That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth ; Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots; And with presented nakedness out-face
The winds and persecutions of the sky. The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity.—Poor Turlygood poor Tom That's something yet;-Edgar I nothing am.” In Disraeli's “Curiosities of Literature,” an interesting and learned account is given of the singular mendicants, known by the name of “Toms o' Bedlam.” Bethlem, at the time when Shakespeare wrote, “was a contracted and penurious charity,” with more patients than funds, and the governors were in the habit of relieving the establishment by discharging patients whose cure was very equivocal. These discharged patients, thrown upon the world without a friend, wandered about the country chanting wild ditties, and wearing a fantastical dress to attract
the
notice and the alms of the charitable.
Sir
Walter Scott suggested to Disraeli, “that these roving lunatics were out-door pensioners of Bedlam, sent about to live as well as they could on the pittance granted by the hospital.” But, in addition to the true “Tom,” there was a counterfeit who assumed the grotesque rags, the staff, the knotted hair of the real one, to excite pity or alarm, and to enforce undeserved charity. These men,
who are described by Decker in his “English Villanies,” were called “Abram men,” and hence the phrase current to the present day, to “sham Abram.”
They had a cant
language, a silly, rambling “mawnd,” or phrase of begging.
