VAGRANTS AND BEGGARS

VAGRANTS AND BEGGARS. With the increase in the ranks of paupers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, contemporary legislation began to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor. The definition of the "true" poor (children, the aged, the sick, and the infirm) reflected the new policy of early modern governments all over Europe of refusing to recognize unemployment per se as an excuse for beggary. The magistrates held that, apart from those who were rendered incapable of earning a living by age or physical condition, all who begged should be considered willful idlers and treated severely. It was therefore declared that the beggary of the able-bodied poor was criminal. The intention was to help those unable to take care of themselves, whereas able-bodied persons unwilling to work were not entitled to poor relief, but, on the contrary, were subject to a variety of disciplinary measures. The dangerous poor were, according to a stereotype that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, typically rootless, masterless, and homeless. The beggar who took to a life of crime, and abused the conventions of a Christian society of "orders" and "callings," became defined as a member of a deviant subculture, who had to be punished. In its justification of these punishments, which became even more severe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, governments stressed the connection between beggary and criminality.

The equation between begging and crime became a commonplace in poor law legislation from the sixteenth century onward. It was used to justify harsh but futile measures against those who supposedly showed an ingrained laziness and a stubborn preference for living from charity, and, inevitably, went astray, becoming used in the end to a disorderly and criminal style of life (vagrancy, theft, smuggling, and prostitution).

THE GROWING NUMBERS OF BEGGARS AND VAGRANTS

Vagrancy was a socially defined offense that reflects the dual problem of geographical and social mobility in early modern Europe. Offenders were arrested and punished not because of their actions, but because of their marginal position in society. The implication was that vagrants were not ordinary criminals but were regarded as a major threat to society, and therefore pursued by all authorities and stigmatized as deviants. The offense of which they were accused posed a serious challenge to the moral and physical well-being of the Christian commonwealth. Vagrants should not be confused with the outsiders known in medieval Germany as fahrende Leute, 'wayfarers'. Those included a variety of people, from wandering scholar to minstrels and knifegrinders. Many of them were engaged in itinerant trades or professions whose form of work involved wandering (entertainers, transient healers, hawkers, tinkers). They were also despised, ridiculed, stigmatized, and marginalized, but not prosecuted for their deviant way of life.

During the course of the fifteenth century a new social phenomenon grew up alongside these traditional "vagrants": the fraudulent beggar and the idle, sturdy vagabond. Their advent caused governments to react accordingly. In early modern Württemberg, for example, all officials were put on alert for idle vagrants from 1495, and by 1508 those arrested were increasingly charged with "suspicious wandering." The legal concept of vagabondage is based on the distinction between able-bodied and "impotent" poor, which had been propagated by the critiques of the traditional view of poverty since the later Middle Ages, but was only fully accepted by governments of all persuasions from the sixteenth century onward. The ideological underpinning was provided by the rhetorical flourishes of humanists and preachers and the attacks upon vagrants in popular literature.

The omnibus statutory definitions of vagrancy, and even those found in the learned or popular tradition, were not purely theoretical. Not every offender, of course, showed all the characteristics of the stereotype, nor were these traits absolutely necessary for prosecutions or arrests to take place. According to contemporary sources the number of vagrants had been increasing over the sixteenth century, but it is difficult to substantiate these estimates statistically. The clearest evidence of a real growth in vagrancy during the early modern period is the figures that refer to people who were arrested, convicted, or punished for vagrancy alone, and not for any other crime. In late-sixteenth-century England, vagrants numbering only in the hundreds were found in the special searches after the Rising in the North (1571–1572), while sixty years later reports to the Privy Council recorded the local arrest and punishment of many thousands of wandering rogues and sturdy beggars (nearly 25,000 in thirty-two English counties between 1631 and 1639). It is likely that the number of people that could be labeled as vagrants continued to increase well into the seventeenth century, not only in England but also in other European countries. But there was worse to come. In the eighteenth century vagrancy was exacerbated not only by deteriorating demographic and economic conditions but also by growing government efforts to eradicate the problem. Comparative statistics for the total number of vagabonds in various European countries are complicated by the variety of ways in which vagrants could be punished. Despite numerous uncertainties, it is possible, for example, to compare the number of people detained as vagrants (broadly defined) and interned in "houses of correction" or dépôts de mendicité in England and France, respectively, in the later eighteenth century. While in England three to four thousand vagrants and idlers were interned annually, the French police arrested in the same period (1770s and 1780s) between ten and thirteen thousand vagrants each year. Comparing the rates of internment for every 10,000 inhabitants in the two countries, shows that, as far the repression of vagrancy was concerned, the French government was obviously more successful and its police more efficient in enforcing the vagrancy laws that had been in force in both countries since the sixteenth century. These numerical results are thus quite significant in terms of the capabilities of the two most powerful eighteenth-century European states and their respective policing organizations, but there can be no doubt that other countries made similar efforts to suppress vagrancy.

