Rufflers

This sixteenth-century term describes a type of vagabond, or parasite of a military, or more often pseudo-military kind, who made a living out of verbal aggression, extorting money, food, goods, or debts by practiced cursing and threats. The term ruffler makes its first appearance in 1535 in legislation from the reign of Henry VIII (Act 27, c. 25) being applied there to “Idell persons … calling them selues saruing [serving] men.” They were aggressive beggars who fraudulently claimed military injury, and are mentioned caustically by the writers of early guides to underground slang, such as Robert Copland (1535–1536), John Awdelay (1561), Thomas Harman (1567), and Thomas Dekker (1608). The type clearly survived, since Francis Grose defined them as “notorious rogues often pretending to be maimed soldiers or sailors” in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). The term then took on the sense of a proud arrogant aggressive fellow, surviving to late Victorian times, but is now obsolete.