ABSTRACT
Lodging houses were notorious vagrant haunts, and the law empowered Justices to institute 'privy searches', or swoops against them, four times a year to haul in concealed offenders. To encourage the mopping up of this pestiferous breed, anyone who effected the arrest of a vagrant was entitled to a ten shilling reward from the rates. Since 1744, convicted Irish and Scots vagrants could be returned home, too. Scotsmen were conveyed to the border and dropped there. Irish were conveyed to specified western ports Bristol and Liverpool were the main ones and the financial burden fell on those ports to ship the vagrants over to any point on the Irish coast. Unlike the 'Settlement Law' removals, each parish en route had to pay its share of the cost of conveying vagrants through its territory. Each parish constable escorting the vagrants would hand them over at the boundary to a neighbouring parish officer.
