In a 1621 pamphlet entitled The Praise, Antiquity and Commodity of Begging, the self-styled ‘Water Poet’, London waterman, bottleman, prolific pamphlet writer, and early modern performance artist John Taylor described the contemporary condition of vagrancy in highly spatialised terms:

Taylor captures in this deliberately meandering poetic statement the unfixed nature and perpetual motion of the vagrant that was of such concern to early modern authorities. There was no fixed point or defining ‘home’ or parish for wandering beggars. It was this very ‘unsettled’ quality of their existence that was the focus of deep anxiety and reaction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As Patricia Fumerton has evidenced, there was a strong perception at this time that vagrancy had reached crisis levels.Footnote ²

The real landscape of poverty, mobility, and transience was not, however, solely populated by beggars. As studies by Fumerton, Joan Kent, Paul Slack, A. L. Beier and others have indicated, the category of ‘vagrant’ in reality embraced a wide set of social groupings, including migrant seasonal agricultural labourers, journeymen and apprentices, unbound servants, chapmen and peddlers, soldiers and sailors, maverick clergymen and religious visionaries, the mentally unwell, people with disabilities, and even itinerant actors and entertainers.Footnote ³ What bound this group together in the public imagination was what Fumerton terms ‘kinesis’, the perpetual motion and movement of the poor, a group endlessly making shift for the purposes of economic survival.Footnote ⁴

Wandering and the conditions of homelessness or itinerancy were overt challenges to accepted norms of behaviour in the early modern period, and not least to structures of parish poor relief, almsgiving, and neighbourhood responsibility.Footnote ⁵ In his 1577 Description of England, William Harrison observed that the vagabond ‘will abide nowhere but runneth up and down from place to place . . . to and fro over all the realm’.Footnote ⁶ Anxiety about perpetual motion and its concomitant condition of homelessness is clearly embodied in this description and such was the level of institutional discomfort provoked and produced by the perceived mutability of the mobile poor that the Elizabethan Vagrancy Acts of 1572 and 1598 were introduced in an effort to prescribe and contain that threat. The cultural geographer Tim Cresswell has suggested that theorists of postmodern mobility have identified in those Acts the origin of contemporary attitudes to homelessness and the unsettling impact of refugee status both on the communities entered into and those whose borders are crossed.Footnote ⁷ That the Acts referred in sweeping generalisations to diverse social groups with little sense of differentiation between them is also indicative of what Barry Taylor has termed the ‘vagrant's deliberate confusion of categories’.Footnote ⁸ It is a very real signifier of the complex communities that could be seen or encountered on a daily basis on the public highways of the realm.Footnote ⁹

In his seminal work on early modern vagrancy, Masterless Men, A. L. Beier carefully mapped what he described as the ‘geography of vagrancy’ in terms not only of the open road along which individuals travelled but also the fields, meadows, and barns in which the transient frequently found shelter and sometimes an opportunity for piece-work, alongside the various alehouses which provided a shared and identifiable network of known stopping places.Footnote ¹⁰ What we can begin to produce from a detailed consideration of this cultural cartography of vagrancy is a spatialised understanding of the experience of poverty in the early modern period, one which in turn helps us to understand the relationship of the mobile poor to place in new ways.Footnote ¹¹ Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan's definition of space is helpful here: ‘if we think of space as that which allows movement then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’.Footnote ¹² From this definition it follows that alehouses, and indeed the winter barns in which many poor people found lodging, were important coordinates on the national map of poverty: ‘To the vagrant [alehouses] were places of refuge in an ever-changing landscape’.Footnote ¹³ This is a vagrant experience of geography which Beier goes on to describe as ‘rootless and transient, haunting alehouses and sleeping rough’ and we can find early modern precedents for this ‘vagrant geography’, not least in that 1621 pamphlet of John Taylor.Footnote ¹⁴ This particular geography of space and place, one of barns and alehouses and sleeping rough, is directly addressed by Taylor there:

In a new version of pastoral, then, Taylor constructs the world of the beggar as one of self-sufficiency, as the meadows provide straw to sleep on, corn for bread, and even materials for clothing:

