Audrey Eccles has produced a very valuable contribution to the study of poverty, crime and mobility in eighteenth-century England. It should be noted at the outset that this not a study of vagrancy ‘under the Old Poor Law’ as promised in the title. The first hundred years of the Old Poor Law are only discussed in the book's first four pages and references to the early eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are very minimal. However, Eccles does provide an impressive and detailed analysis of the creation and implementation of the Vagrancy Act of 1744, which remained in force until a new act was passed in 1792.

Eccles, a retired archivist, has an outstanding command of her sources, primarily the voluminous quarter sessions records of Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, London and Middlesex. She employs them to great effect to show that vagrancy law was used both to plug gaps in the provision of poor relief and to punish poor people who committed a variety of only tangentially related ‘crimes’. The book offers a balanced account of this process, placing specific emphasis on the flexibility with which the Acts were implemented and demonstrating that they were a remarkable illustration of the more general practice of ‘modification of statute law from below’ by magistrates and petty officers (p. 49). Eccles repeatedly notes the harsh effects that the law could have on the poor, such as the ‘very callous treatment’ of impoverished pregnant women (pp. 96–7) and the summary punishment of many ‘suspicious persons’ despite a lack of proof of their supposed misdeeds (p. 81). However, she presents a largely benevolent picture of the law's impact overall. She notes, for example, that routine whipping of vagrants was increasingly rare and that the law was often used to provide subsistence, at the county's expense, for many types of poor travellers such as soldiers, sailors, their families, sick migrants, and the Irish.

Ultimately, Eccles argues that ‘vagrancy law rarely seems to have been used oppressively’ (p. 55) and many cases can be found of the poor using it ‘as a subsidised travel system’ (p. 72). This relatively optimistic view is unlikely to be accepted by every historian in the field, but she certainly succeeds in making a plausible case for such an interpretation. As such, the book could be fruitfully read alongside the work of K. D. M. Snell, Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, Steve Hindle and most recently David Hitchcock, all of whom have explored the dualistic punitive-beneficent nature of the poor law in the eighteenth century.

Apart from its restricted chronology, this book has only a few notable limitations. Some undergraduates may find it a difficult text thanks to the fact that it has no introduction, only a five page conclusion, and a somewhat obscure structure. Likewise, this reader found the lack of a full bibliography and the use of parenthetical references for secondary sources frustrating. Still, Eccles has undoubtedly succeeded in providing a painstaking study that will prove very useful to scholars working on the social history of Hanoverian England.