The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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vagrancy

vagrancy
was not a problem peculiar to Elizabethan England: Acts of Parliament forbidding the movement of beggars from one place to another date from 1388. But the situation was exacerbated by the suppression, in the 1530s and 1540s, of those religious houses which had hitherto provided poor relief. The resultant increase in the number of beggars led to a series of measures confirming the illegality of vagrancy and seeking to make individual parishes responsible for their own poor, culminating in the great Poor Law of 1601 which defined exactly how this responsibility should be established. This did little, however, to solve the problem and the seeking out, arrest, and removal of vagrants to their parish of ‘legal’ settlement remained a preoccupation of parish and borough officials for many years; hence Dogberry's instruction to the watch to ‘comprehend all vagrom men’ (Much Ado About Nothing 3.3.32).

Robert...

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