The Brighter Side of Vagrancy
TOE history of vagrancy is as often as not the negative plate of the history of poor law. The development of a public provision for destitution reacted on the frequency of vagabond crime in a marked way, and progressively altered the structure of the English underworld. Side by side with the growth of organised charity, social and economic changes which threw the poor out of employment, or pauperised those already in employment, modified poor law policy from decade to decade.
A feudal type of society, in which unemployment was rare, regarded such provision as an individual act of piety, with- out too much consideration for the recipient of the charity. But the decline of feudalism, the break-up of the self- sufficient manorial unit, and the growth of the practice of early forms of land-speculation produced an agricultural unemployment so severe that drastic measures had to be taken to prevent the wreckage of the old society fromdestroy- ing the new economic order. Jack Cade's rebellion demon- strated the latent power of the discontented elements in the country, and the necessity for conciliating and controlling them along new lines. The unemployed soldiers returned from France added a raffish and mkehelly tone to the pre- valent vagabondage, but their discontent had nothing in common with that of the contemporary peasant. Previous to Henry VIII's reign vagabondage had been a chiefly rural phenomenon. Where it was independent of changes in rural economy, it occurred in the " bad lands " of Wales and the Cheshire border, where professional vagrancy and wandering minstrelsy was _ commonly accepted and supported by " comorthas " or collections. But the new wealth of the commercial classes, and the increased luxury of the towns, attracted the tramp and the out-of-work from the country and threw him into contact with the smart 'prentice and the young rake.
The succeeding reigns saw, side by side again, increasing vagabondage and crime, and a stricter and more efficient poor law. The City of London set about exterminating the colonies of professional tricksters, prostitutes, receivers and bullies that were growing up round about the Savoy, and in Holborn and Islington, and met with a temporary success. But a flourishing night-life revived in spite of the efforts of the eh* authorities. Urban crime took on a new character, very different from that of common vagabondage. It centred round the pot-house and the Ordinary, became ingenious and sophisticated, and pursued a new and lucrative racket. The chief employment of the tavern gangs was confidence-trickery. " Coney-catching " needed more than a glib tongue. It needed a real knowledge of the fashionable world and enough topical chit-chat to attract and hold the attention of the smart noodles home from an Italian tour. It needed enough inside knowledge of the current alliances and hostilities, and the preferments and degradations in influential households to pose as social handy-man to young men of mean parentage in search of reputation and a gallant career. Dekker's Gulfs Hornbook exposes the contemporary technique of getting on. It was obviously a fascinating employment : the milieu was exciting and various, the process attended by pleasure and lavishness. The social parasites of this adolescent society basked in its reflected glory. Alongside the spoiled youths and the penniless eccentrics moved the " gentlemen foists " and the " upright men," only distinguishable to the practised eye of a Bohemian turned informer like Greene. But there were grades of superiority and inferiority in this vicious society. To a slightly lower grade belonged the travelling tricksters who went from fair to fair, the ballad-sellers, and the pedlars. To a totally different society belonged the beggars and sham-cripples who tramped singly about the country, and who, if Awdely and Harman are to be believed, met secretly to divide their spoils and exchange information. That the beggars had a certain sense of solidarity cannot be denied. A well-developed Thieves' Cant attests the existence of a self-conscious society. Thz existence of such plays as Richard Brome's Jovial Crew, and Fletcher's Beggar's Bush reveals a public interest in the life of these apparently elaborate organisations. There is a rich literature, of which Mr. Fuller makes extensive use, devoted to publicising the sharp practices of vagabonds. There is, too, a large stock of doggerel verse, sometimes achieving poetic vigour, contained in collections like the Bagford Ballads and Roxburghe Ballads which gives a spirited and unsentimental picture of the beggar's life. By 1618 the menace of organised vagabondage was past. A Draconian legislation was crushing it out of existence, and the beggar became what he had been in previous centuries— a furtive outlaw inclined to violence, half-way to the foot-pad of the succeeding century.
Mr. Fuller has produced a scrap-book of vagrancy, beggar- dorn and gang-crime which lacks a thesis or any historical scaffolding entirely. Roughly, it amounts to a smart description of beggars' brotherhoods, thieves' custom and confidence- tricksters' habits from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He has made some attempt to account for the terrific increase in vagrancy caused by the economic upheavals of Tudor and Elizabethan England, but the explanations are disjointed and for the most part the book is purely descriptive. As a study of vagrancy it is brighter but certainly not better than the Victorian classic work on the subject—Ribton- Turner's 700-page encyclopaedia which covers the history of vagabonds from the Laws of Alothaere and Eadric to the Casual Poor Act of 1882. It is disheartening to find that Mr. Fuller has neglected the expert opinion of previous editors of Greene, and has taken the "coney-catching" pamphlets at their face-value. The result of this skimpy treatment is simply this : Mr. Fuller has overlooked the important socio- logical problems underlying the Dialogue between a He-coney- catcher and a She-coney-catcher and the Quip, and has concen- trated on the superficially romantic and unreliable aspects of the whole series. Further, though it distinguishes between criminals of the pauperised type and the urban parasitio classes, it appears to attribute their growth to the same social causes. Mr. Fuller has thrown away his chance of making an entertaining book out of remarkably rich materiaIN
SALLY GRAVES.
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