There is a stubborn refusal in this consciously literary aestheticisation to acknowledge the real threat of starvation for those categories of society reduced to subsistence living. The poetics serve to occlude the realities of the life of the mobile poor. Despite this tendency to view things through a literary and poetic lens, poverty and mobility were nevertheless topics that Taylor demonstrated considerable interest in throughout his writing career.Footnote ¹⁶

What Taylor understood when engaging with the geography of vagrancy was that the act of mapping the spatial world of this group requires considerable thought not only about the spaces inhabited, albeit temporarily, or travelled through, but also the ways in which the mobile poor perform such spaces, that is to say the sets of practices and cultural competencies associated with them.Footnote ¹⁷ Paul Griffiths extends this cartographical understanding of poverty with his poetic riff on the life of the mobile poor as one of ‘movements, streets, not being known, being lost, making ends meet, sinking’.Footnote ¹⁸ We can hear in this observation a lexicon of practice, of doing and being in the landscape, which is crucial to remember when thinking about the poor as a category in this period. It would be all too easy for homelessness and subsistence living to be read in terms of a complete loss of agency, but through this kind of spatialised reading it proves possible to produce alternative notions of agency and effect. Patricia Fumerton is also interested in the cartographies of the unsettled, stressing the need for scholars to look for the poor in their own space, a space which in her account is one of ‘itinerary, fragmentation, disconnection, multiplicity’ and which in turn produces ‘a very different topographical mapping of societal relations than that determined by place’.Footnote ¹⁹

In undertaking this kind of spatially aware reading in this article, I want to move the thinking on to another level and to ask what it means for all these understandings, cartographical and social, economic and political, when the ‘geography of vagrancy’ is consciously re-staged and reconfigured by acts of writing and publication by recognised literary figures of the day like John Taylor and even, as we shall see, by acts of walking and mobility themselves. I want to concentrate in the main on one particular literary remaking of this contemporary social phenomenon of the mobile poor in another published pamphlet text by Taylor, his 1618 The Pennyles Pilgrimage or The Money-lesse perambulation, of Iohn Taylor, Alias the Kings Majesties Water-Poet while making reference to other comparable contemporary literary forays into the notion of performing place and the staged journey. A consistent performance of the life of the vagrant or, perhaps more accurately, the ‘poor distressed traveller’, appears to have been the governing terms of Taylor's literary and theatrical enterprise.Footnote ²⁰

The Pennyles Pilgrimage was a narrative and self-proclaimed documentary account (the title-page stresses that, in contrast to much contemporary travel writing, ‘all is true’Footnote ²¹) of one particular journey that Taylor made from London to Edinburgh via a combination of pedestrian and equine travel and accompanied by a servant companion. Taylor's motivations for making such a journey, and with such a precise set of prescriptions as to how it should be undertaken, appear to be multiple. Certainly, his oeuvre as a whole presents a man who was fascinated by the journey as public art form. Including the 1618 walk, he conducted and published written accounts of fourteen journeys. These included foreign expeditions in Hamburg and Prague and journeys by paper boat upon the Thames. The latter were undertaken with a companion in 1619 and inevitably the boat began to take on water. He also went further afield to York, described in the 1622 A Very Merry-Wherry-Ferry-Voyage, as well as Scotland, the Isle of Wight and East Anglia. Other publications in his canon, while not strictly journey accounts, share kinships and interests with these exercises and enterprises; from a tour of London alehouses to texts on river navigation.Footnote ²² The endpoint of all these journeys appears to have been a published account by Taylor, often produced within months of the event and thereby capitalising on public interest. In this respect, his aims were similar to those published accounts of notorious travel adventures in further flung parts of the world by Thomas Coryate and others, although, interestingly, in The Pennyles Pilgrimage Taylor takes pains to stress that his account will not provide the kind of chorographical writing of the nation to be found in popular works by William Camden and John Speed:

