[Footnote 178:  In that curious source of our domestic history, the “English Villanies” of Decker, we find a lively description of the “Abram cove,” or Abram man, the impostor who personated a Tom o’ Bedlam.  He was terribly disguised with his grotesque rags, his staff, his knotted hair, and with the more disgusting contrivances to excite pity, still practised among a class of our mendicants, who, in their cant language, are still said “to sham Abraham.”  This impostor was, therefore, as suited his purpose and the place, capable of working on the sympathy, by uttering a silly maunding, or demanding of charity, or terrifying the easy fears of women, children, and domestics, as he wandered up and down the country:  they refused nothing to a being who was as terrific to them as “Robin Good-fellow,” or “Raw-head and Bloody-bones.”  Thus, as Edgar expresses it, “sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,” the gestures of this impostor were “a counterfeit puppet-play:  they came with a hollow noise, whooping, leaping, gambolling, wildly dancing, with a fierce or distracted look.”  These sturdy mendicants were called “Tom of Bedlam’s band of mad-caps,” or “Poor Tom’s flock of wild geese.”  Decker has preserved their “Maund,” or begging—­“Good worship master, bestow your reward on a poor man that hath been in Bedlam without Bishopsgate, three years, four months, and nine days, and bestow one piece of small silver towards his fees, which he is indebted there, of 3_l._ 13_s._ 71/2_d._” (or to such effect).

Or, “Now dame, well and wisely, what will you give poor Tom?  One pound of your sheep’s-feathers to make poor Tom a blanket? or one cutting of your sow’s side, no bigger than my arm; or one piece of your salt meat to make poor Tom a sharing-horn; or one cross of your small silver, towards a pair of shoes; well and wisely, give poor Tom an old sheet to keep him from the cold; or an old doublet and jerkin of my master’s; well and wisely, God save the king and his council.”  Such is a history drawn from the very archives of mendicity and imposture; and written perhaps as far back as the reign of James the First:  but which prevailed in that of Elizabeth, as Shakspeare has so finely shown in his Edgar.  This Maund, and these assumed manners and costume, I should not have preserved from their utter penury, but such was the rude material which Shakspeare has worked up into that most fanciful and richest vein of native poetry, which pervades the character of the wandering Edgar, tormented by “the foul fiend” when he

                ——­bethought
    To take the basest and most poorest shape
    That ever penury, in contempt of man,
    Brought near to beast.

And the poet proceeds with a minute picture of “Bedlam beggars.”  See Lear, Act ii.  Sc. 3.]

[Footnote 179:  Aubrey’s information is perfectly correct; for those impostors who assumed the character of Tom o’ Bedlams for their own nefarious purposes used to have a mark burnt in their arms, which they showed as the mark of Bedlam.  “The English Villanies” of Decker, c 17. 1648.]