1 - Defining Begging and Alms-Giving

Summary

From what [weaver Edward] McNally has stated of his neighbourhood, it must be difficult to draw a distinction and institute between the beggar and the labourer, for, as he has already stated, there are labourers or persons willing to labour, holding a patch of ground, whose families beg on all occasions, on which their provisions run short, and this occurs so frequently that McNally has already counted them among beggars. There are others who hold a larger portion of land, and whose families beg only in summer; others holding more land and cheaper are still labourers, and work for hire, but are never reduced to beggary; among the two former cases it is hard to distinguish, for the purpose of comparison where the beggar begins and the labourer ends.

Poor Inquiry report for Aughavale, County Mayo, 1835

Introduction

For the people who lived in pre-Famine Ireland, and subsequently for historians, perhaps the single greatest challenge when considering mendicancy and its extent is defining just who and what is being discussed. This challenge was not unique to nineteenth-century Irish society. Paul Slack's study of vagrancy in seventeenth-century England considers whether ‘vagrants’ and ‘vagabonds’ – which he rightly describes as ‘emotive, elastic terms’ – were wandering pedlars or minstrels, the archetypal ‘able-bodied professional beggars of the criminal underworld’ or ‘simply unskilled migrant labourers and paupers’? Differentiating between begging and casual employment regularly proved difficult, as reflected in the quotation above from the mid-1830s Poor Inquiry. In some instances, begging was carried out without resort to other survival strategies, while perhaps in most cases alms-seeking was a practice that individuals resorted to occasionally and in accordance with their fluctuating economic circumstances. Experiences of begging in early to mid-nineteenth-century Ireland were never homogeneous. In Drogheda, the Poor Inquiry commissioners observed that the ‘distinction between the less industrious, honest, frugal, and independent families of the working class, and the mendicantsor vagrants, is not very broadly marked, as, in times of sickness or want of employment, having no savings to fall back upon, and being unable to obtain credit, their only resource is to pray for alms’.