A HISTORY OF MIDDLESEX 



to some inclosures which had been made in the common fields about 

 Islington, Hoxton and Shoreditch, 



and there, like diligent workmen, so bestirred themselves, that within a short 

 space all the hedges about those townes were cast downe and the ditches filled. 

 The king's councell comming to the graie friars, to understand what was meant 

 by this dooing were so answered by the maior of councell of the citie, that the matter 

 was dissembled, and so when the workmen had done their worke, they came home 

 in a quiet manner, and the fields were neuer after hedged. 1 * 1 



Indeed the necessity for maintaining open spaces round the City 

 became very present to Elizabeth's careful government, to whom the 

 expansion and overcrowding of London and the rural exodus to the 

 City were a source of great disquiet. At the county sessions of the 

 peace in May, 1561, John Draney, citizen and clothier of London, was 

 fined for inclosing an open field in Stepney, through which the citizens 

 were wont to pass freely to their archery practices. 182 And in the 

 Act 1S2a by which the government tried to stem the further growth and 

 overcrowding of the City by limiting the building of new houses within 

 and without the walls, the inclosure of commons and waste grounds 

 within three miles of the City gates was prohibited, as interfering with 

 the mustering of soldiers, the practice of archery, and the recreation, 

 comfort, and health of the people inhabiting the cities of London and 

 Westminster. 



The problem of providing for the poor of the county was compli- 

 cated for Middlesex by the neighbourhood of London. London was 

 one of the first of English towns to provide for itself an organized local 

 system of poor relief. 123 But this had the disadvantage of attracting a 

 hungry immigration from less advanced districts, which defied the 

 terrors of Tudor settlement laws, and flooded the adjoining counties with 

 undesirable vagrants, to provide for and deal with whom quite overtaxed 

 their resources. It is not surprising to find from the county sessions 

 rolls that the Middlesex justices were at once active and uncompromising 

 in the execution of the Vagrant Act. In 1572 they reported to the 

 Privy Council 124 that they had caused privy searches to be made on 

 20 March and 20 April in all the hundreds of the county, by which a 

 number of rogues and vagabonds of both sexes have been taken, and have 

 been ' ordered and ponyshed,' according to the statute. That is to say that 

 those who were not taken into service by some employer who would 

 make himself responsible for them were whipped and branded, and if 

 found again wandering, hanged. Three relapsed vagrants found 

 wandering in the parish of St. Giles were sentenced to be hanged in 

 June, I575- 126 



The sessions rolls for 1572-3 contain twenty-eight, and those for 

 X 574~5 thirty-five convictions for vagrancy, and in ten weeks of the 

 year 158990 seventy-one persons were sentenced to be whipped and 



111 Holinshed, Chron. (1808), iii, 599. " MM. County Sess. Rolls (Midd. Rec. Soc.), i, 38. 



fc 35 EHz. cap. 6. Leonard, Early Hist, of Poor Relief. 



" S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 86, Nos. 21, 28. '" Jeaffreson, Midd. Sess. Roils, i, 81, 94, 101, 103. 



92 



