Vagrants In The 18th Century

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ntroduction The eighteenth century inherited from the sixteenth and seventeenth a body of statute law that saw in vagrancy and vagabondage a powerful social threat deserving of serious punishment, and a category of offence that was distinct from the issue of settled poverty. As the system of legal pauper settlement evolved between the 1660s and the 1690s the obvious distinctions between vicious vagrancy and deserving poverty, however, became increasingly difficult to delineate. Two separate systems were retained throughout the eighteenth century, but their workings, and the experience of the poor within them, became ever more similar. Gradually, vagrants came to be punished less often, while the development of passes allowing the poor to travel unhindered (and to claim support from local constables and overseers along the way), ensured that little of the brutality evident in sixteenth-century vagrancy legislation can be found by 1690. Many examples of vagrancy passes are filed among the Sessions Papers (PS).1 The legal framework for the prosecution and removal of vagrants evolved incrementally over the course of the period covered by this website, with some twenty-eight different pieces of legislation passed between 1700…show more content…
For the Idle and Disorderly, essentially the settled but unruly poor, a period of hard labour for up to one month in a house of correction was specified. For Rogues and Vagabonds, all the bear wards and minstrels, strolling players and jugglers listed in the Act, a public whipping followed by incarceration in a house of correction was mandated. These vagrants were also subject to a further examination at the next meeting of sessions, at which time they might be imprisoned and set to hard labour for a further six months. At the completion of their sentence rogues and vagabonds were either removed to their place of settlement by a pass, or if male and above twelve years old, sent to the army or
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