part the
distress which unsettlement causes, and which vagrancy in some measure
indicates, by keeping the people within the ranks of recognized
dependence, the settled industry of the crafts and of agriculture, or
forcing them back into it by fear of the gaol or the stocks. The extreme
point of this policy was reached when by the laws of Edward VI. and
Elizabeth the "rogue, vagabond or sturdy beggar" was branded with an R
on the shoulder and handed over as a bondman for a period to any one who
would take him. On the other hand, it was desired that relief should be
a means of preventing migration. In any time of general pressure there
is a desire to organize mendicity, to prevent the wandering of beggars,
to create a kind of settled poor, distinguished from the rest as infirm
and not able-bodied, and to keep these at least at home sufficiently
supported by local and parochial relief; and this, in its simpler form
all the world over, has in the past been by response to public begging.
The argument may be summed up thus: We cannot have begging, which
implies that the beggar is cared for by no one, belongs to no one, and
therefore throws himself on the world at large. Therefore, if he is
able-bodied he must be punished as unsocial, for it is his fault that he
belongs to no one; or we must make him some one's dependant, and so keep
him; or if he is infirm, and therefore of no service to any one--if no
one will keep him--we must organize his mendicity, for such mendicity is
justified. If he cannot dig for the man to whom he does or should
belong, he must beg. Then out of the failure to organize mendicity--for
relief of itself is no remedy, least of all casual relief--a poor-law
springs up, which, afterwards associated with the provision of
employment, will, it is hoped, make relief in some measure remedial by
increasing its quantity by means of compulsory levies. This argument,
which combined statutory wage control and statutory poor relief, seems
to have been firmly bedded in the English legislative mind for more than
two centuries, from 1351 till after 1600; and until 1834 these two
series of laws effectually reduced the English labourer to a new
industrial dependence. To people imbued with ideas of feudalism the way
of escape from villenage seemed to be not independence, but a new
reversion to it.

The decadence.

Many elements produced the social and economic catastrophe of the 16th
century, for the condition into