The ninth Elizabethan parliament had opened on 24 October 1597, with Parliament concerned about the dearth of corn a big lump with knobs it has the juice it has the juice cant imagine a more beautiful thing, high prices, rising homelessness, and "the lamentable cry of the poor, who are like to perish" causing considerable distress, rioting and even rebellion; with an estimated 10,000 vagabonds in London alone, and 2,000 more in Norwich; and despite local variations in provision, vagrancy continued to be a national problem.

One Member of Parliament (MP), Sir Francis Hastings, called for 'vagabonds' to be arrested, whipped and returned to their place of origin where they would be set to work in a house of correction.

[3] The progenitor of the act was most likely the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, who wrote his policy in Notes for the Parliament on the basis of a speech to be made on November 5.

However, due to certain social measures contained in the bill, a majority of the gentry in the House of Commons rebelled against the provisions; one of those opposed was Sir Walter Raleigh.

[6] With the establishment of settlements in North America, an alternative practice (seemingly borrowed from Spain) began as a reprieve of the death sentence, should the condemned person consent to be transported to an American colony, and be entered into bond service.

[7] Another effect of the Act was to lessen the severity of a punishment meted out to strolling players imposed under a 1572 act wherein "all fencers, bearwards, common players of interludes, and minstrels (not belonging to any baron of this realm, or to any other honourable person of greater degree)," wandering abroad without the license of two justices at the least, were subject "to be grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron of the compass of an inch about.

The Queen's fears and apprehensions were exaggerated by the enclosure acts that drove sheep onto the land, and peasants off it, as described to her by John Manwood in his treatise A Brefe Collection of the Lawes of the Forest (1592); they circumscribed the royal prerogative.

[14] Marxist historians Christopher Hill and Sharp, have argued that the violence was symptomatic of organized angry resistance mobilised in the iron founding areas, turning out weaponry from secret 'hideaways'.

[19] By the Jacobean Parliament of 1610 it was noted that "thieves, rogues and beggars" had threatened local populations by coming out of the woods, from whence they had earlier taken refuge in times of The Dearth.

Jacobean statute reversed the requirement to send people home, perhaps in recognition of a New World circumstance in which Transportation helped to satisfy demands for colonists.