Definition
A person who subsists by soliciting alms from others, having no independent means of support. In legal usage, the term has functioned primarily as a status classification rather than a description of a discrete act — the condition of being without property or employment and dependent on charitable giving. Most historical American statutes did not define "beggar" with precision but treated the status as a predicate for criminal or civil liability under vagrancy, poor law, and public order frameworks.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To make a beggar of someone; to impoverish; to exhaust the resources of or surpass beyond comparison (as in "beggars description").
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who begs; one who asks or entreats earnestly or with humility; one who makes it his business to ask alms; one dependent on others for support (often contemptuous); one who assumes in argument what he does not prove.
Editorial note: The legal definition is narrower than both common usages. Legally, a beggar is not merely one who asks earnestly or petitions, nor does the term carry its rhetorical or philosophical senses (begging the question). The legal meaning fastens specifically on economic dependency and solicitation of charity as a sustained condition — a status, not a momentary act. A petitioner in court, or someone who "begs to differ," is entirely outside the legal category.
Common Confusion
BEGGAR vs. PAUPER vs. TRAMP vs. VAGRANT: These terms overlapped substantially in historical statutes and dictionaries, but they were not interchangeable. A pauper was typically a person receiving official public relief — formally recognized by parish or county authorities. A beggar solicited private alms without formal relief status. A tramp combined poverty with itinerancy, emphasizing the refusal to work and movement between jurisdictions. A vagrant was the broadest classification, encompassing all of the above plus a range of disorderly or idle persons. Bouvier explicitly cross-references TRAMP, signaling the legal proximity of these categories. Researchers who encounter one term in a statute or case should check the others; a state might punish "vagrancy" through a statute that defined the offense to include begging, or might maintain separate provisions for each.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is historically loaded in ways that create real research traps.
Status vs. conduct: Modern constitutional law has largely dismantled status-based criminal offenses following Robinson v. California (1962) and related decisions. Historical statutes punishing begging as a status — rather than punishing a specific act of solicitation — may be constitutionally defunct, but they appear throughout 19th-century state codes and case reporters without any marker indicating their subsequent invalidity. Researchers using historical corpus sources must be cautious about treating these provisions as good law.
Begging as protected speech: Contemporary First Amendment doctrine has increasingly treated solicitation of charitable contributions, including street solicitation, as protected speech. This represents a near-total inversion of the historical legal treatment of begging as a punishable condition. A researcher moving between historical and modern materials will encounter two entirely different legal frameworks using the same vocabulary.
Statutory synonyms: 19th-century state statutes frequently bundled beggars into vagrancy acts without using the word "beggar" at all. Corpus searches on "beggar" alone will miss large portions of the relevant law. Effective research requires parallel searches on vagrant, tramp, pauper, mendicant, and idle person, as well as searches in poor law and public order statutory compilations.
Poor law connections: The legal treatment of beggars intersects with settlement law, poor relief administration, and workhouse provisions. A beggar's legal status could affect which jurisdiction bore responsibility for their support, whether they could be removed to their parish of settlement, and whether they were subject to commitment to a workhouse or house of correction. These dimensions do not appear in the bare dictionary definitions.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a person who lives by begging charity, having no other means of support. The definitions are nearly identical across the first and second editions of Black's, reflecting that no significant doctrinal evolution was recorded between editions in this entry.
Bouvier adds the most useful dimension: the explicit note that state laws punish begging as an offense, and the cross-reference to TRAMP. This positions the term correctly within a framework of criminal and quasi-criminal liability rather than treating it as merely descriptive. Bouvier's entry is brief but signals to the researcher that the practical legal significance of the term is penal, not civil.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is substantial. None addresses the constitutional trajectory of status-based offenses. None distinguishes between the act of solicitation and the status of being a beggar. None addresses the settlement and poor law implications. And none flags the significant variation in how individual states defined and punished begging — some treating it as a misdemeanor, others folding it into vagrancy frameworks, others addressing it through poor law administration rather than criminal prosecution.
Jurisdictional Note
Treatment of begging varied significantly by state throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some states maintained distinct beggar or mendicant provisions; others addressed solicitation only within general vagrancy statutes. Municipal ordinances added another layer, often criminalizing solicitation in public spaces independently of state law. Modern researchers should identify the specific jurisdiction and time period before relying on any general statement about the legality of begging.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Vagrancy (for the broader statutory and constitutional framework within which begging law operated); Poor Laws (for the intersection of beggar status with relief administration, settlement, and workhouse provisions).