Daily Life in Elizabethan England by Jeffrey L. Forgeng Read Free Book Online Page A

Philip Thomas, Alice Morice and Katherine Hevans, being over fourteen years of age, and strong and fit for labour, were masterless vagrants without any lawful means of subsistence. Whereupon it was decreed that each of the said vagrants should be whipped severely and burnt on the right ear.
    Middlesex County Records, cited Arthur F. Kinney, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973), 17.
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    Daily Life in Elizabethan England
    vagrants while helping those who were genuinely unable to work. Already in 1552 a law had been passed encouraging those of means to contribute to a voluntary parish fund for the support of the poor. In 1563 this contribution was made mandatory, and the first comprehensive Poor Law was issued in 1572, establishing the framework for dealing with poverty that remained in place until the 1800s.
    The Poor Laws acknowledged for the first time the existence of involuntary unemployment. Each parish was to take care of its own residents, based on a mandatory tax, called the Poor Rate, levied on those able to pay. Those physically unable to work were to be given regular stipends.
    The unemployed were to be apprenticed, placed in service, or sent to workhouses where they were given tasks that included pulling apart old ropes to make oakum (used in sealing ships) or operating treadmills to grind flour. Those who shirked labor might be whipped or imprisoned, and vagrants from outside the parish were to be whipped and sent back to their parish of origin. This last provision could be a real problem for the unemployed poor, since anyone leaving their parish in search of work could theoretically be punished as a vagrant (although it was possible to get a license to travel from a local justice of the peace).
    The Elizabethan Poor Laws lie behind the dismal and abusive world
    that Dickens would depict two and a half centuries later in Oliver Twist.
    In their own day, the Poor Laws were a serious and innovative attempt to address a growing problem, but they had little real impact on either poverty or vagrancy. The underlying problem of national-level economic change could not ultimately be resolved by parish-level solutions. Rural communities were unable to support their growing populations, and the rural poor who had no prospects in their villages had no choice but to migrate in search of employment. These migrants would eventually gravitate toward emerging centers of manufacture, providing the labor that supported Britain’s industrialization after 1700.
    In the mean time, long-term unemployment could lead to a life among the growing number of permanent beggars and vagabonds, who may
    have numbered as many as 20,000. In combination with the gypsies, they were beginning to create an underworld culture of their own; in fact, the Elizabethans were both fascinated and horrified by the counterculture of the lawless, much as people today are intrigued by the culture of the Mafia or street gangs. A whole genre of literature emerged that purported to offer a glimpse into the alternative society in which these rogues circulated: social organization, tricks of the trade, and the distinctive cant in which they spoke to each other. John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) describes a few types:
    An Abraham Man is he that walketh bare-armed and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carrieth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it, or suchlike toy, and nameth himself Poor Tom . . .
    Society 23
    A Prigman goeth with a stick in his hand like an idle person. His property is to steal clothes off the hedge, which they call “storing of the rogueman,” or else to filch poultry, carrying them to the alehouse, which they call the “bousing inn,” and there sit playing at cards and dice, till that is spent which they have so filched. . .
    A Kintchin Co is called an idle runagate boy.4
    Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common