The 1618 journey to Scotland in particular appears to have been underpinned by other kinds of economic compulsion. A form of sponsorship had, it seems, been secured by Taylor from London-based colleagues and cohorts. John Chandler describes it as ‘a business venture (albeit a high-risk one) as much as a publicity stunt’; Andrew McRae considers the approach as ‘calculating, even entrepreneurial’.Footnote ²⁴ In a subsequent pamphlet, A Kicksey Winsey or a Lerry Come-Twang, published just a year later, and which assumes the form of a literary suit against bad debtors, Taylor would claim that 4,500 copies of the pamphlet were published at personal cost to himself and berates the fact that half of his 1600 sponsors had failed to pay up.Footnote ²⁵The Pennyles Pilgrimage had, then, been a sponsored walk of a kind and this was not at all unusual at this time. It has been suggested that at least one of the motives for the eminent playwright and poet Ben Jonson's ‘foot-voyage’ to Edinburgh from London in the same year as Taylor's was a wager and Gervase Markham was sponsored to travel to Berwick crossing all rivers and streams by jumping over them and avoiding bridges.Footnote ²⁶ What is particularly fascinating about Markham's 1622 journey is that many of his sponsors were actors or were directly connected to the literary world through the publishing trade.Footnote ²⁷ We start to gain a sense from this flurry of public performance walks that there was an interest in this kind of performance art within theatrical and literary circles at the time and therefore that walks with particular premises, such as being entirely pedestrian or being effected without financial aid as in Taylor's case, were both fashionable and the subject of considerable commercial activity.

The question remains to be posed as to why foot travel was such a particular focus of these staged events, Taylor's not least, and why this was expected to attract public interest. Mark Brayshay has suggested that walking as a mode of transport was more common for ordinary people in Tudor and Stuart Britain than is sometimes assumed and that ‘covering fifteen miles a day was not uncommon’. He makes the point that many touring players would have travelled on foot.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless there was an obvious ‘feat’ involved in a large man like Jonson, who was nearly 20 stone at the time, completing such a lengthy journey entirely on foot and Taylor too obviously recognised commercial potential in his assumption of the on-foot vagrant persona of his ‘pilgrimage’: ‘I speake not of the Tide; for understand / My legges I made my Oares, and rowed by land’.Footnote ²⁹ In the extant records of their respective journeys, both Taylor and Jonson appear anxious to stick to the original premise of their trips; this would seem to confirm the understanding of them as wagers to be completed satisfactorily and indeed witnessed in order for the financial outlay to be realised.Footnote ³⁰

Intriguingly, Jonson had set out on his foot-voyage only a few weeks earlier than Taylor, although the two go by distinctly different routes, and the Water Poet is at pains to stress in his pamphlet that his journey was not intended as a parody of the eminent writer:

Both men could also be said to be imitating another recent journey to Scotland undertaken in rather grander circumstances, which was the self-proclaimed ‘salmon-like return’ of King James VI and I to his Scottish homeland in 1617.Footnote ³² The ways in which both men's journeys interact with the conventions and practices of royal progress is a subject of much fascination.Footnote ³³ There was another more obvious literary and indeed specifically theatrical precedent for their journeys, however, in the unemployed King's Men actor Will Kemp's nine days’ morris dance from London to Norwich in 1599, about which he published a pamphlet account in 1600, the Nine Daies Wonder, and which Daryl Palmer has interpreted as an inspired reworking of monarchical progress.Footnote ³⁴

Jonson and Taylor encountered one another at Leith in Scotland, when Jonson notably gave Taylor ‘a peece of golde of two and twenty shillings to drinke his healthe in England’.Footnote ³⁵ This was no deliberate sabotage of Taylor's journey on Jonson's part since the ‘penniless’ aspect of the pilgrimage only pertained to the journey to and from Scotland, but it is of note that some of the bad debtors that Taylor railed against in A Kicksey Winsey claimed that he had transgressed the terms of the original wager. We are beginning to account, then, for the ‘penniless’ aspect of Taylor's title but, before examining his performative assumption of the role of the wandering vagrant in greater detail, it is important to acknowledge the second key term mobilised in relation to his walk: ‘pilgrimage’. Alexandra Walsham has written of the ways in which the experience of the physical environment in post-reformation Britain and Ireland relied in part on ‘mental mechanisms’ for practising the landscape.Footnote ³⁶ This is particularly true of the concept of pilgrimage in the context of what she describes as a ‘reformed landscape’.Footnote ³⁷ Andrew McRae has certainly interpreted The Pennyles Pilgrimage as ‘an extended play on [. . .] Catholic mendicancy’ but I would argue that what we get with Taylor's walk is the sense of achievement and spiritual reward implicit in the practice of pilgrimage now consciously recast as a performative and professional act for economic gain and that the ironic effects of this in the text should not be underestimated.Footnote ³⁸

