ANCIENT CUSTOMS OF ENGLISH BEGGARS
MONGST those passages which refer to the customs and tricks of beggars, in the Liber Vagatorum, there are few which receive illustration by a reference to the early laws and statutes of this country.
The licenses, or “letters with seals,” so frequently alluded to, and which were granted to deserving poor people by the civil authorities, are mentioned as customary in this country in the Act for the ordering of Vagrants, passed in the reign of Henry VIII. (1531). It appears that the parish officers were compelled by this statute to make inquiry into the condition of the poor, and to ascertain who were really impotent and who were impostors. To a person actually in want liberty was given to beg within a certain district, “and further,” says the Act, “there shall be delivered to every such person a letter containing the name of that person, witnessing that he is authorized to beg, and the limits within which he is appointed to beg, the same letter to be sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough, and subscribed with the name of one of the said justices or officers aforesaid.”
I need scarcely remark that a seal in those days, when but few public functionaries could write, was looked upon as the badge of authority and genuineness, and that as the art of writing became more general autograph signatures supplanted seals. An English vagabond in the time of Elizabeth, when speaking of his passport, called it his JARKE, or JARKEMAN, viz. his sealed paper. His descendant of the present century would term it his LINES, viz. his written paper. The cant term JARKE is almost obsolete, but the powerful magic of a big seal is still remembered and made use of by the tribe of cadgers. When a number of them at the present day wait upon a farmer with a fictitious paper, authorizing them to collect subscriptions for the sufferers in some dreadful colliery accident, the document, covered with apparently genuine signatures, is generally garnished with a huge seal.
In Germany it was the custom (alluded to at page [34]) for the priests or clerks to read these licenses to beg from the pulpit, that the congregation might know which of the poor people who waited at their doors were worthy of alms. Sometimes, as in the case of the Dützbetterin, or false “lying-in-woman,” an anecdote of whom is told here, the priests were deceived by counterfeit documents.
At page [17] reference is made to the wandering students who used to trudge over the country and sojourn for a time at any school charitable enough to take them in. These, in their journeys, often fell in with rogues and tramps, and sometimes joined them in their vagabond calling, in which case they obtained for themselves the title of Kammesierers, or “Learned Beggars.” Now these same vagabond scholars were to be met with in this country in the time of Henry VIII,—and in Ireland, I believe, so late as the last century. Examining again the Act for Vagrants, 1531, we find that it was usual and customary for poor scholars from Oxford and Cambridge to tramp from county to county. The statute provided them with a document, signed by the commissary, chancellor, or vice-chancellor, which acted as their passport. When found without this license they were treated as vagrants, and whipped accordingly.