ll-disposed people bestowed upon them, after a most wicked and
detestable manner.

It is not yet full threescore years since this trade began: but how it
hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now
supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000 persons, as
I have heard reported. Moreover, in counterfeiting the Egyptian
rogues,[168] they have devised a language among themselves, which they
name "Canting," but others, "pedler's French," a speech compact thirty
years since, of English and a great number of odd words of their own
devising, without all order or reason, and yet such is it as none but
themselves are able to understand. The first deviser thereof was hanged by
the neck--a just reward, no doubt, for his deserts, and a common end to
all of that profession.

A gentleman[169] also of late hath taken great pains to search out the
secret practices of this ungracious rabble. And among other things he
setteth down and describeth three and twenty sorts of them, whose names
it shall not be amiss to remember whereby each one may take occasion to
read and know as also by his industry what wicked people they are, and
what villainy remaineth in them.

_The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle vagabonds._

1. Rufflers. 8. Fraters.
2. Uprightmen. 9. Abrams.
3. Hookers or anglers. 10. Freshwater mariners or whipiacks.
4. Rogues. 11. Drummerers.
5. Wild rogues. 12. Drunken tinkers.
6. Priggers or pransers. 13. Swadders or pedlers.
7. Palliards. 14. Jarkemen or patricoes.

_Of the women kind._

1. Demanders for glimmar or fire. 5. Walking mortes.
2. Bawdy-baskets. 6. Doxies.
3. Mortes. 7. Dells.
4. Autem mortem. 8. Kinching mortes.
9. Kinching cooes.[170]

The punishment that is ordained for this kind of people is very sharp, and
yet it cannot restrain them from their gadding: wherefore the end must
needs be martial law,[171] to be exercised upon them, as upon thieves,
robbers, despisers of all laws, and enemies to the commonwealth and
welfare of the land. What notable robberies, pilferies, murders, rapes,
and stealings of young children, burning, breaking, and disfiguring their
limbs to make them pitiful in the sight of the people, I need not to
rehearse; but for their idle rogueing about the country, the la