Three categories of vagrant were retained – in increasing levels of seriousness – ‘the idle and disorderly’, ‘rogues and vagabonds’, and ‘incorrigible rogues’ – and the levels of punishment were reduced. This served to rationalise and replace almost 30 previous vagrancy acts. Otherwise, there was little major change in the legislation until the passage of the 1824 Vagrancy Act. This law remained in force for two centuries. The Law of Settlement and Removal was passed in 1662, providing for vagrants to be sent back to their places of origin (although in many cases this was difficult to establish among a largely illiterate and rootless population). For example, branding of the person literally served to stigmatise them as deviant, whereas enslavement and banishment were responses with clear spatial dimensions ( Beier, 1985). Punishments were severe and often permanent. Towards the end of this century, vagabondage was increasingly becoming associated with disorder and crime. In 1530 the first statute was passed which defined beggars (usually associated with vagrancy or homelessness) as criminals, and various categories of unlawful behaviour and deviance were defined ( Wardhaugh, 2000).īy 1535 vagrants were defined as felons, as enemies of the state, and the maximum punishment was the death penalty. It is not until the sixteenth century, however, that we see the first real criminalisation of itinerancy. The mid-fourteenth century saw the introduction of a series of measures designed to restrict people travelling in search of work, with levels of punishment increasing steadily with time. The earliest-known attempts to control what was then known as vagrancy are usually dated back to Britain in the fourteenth century ( Beier, 1985), although in fact the earliest-known measure was a statute in 1274 restricting almsgiving by monasteries to itinerant people ( Chambliss, 1964). Wardhaugh, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012 Regulating Homelessness
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