It may be disputed whether this printer's name were really Sampson, or Awdeley: he was made free of the Stationers' Company as Sampson, and so he is most frequently termed towards the commencement of the Register; but he certainly wrote and printed his name Awdeley or Awdelay; now and then it stands in the Register 'Sampson Awdeley.' It is the more important to settle the point, because ... he was not only a printer, but a versifier,[2] and ought to have been included by Ritson in his _Bibliographica Poetica_. (Registers of the Stationers' Company, A.D. 1848, vol. i. p. 23.)
These verses of Awdeley's, or Sampson's, no doubt led to his 'small bréefe' being entered in the Stationers' Register as a 'ballett':
"1560-1. Rd. of John Sampson, for his lycense for pryntinge of a ballett called the description of vakaboundes ... iiij^{ d}.
"[This entry seems to refer to an early edition of a very curious work, printed again by Sampson, alias Awdeley, in 1565, when it bore the following title, 'The fraternitie of vacabondes, as well of rufling vacabones as of beggerly, [3]as well of women as of men, [3]and as well of gyrles as of boyes, with their proper names and qualityes. Also the xxv. orders of knaves, otherwise called a quartten of knawes. Confirmed this yere by Cocke Lorel.' The edition without date mentioned by Dibdin (iv. 564) may have been that of the entry. Another impression by Awdeley, dated 1575 [which we reprint] is reviewed in the _British Bibliographer_, ii. 12, where it is asserted (as is very probable, though we are without distinct evidence of the fact) that the printer was the compiler of the book, and he certainly introduces it by three six-line stanzas. If this work came out originally in 1561, according to the entry, there is no doubt that it was the precursor of a very singular series of tracts on the same subject, which will be noticed in their proper places.]"--J. P. Collier, _Registers_, i. 42.
As above said, I take Harman's 'fewe yeares'--in 1566 or 7--to point to the 1561 edition of Awdeley, and not the 1565 ed. And as to Awdeley's authorship,--what can be more express than his own words, p. 2, below, that what the Vagabond caught at a Session confest as to 'both names and states of most and least of this their Vacabondes brotherhood,' _that_,--'at the request of a worshipful man, I ['The Printer,' that is, John Awdeley] have set it forth as well as I can.'