Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Leicester (2023). This thesis interrogates sources about vagrants and vagrancy across the workhouses of six poor law unions in the Midlands between 1834 and 1900.
Vagrants have been a widely neglected group from poor law studies because their presence in the workhouse was temporary. Although scholars have acknowledged vagrants, their lifestyles, and to some extent their agencies, few have explored the breadth and depth of vagrant lives nor their welfare experiences. Discussions about vagrants are most often framed around the law and their legal removal and these studies are typically centred in London, and the early modern period.
This thesis seeks to reconstruct the lives of nineteenth century vagrants both as individuals and as a collective social group. The everyday navigation of poor relief across the Midlands is remodelled through each chapter, informed by wider frameworks of literature spanning traditional poor law histories, media, crime, and folklore, alongside identity studies. As such, the thesis relocates and studies vagrants as they travelled across regions looking for poor relief.
Vagrants were complicated selves and traditional histories have added to their complexities, but too often they also created misunderstood definitions by accepting the broad-ranging characteristics for vagrants written into legislation. This thesis shows that the labelling of vagrancy was weaponized, and from a contemporary perspective – a label never told the whole story of the shifting boundaries of community and belonging. In fact, it was the push and pull forces between acute economic circumstances and habitual vagrant lifestyle factors that decided whether a vagrant was considered dangerous to the community. Rarely have historians refined the complexity of vagrant definitions to such an extent as in this thesis. Thus, although vagrants were not included in original poor law legislation, and were an unwanted presence in the workhouse, the lack of regulations about what to do with vagrants was a legal loophole that they exploited to ensure they received welfare.
Identifying key themes around vagrant identity through fragmented sources, this thesis bridges the historiographical and methodological gap between traditional poor law histories and New Histories from Below of vagrancy.
Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.22709284.v1