Entertainers
 

96

A statute of 1572 included among vagabonds ‘common players in interludes and minstrels’ who were not patronized by the peerage or the Queen’; fencers, who exhibited feats of sword play; bearwards, who trained and showed performing bears; jugglers; and magicians.A vagrancy Act of 1597 reiterated these provisions, putting these entertainers at risk for over 200 years.Later, in 1648, Parliament declared all players to be vagrants, while during the Protectorate a law ordered fiddlers and minstrels summarily to be branded.
 

Formerly such performers had been retained by noblemen and royalty; now they passed the hat at public performances and earned wages for private ones.It was against these hired, ‘common’ entertainers that official opprobrium was directed.Entertainers corrupted youth, it was alleged.By attending plays, a proclamation of 1544 stated, the young were provoked to the ‘unjust wasting and consuming of their master’s goods the neglecting and omission of their faithful service and due obedience’, and the ‘loss and hindrance of god’s honour and the divine service’.
 

…mobs of 500 and 1000 battled near London theatres, and again when revellers led by a pipe and tabor fought all night in Walsall in 1610.Nevertheless, despite the occasional affray, Dr Bradbrook concludes that the record of grave disturbances at plays in the later sixteenth century is negligible, in relation to the number of performances’.Plague also was linked with plays which were cancelled in London when deaths reached prescribed levels.
 

Not all show people were vagabonds by law, because those patronized by noblemen and corporations were protected.Royal licences and the establishment of permanent companies were additional ways to escape prosecution.Those arrested were usually unlicensed, or conjurers and fortune-tellers suspected as confidence tricksters, or minstrels, who were itinerant and poor.
 

97

Minstrels, who included harpers, pipers and fiddlers…Church banned them for promoting immorality, and sixteenth-century officials objected to them on similar grounds.Nicholas Bennet was seized in Wiltshire in 1614 for allegedly playing on Sundays, ‘to the great dishonour of God’.Minstrel shows were also thought to be covers for thievery, Greene alleging in 1592 that music was helpful to pickpockets.Perhaps there was some truth to these aspersions…
 

An ecclesiastical inquiry in Durham diocese in the 1570s warned that popery and rebellion were spread by minstrels singing bawdy songs.The charge was not wholly absurd: in 1608 a man was presented at North Riding quarter sessions for harbouring a fiddler suspected of recusancy, and a Derbyshire piper was ordered to stand trial in 1616 in Nottinghamshire for carrying beads, crucifixes and books.
 

John Parkins had purportedly served Lord Stafford, but was playing at fairs in Essex in 1634, and four years earlier had petitioned Stafford quarter sessions for poor relief.
 

98

Ballad-singers…Although not named in the vagrancy laws…Like minstrels, they were transient, poor, and thought to be dishonest, immoral and seditious.From about 1570 the word ballad is a pejorative term.Both sellers and singers were considered criminals, their performances cloaks for larceny.