The penniless pilgrimage's itinerary of hospitality received from innkeepers, civic officials and some pre-established social contacts, ranging from joiners such as John Piddock in Lichfield to members of the gentry, also reconfigures the age-old association of pilgrimage with required or expected acts of hospitality towards common wayfarers.Footnote ³⁹ Secularised pilgrimage is only one way of thinking about the significance of the journey undertaken by Taylor in 1618, however. The opportunity for experiential learning and education on the road should not be discounted as a motive. By travelling on foot at this time and in this way, both Taylor and Jonson opted to place themselves to varying degrees in the shoes of the less well off. Through such performances they also sought to experience the landscape of the complex country and communities which such groups inhabited or with which they interacted. The disciplines of geography, performance studies, art history, and anthropology have all taken an interest of late in the act of walking and its capacity to remake place and it is logical to associate the pedestrian aspects of Taylor's 1618 trip with a desire to imitate and perhaps even to understand the ‘malleable’ space of the vagrant.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most migrant poor had no choice other than to travel by foot, the occasional few raising just enough money to be carried by carts for short stretches or being afforded parish support for the same.Footnote ⁴¹ Taylor, in turn, strives to maintain this pattern of travel for his ‘pilgrimage’. There are several passages of observation about the physical impact of stony surfaces and long days of walking on his body, such as ‘From thence that night, although my bones were sore, / I made shift to hobble seau'n miles more’.Footnote ⁴² The discursive turn of ‘making shift’ is deployed to invoke Taylor's role as itinerant vagrant. There are puns on the ‘hard’ road surface in Stony Stratford and he describes the welcome rest he gets in Daventry after hobbling in there after several hours longer on the road than planned:

When he provides a helpful moniker in the text by which his audience, whether reading or otherwise, might identify him in the future, he describes himself in terms of walking poverty. He is ‘perambulating, poor Iohn Taylor’.Footnote ⁴⁴

As already observed, Taylor's sponsorship deal does not seem to have required that he be consistent throughout in the foot-based aspect of his journey. Taylor has access to a packhorse to carry provisions. He gets his horse from the Bell Inn at Aldersgate and travels with a knapsack full of bacon, brisket, neat's-tongue, cheese, and conserves.Footnote ⁴⁵ At one stage of the return leg to the English capital, he is given a further horse by an old seafaring acquaintance he has been reunited with during the sojourn in Scotland.Footnote ⁴⁶ There are certainly some touching descriptions of the pack-horse's experience of the journey in the midst of the narrative account. He becomes almost a fellow poor person, sleeping rough and taking his meals where he can, as part of the collective ‘we’ in Taylor's sentence formations: ‘We made a breach, and entred horse and man, / There our pauillion, we to pitch began’.Footnote ⁴⁷ At one point the travellers leave St Albans where they have been generously lodged at the Saracen's Head Inn by a Mr Taylor but then find themselves travelling along the Dunstable highway for twelve miles with neither food nor drink:

Taylor is careful to stress that he crosses the symbolic border between England and Scotland with no additional aid: ‘Without Horse, Bridge, or Boate I o're did get / On foote, I went yet scarce my shooes did wet’. But overall the ‘walk’ appears to have been inconsistent at best in its practices.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the way out of London, Taylor's network of close friends and acquaintances serves him well. He names and thanks Mr Dam of the Green Dragon near Gray's Inn Gate, for example.Footnote ⁵⁰ But as he travels farther from known circuits and neighbourhoods, he encounters greater difficulty in finding a welcoming face at inns in random market towns and is glad therefore when he finds unexpected company. For example, he fully intends to pass through the town of Stony Stratford and ‘find some Lodging in the Hay or Grasse’, but a familiar voice cries out from a window at the Queen's Arms: ‘There were some friends, which I was glad to see, / Who knew my Iourney; lodg'd and boorded me’.Footnote ⁵¹ And then when it begins to rain heavily the following day, the Host of the Queen's Arms offers him additional stay at no extra cost. Taylor promises to reward his kindness in due course and duly does so by recording his hospitality in the published account, providing some positive publicity. By the time he reaches Coventry and the Midlands counties Taylor is increasingly eager to seek out known friends and acquaintances from his London life with whom to lodge rather than face more nights sleeping beneath the stars and under hedges.Footnote ⁵² By comparison, Ben Jonson stuck doggedly to the pedestrian aspect of his walk throughout the trip to Edinburgh and this seems to have been vital to its overall success. Taylor's journey is, then, far more mixed in terms of the modes of transportation used but it shares the same sense as Jonson's of adhering to pre-determined rules of engagement. In Taylor's case, however, the key driver is not consistent pedestrianism but sustaining the state of poverty he has willed himself into.

