and holidays in the churches.  The parish priest was to keep an account of receipts and of expenditure, and relief was administered with some approach to modern formalities.  A further excellent but severe enactment empowered the parish officers to take up all idle children above the age of five years, “and appoint them to masters of husbandry or other craft or labour to be taught;” and if any child should refuse the service to which he was appointed, or run away “without cause reasonable being shown for it,” he might be publicly whipped with rods, at the discretion of the justice of the peace before whom he was brought.

So far, no complaint can be urged against these provisions:  they display only that severe but true humanity, which, in offering fair and liberal maintenance for all who will consent to be honest, insists, not unjustly, that its offer shall be accepted, and that the resources of charity shall not be trifled away.  On the clause, however, which gave to the Act its especial and distinguishing character, there will be large difference of opinion.  “The sturdy vagabond,” who by the earlier statute was condemned on his second offence to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was condemned by the amended Act, if found a third time offending, with the mark upon him of his mutilation, “to suffer pains and execution of death, as a felon and as an enemy of the commonwealth.”  So the letter stands.  For an able-bodied man to be caught a third time begging was held a crime deserving death, and the sentence was intended, on fit occasions, to be executed.  The poor man’s advantages, which I have estimated at so high a rate, were not purchased without drawbacks.  He might not change his master at his will, or wander from place to place.  He might not keep his children at his home unless he could answer for their time.  If out of employment, preferring to be idle, he might be demanded for work by any master of the “craft” to which he belonged, and compelled to work whether he would or no.  If caught begging once, being neither aged nor infirm, he was whipped at the cart’s tail.  If caught a second time, his ear was slit, or bored through with a hot iron.  If caught a third time, being thereby proved to be of no use upon this earth, but to live upon it only to his own hurt and to that of others, he suffered death as a felon.  So the law of England remained for sixty years.  First drawn by Henry, it continued unrepealed through the reigns of Edward and of Mary, subsisting, therefore, with the deliberate approval of both the great parties between whom the country was divided.  Reconsidered under Elizabeth, the same law was again formally passed; and it was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English nation, that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life.  The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.[81]