E. Cobham Brewer seems, from his most famous work, the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published 1870, an agreeable old cove. But a biographical sketch by his grandson in the centenary edition praised his fearlessness in taking a stick to a ‘rough-looking man asleep in the stable’. He belaboured ‘the trespasser… exclaiming “Be off, you scoundrel!”’ This came to mind when I saw a sign prohibiting loitering. I wondered what exactly loitering was.

The OED suggests as a meaning ‘to linger idly about a place’ and remarks that the verb appears ‘frequently in legal phrase to loiter with intent (to commit a felony)’. But now there are no felonies, only indictable offences. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 said that: ‘Any Constable or Peace Officer may take into Custody, without a Warrant, any Person whom he shall find lying or loitering in any Highway, Yard, or other Place during the Night, and whom he shall have good Cause to suspect of having committed or being about to commit any Felony.’ But that section of the Act was repealed in 1967.

The Vagrancy Act 1824 ruled that ‘every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon’ should be deemed a ‘rogue and vagabond’. The section of the Act that dealt with ‘suspected persons and reputed thieves’ was replaced by the Criminal Attempts Act 1981. You might think that the whole Vagrancy Act 1824 had been repealed too, for such was the provision of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. But the repeal won’t come into effect until a replacement has been passed. The OED says that the word comes from the Dutch leuteren, ‘to shake, totter’ and (nautically, of a sail) ‘to shiver’. It adds that the word was ‘probably introduced into England by foreign “loiterers” or vagrants’.