Medieval vagabonds to early modern rogues: legal and cultural continuities in English mobility

The following article provides a reinterpretation of English vagrancy between c .1200 and 1600. It argues for a history defined by long-term continuities rather than ruptures. Scholarship has traditionally fragmented vagrancy into discrete moments, from the post-plague labour crisis to development of the Poor Laws in the sixteenth century. In contrast, this study demonstrates that a stable conceptual logic underpinned legal and literary treatments of mobile people across four centuries. By analysing statutes, chancery commissions and contemporary literature, it reveals how wandering figures consistently embodied anxieties about labour discipline, confederacy, political loyalty, and moral or religious disorder. This article argues that the Black Death intensified existing concerns without creating new ones, that during the fifteenth century vagrant imagery and rhetoric migrated into political and heretical contexts, and that the early modern rogue developed from rather than replaced medieval precedents. Reframing vagrancy as a continuous category provides a fuller understanding of how English society conceptualised and regulated mobility, and challenges periodisation models which obscure deeper patterns of governance and social imagination.