‘Furiously Mad’: Vagrancy Law and a Sub-Group of the Disorderly Poor

Abstract

Abstract:Madness has been a social problem from time immemorial. Wealthy lunatics were made royal wards so that their estates would be looked after, and the common law very early admitted madness and idiocy as conditions justifying the exemption of the sufferer from punishments for crime. But the vast majority of lunatics have never been either criminal or wealthy, and many wandered about begging, unwelcome in any settled community. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the law made some attempt to determine a course of action which would protect the public and theoretically also the lunatic. This legislation and its application in practice to protect the public, contain the lunatic, and deal with the nuisance caused by those ‘disordered in their senses’, form the subject of this article. Much has been written about the development of psychiatry, mainly from contemporary medical texts, and about the treatment of lunatics in institutions, chiefly from nineteenth-century sources, but much remains to be discovered from archival sources about the practicalities of dealing with lunatics at parish level, particularly how they were defined as lunatics, who made such decisions, and how they were treated in homes and workhouses.