A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors

A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called vagabonds was first published in 1566 by Thomas Harman, and although no copies of that edition survive, it must have been popular, because two printers were punished by the Stationers' Company in 1567 for pirated editions. Two editions were published in 1568, and a revised edition in 1573. It is one of the fundamental texts for rogue literature. Harman is one of the first writers to use the word rogue, which was adopted in the Poor Law legislation of 1572.
Harman claimed to have collected his material direct from interviews with vagabonds themselves. The "Caveat" contained stories of vagabond life, a description of their society and techniques, a taxonomy of rogues, and a canting dictionary, which were reproduced in later works. Harman's reputation has changed since his work was first republished in the early twentieth century; A.V Judges described him then as having "all the deftness of the trained sociologist", and the "Caveat" has been used as a primary source. However, historians have long doubted the reliability of his accounts of vagabond society and the use of cant. Harman has been subject to literary analysis informed by Marx, Freud and Foucault, although it has been suggested these "appear to be fruitful sources of fertile error" (Beier).
Harman was certainly not a neutral observer; he frequently makes explicit moral and social judgement about his subjects. These reflect a society in which sexual incontinence was subject to penalties in the local manor courts, the church courts and by Justices of the Peace in Quarter Sessions. It was also a society in ferment over the appropriate response to the increasing number of "masterless men". A large part of the Caveat was included in William Harrison's "Description of England" as part of "Holinshed's Chronicle". Harman influenced and justified the legal punishment of vagrants, particularly the 1572 Vagabond Act. It was Harman's characterization of vagrants that influenced Elizabethan perspectives on them.
Thomas Harman.
Little is known about Thomas Harman's life. He was from the gentry, described as an esquire in 1557, and with a coat of arms, with which he marked his plate. He inherited land in several parishes in Kent, and resided on an estate near Dartford from 1547. HIs wife Anne was the daughter of Sir Edward Rogers. In The Caveat he implies that he was a Justice of the Peace, but there is no evidence for this. However, in 1550 he was appointed to collect tax in Kent, and in 1554 and 1555 he was a member of the important Commission responsible for the Thames and its tributaries from near Southwark to Gravesend. A fellow member of the Commission was responsible for the creation of the Bridewell in London, and Harman was clearly acquainted with developments in law enforcement there. The "Caveat" is dedicated to Bess of Hardwick, although that does not mean that she was known personally to Harman.
There are literary precursors to the "Caveat", including John Awdeley's "The Fraternity of Vagabonds" (1561), of which Harman was aware. It was written in a period when government in England was increasingly concerned with the perceived problem of "masterless men". Solutions were being sought to the issue of the able-bodied poor. In 1563 the Statute of Artificers was passed "to banish idleness". Poor Laws were under review, and a plethora of laws passed against vagrancy, in which the punishments ranged from whipping to branding. In 1559 there was a proposal from a committee (the Privy Council) " "to restore an act of 1547 that provided for slavery as a punishment.
Vagabond Society.
Harman set out a taxonomy of rogues, which expanded one sketched out by Awdeley. The structure and processes of this mirrored those of Tudor society, with its hierarchy and sumptuary laws, and the trade guilds, with their apprenticeships and initiations ceremonies.
An example is the ceremony of "stalling a rogue" which Harman describes. In this an Upright Man pours beer over the head of the initiate, with the words, "I, G.P., do stall thee, W.T., to the rogue, and that henceforth it shall be lawful for you to cant . . . for thy living in all places". Such a ceremony is reproduced in later rogue literature, and in the play "The Beggars Bush" by Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, from which it was extracted by Francis Kirkman in "The Wits". Bampfylde Moore Carew includes a similar account of his own inauguration as King of the Beggars, and there was a tradition that the graves of members of the Boswell gypsy family were visited annually and beer poured onto them during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Although his taxonomy has been read as if these roles were fixed, Harman's examples made it clear that many of these roles were modes of begging or crime adopted by the same vagabond from time to time. They also make it clear that many of these villains also had legitimate trades, which they exercised from time to time. This is confirmed by the historical record, which shows that many of those arrested as vagrants were unemployed through no fault of their own. They included domestic servants who had been dismissed, labourers seeking work, or those whose trade required travel, such as pedlars and chapmen. Harman does seem to have had direct contact with vagabonds, while most of those who wrote later rogue literature were London based writers living in literary circles.
Another area in which Harman has been misunderstood is the place of Egyptians in this vagabond culture. They have no specific place in it, and although he identifies a few individuals as being Egyptians, he describes them generally as having a distinct culture and lifestyle. This is consistent with the attitude to them generally, that they were strange, foreign, little understood and, therefore criminal or at least a danger to the social order. The attitude to the Irish seems to have been similar, though less extreme.
Categories of Rogues.
The following is summarised from Harman, with comments in brackets.
Canting Dictionary.
Harman includes a short dictionary of cant words. His introduction to that is characteristic of his literary style and social attitude:-
"Here I set before the good reader the lewd, lousy language of these loitering lusks and lazy lorels, wherewith they buy and sell the common people as they pass through the country."
