As far back as the reign of Richard II., in 1388, it became necessary for the protection of society to legislate against vagrancy.[4] The natural thing when society was almost wholly agricultural, and stationary in villages or towns, was to legislate against and forbid vagrancy. Beggars impotent to serve were to remain where the Act found them, and be there maintained or sent back to their birthplace. This is the germ of the law of settlement, by which every Englishman was supposed to have a birthright in his native parish. The laws were made stricter and stricter, yet vagrancy did not cease, even when the penalty was whipping, loss of ears and hanging for the third offence.[5]
Even now society does not recognise that units squeezed out of true social relationships _must_ become vagrants, as surely as soil trodden on the highway becomes dust.
The amount of vagrancy, _i.e._ of those obliged to revert to primitive conditions, depends as surely on the drying up of means of sustenance as the highway dust on the absence of refreshing showers.
Any change in society that displaces a large number of units is sure to result in increase of vagrancy. Of those forced out many cannot regain a footing if they would.[6]
But as time went on another class was added to the nomad as akin to it, and yet its origin is wholly different. The man unable to settle because of his affinity to a roving life is one thing, the man _squeezed out_ of the pastoral or agricultural life is another. The latter is akin to our "unskilled labourer," a social unit unfitted for any but a primitive kind of existence, unfitted for industrial development, but not essentially nomad.[7]
As early as Henry VIII., 1531, we find a second class, that of the "incapable," those who could not work, who were "licensed to beg."
The formation of this class was accelerated by the failure of the Church to provide for the assistance of the poor, by suppression of abbeys, etc., at the same time that the abolition of villeinage, which was still recent, threw off from organised society dependents very unfit to live a self-supporting life. (See Note 2.) Thus again the drying up of means of subsistence created as it were another layer of easily drifting dust.