Sturdy Beggars, Mendicant Wanderers, and Gypsies

Q&Q Publishing

5 days ago7 min read

By GL Kriewald, author of A Mad Endeavour

Legislation designed to care for the indigent poor in England and Wales can be traced as far back as 1495, when Parliament, under Henry VII, passed the Vagabonds and Beggars Act, which ordered that “vagabonds, including idle and suspected persons, shall be set in stocks for three days and three nights and have none other substance but bread and water and then shall be put out of Town.”

Not surprisingly, such harsh measures provided no real solution to the problem of caring for the poor or reducing their numbers. Moreover, it failed to distinguish between vagrants and those who found themselves out of a job; both were treated as “sturdy beggars” (those who were fit to work but begged or wandered about instead), who were punished and told to move on.

Fifty years later, the Vagabonds Act was passed, which subjected vagrants to an even more extreme punishment of two years servitude and branding with a V for the first offense; a second triggered the death penalty. Late in the reign of Elizabeth I, a system was established to deal with growing poverty in the realm; administered at the parish level and paid for by levying local rates on rate payers, it provided some relief for those too ill or aged to work by supplying them with food (‘the parish loaf’) and clothing.

Able-bodied beggars who refused to work were sent to Houses of Correction or sometimes subjected to public whipping. The Old Poor Law, as it became known, was administered by the nearly 15,000 parishes around the nation; it was assumed that local treatment of a parish’s poor would result in more humane treatment, as they would be known by those in charge of caring for them, and there would be less likelihood of the ‘undeserving’ poor receiving sustenance for which they were not qualified. Initially, the population was small enough to ensure that the system was administered efficiently, but by the end of the 18th century, population increases, especially in major cities, along with greater mobility of the workforce and regional price variations, began to stress a system that had served the poor for generations. Matters had gotten so out of hand that the author of A New Canting Dictionary (1724) wrote that “no country in the world abounds so much with vagrants and beggars; insomuch that it is impossible to stir abroad in the streets, to step into any of the shops in London, or to take the air within two or three miles of [London], but one must be attack’d with the clamorous and often insolent petitions of sturdy beggars and vagabonds.”

During the Napoleonic Wars, these conditions were greatly exacerbated by the difficulty of importing cheap grain into Britain, which caused prices to rise while agricultural wages remained low, plunging many farm workers into poverty. Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, the government passed the much-despised ‘Corn Laws,’ designed to keep the price of grain artificially high. Industrial depression and high unemployment contributed to a rise in poverty and, predictably, an increase in the number of beggars. That already high number was boosted substantially by military veterans, many of whom suffered disabilities and disfigurements, often having had limbs amputated as a result of wounds they received during their service to king and country, and had been forced into begging as a last resort.

Despite the obvious deprivations suffered by those reduced to begging, the Regency-era saw a certain public fascination with beggars and their way of life; this phenomenon had become so widespread that certain ‘professional’ beggars had achieved something akin to celebrity status. In 1817, the engraver John Thomas Smith published a lavishly illustrated compendium of beggars titled Vagabondiana or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers, which described the careers of thirty Londoners who lived on the streets and their various (and often ingenious) means of survival.

Begging was not a male-only, or even male-dominated, calling. In 1796, it was estimated that ninety percent of beggars were women and children. Nor was it limited to those with ‘legitimate’ claims to indigency; indeed, since one could sometimes earn more from begging than by performing unskilled labor, the line between honest beggars and able-bodied persons who chose to beg was often indistinct. Another such line was that between beggars and petty criminals. An illustrative case was that of Hannah Rosse, a beggar who pretended to be deaf and dumb; she carried a hand-made card explaining her plight, which she presented when asking for a handout. She sometimes took her act inside of shops where, while making loud, unintelligible sounds and distracting gestures, she would secret various items from the shelves under her apron. In 1744, after being abducted for a first offense, she was sentenced to public whipping; after a second offense, she was transported.

