Crime and Punishment / 1547-1597
Crime and Punishment: Vagabonds and Vagrants
Population growth and falling wages made vagabonds seem like a serious problem.
What To Remember
- Population growth, falling wages and migration made vagabondage a major early modern concern.
- Vagabonds and vagrants were unemployed, homeless wanderers, often blamed for theft and disorder.
- Tudor laws such as the 1547 Vagrancy Act and 1597 poor law used harsh corporal punishment as deterrence.
Why vagabonds appeared
After 1500, England's population grew quickly and wages fell for many workers.
Some people left villages in search of work, which made them seem suspicious in communities where strangers were unusual.
If they could not find work, they became homeless and might beg, steal or move on again.
Fear and suspicion
Many richer people saw vagabonds as lazy rather than genuinely poor.
A sixteenth-century leaflet listed supposed tricksters such as dummerers, who pretended to be deaf or dumb, and drunken tinkers, described as thieves pretending to be traders.
Printed warnings like this spread fear and made the poor seem like a threat to social order.
New laws
The Vagrancy Act of 1547 said vagabonds without work for three days could be branded and sold as slaves for two years.
The 1597 Act for the Relief of the Poor allowed whipping and burning vagrants' ears with a hot iron.
These punishments were meant to deter wandering poverty and force the poor back under local control.
Vagabondage is therefore a key example of a changing definition of crime: poverty itself was increasingly treated as criminal.
Revision Prompt
Why did the government punish vagabonds more harshly in the sixteenth century?