by Nathan Smith

The government’s revamped Move-On powers have already had a positive effect on my life, but there’s so much more that could – and should – be done to fix the problem of the “sturdy beggar.”

Just down from where I live is a giant unused carpark. It’s flat and sits next to a major arterial route. It also has no restrictions on types of cars or campervans that can stay overnight. So, naturally, this carpark has attracted plenty of vagrants. At its peak, about three dozen shabby vehicles with shabby owners were semi-permanently camped for more than 18 months, going nowhere, doing nothing.

Then in early July, the police and social services came, and in two days the ne’er-do-wells were all gone. Poof. Massive concrete barriers were then slumped at the entrances to stop them from sneaking in again. Rumour has it that the vagrants were simply shifted around, like a carousel. But my local area certainly feels much safer now without the mangy dogs and babbling weirdos hanging out. Thanks, Luxon!

And it got me thinking: is there anything more the government could be doing about vagrants? I don’t mean mental health seminars or handing out antipsychotics. I mean, do these Move-On powers go far enough to fix the problem? What’s the goal here?

One or two of the people living in that carpark perhaps had a job and were just down on their luck. There but for the grace… But the rest were obvious losers on some form of welfare benefit. How do I know this? Because they weren’t dead. It is extremely difficult to starve in modern New Zealand, since everyone can get free money at pretty much any time. The government will try to get the losers back into work, but it’s also not hard to simply stay on the benefit for life. And many people choose to do exactly that.

The issue I have with the Move-On powers is that they don’t appreciate that the problem is not necessarily the vagrants. The problem is all the people driving to work on that arterial road who watch dozens and dozens of able-bodied people spending their days idle, parasitically sucking on their tax money. The problem is that those citizens might start to get a little resentful and even wonder why they’re working so hard when it’s clearly much easier to do nothing. This is a recipe for quiet collapse.

What can be done to avoid this? Can the Move-On orders be strengthened? Do the attitudes of society need changing as well? Can people be forced into work? Should the government care about the idle as much as the active? All good questions.

And, interestingly, these questions were all answered back in 16th-century England. Admittedly, the political environment back then was very different, as was the economic situation. England felt the threat of invasion by the French (or the Scots, sometimes both), and every Englishman, from the poorest to the richest, was encouraged to own a sword or bow and to be proficient in its use. Everyone was expected to chip in and do their part if they were physically able.

Those who genuinely couldn’t work deserved support, and although the Church was already showing signs of its terminal decline through neglect of its charitable duties, religion was still a source of refuge for the needy. Those who could work and refused, however, were seen as dangerous to the “commonweal”, the shared welfare of the country. But it was difficult to decide who was truly in need and who was faking it.

As early as the reign of Richard II, rules on charity and almsgiving were considered. The argument went that while the giver might feel compassionate, the wider community would always pay a steep price for careless charity. The king saw the elderly, sick and disabled who had worked hard all their lives as “decayed soldiers”, or retired veterans of the economic battle. As such, he owed them some security in their old age.

Since work was always available for those who wanted it and wages were sufficient for an active person to live comfortably, begging was a choice. As such, the king was much harsher on the so-called “sturdy and valiant beggars” who were “whole and mighty in body and able to labour”, but who wandered around asking others to support them.

The king argued that nature punished idleness with starvation, and it was therefore intolerable for an able person to escape that punishment by making honest workers feed him. Begging under false pretences was treated as a form of theft: the idle person was consuming resources that other people had earned through their hard labour. The king was also proud that England was a hospitable place, and tired travellers could always expect a meal or a bed simply by asking for them. But if every charitably open door was being abused by “sturdy beggars,” those doors would soon close, leading to a much-diminished and far less happy commonwealth.

By the time Henry VIII took the throne, laws were introduced that wisely saw idleness as the “mother and root of all vices.” Local officials were ordered to search for those who genuinely had to live upon charity and write them a licence allowing them to beg within a particular area. These licences named the person and set boundaries on their movements. The point was that although the poor deserved help, they weren’t allowed to ask for help wherever they pleased. The corrosive social effects of careless charity meant that all charity must be controlled, local and supervised.

The flipside was that these laws had little mercy for the “sturdy beggars.” A person with no land, employer, trade or good justification for how he earned a living could be arrested as a vagabond. He would then be taken to the town, stripped and “tied to the end of a cart” before being beaten with whips through the streets “till his body be bloody,” according to the law. The punished fraudster was to be given a different licence which only allowed him to beg for food while travelling back to his home town. If he ignored the order, he could be arrested and whipped again until he could be “put to labour for his living.”

Amusingly, the law also stated that students from Oxford or Cambridge could be punished if their begging was not officially authorised by their university. Furthermore, sailors claiming to have lost their ships and goods needed evidence, and travelling fortune-tellers, fake doctors and people who claimed to interpret dreams were also treated as cheats who were living on other people’s gullibility. They got the whip, too.

A few years passed, but the problem of the “sturdy beggar” still wasn’t fully solved, so Henry expanded the system and ramped up its penalties. His first step was to establish enough public works so that vagrants could be given jobs rather than simply ordered to find them. After all, a person with a bad CV might be unable to convince anyone to give him a job. People were also forbidden to give beggars money directly. The poor could visit homes for leftover food, but alms were to be collected and distributed through the church.

Children were brought into the system as well. Idle children aged over five were to be assigned to farmers, craftspeople or other masters so they could learn some useful skills. A child who ran away without a “reasonable” cause could be publicly whipped with rods, just like an adult. The idea was to instil habits of work early, because idleness had a tendency to be passed down from father to son. I’m sure that doesn’t happen today…

Henry then doubled down on the fraudsters. A “sturdy beggar” caught for the first time was whipped. The second time, part of his ear could be cut away or pierced with a hot iron. But if the same loser was caught a third time, he could then be executed “as an enemy of the commonwealth”. Anyone who repeatedly refused to work was only proving to be of no use to society, living only to hurt himself and others. The historian James Froude said everyone supported this rule since they agreed that it was “better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life.”

But was the “sturdy beggar” problem solved? Did these laws work? Well, they weren’t a failure.

The historian Luke Owen Pike said the laws lasted for about 60 years and were renewed over and over by multiple monarchs, but increasingly severe laws under Edward VI and Elizabeth suggested that vagrancy remained a problem. Prisons contained idle labourers, fortune-tellers, pedlars, tinkers, gamblers, shipwrecked sailors and other “masterless” people. But Pike did not think these laws were a complete success, either. The massive decline in crime during the 16th century was, in his view, the cumulative result of a wealthier England, political stability and the discovery of the New World, which speedily started to absorb a lot of the restless spirits.

Like hitting water with a hammer, the “sturdy beggar” will always be a problem. It’s still with us in New Zealand. But the key difference between Henry VIII’s laws and our Move-On orders today is that the king correctly framed the able-bodied beggars as what they were – fraudsters and parasites. Being a “sturdy beggar” makes you a thief, and criminals should be treated like criminals. It shouldn’t be okay for able-bodied people to be idle while others must work. The former is stealing from the latter. This is intolerable in any civilised society. Luxon should be taking notes.

Of course, no government would ever get away with reintroducing laws from 500 years ago. Yet it is the government’s job to ensure the health of the “commonweal,” and right now, the balance between welfare and work effort is out of kilter in this country. And with so much government money sloshing around and everyone looking to get some for themselves, the “sturdy beggar” will likely be a much more common sight.

Originally published on The Good Oil.