Hark hark the dogges do bark
The Beggars are coming to Town!
In a city of wealth, the insurrection of the poor is that which is most feared. In 1581 Elizabeth I was riding by Aldersgate Bars towards the fields of Islington when she was surrounded by a group of sturdy beggars “which gave the queen much disturbance.” That evening the Recorder, Fleetwood, scoured the fields and arrested seventy-four of them. Eight years later a band of five hundred beggars threatened to sack Bartholomew Fair; at the same time they held their own fair, Durrest Fair, where stolen goods were sold.
By 1600, it was estimated that there were 12,000 beggars inhabiting the city: a large group of disaffected people who alternately cajoled or threatened the other citizens. One method of assault was the “whining chorus,” complete with wooden clappers and doleful songs such as
One small piece of money-
Among us all poor wretches-
Blind and lame!
For His sake that gave all!
Pitiful Worship!
One little doit!
Their technique depended upon their terrible appearance and their whining words.
Yet the city can harbour many forms and many disguises. In the middle of the seventeenth century Thomas Harman observed one vagrant, Genings, who begged about the Temple. He described how “his body lay out bare, a filthy foul cloth he wear on his head, being cut for the purpose, having but a narrow place to put out his face … having his face from the eyes downward, all smeared with blood, as though he had new fallen, and had been tormented with his painful pangs, his jerkin being all bewrayed with dirt and mire … surely the sight was monstrous and terrible.” Harman, suspicious of his manner, hired two boys to watch and follow him; they discovered that after his day’s work at the Temple he would return to the fields behind Clement’s Inn where he “renewed his stains from a bladder of sheep’s blood and daubed fresh mud over his legs and arms.” Apprehended by the parish watch, he was found to have a large sum of money on his person; he was forcibly washed and “seen to be a handsome stalwart with a yellow beard and astonishingly fair skin.” His genius for disguise served him well, in a city enthralled to spectacle and enamoured by appearances; how else could he make his mark upon the swiftly passing scene without being theatrical to the highest degree?
There emerged beggars who posed as madmen, otherwise known as “lurkers on the Abram sham.” They would stand on street corners, showing the mark of Bedlam-ER-upon their arms. “Master, good worship, bestow your reward on a poore man that hath lyen in Bedlam without Bishopsgate three years, four moneths, and nine days. Bestow one piece of your small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there.” They would stick pins and nails into their flesh as a symbol of their lunacy; they would roar imprecations, or speak madly of themselves as “poor Tom.” Characteristically they wore the same garment-a jerkin with hanging sleeves-with their hair tangled in knots; they carried with them a stick of ash-wood, with a piece of bacon tied to the end of it. This in turn suggests that their mad medley became something of a theatrical routine, and that their presence on the London streets became an integral part of its scenery of suffering. Yet mingled with them also were the genuinely mad.
It has been supposed that the beggars’ brotherhoods of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were quite formal affairs with their own rites of initiation, ceremonies and rules of procedure. Each beggar was given a nickname on joining their fellowship-Great Bull, Madam Wapapace, Hye Shreve and so on-and recited a list of beggar commandments. These included such admonitions as “Thou shalt share all winnings” and “Thou shalt not divulge the secret of the canting tongue.” This tongue was not in fact unknown to Londoners, who incorporated some of its terms into Cockney, but it was unique nevertheless. It was composed of various tags and terms from other languages-Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Cockney and Latin among them- so it was in one sense an international argot. In “canting speech” “pannass” was bread and “patrico” a priest, “solomon” an altar and “prat” a buttock. “Chete” was variously applied to different things, so “crashing chetes” were teeth, “grunting chetes” were pigs and “lullaby chetes” were children. Life itself, it might be said, was a chete. The canting tongue was “said to have been invented somewhere about 1530 and its originator to have been hanged.”
In all the pamphlets and books of beggars, certain key individuals emerge as types or emblems of beggary. There was London Meg of Westminster who in the early seventeenth century became barmaid of the Eagle Inn, and was very soon notorious as a receiver of stolen goods and “protector of stray vagabonds.” She was the first of the “Roaring Girls,” one of a number of roistering and redoubtable females who walked a fine line between vagabondage, thievery and thuggery. She was “of quick capacitie, and pleasant disposition, of a liberall heart, and such a one as would be sodainely angry, and soone pleased.” She liked nothing better than at night to dress as a man, and wander through the streets of London in search of adventure; she became one of those pure urban types who are filled with the excitement and spirit of the city. The fact of her cross-dressing serves only to emphasise the crude theatricality of her exploits, in a crude and theatrical setting. In her life, however, the emphasis clearly shifts from beggary to criminality. The historians of the subject, led astray by contemporary pamphleteers, often fail to distinguish between vagrants and villains, thus compounding the original misperceptions which labelled every beggar a potential criminal.
The fact that not all beggars were villains, however, is suggested by the available records of the parish registers. “To a poore woman and her children, almost starved … For a shroude for Hunter’s child, the blind beggar man … given to a poore wretch, name forgot … to Mr. Hibb’s daughter, with childe, and likely to starve … to William Burneth in a sellar in Ragged Staff-yard, being poore and verie sicke.” On a statistical, as well as a personal, level the poverty and beggary of London “reached crisis proportions” in the 1690s. So the beggars filled the streets. It was no longer a question of “brotherhoods,” with sanctuaries in Cold Harbour or Southwark or White Friars, but something altogether more basic and desperate. A seventeenth-century report, A Discourse of Trade, noted that the poor were “in a most sad and wretched condition, some famished for want of bread, others starved with cold and nakedness.”
It has been suggested that the industrial expansion of the eighteenth century materially helped to lessen the number of beggars; more specifically, in the latter part of the century, changes in parish systems and the diminution of gin-drinking after the 1750s are supposed to have thinned their numbers. But there is no real evidence of this. There was simply a change in the nature of beggary itself. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the characteristic pattern was of beggars forming crowds, or groups, or settlements. In their place emerged the solitary or individual beggar, of which one fictional example was Moll Flanders. “I dress’d myself like a Beggar Woman, in the coarsest and most despicable Rags I could get, and I walk’d about peering, and peeping into every Door and Window I came near.” But Moll learns the lesson which is imparted in time to every beggar, that “this was a Dress that every body was shy, and afraid of; and I thought every body look’d at me, as if they were afraid I should come near them, least I should take something from them, or afraid to come near me, least they should get something from me.” What should they get from her? Abuse? Spittle? Or, more likely, disease? Beggars were the representatives of the city’s depths and the city’s dirt.