The title-page details that the text will recount: ‘How he travailed on foot from London to Edenborough, not carrying any Money to or fro, neither Begging, Borrowing, or Asking Meate, drinke or Lodging.’Footnote ⁵³ It is interesting to note how keen Taylor is to stress that it is the role of the perambulating pauper rather than that of a beggar per se that he is adopting. At the inn in Highgate Hill where he encounters people studiously eating and ignoring his presence, he stresses that ‘I neither Borrow'd, Crau'd, Ask'd, Begg'd or Bought, / But most labourious with my teeth I wrought’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As scholars including Beier and William Carroll have demonstrated, the beggar as a specific social type was viewed by many as the lowest of the low in the complex category of vagrancy, associated as s/he was with pretence and with the physical and psychological invasion of personal space through aggressive begging tactics.Footnote ⁵⁵ Counterfeit beggars were also the subject of legal retribution and punishment, commonly arrested by constables in parishes where they had illegally entered and held in local workhouses, bridewells and jails. Taylor hints at this world through parodic versionings of that experience. When he travels to Hockley, for example, we are told the following:

There are obvious puns here on the normal expectation of the travelling migrant: of being arrested on arriving in a parish other than their own without a passport and struggling to find bail. Once again on this secular pilgrimage, forms of local government are reconfigured in terms of alehouse hospitalities and reckonings of a rather different kind.

Similarly, later in the narrative, Taylor is given a formal welcome in Preston, despite terrible weather. The mayor visits him in his lodgings and allows the water poet to lodge for three nights at his expense.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the end of the stay, the mayor arranges to join Taylor for the two miles journey out of the town to the edge of the parish jurisdiction. By transporting Taylor back to the parish boundaries, the action of the mayor both recalls the treatment to which an illegal migrant would be subject and echoes the formal acts of departure that were the regular rhythm of royal progress.Footnote ⁵⁸ Taylor then meets and travels onwards in the company of the under-Sherrif of the county, who in turn delivers him unto the care of the Sherrif:

Once again, this sequence wittily restages the constant movement of poor transients, perpetually handed on as they were by local government officials and subject to what McRae calls ‘the legislative gaze’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In reality, the treatment Taylor receives is the exact opposite. The ‘jaol’ into which he is thrown is a comfortable inn with bed, board and lodgings: ‘The Iaylor kept an Inne, good beds, good cheere, / Where paying nothing, I found nothing deere.’Footnote ⁶¹

Throughout his restless kinetic narrative, Taylor appears keener to record the unprovoked acts of kindness and charity he encounters en route than to mimic the experience of an aggressive beggar. In the process he identifies with the larger social grouping of the destitute poor whose presence on the Midlands highways has been mapped in some detail. In a study of the years between 1611 and 1640, and thus encompassing the exact moment of Taylor's performative journey, Joan Kent observes that ‘chastised vagrants in fact formed a small subset of a much larger pool of destitute travellers who often received alms rather than punishment’.Footnote ⁶² While alms and almsgiving are not terms that Taylor actively deploys in his text, he makes repeated efforts to invoke the traditional virtues of charity, piety and hospitality by noting either their presence or absence at various sites en route. While in the environs of Lichfield in Staffordshire, Taylor notes the distinct lack of hospitality he encounters: ‘with here and there a pelting scatter'd village / Which yielded me no charity or pillage’. On the other hand, Sir Urian Legh of Adlington near Macclesfield serves as a model of the ‘compleat Gentleman’, someone who performs ‘deeds of Piety, / Good hospitable works of Charity’.Footnote ⁶³ For these reasons, Felicity Heal regards Taylor's text as in part an investigation into practices of seventeenth-century gentry hospitality, noting that Taylor relies in the first part of his journey on the help of friends and a known network of innkeepers and lodgings houses who hoped to benefit from the publicity potential of the experiment:

