Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain. Sinclair McKay
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Rural walkers could also attract suspicion because of fear. In plague-ridden times, a walking stranger might be a harbinger of the disease coming to the community. This unease and animosity was, in the sixteenth century, firmly embedded in the law. The crime was ‘vagrancy’ – it was strictly forbidden for anyone to take to the roads and move from village to village for the purposes of begging. In 1572, there was an ‘Acte for the punishment of Vacabondes’. This stated:
All and everye persone and persones beynge whole and mightye in Body and able to labour, having not Land or Maister, nor using any lawfull Marchaundize Crafte or Mysterye whereby hee or shee might get his or her Lyvinge … whiche … shall wander abroade and have not lycense of two Justices of the Peace at the leaste … shalbee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacabondes and Sturdy Beggars.1
Another term used was ‘mendicant’, which in the middle ages had been chiefly applied to friars asking for alms.
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enclosure Acts changed not merely the shape and the lie of the land, but also inevitably the lives of so many country dwellers who depended on it. When forced out of work by the new harsh economic systems, some had little choice but to walk looking for alms or work. This form of roaming placed the walker perilously close to the very periphery of society; they would also be sharing those paths with others who had crossed that boundary.
In the era of highwaymen and footpads, strange walkers could turn out to be vicious criminals, looking for new victims. Karl Philip Moritz, who caused such a stir by walking to Oxford, was very interested in what he considered ‘the lowest and vilest class of criminal – the footpads.’ He observed that:
Tragic examples may be read almost daily in English newspapers of poor people met on the road who have been brutally murdered for a few shillings. These thieves probably murder because they are unable to take flight like the highwayman on his horse and so, should anyone live to give information concerning them, they can be pretty easily overtaken by a hue and cry.
As well as haunting the alleys and courts of the big cities, footpads were to be found out on the roads. Hounslow Heath was notorious for its instances of thieving, as was Windsor Forest. The Windsor footpads employed the striking tactic of painting their faces black. They became known as the Wokingham Blacks, and were responsible for a spree not only involving robbery but also murder. Unlike highwaymen, who persist to this day in enjoying a rather romantic reputation, these pedestrian robbers were always on pretty much the same level as modern muggers. Although as Anne Wallace has pointed out:
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