 1647–1720’, in Scott Mandelbrote and Margaret Pelling, eds. The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine and Science, 1500–2000: Essays for Charles Webster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): pp. 185–206. Beattie, J.M. ‘The Pattern of Crime in England 1660–1800’, Past & Present, 62 (1974): pp. 47–95.

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Index Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes. abuse 4, 13, 36, 37, 40, 72, 116 Acts of Parliament (dealing with poverty and vagrancy) 1563 9 1572 9, 13, 107, 159 n.32, 160 n.51, 177 n.4 1597 9, 159 n.32 1598 179 n.46 1601 9, 159 n.32, 179 n.46 1604 9, 159 n.32 1662 5, 9–10, 28, 94–5, 97, 115, 121, 128, 129, 159 n.29, 159 n.32, 177 n.4 1700 159 n.29 1744 6, 140, 159 n.30 1751 9 Statute of Artificers, 1563 92 admiralty papers 18, 26, 34–5, 52, 167 n.62 advertisement 49, 50, 56, 135, 152, 170 n.119 Age of Improvement 20, 27 agrarian change 6, 9 Alcock, Thomas 149, 180 n.54, 188 n.1 alcohol 74 Aldridge, Eleanor 141 Aldridge, William 141 alehouses 10, 15, 19, 55, 58, 63, 67, 69–70, 73, 75, 118–19, 141, 187 n.83 allegories 64, 73, 87, 155 almanacs 80 America 31, 153, 155 Anglo-Dutch war 6, 35 Anglo-French war 6, 35, 96–7, 167 n.63 Annales 57 anti-hero/anti-heroine 3, 65, 123 Apology (Carew) 3 Appleby, Joyce Oldham 163 n.11, 164 n.17, 167 n.68

apprehension (of vagrants) 1, 11, 16, 17, 22, 29–31, 43, 52, 78, 92, 95, 98–9, 102–3, 112–13, 116, 123, 126–7, 131, 133, 137, 139–41–147 apprenticeship 3, 7, 11, 27, 29, 48, 58, 68, 91, 98, 116, 118, 120–1, 132–4, 137, 141, 145 archives 3, 7, 15, 32, 56, 97, 117–18, 126–7, 129–30 Arkell, Tom 42, 168 n.88, 168 n.90, 180 nn.54–5 army service 11, 12, 32–3, 72, 81, 111, 126, 129, 141–2, 166 n.57 assault 10, 17, 147 Assizes 103, 180 n.51 asylum 24 atheists 16, 29 Atlantic world 9, 30, 111, 153, 159 n.28, 167 n.63 Australia 12, 30, 153 Awdeley, John 13 Ayres, Mary 141–2 Bakhtin, Mikhail 61–3, 172 nn.35–6 ballads. See rogue ballads Ballard, George 140 Barnaby, Lee 50 barns 15, 61, 117–19, 141 Basu, Anupram 161 n.52 Bayle, Pierre 46 Beauchamp, Martin 144 ‘Bedfordshire Widow, The’ 79, 86 Bedlam 24, 51 ‘Beggar Boy of the North, The’ (Parker) 67, 143, 173 n.45 ‘Beggar-King of Ithaca, The’ (Fagles) 154, 188 n.10 beggars/begging 4, 17 archetypes of 60, 65, 67

224 assumptions about 44 crackdown on 51 deceptive/seductive 63–5, 67, 71, 78–9, 84, 86, 89 Defoe on 45–6 depiction in ballads 55–89 description of 155 idle 22, 25, 94 as illegal 179 n.46 imagery 82–7 jokes about 61 jovial 55, 63–4, 81 Mandeville on 47 population 42 prevention of 38–9, 43 rising numbers of 40, 51 stereotypes 56 sturdy 26, 28, 51, 65–6, 100, 103, 112, 117 ‘Beggars Delight; As It was Sung at the Theatre-Royal, The’ 69, 173 n.51 Beggar’s Opera 123, 132 ‘Beggars Song, Both in City and Country, Shewing the Contentedness of their lives, The’ 85, 176 n.85 ‘Beggers Chorus, The’ (Brome) 68, 83–4 Behn, Aphra 136 Beier, A.L. 4–5, 25, 88, 92, 96, 117, 119, 126, 127, 129, 164 n.20, 178 n.16, 178 n.20, 181 n.90 Bellers, John 39, 42, 44, 164 n.21, 168 n.91 Bentham, Jeremy 18 Bentley, Ann 138 Berkshire 117 Bethell, Hugh 50 Binsly, Adam 113, 114 biographies 4, 27, 49, 52, 120–1, 150 Bishop, James 120–1 Bitter, Mary 138 Blathwyt, William 30 Blaugdone, Barbara 128, 146, 147 ‘Bloody Code’ 98 Blunstedd, Sarah 131 Board of Trade 18, 30, 32, 38, 39, 42–4 Bodleian ballad collections 172 n.42 Bombay, India 153 Borsay, Anne 175 n.73 Boston 3 Bowden, Peter 160 n.42, 181 n.76

Index Brandford, John 141 Brandford, Mary 141 branding 17 ‘Brave English Jipsie’ 85 Brewer, John 166 n.56 Brewster, Francis 24 bridewells (‘houses of correction’) 10, 17, 18, 39, 91–2, 98, 129, 130–1, 143, 145, 147 Bridewell, London 10, 17, 19, 24, 30, 37, 51, 119, 132, 135, 136, 160 n.37, 182 n.108 Briggs, Robin 161 n.59 Bristol 118, 175 n.73 British Library 59, 64, 153 broadsheet 49 broadsides 55, 60, 80 Brome, Richard 68, 82–3, 173 n.49 Bromley, William 91, 177 n.1 Brooks, Joanna 171 n.3 Broomhall, Susan 183 n.11 brothels 46, 63, 130, 134 Buckinghamshire 137, 141 Buntingford House of Correction 119, 120 burial register 17 Bush, Rice 37, 49, 164 n.16 Cambridge 64 Canting Academy, The (Head) 88 Capp, Bernard 58, 175 n.74 carceral punishment 10, 12, 111, 120, 151–2 carefree rogue ballads 65–9 Carew, Bampfylde Moore (‘King of all Beggars’) 3–4 Carleton, Mary 123, 183 n.1 carnival 61–2 Carter, Sophie 135, 186 n.59 Cast Out (Ocobock) 155 catechism 22–3, 38, 53 Catholicism 29 Cavalier Parliament 28 Caveat for Common Cursitors, A (Harman) 13, 22 central government 18, 27–8, 34, 42, 43, 98 Chambers, Paul 175 n.73 Chandler, Henry 129

