that the parish officers were compelled by this statute to make inquiry into the condition of the poor, and to ascertain who were really impotent and who were impostors. To a person actually in want liberty was given to beg within a certain district, “and further,” says the Act, “there shall be delivered to every such person a letter containing the name of that person, witnessing that he is authorized to beg, and the limits within which he is appointed to beg, the same letter to be sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough, and subscribed with the name of one of the said justices or officers aforesaid.”

I need scarcely remark that a seal in those days, when but few public functionaries could write, was looked upon as the badge of authority and genuineness, and that as the art of writing became more general autograph signatures supplanted seals. An English vagabond in the time of Elizabeth, when speaking of his passport, called it his JARKE, or JARKEMAN, viz. his sealed paper. His descendant of the present century would term it his LINES, viz. his written paper. The cant term JARKE is almost obsolete, but the powerful magic of a big seal is still remembered and made use of by the tribe of cadgers. When a number of them at the present day wait upon a farmer with a fictitious paper, authorizing them to collect subscriptions for the sufferers in some dreadful colliery accident, the document, covered with apparently genuine signatures, is generally garnished with a huge seal.

In Germany it was the custom (alluded to at page 34) for the priests or clerks to read these licenses to beg from the pulpit, that the congregation might know which of the poor people who waited at their doors were worthy of alms. Sometimes, as in the case of the Dützbetterin, or false “lying-in-woman,” an anecdote of whom is told here, the priests were deceived by counterfeit documents.

At page 17 reference is made to the wandering students who used to trudge over the country and sojourn for a time at any school charitable enough to take them in. These, in their journeys, often fell in with rogues and tramps, and sometimes joined them in their vagabond calling, in which case they obtained for themselves the title of Kammesierers, or “Learned Beggars.” Now these same vagabond scholars were to be met with in this country in the time of Henry VIII,—and in Ireland, I believe, so late as the last century. Examining again the Act for Vagrants, 1531, we find that it was usual and customary for poor scholars from Oxford and Cambridge to tramp from county to county. The statute provided them with a document, signed by the commissary, chancellor, or vice-chancellor, which acted as their passport. When found without this license they were treated as vagrants, and whipped accordingly.

GERMAN ORIGIN OF TRICS PRACTISED BY ENGLISH VAGABONDS

T is remarkable that many of the tricks and manœuvres to obtain money from the unthinking but benevolent people of Luther’s time should have been practised in this country at an early date, and that they should still be found amongst the arts to deceive thoughtless persons adopted by rogues and tramps at the present day. The stroller, or “Master of the Black Art,” described at page 19, is yet occasionally heard of in our rural districts. The simple farmer believes him to be weather and cattle wise, and should his crops be backward, or his cow “Spot,” not “let down her milk,” with her accustomed readiness, he crosses the fellow’s hand with a piece of silver, in order that things may be righted.

The Wiltners, or finders of pretended silver fingers, noticed at page 45, are now-a-days represented by the “Fawney Riggers,” or droppers of counterfeit gold rings,—described in Mayhew’s London Labour, and other works treating of the ways of vagabonds.

“Card-Sharpers,” or Joners, mentioned at page 47, are, unfortunately for the pockets of the simple, still to be met with on public race-courses and at fairs.

The over-Sönzen-goers, or pretended distressed gentry, who went about “neatly dressed,” with false letters, would seem to have been the original of our modern “Begging-Letter-Writers.”

Those half-famished looking impostors, with clean aprons, or carefully brushed threadbare coats, who stand on the curbs of our public thoroughfares, and beg with a few sticks of sealing-wax in their hands, were known in Luther’s time as Goose-shearers. As the reader will have experienced only too frequently, they have, when pretending to be mechanics out of employ, a particularly unpleasant practice of following people, and detailing, in half-despairing, half-threatening sentences, the state of their pockets and their appetites. It appears they did the same thing more than three centuries ago.

Another class, known amongst London street-folk as “Shivering-Jemmies,”—fellows who expose themselves, half-naked, on a cold day, to excite pity and procure alms—were known in Luther’s time as Schwanfelders,—only in those days, people being not quite so modest as now, they stripped themselves entirely naked before commencing to shiver at the church-doors.

Those wretches, who are occasionally brought before the police magistrates, accused of maiming children, on purpose that they may the better excite pity and obtain money, are, unfortunately, not peculiar to our civilized age. These fellows committed like cruelties centuries ago.

Borrowers of children, too,—those pretended fathers of numerous and starving families of urchins, now often heard howling in the streets on a wet day, the children being arranged right and left according to height,—existed in the olden time,—only then the loan was but for All Souls’, or other Feast Day, when the people were in a good humour.

The trick of placing soap in the mouth to produce froth, and falling down before passers-by as though in a fit, common enough in London streets a few years ago, is also described as one of the old manœuvres of beggars.9

Travelling quack-doctors, against whom Luther cautions his readers, were common in this country up to the beginning of the present century.