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Eleanor Hubbard, David Hitchcock. Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1685–1686, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1685
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In early modern England, homeless people were easy to see, but many observers avoided paupers’ eyes, preferring instead to project their own fantasies and fears on the marginal, itinerant poor. As A. L. Beier showed in Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (1985), real vagrants had little to do with the alleged vast criminal underworld chronicled in such fascinating but misleading detail by imaginative Elizabethan writers. Instead, they were poor young people unmoored from their homes by demographic and economic change, traveling in search of work and subsistence. Beier argued that vagrancy receded as a problem after the Restoration, but, as recent work has shown, it hardly disappeared. In Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750, David Hitchcock joins scholars such as Patricia Fumerton and Tim Hitchcock in teasing out what vagrancy was like after the 1662 Act of Settlement, in the age of improvement and empire. These scholars have approached the question from different angles: while Fumerton stresses the ways in which the itinerant working poor struggled to establish stable identities, Tim Hitchcock has presented a more optimistic picture of the creativity and agency of destitute Londoners. For his part, like Beier, David Hitchcock concentrates on the relation between fact and fiction: the impact of imagined rogues on real vagrants, and vice versa.