Index Chaplin, John 153 charity Christian 20, 37, 69 deserving objects of 80–2 discretionary 101, 103 gendering of 18, 107–8 harsh 39 ‘privatization’ of 111, 150 charity schools 12, 21, 24, 39, 43–5, 53, 116, 121, 150 campaigns 43 critique of 45–9 defence of 39 merits of 44–5 charity school movement 46, 53 Charles II 28–9, 68, 165 n.36, 173 n.53 Chartier, Roger 57–8 Chatham 11, 116 Chelmsford House of Correction 129, 184 n.34 Chelsea Royal Hospital 142 Cheshire 19, 31, 126, 166 n.47 Chess, Simone 175 n.78 Child, Josiah 24 Child, Rowland 114 ‘Children of Belial’ 5 child vagrants abandoned 120–1, 129 begging 29–30, 118, 143–6 casual relief 108 in charity schools 12, 21, 24, 39, 43–9, 53, 116, 121, 150 education 25, 36, 116 idleness in 29 indentured labour 29–31 infant deaths 138 masterless women with children 136–40, 142–6 medical care 141 orphaned 30, 114–15, 116, 120–1 parochial exclusion 137–9 punishment and control of 21, 29–30, 103 runaways 121 transportation 30–1, 153 in workhouses 120–1 Chiverton, Lord Mayor Sir Richard 21 Clark, Elizabeth 131 Clark, John 50

225

Clark, Peter 4, 6, 92, 157 n.9, 158 n.19 Clark, Thomas 131 Clarke, Mary 110 class elite 18, 20, 25, 37, 45, 55, 58, 69, 74, 78, 88, 130, 147, 150 labour 25 middle 22, 150 upper 22, 25 Cleever, Elizabeth 116 climate conditions 9, 11 Climsell, Richard 75, 174 n.62 Cobham, Thomas 143, 144 Coffey, John 184 n.27 Colchester 40, 123 collective consciousness 53 collective imagination 123 ‘colleges of industry’ 39 Collinson, Patrick 161 n.59 Cologne 50–1 colonial territories 9–10, 12, 27, 30–1, 36, 43, 52, 71, 118, 123–4, 152–3, 155, 167 n.63 Colter, Elizabeth 133–4 commercial society 12, 34, 44, 47–9, 60, 71, 81, 135 commonwealth 21, 28, 36, 46 Compleat Constable, The (Gardiner) 102–4 Conduit, Edward 112–13, 114 Connors, Richard 169 n.97 conscription. See impressment Considerations (Gray) 40 constables and admiralty officials, conflict between 34–5 casual relief disbursements 25, 97, 105, 107–9, 121, 122, 138 gendered aspect 107–8, 121 chastised or fined for negligence 99, 112, 119 corrupt 135 descriptive language used by 92, 93, 100, 102, 106–7, 111–15, 150 duties and powers 10, 21, 93, 98–9, 103, 104 Easter Sessions of 1674 112 enforcement of vagrancy laws 98, 104, 107, 111–12 expenses 10, 35, 100, 107

226

Index

Grandborough accounts 104–8 housing vagrants 119 manual for 102–4 rewards and remunerations 10, 34–5, 109, 111, 119 search for vagrants 10, 21, 98, 111, 112 ‘typology of travellers’ deployed by 93, 115, 122 Cooper, J.P. 168 n.87 Cornwall 139, 176 n.94 corporal punishment 24–5, 43, 128 Corporation of the Poor 21 Corruption of Manners 43, 44 counterfeits. See deception Countrey Justice, The (Dalton) 93, 102–4, 159 n.29 ‘Country Travellers Advice’ 75, 174 n.63 county benches 6–7, 32, 99, 111, 119 courts/court cases 1–2, 10, 27, 31, 52, 112–13, 119, 135, 141, 173 n.53, 181 n.85 Coventry 91, 104 Cowan, Brian 163 nn.6–7 Cox, Elizabeth 131 Cox, Francis 131 Cox, Robert 140 Craven, Paul 159 n.31 Crawford, Patricia 137, 186 n.55, 186 n.71 Creed, James 40, 168 n.84 Creede, Thomas 134 Cresswell, Tim 12, 160 n.46, 189 n.16 crime domestic 49 economic and political 48 history of 7, 9, 57 of kidnapping 36 non-capital 31 organized 4 petty 4, 6, 17, 27, 30, 52 and punishment 9, 22 reporting 49–52, 53 serious 27, 147 of status 8, 14, 18, 19, 28, 98, 151 vagrancy and 6, 7, 28, 30, 98, 117, 149–50 criminal biography 27 criminal justice system 4, 26 cripple’s cart 17 Cropper, James 21–2 Cruelty and Laughter (Dickie) 61

