Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Diary and General Expenditure Book of William Cunningham of Craigends: Commissioner to the Convention of Estates and Member of Parliament for Renfrewshire; Kept Chiefly From 1673 to 1680
The country was overrun with beggars and thieves, who are significantly described in the quaint language of the old statutes as sorners and sturdy beggars. Fletcher states that there were in Scotland at the very time when this Renfrewshire diary was written persons begging from door to door, and extorting sustenance by violence. The number may be exag gerated, but it is certain that in Cuningham's day pauperism was one of the great problems which exercised the Scottish Parliament. In 1661 an Act was passed for the establishment of manufactories in order to afford employment, and by another in 1663 the manufacturers were empowered to seize all vaga bonds and idle persons and make them work for a space, to the extent of eleven years, giving them meat and clothes only. In 1679 another Act authorised all manufacturers 'to seize and apprehend any vagabonds who shall be found begging, or who, being masterless or out of service, have not wherewith to maintain themselves by their own means and work, and to employ them for their own service as they Shall see fit.' The misfortune was that the manufacturers were very few and the beggars very many, so that the provision did not meet the case, and the evil continued, to the cost and sorrow of the diarist and others of his day.
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