HKB
INTRODUCTION.
Vagabonds and Beggars are ancient blots in the history of the world. Idleness, I suppose, existed before civilization began, but feigned distress must certainly have been practised soon after.
In the records of the Middle Ages enactments for the suppression and ordering of vagrancy continually occur. In this country, as we shall see directly, laws for its abolishment were passed at a very early date.
The begging system of the Friars, perhaps more than any other cause, contributed to swell the ranks of vagabonds. These religious mendicants, who had long been increasing in number and dissoluteness, gave to beggars sundry lessons in hypocrisy, and taught them, in their tales of fictitious distress, how to blend the troubles of the soul with the infirmities of the body. Numerous systems of religious imposture were soon contrived, and mendicants of a hundred orders swarmed through the land. Things were at their worst, or rather both friars and vagabonds were in their palmiest days, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century, just before the suppression of the Religious Houses commenced, and immediately before the first symptoms of the Reformation showed themselves,—that great movement which was so soon to sweep one of the two pests away for ever.
In Schreiber’s account of the Bettler-industrie (begging practices) of Germany in the year 1475, he thus speaks of this golden age for mendicants.[1] His theory, as to the origin of the complicated system of mendicity, is, perhaps, more fanciful than true, but his account is nevertheless very interesting, and well worth extracting from.
“The beggars of Germany rejoiced in their Golden Age; it extended throughout nearly two centuries, from the invasions of the Turks until after the conclusion of the Swedish war (1450 to 1650). During this long period it was frequently the case that begging was practised less from necessity than for pleasure;—indeed, it was pursued like a regular calling. For poetry had estranged herself from the Nobility; knights no longer went out on adventures to seek giants and dragons, or to liberate the Holy Tomb; she had likewise become more and more alien to the Citizen, since he considered it unwise to brood over verses and rhymes, when he was called upon to calculate his profits in hard coin. Even the ‘Sons of the Muses,’ the Scholars, had become more prosaic, since there was so much to learn and so many universities to visit, and the masters could no longer wander from one country to another with thousands of pupils.
“Then poetry (as everything in human life gradually descends) began to ally herself with beggars and vagrants. That which formerly had been misfortune and misery became soon a sort of free art, which only retained the mask of misery in order to pursue its course more safely and undisturbed. Mendicity became a distinct institution, was divided into various branches, and was provided with a language of its own. Doubtless, besides the frequent wars, it was the Gipsies—appearing in Germany, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in larger swarms than ever—who contributed greatly to this state of things. They formed entire tribes of wanderers, as free as the birds in the air, now dispersing themselves, now reuniting, resting whereever forests or moors pleased, or stupidity and superstition allured them, possessing nothing, but appropriating to themselves the property of everybody, by stratagem or rude force.
“In what manner and to what extent such beggary had grown up and branched off towards the close of the fifteenth century, what artifices and even what language these beggars used to employ, is shown us in Johann Knebel’s Chronicles, the MSS. of which are preserved in the Library of the City and University of Bâle.”