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]