Towards the end of the reign, in spite of the stringent acts against vagrancy, the country swarmed with rogues and beggars--vagabonds who laid the farmers under contribution, and terrified all honest folk out of their lives. In London crime was rampant. Even then it had its organization; there were houses which harboured thieves, in which schools were maintained for the education of young pickpockets. Maitland tells us that in the spring of 1585, Fleetwood the recorder with several other magistrates searched the town and discovered seven houses of entertainment for felons. They found also that one Walton, a gentleman born, once a prosperous merchant, “but fallen into decay,” who had kept an alehouse which had been put down, had begun a “new business.” He opened his house for the reception of all the cut-purses in and about the city. In this house was a room to learn young boys to cut purses. Two devices were hung up; one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The pocket had in it certain counters, and was hung round with hawk’s bells, and over them hung a little sacring[44] bell. The purse had silver in it, and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed to be a public _foyster_; and he that could take a piece of silver out of the purse without noise of any of the bells was adjudged a clever _nypper_. These places gave great encouragement to evil-doers in these times, but were soon after suppressed. In 1581 a fresh religious persecution began, happily without the sanguinary accessories of that of Mary’s reign. Elizabeth had no love for the puritans; she also began now to hate and fear the papists. Orthodoxy was insisted upon. People who would not go to church were sent first to prison, then haled before sessions and fined a matter of twenty pounds each. Still worse fared the adherents or emissaries of Rome. Years before (1569) a man, John Felton, had been drawn from Newgate into Paul’s Churchyard, and there hanged and quartered as a traitor for affixing a bull of Pope Pius V. on the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace. In 1578 it is recorded that “the papists are stubborn.” So also must have been the puritans. “One Sherwood brought before the Bishop of London behaved so stubbornly that the bishop will show no more favour to those miscalled puritans.” Next began a fierce crusade against the “seminary” priests, who swarmed into England like missionaries, despatched _in partibus infidelium_ to minister to the faithful few and bring back all whom they could to the fold. Newgate was now for ever full of these priests. They adopted all manner of disguises, and went now as soldiers, now as private gentlemen, now openly as divines. They were harboured and hidden by faithful Roman Catholics, and managed thus to glide unperceived from point to point intent upon their dangerous business. But they did not always escape observation, and when caught they were invariably laid by the heels and hardly dealt with. Gerard