Vagrancy
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"As the crisis of vagrancy grew in the early 16th century, the Liber Vagatorum (Book of Vagabonds, 1510) expressed popular suspicion and hostility toward the poor. Martin Luther, enthusiastic to root out fakers, wrote a preface for the German edition of Liber Vagatorum (1528). The poet, Robert Copland, in The Highway to the Spital-House (c. 1536), sketches some of the props and wiles of which the poor were suspected: stilts, crutches, bloody bandages, plasters, substances that looked like leprosy, soap to make the mouth foam."--The Bible and the 'Holy Poor': From the Tanakh to Les Misérables (2017) by David Aberbach |
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A vagrant is a person in a situation of poverty, who wanders from place to place without a home or regular employment or income. Many towns in the developed world have shelters for vagrants.
Vagrancy was a crime in some European countries, but most of these laws have been abandoned. Laws against vagrancy in the United States have partly been invalidated as violative of the due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution. However, the FBI report on crime in the United States for 2005 lists 33,227 vagrancy violations. In legal terminology, a person with a source of income is not a vagrant, even if he/she is homeless.
History
In settled, ordered communities, vagrants have been historically characterised as outsiders, embodiments of otherness, objects of scorn or mistrust, or worthy recipients of help and charity. Some ancient sources show vagrants as passive objects of pity, who deserve generosity and the gift of alms. Others show them as subversives, or outlaws, who make a parasitical living through theft, fear and threat. Some fairy tales of medieval Europe have beggars cast curses on anyone who was insulting or stingy towards them. In Tudor England, some of those who begged door-to-door for "milk, yeast, drink, pottage" were thought to be witches. In some East Asian and South Asian countries.
Fiction and drama
- The Vagabond, an 1878 play by W. S. Gilbert
- The Vagabond (film), a 1916 film starring Charlie Chaplin
- Vagabond (film), a 1985 film by Agnès Varda
See also
- Hobo
- Homelessness
- Rogue (vagrant)
- Simple living
- Squatting
- Status crime
- Vagrancy Act
- "The Blind Girl" by John Everett Millais