ABSTRACT
Karl Marx discussed the repressive side of the English legislation on vagrancy and beggary, drawing attention to the fact that what the English sixteenth-century poor law prescribed as regards the exploitation of manpower had been stated in the 1349 'Statute of Labourers'. The problems arise from the use of the term 'poor law' to refer both to the statutes containing provisions for the poor and to those that are properly and exclusively 'vagrancy laws', that is those statutes which aim at restricting beggary and vagrancy, and where the measures devised for both categories of people are of a repressive kind. There is a reference to the 1495 statute which is demanding and repressive as regards the impotent, who are enjoined to go back to their places of abode and are forbidden to beg 'out of the same hundred'; while the 'idle vagabonds' will be put in stocks for three days and kept alive with a diet of bread and war.
