been set free and would roam about the country, half-crazed, living for the most part on the charity of such as would befriend him. In Dekker’s “Belman of London,” a non-dramatic work professing to expose “The most notorious Villanies that are now Practised in the Kingdome,” is a long description, in the manner of a seventeenth century “character,” of one of “those Wild-geese or Hayre-braynes . . . called Abraham’s men.” Dekker at least has little good to say of them. “The fellow . . . sweares he hath bin in bedlam and will talke frantickly of purpose: you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to (beeing indeede no torment at all, his skin is either so dead, with some fowle disease, or so hardned with weather), onely to make you believe he is out of his wits: he calls himself by the name of Poore Tom, and comming neere anybody, cryes out Poore Tom is a-cold . . . .” The mind at once turns to Edgar and the celebrated lines where he poses as one of those very “Abraham-men”:
“This country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers
Enforce their charity.”[26:1]
From all that we can gather, however, of the treatment of the insane in madhouses of the time, it would seem probable that, among those released or escaping from them, many would still be genuine lunatics. At the same time, it was no doubt fairly easy to make a living in the way Dekker describes, and numbers of beggars must have emulated Edgar’s behaviour from far less worthy motives.