Culpepper, Sir Thomas 24 cultural construction 2, 5, 16, 19, 149, 150, 151, 154–5 cultural representations 4, 14, 18, 129, 155, 185 n.41 culture libertine sexual 71, 130, 134, 136, 173 n.53 literary 57 ‘low’ 57 oral 58, 59 popular 18, 55, 58, 69, 88, 102, 123, 130 print 57, 88 Culture of Print, The (Chartier) 57–8 Cunningham, Andrew 175 nn.69–70 ‘Cunning Northerne Begger, The’ (Parker) 55, 66, 170 n.1, 173 n.43 ‘Cupid’s Revenge’ 86, 87 Curth, Louise Hill 80, 175 n.72, 175 n.76 Dabhoiwala, Faramerz 17, 130, 160 n.49, 173 n.53, 185 nn.35–6, 186 n.60 Dalton, Michael 93, 99, 101, 102–4, 159 n.29 D’Aranda, Paul 32, 33 Das Kapital (Marx) 39 Daventry 104 Davis, Charles 144 Davis, Francis 144 Davis, Mary 143–6 Davison, Lee 167 n.73 death penalty 10, 39 ‘Debauchery Scared’ 73, 77, 130, 174 n.58, 185 n.38 debts 99, 117, 118, 119, 122 deception 3, 9, 14, 21–2, 25, 37, 49, 52, 62–6, 69–72, 78–82, 86–9, 113, 124–5, 149, 152, 154–5. See also disguise Defoe, Daniel 7, 10, 25, 45–6, 55, 118, 123, 125, 150–1, 164 n.23, 169 nn.103–4, 183 n.2, 186 n.66 Delaware river 3, 157 n.6 descriptions of vagrants 4, 9, 14, 15, 22, 27, 49–52, 67, 78–9, 92, 100, 150 in constables’ accounts 101–2, 104–8 in Dalton and Gardiner’s treatises 102–4 in judicial notebooks 91, 111–15 in newspapers 21–2, 27, 49–52 in rogue literature/ballads 15, 55–89

Index deserving–undeserving dichotomy 8, 20, 34, 37, 52, 53, 76–82, 84–8, 101, 154 Devereaux, Simon 165 n.40 Dickie, Simon 61, 163 n.12 Dionne, Craig 57, 162 n.73, 171 n.8 disability 9, 61, 81, 84, 87, 127 Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor (Hale) 25–6, 44 disease 7, 8, 66, 72, 80, 129, 130, 134 disguise 3, 22, 23, 29, 33, 37, 49, 64, 66, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89, 124, 152, 188 n.11. See also deception ‘Distressed Mother, The’ 136, 186 n.67 ‘Dolly and Molly’ 129 domestic crime 49 domestic service and mobility 12, 123–47 childbirth and single motherhood 136–40 dangers and consequences of 132, 133–6, 138 defined 133 fear of 19, 123 population 133 rise in 19, 97, 152 sex and 127, 129, 132–6 ‘Double Standard, The’ (Thomas) 127 Doughty, Robert 113, 129 Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London (Hitchcock) 7, 159 n.24 dress 22, 83–6 drunkenness 1, 10, 15, 21, 58, 61, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 75, 119, 141 Dublin 120, 141 Dugdale, Sir William 104, 180 n.53 Dunning, Richard 37, 167 n.67 Dunton, John 135–6, 186 n.58 Earle, Peter 184 n.24 Easter Sessions of 1674 112 East India Company 153 Ebsworth, J. Woodfall 172 n.26 Eccles, Audrey 109, 126, 139, 141, 158 n.23, 159 n.32 economic landscape economic change 5, 12, 17, 121, 164 n.30 economic crisis 5, 18, 57, 93, 96–7, 118 economic opportunism 124 economic prosperity 5, 64, 134

227

Edinburgh Secret Council 29 Edward III 177 n.2 Egerton, John, Earl of Bridgewater 38, 40 Elizabethan period 4, 9–10, 13, 40, 52, 59, 103, 151, 159 n.32, 178 n.16 employment forced 53 opportunities 95–7, 111, 132 and real wages 93–4 regulations 95 seasonal 7, 9, 116 English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) 170 n.1 English Civil War 4, 10, 127 English colonies. See colonial territories English Rogue, The (Head) 15 English sessions court 1–2 Enlightenment 46, 63, 80 epidemiology 9 Essay on Charity and Charity Schools (Mandeville) 45, 46–7 ‘Essay on the Poor Laws’ (Locke) 43 Essex 19, 123, 125, 127, 138 Euing ballad collections 172 n.42 euphemisms 72, 81, 131 Evans, Ann 141–2 Evans, James 118 Evans, Jane 78 Evans, Tanya 182 n.11 exclusion 9–10, 17, 28, 34, 42, 58, 63, 76, 79, 92, 94, 97, 113, 118, 122, 126, 137–9, 142, 146–7, 150, 153, 155, 165 n.33 Exeter 50, 128, 146 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville) 46 ‘Famous Ratketcher, with his travels, The’ 71–2 Feldman, David 184 n.26 female vagrants abandoned 71, 94, 118, 124, 128, 129, 131, 137, 141, 146 and absent husbands 131–2, 140–3 antenatal and post-natal medical care 138, 139–40 ‘avoidance of ’ military service 11–12, 129 beggars 72–3, 77, 86–7, 118, 124, 127, 129–30, 134, 136, 139–47

228 as burdens 11 casual relief 11, 108 and childbirth 76, 91, 110, 123–4, 126, 132, 136–40 with children 126–7, 128, 130, 136–40, 142–6 commodification of 63, 73 common cause of vagrancy among women 141 education and employment of 38, 44 featured in ballads 68, 83, 86–7 fictional characters 123–4 and gendered homelessness 125–32 harshly treated by authorities 116, 128, 139, 146 in houses of correction 129, 130–1 indentured labour 30–1 independent and resilient 143 marginalized 11–12 parochial exclusion 137–40, 142 pension 29, 79 and politics of belonging 114–15 population estimates 105, 126–7 pregnant/expectant mothers 103, 108, 110, 124, 126, 134, 138 prostitution 72–3, 124, 129–30, 134–6 punishment of 128, 130–1, 136, 138, 145, 146 reason for mobility 11 rise in mobility 126–7, 130, 133 seduced and deceived 70–2, 124 sexual deviance 63–4, 71, 73–4, 124 sexuality and domestic work 127, 129, 132–6 and sickness 78, 103, 117, 121, 131, 138, 145, 147, 149 single 108, 116, 127, 136 transported to colonies 123, 124 varieties of vagrant activity 124, 134 vulnerability of 125–6 West/Davis family, story of 143–6 widows 76–8, 117, 118, 142–3 Finch, Emme 135 Finchley-Common 31 Firmin, Thomas 26, 38–9, 44, 137, 164 n.21, 164 n.28 Fissell, Mary E. 175 n.69 Fleet Prison, London 182 n.96 Fletcher, Anthony 174 n.57

