GERMAN ORIGIN OF TRICS PRACTISED BY ENGLISH VAGABONDS
T is remarkable that many of the tricks and manœuvres to obtain money from the unthinking but benevolent people of Luther’s time should have been practised in this country at an early date, and that they should still be found amongst the arts to deceive thoughtless persons adopted by rogues and tramps at the present day. The stroller, or “Master of the Black Art,” described at page [19], is yet occasionally heard of in our rural districts. The simple farmer believes him to be weather and cattle wise, and should his crops be backward, or his cow “Spot,” not “let down her milk,” with her accustomed readiness, he crosses the fellow’s hand with a piece of silver, in order that things may be righted.
The Wiltners, or finders of pretended silver fingers, noticed at page [45], are now-a-days represented by the “Fawney Riggers,” or droppers of counterfeit gold rings,—described in Mayhew’s London Labour, and other works treating of the ways of vagabonds.
“Card-Sharpers,” or Joners, mentioned at page 47, are, unfortunately for the pockets of the simple, still to be met with on public race-courses and at fairs.
The over-Sönzen-goers, or pretended distressed gentry, who went about “neatly dressed,” with false letters, would seem to have been the original of our modern “Begging-Letter-Writers.”
Those half-famished looking impostors, with clean aprons, or carefully brushed threadbare coats, who stand on the curbs of our public thoroughfares, and beg with a few sticks of sealing-wax in their hands, were known in Luther’s time as Goose-shearers. As the reader will have experienced only too frequently, they have, when pretending to be mechanics out of employ, a particularly unpleasant practice of following people, and detailing, in half-despairing, half-threatening sentences, the state of their pockets and their appetites. It appears they did the same thing more than three centuries ago.
Another class, known amongst London street-folk as “Shivering-Jemmies,”—fellows who expose themselves, half-naked, on a cold day, to excite pity and procure alms—were known in Luther’s time as Schwanfelders,—only in those days, people being not quite so modest as now, they stripped themselves entirely naked before commencing to shiver at the church-doors.
Those wretches, who are occasionally brought before the police magistrates, accused of maiming children, on purpose that they may the better excite pity and obtain money, are, unfortunately, not peculiar to our civilized age. These fellows committed like cruelties centuries ago.
Borrowers of children, too,—those pretended fathers of numerous and starving families of urchins, now often heard howling in the streets on a wet day, the children being arranged right and left according to height,—existed in the olden time,—only then the loan was but for All Souls’, or other Feast Day, when the people were in a good humour.
The trick of placing soap in the mouth to produce froth, and falling down before passers-by as though in a fit, common enough in London streets a few years ago, is also described as one of the old manœuvres of beggars.[9]
Travelling quack-doctors, against whom Luther cautions his readers, were common in this country up to the beginning of the present century.[10] And it is not long ago since the credulous countrymen in our rural districts, were cheated by fellows—“wise-men” they preferred being termed—who pretended to divine dreams, and say under which tree or wall the hidden treasure, so plainly seen by Hodge in his sleep carefully deposited in a crock, was to be found. This pleasant idea of a pot full of gold, being buried near everybody, seems to have possessed people in all ages. In Luther’s time the nobility and clergy appear to have been sadly troubled with it, and it is very amusing to learn that so simple in this respect were the latter, that after they had given “gold and silver” to the cunning treasure-seeker, this worthy would insist upon their offering up masses in order that the digging might be attended with success!
And lastly, the travelling tinkers,—who appear to have had no better name for honesty in the fifteenth century than they have now,—“going about breaking holes in people’s kettles to give work to a multitude of others,” says the little book.