A Dictionary of Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. Hotten John Camden
calling at or not. Almost every door has its marks: these are varied. In some cases there is a cross on the brick work, in others a cypher: the figures 1, 2, 3, are also used. Every person may for himself test the accuracy of these statements by the examination of the brick work near his own doorway – thus demonstrating that mendicity is a regular trade, carried out upon a system calculated to save time, and realise the largest profits.” These remarks refer mainly to provincial towns, London being looked upon as the tramps’ home, and therefore too FLY, or experienced, to be duped by such means.
The only other notice of the hieroglyphics of vagabonds that I have met with, is in Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor.28 Mayhew obtained his information from two tramps, who stated that hawkers employ these signs as well as beggars. One tramp thus described the method of WORKING29 a small town. “Two hawkers (PALS29) go together, but separate when they enter a village, one taking one side of the road, and selling different things; and so as to inform each other as to the character of the people at whose houses they call, they chalk certain marks on their door posts.” Another informant stated that “if a PATTERER29 has been CRABBED (that is, offended) at any of the CRIBS (houses), he mostly chalks a signal at or near the door.”
Another use is also made of these hieroglyphics. Charts of successful begging neighbourhoods are rudely drawn, and symbolical signs attached to each house to show whether benevolent or adverse.30 “In many cases there is over the kitchen mantel-piece” of a tramps’ lodging-house “a map of the district, dotted here and there with memorandums of failure or success.”31 A correct facsimile of one of these singular maps has been placed as a frontispiece. It was obtained from the patterers and tramps who supplied a great many words for this work, and who have been employed by me for some time in collecting Old Ballads, Christmas Carols, Dying Speeches, and Last Lamentations, as materials for a History of Popular Literature. The reader will no doubt be amused with the drawing. The locality depicted is near Maidstone, in Kent, and I am informed that it was probably sketched by a wandering SCREEVER32 in payment for a night’s lodging. The English practice of marking everything, and scratching names on public property, extends itself to the tribe of vagabonds. On the map, as may be seen in the left hand corner, some TRAVELLER32 has drawn a favourite or noted female, singularly nick-named Three-quarter Sarah. What were the peculiar accomplishments of this lady to demand so uncommon a name, the reader will be at a loss to discover, but a patterer says it probably refers to a shuffling dance of that name, common in tramps’ lodging-houses, and in which “¾ Sarah” may have been a proficient. Above her, three beggars or hawkers have reckoned their day’s earnings, amounting to 13s.; and on the right a tolerably correct sketch of a low hawker, or costermonger, is drawn. “To Dover, the nigh way,” is the exact phraseology; and “hup here,” a fair specimen of the self-acquired education of the tribe of cadgers. No key or explanation to the hieroglyphics was given in the original, because it would have been superfluous, when every inmate of the lodging-house knew the marks from their cradle – or rather their mother’s back.
Should there be no map, “in most lodging-houses there is an old man who is guide to every ‘WALK’ in the vicinity, and who can tell each house on every round, that is ‘good for a cold tatur.’”33 The hieroglyphics that are used are: —
Where did these signs come from, and when were they first used? are questions which I have asked myself again and again, whilst endeavouring to discover their history. Knowing the character of the Gipseys, and ascertaining from a tramp that they are well acquainted with the hieroglyphics, “and have been as long ago as ever he could remember,” I have little hesitation in ascribing the invention to them. And strange it would be if some modern Belzoni, or Champollion, discovered in these beggars’ marks fragments of ancient Egyptian or Hindoo hieroglyphical writing! But this, of course, is a simple vagary of the imagination.
That the Gipseys were in the habit of leaving memorials of the road they had taken, and the successes that had befallen them, there can be no doubt. In an old book, The Triumph of Wit, 1724, there is a passage which appears to have been copied from some older work, and it runs thus: – “The Gipseys set out twice a year, and scatter all over England, each parcel having their appointed stages, that they may not interfere, nor hinder each other; and for that purpose, when they set forward in the country, they stick up boughs in the way of divers kinds, according as it is agreed among them, that one company may know which way another is gone, and so take a different road.” The works of Hoyland and Borrow supply other instances.
I cannot close this subject without drawing attention to the extraordinary fact, that actually on the threshold of the gibbet the sign of the vagabond is to be met with! “The murderer’s signal is even exhibited from the gallows; as a red handkerchief held in the hand of the felon about to be executed is a token that he dies without having betrayed any professional secrets.”34
Since the first edition of this work was published the author has received from various parts of England numerous evidences of the still active use of beggars’ marks, and mendicant hieroglyphics. One gentleman writes from Great Yarmouth to say that only a short time since, whilst residing in Norwich, he used frequently to see them on the houses and street corners. From another gentleman, a clergyman, I learn that he has so far made himself acquainted with the meanings of the signs employed, that by himself marking the characters
THE HISTORY OF SLANG, OR THE VULGAR LANGUAGE OF FAST LIFE
Slang is the language of street humour, of fast, high, and low life. Cant, as was stated in the chapter upon that subject, is the vulgar language of secrecy. They are both universal and ancient, and appear to have been the peculiar concomitants of gay, vulgar, or worthless persons in every part of the world, at every period of time. Indeed, if we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that “there is nothing new under the sun,” the “fast” men of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty looking beards, may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennacherib’s palace; and the stocks and stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of venerable and used-up Babylon, may, for aught we know, be covered with Slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians, and which have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist; so impossible is it at this day to say what was then authorised, or what then vulgar language. Slang is as old as speech
Vol. i., pages 218 and 247.
See Dictionary.