Vagrant definition12/24/2023 ![]() Twelve Pence a Peck Oysters, Marcellus Laroon, The Cryes of London, 1679. All persons wandering abroad and begging.All persons wandering abroad and begging, pretending to be soldiers, mariners, seafaring men, pretending to go to work in harvest.All persons wandering abroad and lodging in alehouses, barns, outhouses or in the open air, not giving a good account of themselves.Petty chapmen and pedlars, not duly licensed.All persons who run away and leave their wives and children.Those using subtle crafts to deceive and impose, or playing or betting on unlawful games.Those pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or fortune telling.Persons pretending to be Gypsies, or wandering in the habit of Gypsies.All persons concerned with performing interludes, tragedies, comedies, operas, plays, farces or other entertainments for the stage, not being authorized by law.Fencers and bear wards (those who travel with a bear or dancing bear).Collectors for prisons, goals, or hospitals.Patent gatherers, gatherers of alms under pretence of loss by fire, or other casualty.The list was a long one that owed as much to tradition as to eighteenth-century occupational categories, and included: 5įollowing a centuries-old tradition of associating vagrants with a series of specific occupations and activities, the 1744 Vagrancy Act simply listed who could be prosecuted under the law. In 1783, individuals found in possession of either small arms or burglary implements were encompassed within the vagrancy acts, and in 1787 those running unlicensed lotteries and similar games of chance were also explicitly defined as vagrants. s also saw the passage of two further Acts reflecting explicitly metropolitan concerns. This 1714 Act was in its turn superseded by 1744 Vagrancy Act, which again added little that was new to the then current legislation, but provided the legal framework for the policing and punishing of vagrants until 1792. 3 It bundled together in this single category settled paupers who were thought in danger of deserting their wives and children, those who refused to work for the usual wages, those wandering abroad and begging, a wider set of travelling mendicants and traders, and all those who were unable (for whatever reason) to give a good account of themselves. ![]() In particular, the 1714 Vagrancy Act consolidated current legislation, and widened the definition of a vagrant. This change also ensured that vagrancy policy - in terms of punishment and removal - came to form a significant part of the business of the Middlesex Bench and the Common Council and Lord Mayor of the City of London.Īfter the Vagrants Removal Costs Act, a range of further Acts of Parliament were mostly directed at codifying and consolidating the law, rather than fundamentally changing policy. 2 Although in no way the intention of the law makers, this legislation effectively encouraged parishes to redefine paupers as vagrants, as a means of transferring the costs of their support and removal to the county. Of these Acts of Parliament, the most significant was the Vagrant Removal Costs Act of 1700, which shifted the expense of removing vagrants from the parish to the county (or the city in the case of the City of London). The legal framework for the prosecution and removal of vagrants evolved incrementally over the course of the period covered by this website, with some twenty-eight different pieces of legislation passed between 17. Many examples of vagrancy passes are filed among the Sessions Papers (PS). Gradually, vagrants came to be punished less often, while the development of passes allowing the poor to travel unhindered (and to claim support from local constables and overseers along the way), ensured that little of the brutality evident in sixteenth-century vagrancy legislation can be found by 1690. Two separate systems were retained throughout the eighteenth century, but their workings, and the experience of the poor within them, became ever more similar. As the system of legal pauper settlement evolved between the 1660s and the 1690s the obvious distinctions between vicious vagrancy and deserving poverty, however, became increasingly difficult to delineate. The eighteenth century inherited from the sixteenth and seventeenth a body of statute law that saw in vagrancy and vagabondage a powerful social threat deserving of serious punishment, and a category of offence that was distinct from the issue of settled poverty.
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