Index Floyd, John 33–4 Fog’s Weekly Journal 50, 170 n.118 food 56, 70, 95, 108 forced labour 25, 27, 53, 151 foreign vagrancy 50–1 ‘Forlorn Traveller, The’ (Climsell) 75 Foucault, Michel 18, 163 n.14, 188 n.5 Fox, Adam 60, 68–9, 172 n.27, 172 n.32 Foyster, Elizabeth 62, 172 nn.38–40 Fraiser, John 116 France 12, 31, 35, 41, 45, 71, 72, 96–7, 167 n.63 Fraternity of Vagabonds (Awdeley) 13 Friendly, James 120 From Reformation to Improvement (Slack) 41, 163 n.15 Fry, A. Ruth 168 n.78 Fumerton, Patricia 16, 141, 162 n.64, 171 n.4, 171 n.6 gallows 3, 23 gaol-fever 7 gaols 111, 113, 130 Gardiner, Robert 102–3 Gay, John 7 Germany 31 Gibbons, Elizabeth 142 Gibbons, John 142 Giles, John 34–5 Giving Alms no Charity (Defoe) 45, 169 n.103 Goode, John 105 Goodman, Godfrey 99 Gowing, Laura 128, 134, 184 n.28 Gray, Charles 40, 168 n.81 Great Depression 117, 152 Green, Elna 160 n.38 Green, Samuel 120, 121 Greenblatt, Stephen 170 n.114 Greenwich 140 Grell, Ole Peter 175 nn.69–70 Griffiths, Paul 160 n.37, 179 n.40, 182 n.108 Guerrini, Anita 171 n.4 Guildford 131, 133, 137, 139, 140, 145 Gunpowder Plot of 1605 68 gypsies 3, 4, 8, 10, 15–16, 25, 28, 31, 42, 50, 72, 78, 85–6, 92, 106, 107, 123

Index Hackney 99, 114, 121 Hailwood, Mark 60, 172 n.31, 187 n.83 Hakluyt, Richard 164 n.29 Hale, Matthew 24–6, 44, 164 n.24, 169 n.99 Harding, Richard 138–9 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth) 132, 136 Harman, Thomas 13, 22, 53, 63, 65, 67, 88, 150, 173 n.47 Harris, Diana 139 Harris, Michael 170 n.116 harvest 8, 9, 11, 77, 96 Harvey, Francis 103, 180 n.51 Hay, Douglas 159 n.31, 178 n.28, 188 n.7 Hays, Elizabeth 120, 122 Haywood, Eliza 134, 185 n.51 Head, Richard 15, 88, 161 n.58, 176 n.91 Healey, Jonathan 128, 184 n.30 health as morality (portrayed in rogue ballads) 65–6, 69, 71, 78, 79–82, 87, 151 and welfare 39, 42 hearth tax 41, 42, 104 Hempstead House of Correction 119, 120 Henderson, Tony 174 n.57 Herndon, Ruth Wallis 188 n.7 Herrup, Cynthia B. 31, 165 n.40 Hertford House of Correction 119, 120 Hertfordshire 19, 99, 111, 119, 120, 131 Hidden from History (Rowbotham) 125 Higbie, Frank Tobias 189 n.16 Higgs, Susan 123 Highway to the Spital House 88 Hilton, Mary 136 Hindle, Steve 101, 160 n.35, 162 nn.74–5, 177 n.14, 184 n.31 Hinnells, John 175 n.69 historicism 57 historiography 4, 6–7, 18, 57, 92, 95, 126, 157 n.11, 158 n.21, 174 n.57 Hitchcock, David 176 n.87 Hitchcock, Tim 3–4, 7, 16, 126, 129, 136, 146, 157 n.8, 159 nn.24–5, 161 n.60, 167 n.73, 168 n.85, 181 n.85, 182 n.100, 187 n.103 Hitchin House of Correction 119, 120 Hogarth, William 132–3, 136, 151

229

Holland 6, 35 Holland, Henry 50 Holland, Mary 50 ‘Holland’s Leaguer’ 130 Holliday, Robert 153 Holmes, Geoffrey 163 n.6, 168 n.88 homelessness 2, 5, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18, 28, 40, 64, 73, 75, 79, 125–32, 139, 150, 153, 155, 187 n.103 Homer 154, 188 nn.10–11 homosexuals 16 hospitals 19, 39, 47, 80, 116, 134, 142, 175 n.73 Hoyles, William 31 Hubbard, Eleanor 135, 183 n.11 Hufton, Olwen 174 n.57, 187 n.93 Hugh, Mary 110 humanism 12, 13, 41, 44, 46 Hundert, E.J. 46, 169 n.105 Hunnyborne, Thomas 110, 180 nn.70–1 Hunter, J.P. 125, 183 n.7, 183 n.9 Huntington ballad collections 172 n.42 Hurl-Eamon, Jennine 167 n.73 Hutcheson, Francis 169 n.113 identification (of vagrants) and accuracy 41 definition 27 new forms of 150, 152 and punishment 9, 36, 114 stock conveyance order 152 technologies of 20, 53 and vagrant news 27, 49–52, 150 idleness 3, 13 assumptions of 21–53, 149–51, 154–5 characteristics of 34 by choice 24–6, 27 and crime reporting in newspapers 49–52 cultural construction 154–5 Dalton and Gardiner’s treatises 103 improvement and 36–49 indenture and 27–30 industry and 25 sermons and pamphlets on 25 sin of 24–5 imperial ambitions 12, 20, 23, 32, 34–6, 52, 149–50, 153, 155

