ABSTRACT
The range of punishments available to the justices for vagrancy offences was extremely limited. Shoemaker notes an increasing reluctance to use violent public punishments as the eighteenth century wore on, and people have seen that the 1792 Vagrant Act abolished whipping for female vagrants. According to Cockburn vagrants in the North Riding were generally whipped before being passed. Quarter Sessions in Cambridgeshire seem to have handed down a higher proportion of sentences of whipping than in other counties, but what justices sitting alone did in any county is unknown. In the nineteenth century even apprehending vagrants had become unpopular: the clerk to the Lord Mayor of London told the 1815 parliamentary enquiry into mendicity that in the City beggars were rarely arrested unless they were also pilfering. Impressment, although permitted for vagrants with no settlement, and for incorrigible rogues, was of questionable legality when used in other vagrancy cases, although it sometimes was, especially in wartime.
