t an elevated disposition; the rough humour of desperadoes breaks
out from many of them. The practice, like the language of these rogues,
developed itself in greater refinement. The usual form in which the
resident inhabitants were plundered was begging. The works of holiness
of the old Church--an irrational alms-giving--had spread throughout
Christendom an unwieldy mass of mendicancy. In the first century of
German Christendom it is the subject of complaint of pious
ecclesiastics. In churchyards and in public places lay the beggars,
exposing horrible wounds, which were often artistically inflicted; they
sometimes went naked through the country with a club, afterwards
clothed, and with many weapons, and begged at every homestead for their
children, or for the honour of their saints, or as slaves escaped from
the Turkish galleys, for a vow, or for only a pound of wax, a silver
cross, or a mass vestment. They begged also towards the erection of a
church, producing letters and seals; they had much at heart to obtain
special napkins for the priest, linen for the altar cloth, and broken
plate for the chalice; they rolled about as epileptics, holding soap
lather in their mouths. In like manner did the women wander about, some
pretending to give birth to monsters (as for example a toad) which
lived in solitude as miraculous creatures, and daily required a pound
of meat. When a great festival was held they flocked together in
troops. They formed a dangerous company, and even iron severity could
scarcely keep them under restraint. Basle appears to have been one of
their secret meeting-places; they had there their own special place of
justice, and the famed "_Liber Vagatorum_" also, seems to have
originated in that neighbourhood. This book, written by an unknown hand
about 1500, contains, in rogues' language, a careful enumeration of the
rogue classes and their tricks, and at the end a vocabulary of jargon.
It was often printed; and Pamphilus Gengenbach of Basle rendered it
into rhyme. It pleased Luther so well that he also reprinted the clever
little book, after one of the oldest impressions.

To the order of beggars belong also the travelling scholars, who, as
treasure diggers and exorcists, made successful attacks on the savings
of the peasants and on the provisions in their chimneys. "They desired
to become priests," then they came from Rome with shaven crowns and
collected for a surplice; or they were necromancers, then they