230 impressment army 11, 12, 32–3, 72, 81, 111, 126, 129, 141–2, 166 n.57 naval 12, 30, 32–6, 52, 111, 129, 141 physically unfit for service 33 procurement of vagrants 32–6 transport and 30–6 improvement definition 27 and forced employment 53 ideologies of 44, 150 and idleness 26, 36–49 literature 37–40 and luxury, debate over 44 national 22, 36, 149 population estimates 41–4 incarceration 16, 17, 20, 50, 91–2, 94, 98, 114, 119, 121, 128, 130, 138, 147, 150 indentured servitude 10, 27–30, 36, 52, 111, 152–3, 177 n.6 India 71, 153, 155 inequality 12, 57, 153, 155 International Workers of the World 155 Ireland 12, 31–2, 45, 111, 117, 140–2, 146 charity schools 45 Irish vagrants 6, 7, 31–2, 92, 142 Jacobite rebellion 12, 30, 161 n.57 Jacquett, Joan 137 jails 3, 24, 128, 146 James I 31, 130, 165 n.42 James II 29, 165 n.37 Jamestown 30, 36, 153 jests/jestbooks 61, 63 Jews 16 Johnson, H.C. 181 n.78, 182 n.105 Johnson, Sarah 114–15, 178 n.27 Johnson, William 114–15 jokes 23, 61, 67 Jones, D.W. 178 n.23 Jones, Elizabeth 137, 142 Jones, Jane 137 Jones, John 142 Jones, Mary G. 44, 169 n.100 Jones, Owen 140 Jones, Richard 120 Jones, Sarah 140 Jordan, Sarah 25, 164 n.18

Index journals 49–51 ‘Jovial Pedlar, The’ 59, 73 ‘Jovial Tinkers’ ballads 62–4, 70–1, 73, 117, 149 Justices of the Peace (JPs) (or magistrates) 10, 20, 26 descriptive language used by 111–15 discretion 104, 114, 121, 137, 139–40 enforcement of vagrancy laws 98 manual for 102, 104 petty sessions 114 social prejudices of 114–15 supervision and control by 119 Jütte, Robert 161 n.59, 175 n.70 Kennison, Mary 128 Kent 1–2, 11, 19, 32, 40, 72, 115, 116, 117, 126, 137, 140–2, 166 n.57 Kent, Joan. 179 n.32 Kesselring, Krista 178 n.28 Khalfa, Jean 157 n.4, 163 n.14 kidnapping 36 Kietzman, Mary Jo 183 n.1 King, Gregory 41–2, 168 nn.88–9 King, Moll 123 King, Peter 178 n.28 King, Steven 158 n.21, 182 n.101, 184 n.26 Knights, Mark 161 n.59, 163 n.6 Knowles, Mary 11, 116 Lake, Peter 161 n.59, 163 n.6 Lancashire 60, 116, 128 Landau, Norma 165 n.33, 166 n.48, 166 n.52 landless labourers 4–6, 55, 128 land ownership 104 ‘Lanthorne for Landlords, A’ 76–8, 87, 142–3, 174 n.65, 187 n.90 Laslett, Peter 178 n.19 Latin 14 Lefebvre, Henry 16 Le Hardy, William 179 n.33 Leicester 113 Levine, Alyssa 175 n.73 Lewis, Bernard 161 n.59 libertine sexual culture 71, 130, 134, 136, 173 n.53 Liber Vagatorum 88 life cycles, vagrant 6, 9, 96, 97, 128–9, 145 liminal spaces 15, 29, 36, 67

Index Linebaugh, Peter 159 n.28, 188 n.7 literary culture 57 Lloyd, Richard 99 Lloyd, Sarah 185 n.45 local/county authorities 8–10, 19–20, 27–8, 31–8, 44, 57, 60, 66, 86, 91–122, 139, 146, 151, 178 nn.28–9 Locke, John 32, 35–6, 43, 166 n.49 Lockley, Tim 188 n.7 London Gazette 21–2, 50 London Journal 50–1 London Metropolitan Archives 118 Long, Henry 138 Louis XIV 41 Love, Harold 163 n.7 Lynn, Mary 118, 141 Mackcarter, Elizabeth 118 Mackcarter, John 118 Manchester 175 n.73 Mandeville, Bernard 45–9, 169 nn.109–10 Mansfield, Judith 138–9 Markley, Robert 186 n.65 marriage age of 140 attitudes towards 55 in ballads and popular literature 55, 57, 59, 62–3, 73–4, 87, 91, 124, 188 n.6 certificate 91, 143 clandestine 182 n.96 forced 124 in popular literature 57, 59, 62 promissory 130, 152 records 41 serial 124 Marshall, Dorothy 157 n.11 Martin, Randall 171 n.14 Marx, Karl 39, 168 n.77 Mary II, Queen 29, 79 Maryland 3 Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (Beier) 4–7, 92, 118, 126, 158 n.12 ‘Maunding Soldier, The’ 81, 82 Mayall, David 161 n.59 McEwan, Joanne 159 n.30, 181 n.85, 182 n.100