THE STRUCTURE OF VAGRANCY

The sources also tell us something about the structure of vagrancy. Vagrants were more mobile and traveled longer distances than other migrants. According to an English study, the large majority of apprentices and journeymen moved less than forty miles, while among the vagrants whose place of origin can be determined, more than seventy percent had gone farther; a substantial number of them (22 percent) had even covered a distance of more than one hundred miles. It is often impossible to state the average age of those arrested as vagrants, because of the incompleteness of the data. The few statistics that we have for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, however, leave no doubt that vagrancy was mainly a young person's crime. In Tudor and Stuart England the proportion of vagrants below age twenty-one declined from 67 to 47 percent in the years 1623–1639 as compared to 1570–1622, but was still rather high. Most vagabonds were single and male. That is precisely the group that is underrepresented in listings of the resident respectable poor. The vagrants were distinguished from the latter also in being predominantly young.

Almost unanimously, contemporary observers and legislators assumed that vagabonds chose to be unemployed. The evidence of vagabonds' previous and present occupations suggests that unemployment was a growing problem and that opportunities were contracting, and that as a result the poor were taking up less secure positions such as casual labor, soldiery, and entertainment, which had at that time close links with vagabondage. According to a study on the profile of vagrancy in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, roughly one-third of all vagabonds who could report work histories were engaged in the production of food, leather goods, or cloth and metal wares, or in mining or building; at least one-quarter were servants, apprentices, journeymen, laborers, and harvest workers; almost one-fifth were petty tradesmen and tinkers; and one-tenth were soldiers and mariners. This profile of occupations is strikingly similar to that established for vagrants arrested in eighteenth-century Bavaria. The other major group that figures prominently in the German reports of arrest was a medley of tramping artisans and members of "dangerous trades," consisting largely of flayers and knackers' men and their families.

All these features and social traits provided ample grounds for abhorrence of the idle rogue and sturdy beggar and for his accidental confusion with the simple migrant or pauper.

STIGMATIZATION

In early modern legislation the sturdy beggar was characterized as the incarnation of idleness. Flogging, branding, hard labor in the galleys, and all other penalities introduced against begging and vagrancy that involved public disgrace, were justified because they were meant to constrain the poor from following their unlawful and unchristian inclinations and impel them toward their moral and social duty, that is, to work. Branding and ear boring were ritual punishments that left everlasting marks of infamy on the body of the offender. According to the Edwardian statute of 1547 vagrants were to branded with a V on their breasts. Ear-boring is first mentioned in a statute passed in 1572. In France beggars and vagrants brought to court were subjected to the ritual of corporal punishment including branding (M for mendiant, V for vagabond) and public flogging. Both police and judges examined suspects' bodies for the marks of branding and whipping when they took their disposition. Sometimes the most obscure mark (e.g., the fact that a patch of skin on the shoulder was lighter and of different texture from the rest) was used as proof of a criminal record.

Further forms of corporal punishment for deviant paupers included hair polling, the pillory, and ear cropping. Each of these rituals implied various degrees of public disgrace. The pillory, for example, had been employed against fraudulent beggars since the late Middle Ages. Other forms of degrading punishments for vagrants were of local origin, as for example the "ducking-stool," which was in use in some early modern English towns. This was a special instrument of punishment for prostitutes or dis-honest tradesmen but also for other offenders, consisting of a chair in which an offender was tied and exposed to public derision or ducked in water.