Heal is right to highlight the theme of fame in this text and in the premise of the journey overall. Advance notice of Taylor's journey appears to have reached certain villages and towns and in some sustenance awaits him:

In this particular instance someone encountered on the road has ridden ahead with the news of the moneyless enterprise.Footnote ⁶⁶ Elsewhere, news seems to have travelled through wider networks of communication. In one instance, Taylor compares himself to an exotic item of display in the streets, heightening the sense of this journey as an act of public performance and its appropriation of transient poverty as a piece of carefully choreographed public theatre. Spectators, we are told, crowd the streets to catch a glimpse of him:

From all these angles and perspectives, it might seem that Taylor's text and the motives of his trip are moving far away from a direct relationship to contemporary notions of poverty and mobility. Nevertheless, his experiment is governed by a sense that hospitality must be given and not coerced. This constitutes an attempt to read the landscape from the vantage point of those in society who have to exist without formal agency, those unable to leverage financial support or patronage. In this respect, Taylor's Scottish walk differs considerably from Jonson's, which enacts a map of gentrified encounters and experience as he moves from civic welcome to lodgings with significant nobles of the day.Footnote ⁶⁸

Heal has noted the importance of ‘reciprocity’ to early modern concepts of hospitality: ‘In all its varied forms the notion of hospitality in early modern England seems to be bound to that of reciprocity, of the exchange of gifts and rewards to which value not simply articulated in money terms attaches.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Taylor's walk rests on an identical premise. He may only accept hospitality, for example, in the form of food, wine, lodging, laundry services, the provision of haircuts and personal grooming, and access to horses, provender, and stabling, but no real cash gifts. We are therefore witness to different kinds of commercial, economic and social transactions being performed throughout this quirky narrative. Taylor's deliberate adoption of the mantle and rhetoric of the poor pilgrim cannot simply be understood as enacting the reciprocal operations of the upper orders. Instead, Taylor's ‘progress’ brings into dialogue the world of gentrified patronage support networks and the complex matrices of poor relief and almsgiving that existed side by side in early modern society. And, to return to where we began, with the ‘geography of vagrancy’, the locations that remain crucial on the spectrum of hospitality that is tested by the penniless pilgrim in general, and by Taylor's performance in particular, are those stopping places central to Yi-Fu Tuan's sense of how space makes place: inns, alehouses and households.

We perhaps get closest to comprehending the ways in which Taylor's performance abuts with the real experiences of the mobile poor when we place one particular contemporaneous narrative of the experience of life on the road alongside the structure and movement of Taylor's text. Beier cites the peripatetic experience of a vagrant recounted in a legal deposition of 1612. This documentary source not only draws for us a now familiar cartography of motion punctuated by ‘tippling houses’, but seems to pre-empt the descriptive style of Taylor's hybrid verse-prose pamphlet with its carefully mapped itinerary of sleeping places:Footnote ⁷⁰

Compare this redacted list to a passage of Taylor's, one of several I could have selected for the purpose of comparison:

The poetic embellishments aside, there is a parallel experience taking place. There is an interest in Taylor's text, even at the level of form, in the choreography of poverty, mapping a life on the road and its encounters, audiences, pauses, staging posts and salient events.

We must not lose sight of the fact that real poverty and social disenfranchisement are always at one stage of remove in The Pennyles Pilgrimage. Even if, unlike Ben Jonson, Taylor does on occasion subject himself to the genuine hardships of sleeping rough, what we never locate in his text is an encounter with a real figure of poverty. In the recently discovered manuscript account of Jonson's pedestrian journey, there are several identifiable occasions when he and his as yet unidentified companion encounter madwomen, gypsies and, indeed, ranting clergymen, in particular in the early stages of the journey as they travel out of London and through nearby provincial villages and market towns.Footnote ⁷³ By contrast, Taylor's text is noticeably silent on this topic. We get no glimpses of the complex community of the highway, as if he and his companion, and indeed their horse, must necessarily substitute entirely for that ephemeral world. It is as if, were the real world of poverty and mobility allowed to intervene in the text, it would be too destabilising; Taylor resists realistic portrayals of poverty in order to protect the comic tone of his commercial publication. There are as a result no ‘real’ voices of the poor in Taylor's text and it would be wrong to hold it forth as a functioning socio-historical document for this reason. While Taylor may describe the ways in which his arduous journey physically wracks his body, there is no sense at all that he endures the kind of tangible hardships of the individual bodies we encounter, albeit fragmentarily, in other kinds of records.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nevertheless, there remains a value in looking more deeply at The Pennyles Pilgrimage as one helpful point of access to contemporary ideas about poverty and mobility. The places Taylor visits and the various scrapes he gets into can tell us much about the ways in which poverty and transience were imagined in this period and the spatial and cultural geographies with which they were associated.Footnote ⁷⁵