The value of the dictionary to the "good reader" was probably minimal. Cant has only been found in court records six times, all after Harman and Awdeley, and the extent to which it was actually used is unclear.
However, it was a goldmine for later writers, who various copied it, expanded on it, or used it to add colour to pamphlets and plays. Harman's taxonomy is reproduced in William Harrison's "Description of England", contained in Holinshed's "Chronicles" (1577, 1587), as history, and extensively copied by in rogue literature, including Thomas Dekker, in "Lantern and Candlelight" (1608), Richard Head "The English Rogue" (1665), and "The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew', (1745).
Rogue Tales.
Harman claimed that having for twenty years kept a house on the main road to London, and having through sickness been at his home much, he had learned how to extract information from those vagabonds who called seeking alms. His accounts show similarities to the depositions taken by Justices of the Peace examining cases, and have been assumed to have been the same kind of first hand account collected by researchers such as Henry Mayhew. However, Harman is not a disinterested observer or reporter. He regards himself as a skilled interrogator, and the information to have been extracted against the will of those providing it. Although there is no suggestion he did so frequently, he approvingly reports his own use of violence to extract a confession in one case. He justifies his expansion of Awdeley's work by saying it was insufficient to protect people. His work is aimed at assisting law enforcement, and ridding the country of rogues, so that parishes can concentrate their spending on the relief of the deserving poor.
Also, although he denies it, he writes with style, being fond of alliteration, and within a tradition of vulgar writing in chapbooks and jest books, which included crude and sexual references. Such writing was at the time widely acceptable; Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus wrote jests, the latter including a fart joke, and on her deathbed in 1603 courtiers read to Queen Elizabeth from the jest book "A Hundred Merry Tales", (1526).
Two-thirds of the Caveat is taken up with stories, and in the second edition he says he has added more. The stories are often comic, involving tricks, and have some moral element. A prime example is the man who rescues a "mort", having extracted a promise of sexual favours for doing so. She defers the reward, in the meantime informs local "gossips", and the lecher is caught by his wife and her friends with his pants literally down and soundly beaten by them.
Nicholas Jennings.
Harman lists by name 215 Upright Men, Rogues and Palliards in separate lists. Of these 18 have been identified with named individuals punished as vagabonds in contemporary court records by Aydelotte. He also found about a dozen more punished for other offences. Taking into account the possibility of coincidences, the likelihood or apprehension, and the use of false names, this does suggest that some of Harman's information was reliable.
The most significant and detailed account given by Harman concerns a man named by him in his list of rogues as "Nicholas Blunt (alias Nicholas Jennings, a counterfeit crank) ". Harman recounts Blunt's appearance at his lodgings in Whitefriars on All Hallows Day 1566 seeking alms, naked from the waist upwards, in ragged dirty clothes, his face smeared with fresh blood feigning the "falling sickness" (probably palsy or epilepsy). Being suspicious Harman questioned him, and Blunt claimed to have been suffering from the falling sickness for eight years, and to have been discharged from Bedlam two weeks before, after being an inmate there two years. Harman checked with the keeper of the hospital who denied this, and then had Blunt followed by two boys from his printers, who saw him beg all day, renewing the blood from a bladder, and putting fresh mud on his clothes. They then followed him to Newington, south of the river, where the Constable apprehended him. On being searched he was found to have collected 13s. 3½d. (a labourer would have earned 6d. a day). He was also stripped and found to be fit and well, but escaped naked across the fields in the dark. Having then spent a period begging in the guise of a sailor whose ship and cargo had been lost at sea, and then as "Nicholas Jennings", a well-dressed hatter who had come to London for work, Blunt happened to accost Harman's printer on New Year's Day 1567. The printer recognised him and had him arrested. After denials and another escape attempt Blunt made a confession and was found to have "a pretty house" in Newington, "well furnished" and with a wife living there. Blunt's punishment combined the old penal techniques of physical punishment and public exposure, with the modern theory of rehabilitation through labour. For the latter he was imprisoned in the new Bridewell. For the former he was whipped at a cart's tail through the streets of London, and put in the pillory at Cheapside dressed in both his "ugly and handsome attire". His picture was exhibited there, and while he was whipped, and also outside his house, and kept at the Bridewell "for a monument".
We know that at least the apprehension and whipping took place as there is a record of it in the Repertory of the Court of Aldermen for 13 January 1567. There are also records there of two others admitting similar crimes, in 1547 and 1517.
Several illustrations of Blunt's tale appear in the "Caveat". Both these and his story are repeated in later rogue literature . These illustrations and later texts often describe Blunt as an Upright Man, which Harman does not in his text.
See also examples in Thieves' cant
Sources.
Text.
The "Caveat" is available online to subscribers to EEBO, and at Google Book Search. (The latter comprises page-images of an 1814 reprint of the 1573 edition.)
The text is included in:
External links.
[[Category:1566 books]]
[[Category:1566 in England]]
[[Category:Non-fiction books about criminals]]
[[Category:Slang dictionaries]]