IX
THE STRUGGLE OF COURT AND CITY
[Bibliographical Note.—Most of the material for the present chapter is
collected in Appendix D. An outline of the subject was given in Tudor
Revels (1906), and it is well and fully treated in V. C. Gildersleeve, Government
Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (1908). G. M. G., The Stage
Censor (1908), and F. Fowell and F. Palmer, Censorship in England (1913),
are perhaps more valuable on later periods. Vagabond life and legislation
may be studied in G. Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law^2 (1898),
C. J. Ribton-Turner, History of Vagrants and Vagrancy (1887), E. M.
Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief (1900), and F. Aydelotte,
Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (1913), and the working of local government
in C. A. Beard, The Office of Justice of the Peace in England (1904),
and E. Trotter, Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish (1919).]
The foregoing chapter has endeavoured to define the practical and spiritual forces which underlay the controversy between Puritanism and the stage; it remains to study the working of the constitutional forms through which, as a resultant of those forces, the 'quality' of the player ultimately established itself as a recognized constituent of the polity. And first, for the social status of the players. The wittier Puritans were fond of twitting them, on the ground that, if all men had their rights, they would count as no better than vagabonds. There is little more than a verbal truth in the taunt. No doubt, in certain circumstances, players, like minstrels before them, might fall within the danger of a series of statutes which, in the course of formulating the provisions of a nascent poor-law, attempted also to regulate the wandering elements of society. It was part of the mediaeval conception of things to assign to every individual a definite function in the social organism and to expect from him the regular fulfilment of that function. To such a theory the migratory beggar and the masterless man were naturally repugnant. But it was primarily a shortage of labour towards the end of the fourteenth century which brought about the first serious endeavour to check vagabondage by legislation, and to compel the able-bodied vagrant, through the machinery of local government, to return to the village of his domicile and there take up again the service which he had abandoned. This policy was continued and developed by the Tudors. The principal act which was operative, when Elizabeth came to
