Another authority, John Awdeley in his Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), added to their number ‘Jarckmen’ who forged licences to beg; ‘Patricios’ or hedge-priests who performed marriages which were to hold until death did part, that was to say until the couple agreed to separate by shaking hands over the carcass of a dead animal they happened to pass on the road; and ‘Curtsey Men’ who pretended to be well-to-do people fallen on hard times. ‘These kind of ydle vacabondes will go commonly well apparelled without any weapon, and in places where they meete together at their hosteryes they wyll bear the part of right good gentlemen … but commonly they will pay them with stealing a pair of sheetes or coverlet.’26 All were followed by ‘Doxies’, women who had been ‘broken and spoiled of their maidenhead’; by ‘Dells’, ‘young wenches not yet broken’; by ‘Walking Morts’, unmarried whores; by ‘Kynchin Coes’ and ‘Kynchin Morts’, male and female children; and by ‘Bawdy Baskets’, female pedlars who ‘go with baskets and cap-cases on their arms, wherein they have laces, pins, needles and silk girdles of all colours. And for their trifles they will procure of maiden-servants when their mistress or dame is out of the way, either some good piece of beef, bacon or cheese, that shall be worth twelve pence, for two pence of their toys.’27
Also on the road, though not necessarily of their company, were bands of strolling players and performers who had no patron to grant them his protection, jugglers, quacks and acrobats, tinkers, pedlars, and gipsies who were described by Thomas Dekker in his Lanthorne and Candle-light: ‘Their apparell is old and phantasticke, tho it be never so full of rents: the men weare scarf es of Callico, or any other base stuffs having their bodies like Morris dancers with bells and uther toyes to intice the countrey people to flocke about them, and to wounder at their fooleries or rather rancke knaveryes’.28
When Dekker wrote this gipsies had been the subject of several punitive Acts. In 1554 it had been declared a felony for a gipsy to remain in England after twenty days from the proclamation of the Act; and in 1563 it was made a capital offence for anyone to consort with gipsies. This statute, for breach of which five men were hanged at Durham in 1596, was not repealed until 1783 as a law of ‘excessive severity’ and one which had never been effective.29
Many vagabonds had been born on the road and their fathers before them. ‘I once rebuking a wyld rogue because he went idelly about,’ wrote Harman, ‘he shewed me that he was a beggar by enheritance – his grandfather was a beggar, his father was one, and he must nedes be one by good reason.’ It was difficult for wanderers like this to grow accustomed to any other life. The Records of the Borough of Leicester refer to a destitute ten-year-old boy covered with lice and sores, who was taken in by a kindly family who cleaned him, fed him and cared for him. But after four or five months the call of the road proved irresistible and he fell to wandering again, and no doubt eventually became like one of those revering pilferers described by the satirist, Samuel Rowlands:
As perfect lousy as they both could crawl
Each had a hat and nightcap for the cold,
And cloaks with patches …
Great satchel scrips that shut with leather flaps
And each a dog to eat his master’s scraps.
Their shoes were hob-nail proof, soundly bepegged,
Wrapt well with clouts to keep them warmer legged.30
Those not born to the vagabond’s life and who wished to become members of the fraternity were initiated by ‘Upright Men’ who took them off to ‘the bowsing Ken, which is to some typpling house next adjoyninge’:
Then doth this upright man call for a gage of bowse, whiche is a quarte pot of drinke [Harman recorded] and he powres the same upon peld pate, adding these words: ‘I G.P. do stalle thee W.T. to the Roge, and that from hence forth it shall be lawefull for thee to Cant’ – that is to aske or begge – ‘for thy living in al places.’ Here you se that the upright man is of great auctorite. For all sortes of beggers are obedient to his hests, and surmounteth all others in pylfring and stealings.31
Harman and several other writers of contemporary pamphlets provide entertaining and macabre examples of the vagabonds’ skills and tricks, a ‘Hooker’s’ expertise in plucking the sheets and coverlet from a bed in a farmer’s house – ‘in which laye three parsones (a man and two bygge boyes)’ and leaving them ‘lying a slepe naked’ – a juggler killing himself having drunkenly forgotten to place in position the metal plate between his stomach and the bladder full of calf’s blood into which it was his practice to thrust a dagger in a horribly realistic representation of disembowelment.