Whipping, branding, and ear boring were for a long time and until the eighteenth century the easiest way of dealing with sturdy beggars and vagabonds. Whether these corporal punishments alleviated the problem of poverty and its concomitant, vagrancy, is doubtful. But it had at least one great advantage: it gave the local governments the feeling that they were at least doing something against the rising number of "masterless men" on the road.

EXPULSION

Local authorities rather seldom used their legislative powers to lock up the wandering or deviant poor (confinement) or to restrict their freedom to move within the municipal area (segregation). More often than not, magistrates turned to the ancient remedy of expulsion. There was almost no town in early modern Europe that at one time or another did not prohibit begging and order the removal of all sturdy beggars and vagabonds. Gatekeepers and constables were admonished to redouble their efforts in order to keep the unwelcome poor outside the city. Some municipalities (e.g., Cologne and Bordeaux) were less successful in barring foreign beggars from entering the city because of the lack of police forces and gaps in their fortification systems. Other European cities managed better in keeping an eye on the floating populations.

In view of the various weaknesses connected with the expulsion or mass banishments of beggars, national governments tried more effective forms of removal for outcast rogues and sturdy beggars. In England the transportation of vagabonds to the colonies dates back to Elizabeth I's reign. The Vagrancy Act of 1597 stipulated that dangerous rogues should be banished overseas. A Privy Council order of 1603 mentioned various destinations: Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, France, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries. Most of those exiled for vagrancy and other crimes were, however, sent to the American colonies.

THE GREAT CONFINEMENT

Compared to stigmatizing corporal punishment and other traditional measures of social control such as expulsion and transportation, a new reformative policy of punishment in the form of so-called protopenal institutions offered the authorities a kind of control over the offender without abusing his body. One should not forget, however, that despite this humanitarian impetus, in most "bridewells," houses of correction, or similar institutions founded in many European countries during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, chaining and beating of the inmates were common practice until the end of the ancien régime.

The most distinctive product of early modern thinking on social welfare was the creation of a new kind of hospital. The practice of confining beggars in jail-like institutions certainly gained favor in the eighteenth century, but as a means of providing work for the needy and punishing the disreputable and deviant, it had a long history, dating back to the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1553 Edward VI, influenced by Bishop Nicolas Ridley, conveyed an old, decayed palace, the Bridewell, to the city of London, for the purpose of safekeeping, punishing, and setting to work the idle poor and vagabonds. Other English towns (such as Norwich and Ipswich) followed in the 1560s. The poor-relief act of 1576 ordered the establishment of so-called houses of correction in all counties and corporate towns of the realm. In this prototype of an institution that was later to become known as the "workhouse," punishment by imprisonment was given a new importance. This means that labor was, for the first time, introduced as corrective discipline. The English statutes of 1576, 1597, and 1610 all listed punishment, work, and discipline as reasons for the establishment of such houses.

At about the same time when Bridewell became the English model for a new type of institution to combat vagabondage, the magistrates of the city of Amsterdam decided to establish a tuchthuis for men, to be followed by a similar institution for women known as a spinhuis. The name of the institution derived from the type of labor the inmates were compelled to perform. The men were forced to chop and rasp Brazilian dyewood, while the women and young children were required to spin, knit, or sew. The reformative program attached great importance to personal hygiene, industriousness, and piety.

The foundation of the Amsterdam tuchthuis was a landmark in the history of a vast program of social engineering, known since Michel Foucault's work in this field as "the Great Confinement." Whether or not one agrees with Foucault's theory of continuity of incarceration and the common disciplinary features of workhouses, asylums, prisons, and factories, there can be little doubt that all those institutions attempted to repress vagrancy and mendicity by segregating and putting to work those caught begging without permission. In the sixteenth century, labor still had strong religiousmoral connotations as a remedy against sinful idleness. By the seventeenth century, when the work-house movement had gained momentum all over Europe, the earlier quality of labor as the means to fight the supposed main cause of poverty (idleness) had been overlaid by a more pragmatic concept in which confinement and compulsory labor were seen as the appropriate instrument to punish and correct beggars and other deviants. Consequently, the workhouse became the distinctive feature of poor relief right to the nineteenth century, even if this English institution and its European adaptations and mutations failed to meet the high expectations of contemporaries.

See also Charity and Poor Relief; Crime and Punishment; Poverty.

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ROBERT JÜTTE