Vagrant/Vagabond

The Anglo-Norman wakerant and its variants were associated with Latin vagari (to wander), and through that to ‘vagabond’, a word whose variants appear in French, Italian, Portuguese, and multiple other European languages. ¹ In England, they represented a threat to law and order in the earliest recorded uses in legal enactments from the fourteenth century, and continued to attract similar attention in centuries to follow. In a speech to the Lord Mayor and the governors of Christ's Hospital in 1676, Benjamin Long demanded that all vagrants leave London so they would no longer ‘infest the Air’ of the city with their ‘noysom breath’. ² Long's speech was partly a reaction to the rapid population growth of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had resulted in a large underemployed migratory labour force. As early as 1583, the English pamphleteer Philip Stubbes maintained that various travelling groups, such as tramps and itinerant beggars, ‘runne roging like vagarents up & downe the countries like maisterlesse men’. ³ The glut in the rural labour market meant that England's towns and cities underwent a period of substantial urban growth, as people migrated from rural to urban areas in search of work. From 1520 to 1700, London's population increased nearly tenfold, from 60,000 to an estimated 575,000, bringing increased numbers of unemployed or seasonally employed ‘maisterlesse men’ who migrated to the city. ⁴ Local and national authorities perceived ‘masterless men’ as a threat to hierarchical, patriarchal society, and sought to restrict and prevent the influx of the unemployed poor. ⁵ One method of doing so was to differentiate between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving, or the impotent poore’ and ‘impudent poore’. ⁶ ‘Vagrants’ were placed in the latter category. Scorned for their landlessness, mobility, and suspect occupations, vagrants, alongside rogues, vagabonds, enslaved peoples, apostates, itinerant ministers, and others, were considered a ‘blemish of our government, and a burthen to the commonwealth’ and like rogue were for the most part members of the lower classes. ⁷ Authorities placed vagrants under severe legal restrictions that were both popular and onerous, introducing ‘extreme punishement of all vagarantes’. ⁸ By the end of the seventeenth century, Long's perception of vagrants as a ‘verminous brood’ who ‘swarm and poison our streets’ was commonplace, as was his hope that they ‘meet with the lash, and be taught the Lesson of Industry’. ⁹