Thomas Harman - Vagabond Society

Vagabond Society

Harman set out a taxonomy of rogues, which expanded one sketched out by Awdeley. The structure and processes of this mirrored those of Tudor society, with its hierarchy and sumptuary laws, and the trade guilds, with their apprenticeships and initiations ceremonies.

An example is the ceremony of “stalling a rogue” which Harman describes. In this an Upright Man pours beer over the head of the initiate, with the words, “I, G.P., do stall thee, W.T., to the rogue, and that henceforth it shall be lawful for you to cant . . . for thy living in all places”. Such a ceremony is reproduced in later rogue literature, and in the play The Beggars Bush by Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, from which it was extracted by Francis Kirkman in ‘’The Wits’’. Bampfylde Moore Carew includes a similar account of his own inauguration as King of the Beggars, and there was a tradition that the graves of members of the Boswell gypsy family were visited annually and beer poured onto them during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Although his taxonomy has been read as if these roles were fixed, Harman’s examples made it clear that many of these roles were modes of begging or crime adopted by the same vagabond from time to time. They also make it clear that many of these villains also had legitimate trades, which they exercised from time to time. This is confirmed by the historical record, which shows that many of those arrested as vagrants were unemployed through no fault of their own. They included domestic servants who had been dismissed, labourers seeking work, or those whose trade required travel, such as pedlars and chapmen. While Harman may seem to have little appreciation of the powerlessness and exploitation of those he wrote about, his accounts do show some understanding of social realities. Awdeley is less subtle and later writers used the same terms, but with less understanding. Although he may have failed to fully understand their predicament Harman does seem to have had direct contact with vagabonds, while most of those who wrote later rogue literature were London based writers living in literary circles.

Another area in which Harman has been misunderstood is the place of Egyptians in this vagabond culture. They have no specific place in it, and although he identifies a few individuals as being Egyptians, he describes them generally as having a distinct culture and lifestyle. This is consistent with the attitude to them generally, that they were “others”, strange, foreign, little understood and, therefore criminal or at least a danger to the social order. The attitude to the Irish seems to have been similar, though less extreme.