Poverty has many faces, and mobility appears in many forms - from those highly valued by society to those criminalized. Particularly problematic in Europe since the late Middle Ages were social groups where poverty was linked to mobility: people who wandered the streets, from house to house, from place to place, trying to secure their livelihood by begging for alms. Although primarily associated with the Early Modern period in historiography, begging and vagrancy did not disappear on the threshold of modernity. Rather, these phenomena of poverty experienced new cycles during the crisis-prone industrialization. They provoked harsh repressive measures, but at the same time exerted a strange fascination as embodiments of radical nonconformity to the norm.