“24 Sonday was here ij weman the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a gentlman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gallyglasses and gathered xviijd.
“May 26 Item her was a man from Dorkinge whose howse was brent.
“August 20 Item the proctor of Kingsland was here the Sonday being the 20 of August. In the same day was here ij men being robbid on the Seye.”
This licensed mendicancy was finally suppressed by the Act of Parliament, passed in the thirty-ninth year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, “For the Suppressing of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars.” It begins by setting forth in detail all those who were considered to come under these designations. These were:—“Persons calling themselves scholars, going about begging; all idle persons going about in any country either begging or using any subtil craft or unlawful games or plays, or feigning knowledge in physionomy or palmestry; patent-gatherers; common players of interludes, other than players belonging to any Baron of the Realm; juglers, tinkers, pedlers, and petty chapmen; and generally all wandering persons using, loytering, and refusing to work for reasonable wages, or pretending to be Egyptians. These are to be taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and on apprehension to be, by appointment of any justice of the peace, &c., being assisted therein with the advice of the minister and one other of the parish, stripped naked, from the middle upward, and openly whipped until his or her body be bloody; and then sent from parish to parish to his or her last residence, and in default of going there within a time limited, to be eftsoons taken and whipped again.”
This statute was continued and altered in subsequent reigns, and not repealed until the twelfth year of Queen Anne.
There is an entry in Godalming parish registers, on this very road, which shows that this was no disregarded law. On April 26, 1658, the Godalming authorities seem to have inflicted a peculiarly brutal scourging:—
“Here was taken a vagrant”—says this yellow page, stained with time and grotesque with crabbed writing and singular spelling—“one Mary Parker, Widow, with a Child; and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is, in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be caried from Tithing to Tything tell she comes to the end of the sd jerney.”
THE ‘GOOD OLD TIMES’
Oh, those “good old times”!
Other singular entries occur at Kingston. In 1570, for instance, we read that, on October 9—