74 FARMING FOR PROFIT 



it was possible for men, who were neither infirm nor idle, to lose 

 their footing. Voluntary almsgiving was tried and proved inade- 

 quate. Gradually and cautiously the legislators of the reign of 

 Elizabeth were forced to apply the principle of compulsory pro- 

 vision for the relief of the necessitous. 1 Previous legislation, in 

 dealing with the impotent poor, had outlined the systems of local 

 liability and of settlement which were adopted in the later poor- 

 laws ; but it had been mainly concerned with the suppression of 

 those persons who were styled idle rogues and vagabonds. The 

 object explains, though to modern ideas it cannot justify, the 

 harshness of the law. Able-bodied men and women, who were 

 willing to work but had lost their livelihood, were unknown to the 

 legislators who had sketched the first poor-laws for the relief of 

 the impotent poor and the punishment of sturdy beggars (validi 

 mendicantes). Our ancestors did not discriminate closely between 

 the different sources of poverty. To them, as is stated in the 

 preamble to the statute of Henry VIII., 2 " ydlenes " was the 

 " mother and rote of all vyces." The " great and excessive 

 nombres " of idle rogues and vagabonds were a crying evil. To 

 this class belonged the men who committed " contynuall theftes, 

 murders, and other haynous offences, which displeased God, 

 damaged the King's subjects, and disturbed the common weal of 

 the realm." Apart from the committal of serious crime, the mass 

 of idle vagrants was in country districts a nuisance and a danger. 

 The kidnapping of children was not uncommon. Housewives were 

 robbed of their linen, and their pots and pans, or terrified by threats 

 of violence into parting with their money. Horses were stolen 

 from their paddocks, or, still more easily, from the open-field balks 

 on which they were tethered ; pigs were taken from their styes, 

 chickens and eggs from the henroosts. Men and women, as they 

 returned from markets, were waylaid by sturdy ruffians. Shops, 

 booths, and stalls were pilfered of their contents. Tippling-houses 

 were converted into receivers' dens for stolen goods. The com- 

 parative leniency of the laws of Henry VII. had failed ; therefore 

 the evil must be stamped out with a severity which was not only 

 unsentimental but ferocious. 



Here the interesting point is whether the ranks of idle rogues 



1 See Appendix II., The Poor Laws, 1601-1834. 



2 1530-1 (22 Henry VIII. c. 12) supplemented in 1536 by 27 Henry VIII. 

 c. 25. 



