Peasants’ Revolt

The Peasants’ Revolt is identified as the point at which the first Act against begging was introduced, in 1381. In the book’s account, it marks an early turn in a long history of regulating people without secure means of support, placing the revolt within a chronology that links poverty, public order and the treatment of homelessness.

The Revolt in a History of Anti-Begging Law

The account places the 1381 Act at the beginning of a sequence of measures directed at begging and vagrancy. Anti-vagrancy legislation followed in 1547, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. As homelessness grew amid the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution, legislation expanded; the 1744 Vagrancy Act then supplied a template for later laws. The Peasants’ Revolt is significant here not through a description of its events, but as the historical marker for the start of this legislative sequence.

From Classification to Punishment

The book traces how later statutes classified people as beggars, idle, vagabonds or rogues, and authorized action against those considered suspicious or unable to sustain themselves. It also notes a financial incentive dating from 1713: local authorities were required to pay five shillings to anyone who apprehended a person deemed idle or disreputable. The account connects that arrangement to abuse of the law, reporting that more than five hundred people were arrested in a single year. In this chronology, legal categories did not merely describe poverty; they could expose people to arrest.

Historical Echoes in the Present

The reference to 1381 forms part of the book’s challenge to the idea that hostility toward homeless people is new. Its wider discussion contrasts the familiar stereotype of a rough sleeper with a much broader range of homelessness, including people omitted from official counts, and argues that addiction may result from homelessness as well as precede it. The narrative brings that history into the present by stating that, in the summer of 2013, Ray and Moth became two of the homeless people whose lives the book describes. The Peasants’ Revolt thus serves as a starting point for a historical frame in which successive laws and public judgments shape how homelessness is recognized and treated.