231

McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston 165 n.33 McRae, Andrew 16 McShane Jones, Angela 171 n.5, 172 n.34 media 49, 88 medical knowledge/care 78–82, 130, 139, 141, 146–7 Mentz, Steve 57, 162 n.73 Mersham church 1–2, 10 Michaelmas calendar, 1734 130–1 Middlesex 30, 40, 99, 109, 114, 116, 117, 121, 126, 138, 142 Middleton, Simon 123, 188 n.7 migration ‘betterment’ 97 constables’ accounts 98–100 Grandborough accounts 104–8, 126–7 Dalton’s and Gardiner’s treatises 102–4 definition 12–13 demographic pressures 95–7, 105, 118, 121, 126, 152 forced 124 ‘permanent’ 121–2 private conveyance 108–11, 115 reason for vagrants' 11 regulation of 17 seasonal 6 ‘semi-permanent’ 122 settlement and vagrancy law, local operations of 94–5, 97, 103, 104 social description and differentiation 101–2 language used 111–15 in printed treatises 102–4 Warwickshire records 104–8, 111–15 subsistence 91–122 and vagrancy, distinctions between 92, 95, 97 vagrant examinations 115–18 ‘vagrant spaces’ 118–22 Migration and Society (Clark and Souden) 6 Miller, George 32–3 molestation 103 Moll Flanders (Defoe) 10, 19, 123–5, 136, 150, 152 monastery 104 monasticism 155 Monmouth rebellion, 1685 29, 30 Moore, Adrian 139

232

Index

Moore, Anne 117 Moore, John 117 Moore, Robert 117 Moore, Susan 134 morality 53, 65, 79–82 Morgan, Gwenda 163 n.13 Musgrove, Lazarus 138, 139 National Library of Scotland ballads 172 n.42 Native Americans 3 Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (Gregory King) 41–2 navy service 12, 30, 32–6, 52, 111, 129, 141 Newgate Ordinaries 49 Newlands 139 newspaper reports 18, 21–3, 27, 49–53, 150, 152, 163 n.4, 170 n.115 Nichols, Tom 83, 175 n.79 Nicole, Pierre 46 Night-Walker, The (Dunton) 135–6 night watchmen 103 Nine Years War 12 Norris, Henry 99, 114 Northampton 91 Ocobock, Paul 155, 161 n.54 Odyssey (Homer) 154, 188 nn.10–11 Old Bailey 31, 166 n.44 oral culture 58, 59 ‘others’/otherness 16, 85 Outhwaite, R.B. 182 n.96 Overseers of the Poor 94, 102, 110, 113, 116, 139 Ovington, J. 161 n.53 Oxford 114 Paley, Ruth 179 n.34 ‘Palmer the Fiddler’ 114 pamphlets 14, 18, 24–6, 37, 40, 49, 52, 61, 63, 78, 93, 128, 135–6, 161 n.53, 164 n.21 panopticon 18 parish(es) 7–8 Charles II’s rebuke of 29 contracted conveyance 108–11 Egerton’s proposals 38

employment in 95–6 exclusionary practices 28, 34, 97, 113, 138–9, 147 financial interests 33–4 Grandborough case 104–8 Gray’s proposal 40 home 10, 29, 97, 100, 104, 128, 140, 143 Locke’s proposal 32, 43 poor rates 11, 32–4, 38, 94–5, 105, 110, 114, 147 poor relief 39, 43–4, 105, 118 registers 17, 42, 100, 140 removal of vagrants 32–4, 44, 95, 113 of residence 95, 114 rural 96 of settlement 2, 10, 104, 108, 115, 129, 139–40, 145 Parker, Geoffrey 160 n.41 Parker, Martin 58–9, 66–7, 74–5, 173 n.45, 175 n.75 Parker’s Penny Post 50, 51 passes, vagrant 6, 20, 22, 52, 99–100, 103–4, 106, 108, 113, 119, 127, 138, 150–2, 179 n.36 passports 6 patriarchy 62–3, 131, 136 ‘Pedlar opening of his Packe, To Know of Maydes what tis They lacke, The’ 81–2 penal institutions 10, 16–17, 30, 119 penal transportation 3, 7, 10, 12, 17, 18, 150 court sentences 31 and impressment 30–6, 52 monetization of 34 privatization of 34, 36, 108–11 for productive use 21, 27–30, 34–6, 53, 167 n.63 pension 29, 39, 79, 101, 142 Pepys, Samuel 55, 58 Pepys ballads 64, 73, 172 n.42 permanent vagrancy 5, 121–2, 126, 128–9 Pestana, Carla Gardina 188 n.7 Petty, Sir William 42, 163 n.7 petty crime/criminals 4, 6, 17, 27, 30, 52 petty sessions 26, 32–3, 111–15, 119, 166 n.51, 166 n.57 physical attributes. See descriptions of vagrants

Index Pierce, C.S. 175 n.80 pillory 17, 18 Pincus, Steven C.A. 163 n.6 Place, G.W. 166 n.47 plague 7, 8, 38 Plim, Thomas 139 political arithmetic 41–2 political economy 41, 52, 150, 152 ‘Politick Begger-Man, who got the love of a pretty Maid, The’ 70 Pollock, Anthony 163 n.6 ‘poore passingers’ 20, 104–5, 105, 108, 150 Poor Mans Friend (Bush) 37, 164 n.16 popular culture 18, 55, 58, 69, 88, 102, 123, 130 popular songs 14, 18, 59–60, 73, 80 population growth 4–5, 95–6, 105 mobile 6, 91–122, 133 as national resource 9, 152, 170 n.127 statistics 41–4, 104–5 Porter, Roy 175 n.69 Portsmouth 34, 142 Postles, David 136, 178 n.27 Pottifor, Mary 110 Pound, J.F. 158 n.11 Powell, Christopher 62 Price, Edward 91, 150 print culture 57, 88 prisoners of war 31 private contractors/conveyance 108–11, 115, 126, 151 privatization of procurement 33–4 proclamations 14, 18, 21, 23–4, 28–9, 31, 36, 51, 55 Proposals for a College of Industry (Bellers) 39 Proposals for Imploying the Poor (Firmin) 38–9 prostitution 10, 18–19, 57, 62–4, 70, 72–3, 77, 79, 98, 123–4, 129–36, 163 n.14, 174 n.57, 176 n.93, 185 n.41 Pryor, William 164 n.22 punishment carceral 10, 12, 111, 120, 151–2 corporal 24–5, 43, 128 crime and 9, 22

