Rogue

A common figure in early modern life, the ‘rogue’ was part of a negatively perceived, transient group of people that also contained vagrants and vagabonds. The etymological origins of the word, perhaps appropriately, are unknown, but it developed during a period when the government was increasingly concerned with issues of population movement and ‘[m]asterles Men’, particularly after the Reformation, as Tudor monarchs from the mid-sixteenth century increasingly sought to consolidate their power within the realm. ¹ The term ‘rogue’ for the most part was reserved for the poorer classes, and in particular for homeless or economic migrants forced to move with seasonal work. Thomas Harman, who also wrote about Gypsies, was one of the first writers to use the word ‘rogue’. ² According to Harman's definition, there were two types, one made and one born. A born rogue, according to Harman, was a ‘[w]ylde Roge’ who had been ‘begotten in barne or bushes’ and was ‘from his infancy traded up in treachery’. ³ This type of rogue had been referenced in John Awdelay's The fraternitye of vacabondes (1561), where he described them as having ‘no abiding place but by his coulour of going abrode to beg’ and stated that all who do this ‘be properly called Roges’. ⁴ Unlike a ‘wylde Roge’, the ‘rogue made’ was Harman's innovation. A rogue of this kind was ‘neither so stoute or hardy as the uprightman’ and despite possibly having to learn this trade there was ‘nothing to them inferiour in all kynde of knavery’. ⁵ In the seventeenth century, John Cowell built upon Harman's definition to include poor travellers as ‘counterfeit rogues’, describing the ‘Roag’ as an ‘idle sturdie beggar […] wandring from place to place without passport’. ⁶ The rapid development of the word ‘rogue’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was therefore matched by legal and governmental attempts to define, legislate, and restrict the lives and mobility of those considered to be outside the reach of English authorities and policymakers.