Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors (first published in 1566, though the earliest extant edition is from the 1567 second printing) is a classic Elizabethan crime or "coney-catching" pamphlet which purports to describe the stratagems, language, and cultural practices of the vagrants (or "cursitors," as Harman calls them) wandering the sixteenth-century English countryside as a result of such social upheavals as the enclosure of lands for sheep grazing, which resulted in the expulsion of many rural tenants by landowners. To some extent already a redaction of material from earlier pamphlets, the Caveat was copied or borrowed from in subsequent pamphlets and plays purporting to expose "underworld" life and in dictionaries of cant until the end of the eighteenth century. Until recently it was also assumed to be an accurate record of Elizabethan criminal culture. One of the earliest examples of crime writing in English, Harman's little book initiates the construction...