233 in Dalton and Gardiner’s treatises 103–4 de rigueur 30 discretionary 101, 121 identification and 9, 36, 114 innovative 20 primary 100 public 18, 24 summary 19, 32, 114, 166 n.52

Quakers/Quakerism 3, 26, 39, 128, 146 quarter sessions 35, 57, 93–4, 100, 102, 109, 111–15, 139–40, 145, 157 n.1 rape 61, 135, 187 n.103 Ratcliff, S.C. 181 n.76 ‘Ratketchers returne out of France, The’ 71–2 Raymond, Joad 170 n.115 Reading 22 real wages 4–6, 94, 96, 126 Reay, Barry 171 n.19 records (archival) baptism 2, 41, 140 birth 2, 41 double record-keeping 115 duplicate 7 judicial 19, 94, 115 legal 3, 93, 96–7, 121 marriage 41, 91, 140, 143 petty sessions 32 traditional 5 written 2, 100 Rediker, Marcus 159 n.28 Rees, Siân 125, 167 n.64 Reformation of Manners 17, 38, 43, 46, 135 Reinke-Williams, Tim 63, 172 n.41 Renaissance 13, 61–2 Restoration 6, 15, 49, 58, 113, 129 Review of the Affairs of France (Defoe) 45 Ribton-Turner, C.J. 158 n.11 Richards, Thomas 111 Richardson, J. 151 roadside vagrant births 110, 126, 137–9, 183 n.12 Roaring Girl, The (Dekker) 123 Robinson, Alice 135

234

Index

Robinson, Richard 135 Rochester 78, 115, 116, 117, 127, 142 Rogers, John 137 Rogers, Mary 137 Rogers, Nicholas 126, 158 n.22, 166 n.48 rogue(s) 3 characteristics of 13, 57 etymology/definition 13–14, 48, 160 nn.50–1 incorrigible 7, 10, 17, 50, 92 Mandeville on 47, 48–9 rogue ballads 55–89, 151 authorship of 58–9 campaigns and petitions against 163 n.4 ‘Carefree or Highway’ narratives 65–9 categories 65–78 collections 64 construction of characters 63–4 dating of 59 health, sexuality, and morality, representations of 71, 79–82 historical use of 59–65 idleness and 64 interpretive problems 60, 61 learning and transmission of 60 ‘lewd living’ narratives 55, 64, 74–6 lost 64 online sources 64 overview of ballads 55–9 performance vs. printed 60–1 popularity and diffusion of 58–9 and popular literature 56–9 problems of selection, survival, and diffusion 64–5 revenge narratives 64, 76–8 role of laughter in 61–3 seduction narratives 69–74 source material 64–5 subsets 64 themes 55, 61, 64, 75, 78, 80 ‘Tom the Taylor Group’ 72–3 types of narratives 63–4 warning and lamentation narratives 74–6 woodcut designs 82–7 rogue literature 3–4, 15, 27, 49, 63, 66–8, 78, 88, 151 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 87 ‘Room for a Jovial Tinker’ 73, 174 n.60

Rosenthal, Laura J. 186 n.59 Rouen 51 Roxburghe ballads 59, 64, 72–3, 172 n.42, 173 n.56, 174 n.60, 176 n.94 Royal Library of Scotland 73 Royal Navy 34 run-away husbands 8, 17, 28, 34, 37, 42, 98, 122, 129 Russia 155 Rye House plot 68 Sacks, Benjamin 165 n.39 Saint Christopher Island 30 Salgado, Gamini 173 n.43, 176 n.91 Salinger, Sharon V. 188 n.7 satire 46, 57, 82, 85, 151 Savage, Elizabeth 112, 114 Savage, Thomas 112, 114 Schofield, Roger 178 n.21 Scotland 2–3, 29, 45, 73, 116, 172 n.42 Scott, James C. 27–8, 164 n.31 Scottish vagrants 1–3, 6–7, 9–12, 29–31, 116, 147 Scribner, Robert W. 58, 171 n.17 Search, Thomas 119 Seeing like a State (Scott) 27–8, 164 n.31 sermons 14, 22–3, 25, 88, 93, 161 n.53, 163 n.9, 164 n.21 settlement certificate 52, 95, 100 settlement rights 6–7, 134, 139–40 Sevenoaks 32–3 sex and sexuality 9, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 25, 62–6, 68, 70–4, 78, 81, 87, 123–47, 151, 155 sexual policing 17, 173 n.53 Shadwell 116, 138 Shakespeare, William 87 Shapely, Peter 175 n.73 Sharpe, J.A. 171 n.2, 178 n.16 Sheale, Richard 60 Shepard, Alexandra 179 n.39 Shoemaker, Robert 167 n.73 Shoreditch 118 Siberia 155 Simpkins, William 118, 181 n.95 Slack, Paul 4, 41, 46, 92, 95, 157 n.10, 167 n.68, 181 n.74 Smith, Billy G. 188 n.7

