Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.