ABSTRACT
Vagrancy law as applied by the justices was very different from vagrancy law on the statute book otherwise the streets would have been running with blood round the whipping posts. In fact the vagrancy problem worsened in the nineteenth century, particularly in the lean times following the Peninsular War, and the whole vagrancy issue contributed to the pressure for abolishing the Old Poor Law and adopting again the repressive and punitive attitudes that had from time to time surfaced over the centuries, and had been a constant theme in statute vagrancy law. A parish-based relief system was completely unsuited to such a situation and unsurprisingly such parishes either ignored the begging or used vagrancy law to get rid of them if they applied for relief. In other cases vagrancy law might be used in addition to other legal provisions: in Cambridgeshire William White was committed for behaving in a disorderly manner and trading as a pedlar without licence in Newmarket.
