ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests some additional causes of vagrancy emerging from the records to illustrate other reasons why so many mobile poor found themselves falling foul of vagrancy law. Parish attitudes could be harsh even to settled poor: families might be split up on entering the workhouse. Hence some writers believed most vagrancy was voluntary and down to personal failings, and that most vagrants were impostors, others that structural social and economic problems were more important. Settlement law could be particularly hard on children over the age of seven born bastards or whose mothers had remarried, who might be hurried off to a parish where perhaps they knew nobody; and also on increasing numbers, particularly the Irish, who had no settlement. Noteworthy among the rough sleepers were child vagrants, although some of these may have been cases of a parish ridding itself of a liability the easy way by using vagrancy law.
