LIVING ON NOTHING.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5420, 6 May 1929, Page 3

LIVING ON NOTHING.

rogues, VAGABONDS & beggars. THE SEVENTEENTH (CENTURY. Though beggars are numerouus enough in these days they are fefiv in comparison with the that infested the highways of England IP the time of Queen Elizabeth. Miss Muriel St. Clara Byrn.e, in nef book “ Elizabethan Life in Town and Country,” published three years ago, states Vagabondage has increasqfli to sue an alarming extent that the regulation of it was one of the chief problems with which the Government was confronted. Thq wandering beggars numbered in their ranks, all kinds of mem and! women, from the real gypsies to the impotent poor, and the sturdy rascals whose aim in life was, to avoid honest work. Discharged serving men, old soldiers, ruined smallholders, out-of-work agricultural labourers, masterlqss men of all kinds, helped to make up the almost unbelievably numerous crew of radicals who swarmed ovqr, the whole, countryside.practising the gentle art of living on nothing a year at the expense of trie respe;c.table members of the community. CREATING SORES. The Palliard, who was aiso known in the canting tongue asi a Clapperudgeon, was the kind of beggar who deliberately covered his iimbs Wi th loathsome running sores to'rouse compassion and elicit alms. To make these raw and bleeding places they would tie arsenic or ratsbane cn an ankle pr an. arm. When it had produced its corrosive effect they would then leave the sore exposed, and russound it with bloody and filthy rags, and so take their way from fair to fair and market to market, sometimes obtaining *as much as five shillings, a week in charity. (In Elizabethan times money had far greater purchasing power than it has to-day). Shanr “ old soldiers ” used muc,h the same methods to produce wounds applying unslaked lime, soap and iron rust, which made the arm appear black, while the sore was “raw and reddish, but w.hitq about the edges like an old wound.” The Counterfeit Crank was another rogue, who dressed himself in the filthiest rags imaginable, daubed his face with blptod and pretended to have thq falling sickness, or some other dreadful affliction. One of the favourite tricks bf his repertoire was to fall grovelling in the dirt at feet of a passerby, counterfeiting froth at the mouth sucking of a piece of soap. The Abraham Man was perhaps the most terrifying figure of the three, as 'he pretended to be mad. Tom o’ Bedlam and poor Tom were other names for him. These imposters roamed t.he country half naked. Despite the measures taken to deal with rqguqs and vagabonds and sturdy beggars, there was no diminution in their numbers until the eighteenth century. There can be little doubt that the industrial expansion of the eighteenth century absorbed' muc.h of that terrible residuum of beggars and vagrants who had been so great a problem in the sixteenth, seventeenth; and early eighteenth centuries.