Index Smith, Mary 110 Smith, Richard 110 Snell, Keith 137, 165 n.33, 177 n.14, 186 n.70 social control 21–2, 24 social descriptions 9, 92, 100, 101–15 social networks 129 social policy 5, 9, 27, 36, 41–2, 121, 126, 150, 188 n.3 Societies for the Reformation of Manners 17, 38, 46 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 45 Souden, David 6, 158 n.19, 177 n.6, 177 n.9 Southchurch 138–9 Southwark 32, 50, 115, 118, 130–1, 133, 141, 144, 185 nn.36–7 Spain 31 Spufford, Margaret 171 n.15, 177 n.7 St. Albans 111 St. Bishop’s, Aldersgate 38 St. Paul’s Shadwell 116 Stafford 114–15 Stafford, J. Martin 169 n.109 Staffordshire 91 Starling, Igdelius 116 Stationers’ Company 58 Statute of Artificers 92 Steinberg, Jessica 185 n.41 Stephens, Richard 117, 122 Stephenson, Svetlana 189 n.14 stereotypes 4, 14–16, 18–20, 23, 56–7, 63, 65, 69, 71, 83, 85–6, 107, 113, 123–5, 129, 154 Stone, Lawrence 130, 185 n.35 Stuart dynasty 94, 103 Styles, Philip 177 n.13 subcultures 8 subsistence migration 2, 18, 78, 91–122, 152 subversion 13, 62 Surrey 19, 32–5, 40, 125–7, 130–1, 133, 136–7, 139–46 Sutton Coldfield 110, 180 n.70 Tarbin, Stephanie 183 Taylor, James Stephen 158 n.21 testimonials 8, 103–4, 179 n.48 Thames river 30, 130

235

Theed, Lionel 99 theft 13, 30–1, 42, 51, 79, 98, 113, 123–4, 134–5 Thirsk, Joan 160 n.42, 168 n.87 Thomas, D.B. 176 n.91 Thomas, John 99 Thomas, Keith 127, 184 n.22 Thompson, E.P. 162 n.76, 178 n.28 Tilly, Joseph 141 Tilly, Mary 141 Tilly, Thomas 141 Tinker, Richard 78, 115–16, 127 Tomkins, Alannah 159 n.26, 169 n.97, 177 n.14 Tomlins, Christopher 164 n.29 ‘tour’ literature 119 tramps/tramping 6, 154–5 transportation. See penal transportation travelogues 119 Trinity sessions, 1677 112 Trivia (Gay) 7 tropes 63, 67, 71, 81, 88, 141, 154 Troughear, Thomas 163 n.9 Tudor period 4, 95 ‘Two-Penny Whore, The’ 135 underemployment 24–5, 45, 97 underworld, Elizabethan 4, 13, 15, 19, 66, 123, 151, 155 unemployment 6, 25, 92, 97, 117 vagabond, etymology/definition 4, 14, 53, 151, 161 n.56 vagrancy. See also specific entries ambiguous definitions 25–6, 98 assumptions 19–20 categories 8–9, 103 common causes of 96, 117, 141 decline of 5, 93, 96, 122, 126 etymology/definitions 24–5, 44, 149–50, 161 nn.55–6 key arguments 19–20 overview of, in early modern England 4–20 as perpetuated crime 19–20, 28 preconceptions of 3 social history of 4–12, 18–19, 149–56 threat of 8, 113, 151

236

Index

vagrancy laws 4, 9, 14, 17, 19, 26, 33, 40, 43, 51, 60, 97, 111, 113, 150, 155. See also under Acts of Parliament (dealing with poverty and vagrancy) defects in 26 language of 150 royal proclamations 28–31 state policies 27–30 subcategories 24 Vagrant Removal Costs Act of 1700 9, 109 vagrant(s) characteristics of 14–15, 18, 25 contractual private conveyance 108–11 definitions 8, 14, 17, 27, 36, 92, 103 (mis)classification of 111–15 spaces 115–22 stories 115–22 summary punishment of 19, 32, 114, 166 n.52 transgressive individuals ‘made’ 98, 99 vagrant voices 93–4, 150 Valenze, Deborah 168 n.80 Villiers, George 130 Virginia 10, 31 Waddell, Brodie 97, 158 n.20, 160 n.44, 177 n.10, 178 n.28 wages 4–6, 8, 26, 94, 96–7, 110, 126, 133, 135, 181 n.90 Wales 45 Walford, Edward 185 n.37 Walker, Garthine 171 n.14, 187 n.103 Walker, Thomas 110 Walpole, Robert 47 Walter, John 180 n.63 war domestic effects of 9 mobile populations associated with 6 ‘Warning to all Lewd Livers’ (Parker) 74, 174 n.61 War of the Spanish Succession 32, 45 warrants 99, 113 Warwick House of Correction 112–13 Warwickshire 19, 77, 91, 100, 102, 104–22, 126 Warwickshire Order Books 111

Watt, Tessa 60, 171 n.2 Webb, Beatrice 158 n.11 Webb, Sidney James 158 n.11 welfare systems 22, 26, 36, 42, 53, 97 West, Ann (daughter) 145 West, Ann (mother) 143–6 West, Jane 145 West, Richard 143 West, Sarah 143 West, Thomas 143 West Midlands 104 Westminster 117–18, 121, 140, 167 n.73 Westram 33–4 whipping 10, 17–18, 24, 29, 37, 53, 66, 77, 87, 91–2, 100, 103–4, 108, 113, 130, 151 ‘white-letter’ balladry 64 Whittle, Jane 184 n.24 Whyte, Ian D. 158 n.21, 159 n.27 widows 18, 29, 76–9, 83, 86–7, 89, 92, 110, 117–19, 136, 138, 140, 142–3, 149 Wilkinson, C.H. 157 n.7 William III 29–30, 41, 43, 96–7, 159 n.33, 167 n.63 Wit and Drollery 59 Woking 143–5 Wolverhampton 91 Wood, Mary 133, 134 Woodbridge, Linda 26, 160 n.47, 160 n.50 Woodward, Josiah 22–3, 36, 163 n.8 workhouses critique of 45–6 Firmin’s views 38–9 merits/defences of 23, 44–5 rise of 150 supervision 39, 111 Wright, Thomas 1–2, 12 Wright, Will 109–10 Wrightson, Keith 101 Wrigley, E.A. 164 n.30, 178 n.21 York 11, 116, 138 youth 5 education for 39 laughter of 62 Zahedieh, Nuala 167 n.63