Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is Episode 156, Beggars, Cheats and Thieves.

In this episode, we're going to explore the language of the tutor underworld.

Out of the 1500s, England saw a significant rise in the number of vagabonds and beggars.

Those who couldn't survive by simple begging often turned to thievery, gambling and fraud.

This subculture had its own social structure, and it also had its own vocabulary.

And in the mid 1500s, several books were published in an attempt to highlight the lifestyle

and language of these people who lived on the fringes of society.

Those books give us an early look at English slang, and are arguably the precursors of our

modern dictionaries.

So this time, we'll look at those developments, and we'll also look at the beginning of the

Elizabethan era in England.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is HistoryofEnglishPodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash

History of English.

Now let's turn to this episode, and let's begin where we left off last time.

In the last episode, we looked at a series of scholars in the mid 1500s who recommended

the use of plain English in place of fancy loan words.

This was the beginning of a scholarly debate which became known as the ink horn debate,

and it reflected a growing unease with a large number of loan words that were pouring into

English at the time.

...