It bears remembering that Taylor's performance in The Pennyles Pilgrimage was Janus-faced. His conscious acknowledgment of hosts and hostesses and their various kindnesses can be understood as a direct imitation of published accounts of Elizabethan and Jacobean royal progresses.Footnote ⁷⁶ The bounty of hosts was regularly recorded in these narratives in what Daryl Palmer suggestively describes as a mapping exercise that tested the English landscape at the level of hospitality and welcome, inscribing and producing a ‘cartography of civil obedience’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Taylor's conscious intertext, Will Kemp's Nine Daies Wonder, has been read as an inventive appropriation of the royal progress and certainly the dancing actor took great pains to record each gift given to him.Footnote ⁷⁸ Kemp's morris won him food and income and was highly entrepreneurial in that, like Taylor, he sought to generate additional income from the published version. While we can register all these kinships with Kemp's text, such is the nature of the particular wager that Taylor undertook, to travel penniless, that, despite recording the hospitality encountered in a manner similar to his precursor, he is forced to return gifts of money almost immediately. When Sir Urian Legh is keen to give him financial aid during the stay at Adlington, for example, he notes: ‘He would haue giu'n me Gold or Siluer either, / But I with many thanks receiued neither.’Footnote ⁷⁹

To conclude, then, there is a duality to the purpose and effects of the hybrid narrative of The Pennyles Pilgrimage. By performing poverty in his walk, Taylor draws quite knowingly on a series of real-life and literary precedents and models. These precedents complicate the picture in that they frequently blend discourses of monarchy with nuanced understandings of poverty and mobility.Footnote ⁸⁰ What we have is thus not a text that constitutes a simple or monolithic effort to perform poverty, but one that brings different discourses of mobility and charity into a witty, and often uncomfortable, dialogue with one another. This is at the heart of Taylor's experimentation as he performs a conscious and sometimes tense test of hospitality in the landscape. In this examination, some communities and individuals are found to be failing, while others happily exceed expectation. Taylor's performance of poverty and the condition of the distressed traveller is, therefore, designed to achieve the complete opposite of the condition it enacts. Through mobility, and through the performance of mobility, Taylor ironically staves off the very condition that he alludes to. His text avoids literal poverty through the figurative staging of it.Footnote ⁸¹ Taylor performs the role of both progressing monarch and poor migrant, sometimes even within the compass of the same geographical sites and locations. At other times, contrasts are drawn between the resting points of progress, the castles and noble households, and the alehouses and hedges that form the dominant sites of practice for the penniless pilgrim. There is a fascinating circularity in all of this. Taylor's performance of the role of both vagrant and monarch within the single text, and sometimes along the same routes and notional geographical itineraries, performs the English countryside back to its population in deliberately confusing and contradictory ways.Footnote ⁸²

In his pedestrian and pamphlet performance events of 1618, Taylor captures something of what Patricia Fumerton has termed the ‘speculative subjectivity’ of the mobile poor.Footnote ⁸³ To return to the different categories of vagrancy catalogued by the Elizabethan Vagrancy Acts, for this modern reader of Taylor's strange and thought-provoking text, it is ultimately the figure of the itinerant actor that comes most stridently to mind, both in the water-poet's conscious re-performance of Will Kemp's entrepreneurial 1599 dance and his decision to follow so closely in the footsteps of theatrical giant Ben Jonson in 1618. In a conscious work of theatre, Taylor performs the role of mobile poverty and stages a vagrant experience of geography in order to make ends meet in the most impressive and ingenious ways.