ABSTRACT
The poor law and settlement law together persuaded successive governments and many contemporary writers that nobody need beg, and that therefore beggars were all dissolute, wicked and deserving of punishment, and the vagrancy laws continued to be updated well into the nineteenth century. The act directed vagrants to be passed to rogues and vagabonds' settlement, if they had gained one, or place of birth; crucially an iniquitous clause enabled those without settlements, primarily the Irish and Scotch, irremovable under settlement law, to be removed as vagrants. The same act enabled the justice to make a discretionary order for 2s reward to any person apprehending a vagrant, payable by the constable of the last parish where the vagrant was begging unapprehended. The entire thrust of the new act of 1792 Vagrant Act was to drop the universal mandatory punishment of vagrants but also to minimize the cost of enforcing the law against them.
