David Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750

Abstract

Before the advent of the “New Social History” in the 1960s, conventional wisdom among historians about vagrancy in early modern England was founded on a number of contemporary print commentaries which depicted vagrants as a threat to the well-ordered commonwealth, portraying them as an organised and hierarchical “fraternity of vagabonds” whose values subverted the social norms and values of respectable society. Early work on relevant archival sources (Paul Slack and A.L. Beier were two notewo...