Whether or not we can believe all the stories which give so vivid a picture of life on the English road in the sixteenth century, there can be no doubt of the government’s deep concern both about masterless men and vagabonds and about ‘Movers of Sedition and Spreaders of Falce Rumores’ who went around the country alienating ‘the people’s mind’ and who were punished in the pillory and by mutilation in a series of increasingly cruel measures.
At the beginning of the century it was enacted that impotent beggars should hold licences from the justices of the peace permitting them to beg within certain limits. All vagabonds and beggars without licences and all able-bodied men found begging were to be stripped from the waist upward and whipped until bloody, or set in the stocks for three days and nights on bread and water. They were then to be sent to their usual place of residence, when this could be discovered. It often happened, however, that the place of residence, once discovered, would not accept responsibility for the beggar. This was the case with one poor widow and her six children who, for two years, were sent back from one village to another, both places denying that they had any responsibility for them. When accepted, the vagrants were to be cared for if they could not work and to be put to labour if they could. A second offence of vagrancy might entail the loss of an ear, a third of two ears. Anyone harbouring a sturdy vagabond was liable to a fine and imprisonment at the discretion of the court.
These measures proving ineffective and the numbers of vagabonds increasing, the early laws were repealed in 1547 and a severer statute was passed. This decreed that all those who were capable of work but remained idle should be deemed to be vagabonds, branded with a V on the breast and made slaves for two years. As slaves they could be chained, driven to work with whips, and given food little better than that provided for animals. Those for whom private masters could not be found were to become slaves of local communities and put to road-mending or other public works. Should they run away they were to be branded on the chest with the letter S and made slaves for life. If they ran away again they were to be executed. This statute, however, was so severe that it was soon repealed and the previous law revived.
Yet, determined as were the efforts made to stamp them out, and active as several towns were in levying compulsory rates to help the deserving poor before Parliament decided to do so on a national scale, the bands of vagabonds continued to grow. And by 1572 further legislation was essential, since all parts of the kingdom were ‘presently with rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered, by means whereof daily happeneth horrible murders, thefts and other great outrages’. In that year a statute considerably widened the definition of vagabond to include all idle persons using ‘subtyll craftye and unlawf ull games or playes’; all able-bodied persons not working and with no excuse for being idle; all players and minstrels ‘not belonging to any baron of this realm or some honourable personage of greater degree’; all pedlars, tinkers and petty chapmen without licences from two Justices of the Peace; university scholars begging without licence from their Vice-Chancellors; and released prisoners caught begging without permission and without means to support themselves on their way home.
Exceptions were specifically made for harvest workers returning to their villages; servants who had been dismissed or whose masters had died; persons who had been robbed on the highway; and discharged soldiers and sailors. But all others who could not give a satisfacto
ry account of themselves and were over fourteen years old were to be whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron unless a master undertook to give them employment for a year. For second offences they were to be hanged as felons, unless given employment for two years. For leaving their employment or for a third offence they were to be hanged without benefit of clergy. Three years later it was ordered that stocks of wool, hemp, iron and other materials should be provided by each parish and that houses of correction should be established in each county, so that there was always work for rogues to do and places in which to do it. Overseers of the Poor were to be appointed and empowered to assess each parish so that funds could be collected for the relief of the aged, impotent and sick. A subsequent statute of 1597 modified the previous legislation, moderated the punishments to be inflicted on the able-bodied and elaborated the methods by which a compulsory poor rate to aid the deserving poor was to be collected and distributed.32
