In the middle of the sixteenth century, after the closing of the monasteries, the peasantry found it difficult to find work on the countryside, and thus it was that they flocked to London in hundreds seeking employment, in exactly the same way that thousands of the poor do to-day. The results, however, are different. In our times we house them in workhouses, feed them in soup-kitchens, and allow them to sing in our roads, until they make life hideous. We encourage them in every way until the street loafer is a curse to London, and the want of labourers in the country an unceasing cry. This is our modern way of creating mendicity. Formerly they were not so foolish, though perhaps too severe. Any one caught begging, or aimlessly wandering about, was seized, ordered to be whipped, and sold as a chattel. Thus it was that hundreds of these poor creatures were shipped off to the West Indies and the early American colonies. Travelling in those days was not so luxurious as it is now, and many of them died on the way. Those who remained behind were even worse treated. They were often ruthlessly beaten and continually starved; they were, in fact, brought to such dire distress that they were bought and sold as mere slaves. How surprised the loafers, who bury their noses in mother earth and sleep by the hour on the green grass of Hyde Park, would be if such drastic measures were applied to them; but surely some happy medium between the hanging of the sixteenth century and the encouragement of loafing of the twentieth might be found. Punishments were altogether more severe in those days, and even as late as the end of the eighteenth century batches of men, women, and children were hanged at Tyburn for deeds which would hardly be punished nowadays, and, any way, would not be reproved by more than a day or two in prison. In fact, when the last century dawned, there were no less than two hundred and twenty-three capital offences. Even soldiers and sailors, who are still noted for their jollities on landing from distant climes, were marched to the scaffold in the “good old times.” “Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, being returned, as ye have heard many of their Saylers, and souldiers, shortly after their landing fell sick, and died of a stanch bred amongst them on shippe board, other some of them so rudely behaved themselves about the countrey, about the Court, and elsewhere, that many men misliked of their doings, and divers of them being apprehended, on the twenty 7 of August one was hanged on the end of a signe at an Inne doore in the Towne of Kingstone-uppon-Thames, for a terror to the rest. The twenty nine of August, two more were hanged in Smithfield, two at the Tower Hill, two besides at Westminster, and one at Tiburn” (Stow).