Lives of Famous London Beggars: With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable. — John Shaqi
Lives of Famous London Beggars: With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable.Smith, John Thomas
History
Lives of Famous London Beggars: With Forty Portraits of the Most Remarkable.
Smith, John Thomas
Beggars -- England -- London
The Stat. xix. Hen. VII., adverting to the rigour of the last-mentioned
regulations, and to the great expense of confining vagabonds and beggars
in prison, enacts, that an immediate discharge from the gaols shall take
place, and all beggars be set in the stocks for a day and a night,
without other food than bread and water, and then sent to the place of
their nativity, or where they may have resided for the space of three
years. It also enacts, that such beggars as are not able to work be
passed to their own towns, where only they are to be allowed to beg.
By Stat. xxii. Hen. VIII., persons unable to work are to be licensed by
certificate from mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, or justices, to beg within
certain districts; and if they be found begging without such licence,
they are to be set in the stocks for three days and three nights, and
fed only on bread and water, or else whipped, at the discretion of the
magistrate, who is afterwards to give the party a licence and dismiss
him. Persons being "whole and mighty in body, and able to labour," and
found begging, are to be whipped at the cart's tail till blood come, and
then dismissed to their own district, receiving a licence, stating their
punishment, and authorising them to beg by the way. Scholars at the
universities begging without licence, to be punished as above. Persons
wandering about with unlawful games, and fortune-tellers of all kinds,
to be punished for the first offence by two days whipping; for the
second, by like whipping, with subsequent pillory and loss of one ear;
for the third, the like punishment, with loss of the other ear. The
licence was in these words,--"Memorandum, that A. B. of Dale, for
reasonable considerations, is licensed to beg within the hundred of P.
K. in the county of L.;" and the licence after whipping is as
follows,--"I. S., whipped for a vagrant strong beggar, at Dale, in the
county of L., according to the law, the 22 July, in the 23 year of King
Henry the Eighth, was assigned to pass forthwith and directly from
thence to Sale, in the county of M., where he saith he was born, or
where he last dwelled by the term of three years, and he is limited to
be there within fourteen days next ensuing, at his peril," &c.
By this act, persons delivered from gaol, or acquitted of felonies, who
could not pay the usual fees, were to be licensed by the keeper to raise
such fees by begging for the space of six weeks, on pain of whipping for
default of such licence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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