Punishments seem to have been severely inflicted where they were considered necessary. At the Middlesex Sessions alone between 1570 and 1575 forty-four vagabonds were branded and eight were hanged. It was some years, however, before the numbers of vagabonds over the country as a whole were reduced; and then the improvement was doubtless due more to the overseers of the poor than to the officers of law enforcement, and to the tardy recognition that savage punishments were no defence against men who could find no work or who would, as one Somerset Justice of the Peace put it, ‘rather hazard their lives than work’. This same justice of the peace complained to the Privy Council in 1596 that, although forty felons had been executed in his county that year, far more than this had been allowed to escape justice, while no more than a fifth of those who committed felonies were apprehended. Even when they were arrested they often obtained their freedom by restoring the stolen goods, or through the corruption or carelessness of incompetent officers of the law:
And these that thus escape ynfect great numbers, ymboldenynge them by ther escapes. And they will change both name and habytt and commonly go ynto other sheeres so as no man shall knowe them … I do not see howe yt ys possible for the poore cuntryman to beare the burthens dewly layde uppon hym and the rapynes of the Infynytt numbers of the wicked wandrynge I dell people of the land … And I may Justlye saye that the Infynyte numbers of the Idle Wandrynge people and robbers of the land … spend dobly as myche as the laborer dothe, for they lye Idely in the Ale houses daye and nyght eating and drinkynge excessively. And within these iii monethes I tooke a thief that was executed these last assizes that confessed unto me that he and two more laye in an Alehouse three weeks in which tyme they eate xxti fatt sheepe whereof they stole every night … And such numbers beynge growen to this Idle and thevyshe lif ther ar scant sufficyent to do the ordynary tillage of the land, for I know that some having had their husbandmen sent for Soldiers they have cost a great parte of ther tyllage and others are not to be gotten by reason so manye are abroad and practysinge all kind of villanye.33
Soon after this letter was written conditions in the countryside did begin to improve, though in the towns, mainly in London, cheats and rogues remained as great a menace as ever, haunting bowling alleys, taverns and dicing houses and the cheaper of those eating houses known as ordinaries where, according to George Whetstone, author of Touchstone for the Time (1584), ‘the dayly guests are maisterless men, needy shifters, theves, cut-purses, unthriftie servants, both serving men and prentises’.
There was your gallant extraordinary thief that keeps his college of good fellows, and will not fear to rob a lord in his coach for all his ten trencher-bearers on horseback [wrote Thomas Middleton of the company of one such ordinary]; your deep-conceited cutpurse, who by the dexterity of his knife will draw out the money, and make a flame-coloured purse show like the bottomless pit; your cheating bowler … your cheverill-gutted catchpoll, who like a horse-leech sucks gentlemen; and, in all your twelve tribes of villany.34
The pickpockets and cut-purses to be found in these places were highly skilful, carefully trained criminals, proud of their skills and jealous of their territories. There were ‘Nips’ who cut purses with a knife and a horn thumb, and ‘Foists’ who used their fingers only and so disdained the use of knives that they did not carry them even to cut their meat for fear lest they be thought to need them in their profession. Active at fairs and executions and upon all occasions when crowds gathered, they hired accomplices to climb steeples to get people to look up into the air, exhibited freaks and worked with the singers of bawdy ballads. William Fletewood, Recorder of London, reported to Lord Burghley of a training-school which was established by ‘one Wotton, a gentleman borne, and sometyme a marchaunt man of good credyt, who falling by tyme into decay, kepte an alehouse at Smart’s Key, neere Byllingsgate’:
There were hung up two devyses, the one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain cownters, and was hung about with hawkes’ bells and over the top did hang a little sacring bell; and he that could take out a cownter without any noyse was allowed to be a publique foyster, and he that could take a piece of sylver out of the purse, without the noyse of any of the bells, he was adjudged a judiciall nypper. Nota, that a foyster is a pick-pocket, and a nypper is termed a pickpurse, or a cutpurse.35
Fletewood and others described the numerous tricks practised upon the unwary and gullible by the denizens of the London underworld, the card tricks, the frauds with loaded dice, the cozenage at bowls, the shop-lifting, the trap known as ‘cross-biting’ by which a whore enticed a countryman into her room whereupon her bully appeared, in the guise of an outraged husband, sword in hand, to relieve his victim of all he had. Many of these criminals lived in gaols, keeping themselves loaded with suits for debt, escaping the searches made for them by the watch, and paying the keeper to let them out and to receive them back again after the commission of their crimes.36
The authorities could do little to cope with the cony-catchers who generally got off lightly when they were brought to justice, which was not often. In 1537, for instance, a man who had acquired a horse ‘per fraudem deceptionem et astutiam vocat Cosenyage’ was fined 40s and put in Cheapside pillory. Had he stolen the horse and not got it by deceit he would probably have been hanged.
