Section I. History

The historical interest and the juridical anomalies of the Vagrancy Act are such as to justify a fuller reference to it here than the importance of the offences created by it might seem to call for. An experienced observer of criminal proceedings has pronounced it, somewhat sweepingly, to be ‘the most unconstitutional law yet lingering on the statute book’. It is a survival from a long series of penal enactments— enforced by imprisonment, flogging, enslavement, and death—whereby the legislature strove to grapple with the difficulties created by the steady increase in the numbers of the migratory population. Legislation for this purpose began as far back as 1388, when the dearth of labourers, caused by the devastations of the Black Death in the period 1348-69, had produced competition amongst employers and, consequently, many migrations of labourers towards the districts where they could profit by this competition. The legislature interposed in order to check both the rise of wages consequent upon all such free exchange between labour and capital, and also some more genuine evils, arising from the mendicancy of such of the wanderers as did not obtain employment, and the dishonesty of many of them who did not even seek for it. To this latter class of vagrants an addition was made in the reign of Henry VIII by the arrival of the first gypsies. The establishment under Elizabeth I of a compulsory parochial assessment, for the rehef of the destitute, naturally led to the imposition of further penalties to protect parishes from the arrival of strangers who might become a burden on the local assessment. The modern reform of our industrial legislation and of our former system of poor relief has now swept away almost the whole of the long series of enactments which four centuries had accumulated. But there still remain some parts of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, which might be unintelligible if we did not regard them as a supplement to the old Poor Law, intended to prevent indigent persons from wandering out of their parishes, and to restrain the offences likely to be committed by such wanderers.