Mediaeval Tramps.
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MEDIAEVAL TRAMPS. AS far as occasional glimpses allow us to judge, the mediaeval tramp was as like in character and conduct to the tramp of the present day as ever were father and son to each other. The history of vagrancy in earlier times is frequently a history of social oppression, by which the laborer is driven to lead a wander ing life; the history of begging is froni first to last a history of craft on the part of the beggar, and of credulity on the part of his supporters. From the fragments of laws dealing with vagrancy that have c^me to us from Anglo-Saxon times we can infer that it was then a recognized evil. The most an cient of these is an enactment of Hlothaere, who was king of Kent from 673 to 685. It makes the host responsible for the misdeeds of his guest, who no doubt would frequently be a fugitive from justice, a runaway slave, or a highway robber. Private hospitality was necessarily much resorted to by honest and dishonest, poor and rich alike, at a time when inns were few, workhouses non-existent, and monasteries— which to some extent supplied the place of both—were at distances too great to be cov ered by a day's journey. And no doubt, un der cover of hospitality, all kinds of enemies of society could be harbored by their accom plices, and aided to escape justice. To check this Hlothsere's law enacts that "If a man entertains a stranger for three nights at his own home, a chapman, or any other that has come over the march, and then feed him with his own food, and he then do harm to any man's let the man bring the other to justice, or do justice to him." Under the later Anglo-Saxon kings we find numerous regulations aimed against lordless and wandering" men. On the other hand, the Church inculcated charity and mercy, and the duty of hospitality.
During the period succeeding the Nor man conquest the legal status of the lowest stratum of society improved. But lawless ness, violence, and disorder were terribly rife. The fearful oppressions endured by the people at the hands of the barons in the reigns of Henry and Stephen, are vividly de picted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, and are tod well known to need repetition here. When the Black Death carried off a third of the inhabitants of Europe, England included, the free laborers, who had by that time be come pretty numerous, found themselves masters of the situation owing to the scar city of labor, and they made sucn good use of their advantage that the "Statute of La borers" was passed to compel them to work for the old wages. One of its clauses made it penal to give alms. In the Vision of Piers Ploughman, written about 1362, are descriptions of the strug gling cottager and the sneaking beggar. In the Middle Ages "Poor Scholars" thought it no disgrace to beg for the means of defraying their expenses of the journey to Oxford and Cambridge, and of their mainten ance there. Even still, begging students are to be found in Spain, and perhaps in some other European countries. But the Oxon ian of the present day would doubtless be startled to read that his predecessors were regularly licensed by the University to beg from the townspeople. It is often said that the dissolution1 of the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth was the origin of begging and vagrancy in England. Rut from the statutes, as well as ifrom the allusions of contemporary writers, it is evident that this is a complete error. Henry the Eighth tried hard to stamp out the pest of beggars, and is believed to have hung no fewer than three-score and twelve thousand (72,000.)
