Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. (Reviews).

Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature.

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. x + 338 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-252-02633-0.

"So insistently did Renaissance writers hammer at the issue of vagrancy;" Linda Woodbridge says at the outset of her new study, "so frenetically did the Tudors legislate against vagrancy, that R. H. Tawney once famously concluded that 'the sixteenth century lived in terror of the tramp"' (1; Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 268). A majority of scholars in history and literature have echoed that judgement; it aligns itself with Elizabethan statutes and Parliamentary concerns, as well as with folk tales, jest books and rogue literature. The difficulty, Woodbridge discovers, is that the historical facts do not bear this out: vagrancy was in fact a minor matter in the social life of England if not in the publicized political life. This widely-informed and passionately argued book asks why there is such a discrepancy between the scholarly discourse and the historical evidence, and takes its mission from the introduction's epigraph from Piero Camporesi: "The voices of the wretched, the miserable and the alienated, weak a nd plaintive, have never found citizenship in the beautiful palace that is literary history."

Philip Stubbes' comment in 1583 is indicative of the kind of evidence that has usually been cited. He notes in his Anatomy of Abuses that "the poor lie in the streets upon pallets of straw, and well if they have that too, or else in the mite and dirt, having neither house to put in their heads, covering them to keep them from the cold, nor yet to hide their shame withal, penny to buy them sustenance, nor anything else, but are permitted to die in the streets like dogs, or beasts, without any mercy or compassion showed to them at all" (59-60). Such an observation, reportedly made at first hand, echoes early rogue literature; Robert Copland's Highway to the Spital-house (1536?), Gilbert Walker's Manifest Detection of... Dice-Play (1555), John Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds (ca. 1561), and Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Curseters, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds (1556-67). Harman has become the favorite authority of historians and literary critics; a justice of the peace, retired, from Kent, he tells us of the records he kept of wayward beggars and vagabonds stopping at his door and moves from what appear to be the noted details of a sociologist into anecdotes and tales later taken up by the cony-catching works of Robert Greene and the pamphlets of Thomas Dekker. His sense that this large population is an even larger and pressing social and political issue - that the vagrants are often dangerous and criminal, united in immorality and corruption - is reflected in the Poor Laws and Elizabethan statutes about capturing and punishing them as well as in renewed bureaucratic efforts to force home parishes to support them, especially after the Reformation when there was no longer charity provided to many of them by the Roman Church. Woodbridge's striking discovery is that much of this misrepresents the facts; the rogue literature, and, especially jest books, preceded and were often used to write the Poor Laws. She writes, "Not only was the response to vagrancy excessive, but it was also weirdly off-target" (2). Her own ev idence is taken from parish registers, censuses, and a close reading of literary tropes.

Even the word "rogue" itself, she finds, was at first what is designated as thieves' cant, perhaps fictional, and certainly not statistically useful (42).

She begins her case by a close examination of Harman, finding that he has little or no sense or concern for the causes of vagrancy: the lack of work, the displacement of laborers, the loss of charity. "He simply and unabashedly blames the victim" (45); worse, he makes fun of them in his anecdotes. By pointing to Harman's (and later Greene's) close relationship to jest books first appearing in the time of Henry VIII, she undermines Harman's form and, by implication, much of his content. "A further piece of duplicity appears: while Harman presents himself as a private citizen, householder, charitable man, and author, he plays down his position as magistrate ... responsible for punishing offenders against the Poor Laws" (59); in this way, too, his work is contaminated by its self-service.

Most of Woodbridge's book addresses the gross discrepancy between the written (and legal) record and facts and how we might explain it. The Reformation, she argues, associated beggars and vagabonds with Catholic clergy, demonizing them from late in Henry VIII's reign onward. The dissolution of the monasteries was a factor in prolonging this association, as was anti-Catholic rhetoric. Humanism also played a part in blaming the poor and uneducated for profligacy (115) -- even in the work of Thomas Starkey and Thomas More -- and by making them central to humanist jest books, beginning with the works of Poggio. The nation feared them because of their mobility and their unpredictability, and so accused them of sedition, policing their unruly activity by leaning on parishes and practices of home and domesticity. There was also grounded fear in their ability to spread disease, bad hygiene, and incivility, all of them undermining the ordered Elizabethan and Jacobean state. The study concludes with a detailed and movi ng examination of homelessness in King Lear, the loss of order in the loss of place in a play full of traveling and uprootedness. Shakespeare becomes, in fact, through this single work, the most thoughtful and sensitive writer of the period about the conditions of both fat kings and lean beggars and how they teach each other.

Woodbridge has long been one of the foremost scholars in the tradition of legend, jest book, and popular writing, and her understanding of lower class and standards of life has helped us see the English Renaissance more clearly and more comprehensively. Working from below helps her to reinterpret and reinscribe popular publications and the lives of the middling class and the poor. Jest books, for instance, the penny pamphlets that she says reflected their lives to the continuing amusement of their betters, recur frequently in the argument. But the book also relies on Juan Luis Vives, Roger Ascham, Thomas Elyot, and royal proclamations; it is the range of materials assembled here that makes her case at once startling and convincing. The study, never dispassionate, is beautifully and forcefully written: fresh observations appear on every page. Of our understanding of the vagrant, the placeless, she concludes, "We have ta'en too little care of this." Now that is no longer true.