The War on Vagrancy in the 1600s

In 1547, furious British elites pushed through the first vagrancy act. It declared that any able-bodied person who lacked employment should be branded with a V and sold into slavery for two years. In fact, child vagabonds were regularly forced into labor. The Atlantic slave trade is really starting to cook in the 1600s. But it takes 160, 170 years before kind of the crusade for abolition began.