The topic of vagrancy in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England has not attracted much attention from historians, but it was of particular concern to both the contemporary poor and those who sought to regulate them. In Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750, David Hitchcock explores the experiences, interpretations, and representations of those who wandered the English landscape during those decades. He draws on examinations, constables’ notebooks, petitions, and petty sessions from Cheshire, Essex, Kent, London, Sussex, and Warwickshire, and also printed proceedings of Old Bailey trials, ballads, newspaper reports, and novels. After reviewing the historiography of vagrancy covering the century preceding his study, Hitchcock makes two bold claims for the century after 1650: first, that the term vagrant became a flexible term that was applied to a broader range of people than ever before; and second, that a growing number of women were becoming vagrants, a trend that should make historians question the classification of such individuals as masterless men.

In chapter 1, Hitchcock argues that attitudes towards and treatment of vagrants were based on the assumption that such individuals had chosen to be idle. Vagrants were set to work as part of broader policies of improvement promoted by an increasingly aggressive fiscal-military state, with male vagrants often treated as disposable commodities in imperial conflicts. Localized parish welfare was transformed into national “workfare” (53) in order to improve vagrants both morally and personally, while concerted attempts were made to identify individual vagrants in order to expose frauds and tricksters. Increasingly this was done by recounting vagrant life stories in newspapers and weekly journals, and other forms of cheap print had similar aims. In chapter 2, Hitchcock examines representations of begging and vagrancy in broadside ballads, and, by reading them as allegorical texts, identifies four narratives about such individuals within these songs. The first genre recounts the carefree life of traveling the highway; the second tells tales of deception and seduction; the third offers warnings and lamentations of the misfortunes of vagrants; and the fourth focuses on the deserving poor, in particular widows, and their revenge on those who wronged them. Within such songs, divisions between the deserving and undeserving poor are based on physical and moral health, with frauds depicted as physically healthy while the deserving were imagined as sorely afflicted.

Although attempts were made to clearly identify and demarcate different forms of traveling pauper, Hitchcock argues that definitions of “vagrant” and “pauper migrant” are insufficient to describe the range of experiences of the mobile poor. In chapter 3 he uses case studies from Warwickshire and Kent to illustrate how constables and justices of the peace were pragmatic when dealing with such individuals, using a “calculus of relief and punishment” (101) when deciding who to label a vagrant and who to treat simply as a poor migrant. Alongside national legislation the needs and resources of the local community did much to determine whether or not individuals or groups were labeled as vagrants. Rather than placing attention on broader demographic trends, as historians of vagrancy working on the century prior to 1640 have done, Hitchcock emphasizes the need to examine these local dynamics, as well as life-cycle processes, to understand vagrancy and vagrants in the decades after 1660. The emphasis on life narratives is especially evident in the final chapter where Hitchcock focuses on female vagrants. Using examinations from Essex, London and Surrey alongside literary representations, he argues that “if male vagrancy was fundamentally considered a problem of labour” then female vagrancy was “a problem of the life-cycle” (128), linked to domestic service, pregnancy, and childbirth. The evidence presented reveals that many vagrant women had been deserted by husbands or male lovers and had children with them when they were encountered by the authorities, and it was the presence of the latter that did much to determine how they were treated. Often such women were apprehended for vagrancy only after they had given birth, often in difficult circumstances, and escaping vagrancy often involved mothers being separated from their children.

Overall Hitchcock sees the century up to 1750 as a period when distinctions between poor migrants and undeserving vagrants collapsed; when “narratives of mobility … became personalized” (151); and when a growing proportion of traveling paupers were women. Linking these developments to the growth of the fiscal-military state and the impact of the print revolution adds weight to these arguments, and Hitchcock offers a distinctive take on early modern vagrancy, downplaying the emphasis in much existing historiography on demography and highlighting the need to consider both local social dynamics and the importance of printed discourse in more depth. That said, there are ways in which such arguments might be questioned. The processes of labeling and the shifting gender balance of the poor highlighted by Hitchcock can be seen in the century prior to 1660, too, in particular in London, as shown by Paul Griffiths in Lost London: Crime, Control and the Capital City, 1550–1660 (2008). Griffiths (whom Hitchcock cites, but whose work is not engaged with especially closely) made extensive use of the Bridewell hospital court books, and although these records are less detailed after 1660 they do survive and are accessible online, so it is surprising that Hitchcock did not make greater use of them. Hitchcock examines national trends, so an undue bias towards London would have been inappropriate, but Hitchcock himself acknowledges that the unique nature of the metropolis needs to be considered when evaluating his arguments about female vagrants, built as they are on evidence from the southeast. Overall this reviewer found them to be persuasive, in part because of what is known already about women around 1700, when the population was predominantly female, and it is to be hoped that the work of Hitchcock, as well as that of Griffiths, will inspire others to explore the gendering of vagrancy in provincial communities, both rural and urban, across the early modern period.