Glimpses into the Abyss

Cave, Settle, for instance, human remains and relics of the corresponding animal and social life were actually found stratified. If you take the lowest stratum of

n sense of the term would be by some crime that excluded him from the companionship of his fellows like that of Cain. A man with his hand against every

emained as representatives of a

the unabsorbed nomad. But the world was wide, the best land alone was appropriated, and even when England had become largely a

y on to the roads with money in their pouch, and the less wealthy could make use of the hospitality of abbeys. Fuller describes the old abbeys as "promiscuously entertaining some who did not need and more who did not deserve it" ("Church History," ed. 1656,

owns, was to legislate against and forbid vagrancy. Beggars impotent to serve were to remain where the Act found them, and be there maintained or sent back to their birthplace. This is the germ of the law of settlement, by which

out of true social relationships must become vagrants,

ive conditions, depends as surely on the drying up of means of su

nits is sure to result in increase of vagrancy. Of those

his affinity to a roving life is one thing, the man squeezed out of the pastoral or agricultural life is another. The latter is akin to our "unski

ond class, that of the "incapable," those wh

tc., at the same time that the abolition of villeinage, which was still recent, threw off from organised society dependents very unfit to live

k, and diseased," i.e. the incapable, and of the "l

dual who was left stranded. He was shepherded in some way or other either by church or lord. But when social change left him unshepherded the charge fell on the nation as an organised unit. The Poor Law began. The necessity for it

pected that we should find the third great change that has passed over society, which is still recent,