y beg,
what forcible speech, and how they select and choose out words of
vehemence, whereby they do in manner conjure or adjure the goer-by to
pity their cases, I pass over to remember, as judging the name of God
and Christ to be more conversant in the mouths of none and yet the
presence of the Heavenly Majesty further off from no men than from
this ungracious company. Which maketh me to think that punishment is
far meeter for them than liberality or alms, and sith Christ willeth
us chiefly to have a regard to Himself and his poor members.

Unto this nest is another sort to be referred, more sturdy than the
rest, which, having sound and perfect limbs, do yet notwithstanding
sometime counterfeit the possession of all sorts of diseases. Divers
times in their apparel also they will be like serving men or
labourers: oftentimes they can play the mariners, and seek for ships
which they never lost. But in fine they are all thieves and
caterpillars in the commonwealth, and by the Word of God not
permitted to eat, sith they do but lick the sweat from the true
labourers' brows, and bereave the godly poor of that which is due
unto them, to maintain their excess, consuming the charity of
well-disposed people bestowed upon them, after a most wicked and
detestable manner.

It is not yet full threescore years since this trade began: but how
it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are
now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000
persons, as I have heard reported. Moreover, in counterfeiting the
Egyptian rogues, they have devised a language among themselves, which
they name "Canting," but others, "pedler's French," a speech compact
thirty years since, of English and a great number of odd words of
their own devising, without all order or reason, and yet such is it
as none but themselves are able to understand. The first deviser
thereof was hanged by the neck--a just reward, no doubt, for his
deserts, and a common end to all of that profession.

A gentleman also of late hath taken great pains to search out the
secret practices of this ungracious rabble. And among other things he
setteth down and describeth three and twenty sorts of them, whose
names it shall not be amiss to remember whereby each one may take
occasion to read and know as also by his industry what wicked people
they are, and what villainy remaineth in them.

_The several disorders and degrees amongst our idle vagabonds_.