There were statutes enough to limit the opportunities of cony-catchers: bowling, quoits, tables, dice and cards were all, at one time or another, proscribed; and, in order to encourage archery, the practice of which was declining fast, bow-makers were forbidden to charge more than 6s 8d for a long-bow of the best quality. Yet archery continued to decline, while men persisted in playing cards and dice. Indeed, the government issued licences for what proved impossible of restraint. When Thomas Cornwallis, Queen Elizabeth’s groom-porter, sought a patent to license gaming-houses in London, the failure of the government to enforce the law was freely admitted. ‘Seying that the inclination of menne to be geven and bent to the aforesayd pastymes and plays, and that no penaltye of the lawes or statutes aforesayd hath heretofore restrained them’, Cornwallis’s request for a patent was granted.37
15 Priests, Parishioners and Recusants
Between 1536 and 1540, with varying degrees of justification, some eight thousand monastic houses were suppressed and their property transferred to the Crown as a means of increasing royal income. A few years before this Dissolution of the Monasteries a pamphlet addressed to King Henry VIII condemned the ‘idle beggars and vagabonds’ of the Church who had ‘gotten into their hands more than a third part of all your Realm’.
The goodliest lordships, manors, lands and territories are theirs [the pamphleteer continued]. Besides this they have the tenth part of all corn, meadow, pasture, grass, wool, colts, calves, lambs, pigs, geese and chickens. Yea, and they look so narrowly upon their profits, that the poor wives must be countable to them of every tenth egg, or else she getteth not her rights at Easter, and shall be taken as heretic … Who is she that will set her hands to work to get 3d a day and may have at least 20d
a day to sleep an hour with a friar, a monk or a priest?1
Such outbursts of anti-clericalism were not in the least uncommon, even if, as Professor Scarisbrick has said, ‘On the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came.’2 Erasmus, while deploring what he took to be the excesses of Martin Luther, unfavourably compared ‘contemptible friars’ with ‘itinerant mountebanks’ and roundly condemned the greedy monks, ‘gorging the carcase to the point of bursting’, while scrupulously observing ‘a lot of silly ceremonies and paltry traditional rules’.3 It was widely suggested that the immense wealth of these monks and friars and such princes of the Church as Cardinal Wolsey should be transferred to more deserving hands; and, except in the north, the people of the country as a whole were in general agreement that this transference at least was overdue. So were many of the clergy themselves. Most reforming clergy, however, believed that the monastic wealth, if appropriated, should go towards the endowment of charitable, religious and educational enterprises; while the King saw the Dissolution as an opportunity to place his finances on a sounder footing, Parliament as a means of avoiding unpopularity by taxation, the landed gentry as a means of enlarging their estates, and the urban middle class as a chance of becoming landed gentry themselves. Some endowments were made: Trinity College, Cambridge was founded by the King in 1546 not long after Christ Church, originally Cardinal College, had been founded by Wolsey at Oxford; and other benefits were bestowed upon the nation by the fortification of harbours and the improvement of arsenals which were paid for out of the money received from the spoliation of monastic lands. But those who profited most from the Dissolution were initially the King and ultimately, and to a far greater extent, the families into whose hands the lands and tithes and coal-fields of the monasteries passed.4
The pensioned monks, about five thousand of them, in addition to two thousand nuns and 1,600 friars, were for the most part not ill treated. Many of them became clergymen, and in the years to come seem to have been as ready as those whose ranks they had joined to accept the changes required by the Protestant regime of Edward VI, by the Catholic revival of Mary, and by the ecclesiastical compromise which was eventually contrived in the reign of Elizabeth.
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