We have little idea of the tremendous religious antagonism of those days, an antagonism which brought so many poor sufferers to the gibbet at Tyburn. Indeed, so determined were those in power to extirpate all remains of Roman Catholicism, that a search was actually instituted from house to house, and all rosaries and other objects savouring of Romanism were destroyed.
That a man was priest, open or disavowed, during that fierce struggle between Henry VIII. and the Church which he had overthrown and despoiled, was sufficient to condemn him to suffer under Tyburn’s fatal tree:
“The 8 of October last before passed I. Low, I. Adams, and Richard Dibdale, being before condemned for treason, for being made Priests by authority of the Bishop of Rome, were drawne to Tyborne, and there hanged, bowelled, and quartered.
“The 18 of Februarie, Harrington, a seminary priest, was drawne from Newgate to Tyborne, and there hanged, cut downe alive, struggled with the hangman, but was bowelled and quartered.”
Elizabeth, too, found the terrors, which the very name of Tyburn instilled into the minds of her subjects, useful in maintaining public order and punishing plotters against her personal welfare. The gibbet, indeed, became a corrector of manners.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, after the closing of the monasteries, the peasantry found it difficult to find work on the countryside, and thus it was that they flocked to London in hundreds seeking employment, in exactly the same way that thousands of the poor do to-day. The results, however, are different. In our times we house them in workhouses, feed them in soup-kitchens, and allow them to sing in our roads, until they make life hideous. We encourage them in every way until the street loafer is a curse to London, and the want of labourers in the country an unceasing cry.
This is our modern way of creating mendicity. Formerly they were not so foolish, though perhaps too severe. Any one caught begging, or aimlessly wandering about, was seized, ordered to be whipped, and sold as a chattel.
Thus it was that hundreds of these poor creatures were shipped off to the West Indies and the early American colonies. Travelling in those days was not so luxurious as it is now, and many of them died on the way. Those who remained behind were even worse treated. They were often ruthlessly beaten and continually starved; they were, in fact, brought to such dire distress that they were bought and sold as mere slaves.
How surprised the loafers, who bury their noses in mother earth and sleep by the hour on the green grass of Hyde Park, would be if such drastic measures were applied to them; but surely some happy medium between the hanging of the sixteenth century and the encouragement of loafing of the twentieth might be found.
Punishments were altogether more severe in those days, and even as late as the end of the eighteenth century batches of men, women, and children were hanged at Tyburn for deeds which would hardly be punished nowadays, and, any way, would not be reproved by more than a day or two in prison. In fact, when the last century dawned, there were no less than two hundred and twenty-three capital offences.