Another such professional beggar/imposter was Thomas Mitchell, who went by the name of Slabbering Tom, and who, in addition to claims of being deaf and dumb, declared himself afflicted by ‘the palsy,’ or what today would be termed epilepsy. One witness to his performance described how “[his] right hand and head shook, as if much agitated with the palsy; he had much froth and filth come continually from his mouth …. He had a pair of gaiters tied over his forehead, and round behind his head, then brought forward and fastened near his temples, where there appeared to be a pustulant boil.” Tom used these gaiters, one end of which was passed through his right-hand shirt sleeve and attached to his wrist, to make his head and right hand to tremble together in an apparently convincing semblance of an epileptic seizure. His promising career came to an end when a suspicious constable arrested him and hauled him before a justice of the peace in a wheelbarrow (he claimed he could not walk), where a thorough examination revealed that his signature ‘froth and filth’ was induced by “two pieces of hard soap, one on each side of his mouth.” It was also discovered that Tom had no genuine physical afflictions, and that his act earned him a substantial income of around three half-crowns a day—and more on Sundays. Even the ‘pustulant boil’ was a fake.

While the various types of beggars constitute one category of the indigent poor, there is another that was well-known throughout England, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries: gypsies, a population that was divided between genuine gypsies and their imitators. Genuine gypsies, today known as the Romany people, traveled in groups around the country, except in winter when they congregated in the Seven Dials area of London and in Norwood, Surrey. Gypsies had acquired a reputation for thievery (usually of the pilfering variety, such as raiding hen-houses) and for intimidating those whom they importuned for money; they were also scorned and feared for being ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ in appearance and for their clannishness, which kept them in many ways apart from the larger society. At the same time, gypsies were sought out for their supposed ability to tell fortunes, which, for the price of a shilling, would offer assurances of prosperity—and sometimes untold riches—in the near future. Female gypsies would often target servant girls with the offer of telling their fortunes for free as a way of gaining access to a house, where they would steal such items as silver plate or cloth.

The most famous incident involving gypsies in Jane Austen’s work occurs in Emma, where, the day after the ball at the Crown Inn, the hapless Harriet Smith and her friend Miss Bickerton encounter a group of gypsies while out for a walk. These “half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy, all clamorous and impertinent,” demand money from the two girls and seem prepared to use violence to get it. Miss Bickerton dashes away, but poor Harriet, due to a leg cramp, is left behind. Terrified, she gives them a shilling and begs them

not “to use her ill” (which could mean anything from verbal abuse to rape). At this fraught moment, she is rescued by Frank Churchill, who removes her to the safety of Hartfield. Emma assures Frank that she will give “notice of their being such a set of people in the neighborhood to Mr. Knightley,” who, as the local magistrate, will take the appropriate measures. In her portrayal of gypsies as criminal outsiders, Austen draws on, and reinforces, the many negative associations her readers would have had of them.

Interestingly, gypsies may have made another, albeit more oblique, appearance in the novel. Though not mentioned outright, they may have been responsible for the theft of poultry from Mrs Weston’s hen-house. The threat of a criminal element in the vicinity throws Mr Woodhouse into predictable fits of anxiety, which may have induced him to give his consent to Emma’s marriage to Mr Knightley, whose presence at Hartfield thereafter would secure its safety and thereby allow him a peaceful night’s slumber. Though the gypsies Harriet encounters are not explicitly named as the thieves, stealing from hen-houses was an act routinely associated with their presence in a community. If they were indeed the culprits, they could be credited with (inadvertently) removing the only obstacle to the marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley.

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Image Sources:

The Gypsies by William Simpson, Dumfries and Galloway Council (Kirkcudbright)

A blind beggar hunched over his walking stick, holding out his hat for money. Etching by T. Smith, 1816.

Charity to the Blind, Well-Bestowed, Thomas Rowlandson

References

Austen, Jane. Emma. Penguin, Random House UK. 2015.

Boissoneault, Lorraine. “The Myth of Professional Beggars Spawned Today’s Enduring

Stereotypes: In England and the United States the Fear of Beggars Gave Rise to a

Number of Justifications for Why They Shouldn’t Be Helped.” Smithsonian Magazine.

30 March 2017.

Emsley, Sarah. “The Gypsies in Emma.” 22 January 2016.