hawks' eggs, conjuring, prophesying upon arms and badges, stealing deer
by night, cutting purses, counterfeiting coin, etc. Death was the penalty
for all these offenses. For poisoning her husband a woman was burned
alive; a man poisoning another was boiled to death in water or oil;
heretics were burned alive; some murderers were hanged in chains;
perjurers were branded on the forehead with the letter P; rogues were
burned through the ears; suicides were buried in a field with a stake
driven through their bodies; witches were burned or hanged; in Halifax
thieves were beheaded by a machine almost exactly like the modern
guillotine; scolds were ducked; pirates were hanged on the seashore at
low-water mark, and left till three tides overwashed them; those who let
the sea-walls decay were staked out in the breach of the banks, and left
there as parcel of the foundation of the new wall. Of rogues-that is,
tramps and petty thieves-the gallows devoured three to four hundred
annually, in one place or another; and Henry VIII. in his time did hang
up as many as seventy-two thousand rogues. Any parish which let a thief
escape was fined. Still the supply held out.

The legislation against vagabonds, tramps, and sturdy beggars, and their
punishment by whipping, branding, etc., are too well known to need
comment. But considerable provision was made for the unfortunate and
deserving poor--poorhouses were built for them, and collections taken up.
Only sixty years before Harrison wrote there were few beggars, but in his
day he numbers them at ten thousand; and most of them were rogues, who
counterfeited sores and wounds, and were mere thieves and caterpillars on
the commonwealth. He names twenty-three different sorts of vagabonds
known by cant names, such as "ruffers," "uprightmen," "priggers,"
"fraters," "palliards," "Abrams," "dummerers "; and of women, "demanders
for glimmer or fire," "mortes," "walking mortes," "doxes," "kinching
coves."