Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature

Abstract

With an eye trained on our iron age, which blames the poor for not being rich, Linda Woodbridge has written a provocative study about the ways in which trivial comic fictions led to colder attitudes and crueler laws about the destitute in early modern England.The homeless who so vexed the guardians of order were subjects and victims of a "discourse of vagrancy" that fueled Reformation debates, preoccupied humanists, and obsessed writers on manners and architects of nationhood.Woodbridge has pulled together a broad and diverse array of writings, most memorably Simon Fish's Supplication for the Beggars, satirizing greedy priests as competitors for beggars' alms; Richard Layton's Boccaccian reports to Thomas Cromwell about naughty English monks; Erasmus's colloquies "Beggar Talk" and Convivium Religiosum; brutal scatological polemics by Luther and More; Thomas Harman's rogue exposé A Caveat for Common Cursetors; a scurrilous jest book, A Merry Jest of a Man That Was Called Howlglas; and a number of conduct books, sermons, statutes, and plays.Texts high and low painted the vagrant as fiendishly clever, theatrical, lazy, promiscuous, double-talking, seditious, filthy, and diseased, in this way "hardening hearts" (a recurring phrase) against the homeless and any consideration of root causes and solutions.Writings like these justified a new distancing between almsgiver and beggar that eventually gave rise to modern attitudes about "welfare cheats" and "fake" panhandlers, and helped form consciences that permit the poor to die of exposure in American cities, just as in early modern London.If Woodbridge had done only this, it would have been a worthy endeavor, but she attempts far more by attacking scholars' use of rogue literature as evidence about actual vagrants (chap.1), pointing out humanism's failure to extend its educational ideals to the poorest, judged to be uneducable (chap.3), and showing how writers deployed the language of filth and disease to link incivility, barbarism, and vagrancy (chap.5).A noted Shakespearean, Woodbridge concludes with a chapter on King Lear, in which she discerns "a few maverick sympathetic voices" (p.205) about the lives of the poor and the callousness of the comfortable.Central to her thesis is the stunning congruency of seemingly disparate realms of Renaissance thought when the topic was the ragged and rootless vagrant.Catholic or Protestant, magistrate or humanist, everyone in authority apparently agreed that the unhoused poor were dangerous and not to be pitied: "The vagrant poor became such bogeymen not because they were big bogeymen so much as because they were everybody's bogeymen" (p.13).Unlike "the deserving poor," who managed to keep a roof over their heads, the homeless and therefore "undeserving poor" were forced to move constantly.Their mobility was disorderly by definition, and someone with no fixed abode in search of charity or work was suspicious and probably criminal.Woodbridge ably tracks how the Reformation, and Calvinist doctrine in particular, wrought radical changes in attitudes about almsgiving, intensifying the demonization of the vagrant.(Some people continued to help them anyway, as Woodbridge herself points out, so the assertion that

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