Beggar

The condition of poverty is generally viewed, in the West at any rate, with a mixture of contempt and sympathy. Beggar has shifted in meaning over time, in a fashion similar to bastard , from being a social description, recorded from the early thirteenth century, to a general emotive term. As a consequence of natural disasters, pandemics, and famines, medieval society had a great mass of destitute people reduced to begging. With the subsequent “enclosure,” or buying up of common land (previously accessible to all), this number greatly increased. However, in Elizabethan times there emerged a less genuine underclass consisting of idlers and confidence tricksters, “a vast army of wandering parasites” (Salgado 1972, 140). Hence the term beggar (which probably derives from a mendicant or begging religious order called the Beghards) changed from being a literal description to a term of reproach. Those who were physically fit but work-shy and often aggressive in their manner were called sturdy beggars , a term recorded from 1538. The social problem they embodied is starkly alluded to in Act 39 of Queen Elizabeth (1597): “For the suppressing of rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars.”

Beggar is recorded as a term of contempt from about 1300 and is so used in Shakespeare in Richard III (1592) in a reference to “a beggarly denier [small coin]” (I ii 253). The word became quite common as a mild insult in phrases like “the cheeky beggar!” in Victorian terms, and could even be used playfully and familiarly, as in Thomas Hughes’s famous novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857): “You’re an uncommon good-hearted little beggar!” (Chapter 1). The modern equivalent is “you lucky beggar!” These usages have had little currency outside British English (being unrecorded in American and Australian dictionaries of slang).