Tom O’Bedlam: Mad Mendicant or Feigning Fraud?
The figure of Tom O’Bedlam remains one of the most enigmatic characters in English literary tradition—a wandering mendicant who is either mad or skillfully feigning madness, forever linked to the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital and to the wild visionary speech of an anonymous seventeenth-century ballad.
Historical Origins of the Bedlamite
Tom O’Bedlam, also known as the Bedlam beggar or Abraham-man, emerged in Tudor and Stuart England as a recognizable social type. The name derives from Bethlem Royal Hospital—popularly called Bedlam—the ancient London asylum founded in the thirteenth century.
By the sixteenth century, the appellation “Tom O’Bedlam” designated those who claimed, truthfully or fraudulently, to have been discharged from the hospital and licensed to beg [1]. J
ohn Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, recorded that such figures once traveled the countryside wearing an armilla—a tin or iron band—about the left arm and carrying an ox-horn around the neck [2], which they sounded at cottage doors and used as a drinking vessel.
Whether genuine former patients or cunning impostors, these “poor Toms” became fixtures of the English landscape until the Civil Wars largely swept them from the roads [3].
Early rogue literature, beginning with John Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), already catalogues “poor Tom” as one who “walketh bare armed, and bare legged, and faineth him selfe mad.” The figure therefore occupies a morally ambiguous space: simultaneously an object of pity and a symbol of calculated deception.
The Shakespeare Writer’s Appropriation in King Lear
The Shakespeare writer seized upon this familiar type and transformed it into high tragedy. In King Lear, Edgar, the legitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, adopts the disguise of “Poor Tom” after being driven from his home by his brother’s treachery [4].
On the storm-swept heath, he presents himself as a Bedlam beggar, complete with the conventional speech of demonic persecution, grotesque appetites, and self-inflicted wounds.
The Shakespeare writer’s use of the figure is masterful. Edgar’s assumed madness allows him to speak truths that the court cannot hear and to accompany the genuinely deranged king in a landscape where all social order has collapsed.
The Bedlamite persona thus becomes a vehicle for exploring the thin boundary between feigned and real madness, between theatrical performance and authentic suffering. Edgar’s “Tom’s a-cold” refrain and his catalogues of foul fiends remain among the most haunting passages in the play.
The Anonymous Ballad: A Visionary Masterpiece
Yet the figure’s greatest literary monument is the anonymous poem commonly called “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” or “From the Hag and Hungry Goblin” [5]. Probably composed in the early seventeenth century and preserved in manuscript sources such as the Giles Earle Song Book (circa 1615), the poem speaks in the first person of the mad beggar himself. Its structure—eight-line stanzas concluding with a four-line refrain—suggests it was originally sung as a ballad.
Harold Bloom has called it “the greatest anonymous lyric in the English language” [6]. The speaker moves from abject pleading for food and clothing to soaring, almost cosmic vision:
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at bloody wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
Here the madman claims a knowledge that surpasses the rational sun-god. The poem’s imagery—hag and goblin, the Book of Moons, the heavenly Farrier, the tourney “ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end”—creates a surreal landscape in which madness becomes a form of higher perception.
Robert Graves found in the ballad a “perfect compendium” of moon-goddess worship, while later readers have recognized its strange power to combine utter humility with vaulting arrogance [7].
Critical Reflection
What makes Tom O’Bedlam endure is precisely this dual nature. He is at once a historical curiosity of English vagrancy laws, a theatrical mask for self-preservation, and a poetic voice that dares to speak from the outer edge of sanity.
The figure forces the culture to confront uncomfortable questions: How do we distinguish genuine mental affliction from strategic performance? What truths become available only when the social mask is discarded? And why does the most “purely poetic” of anonymous English compositions arise from the mouth of a supposed lunatic?
In an age that still struggles with the treatment of mental illness and the spectacle of public suffering, Tom O’Bedlam remains disturbingly contemporary.
He wanders the literary landscape still—barefoot, horn in hand, singing of stars at war—reminding citizens that the boundary between the sane and the mad is thinner than the social order prefers to believe, and that the greatest poetry sometimes is thought to originate from the very places society has labeled Bedlam.
The Risk of Undeserved Admiration
In a culture wherein literary works—especially poetry—often suffer from misunderstandings and misinterpretation, the hoisting of a character such as Tom O’Bedlam is particularly troublesome. To elevate a figure whose defining traits are destitution, possible deception, and either genuine or performed lunacy into a cultural icon risks romanticizing mental affliction and social marginality.
The historical “poor Tom” was not a visionary sage but a product of harsh vagrancy laws, institutional neglect, and the street-level opportunism that preyed upon genuine suffering. Celebrating his voice as a source of higher wisdom can obscure the material realities of madness—poverty, isolation, exploitation, and the absence of effective care—and convert them into aesthetic spectacle.
If literature transforms the Bedlamite into a symbol of liberated perception or subversive truth-telling, it may inadvertently encourage a sentimental or voyeuristic attitude toward mental illness.
The danger is that the “mad beggar” becomes an archetype through which society flatters itself: we admire the poetic intensity while remaining comfortably distant from the actual conditions that produced such figures.
In this sense, the icon of Tom O’Bedlam can serve less as a call to empathy or reform than as a poetic convenience that aestheticizes the very suffering it appears to honor. A more responsible reading would keep the historical and clinical costs of that suffering clearly in view, refusing to let the allure of visionary language erase the human cost of the condition it describes.
Sources
[1] Curators. “Tom O’Bedlam.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster. Accessed September 29, 2026
[2] Isaac Disraeli. “Tom O’Bedlams.” readbookonline.org. Accessed September 29, 2026.
[3] Daniel P. Mason, M.D. “Tom of Bedlam.” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 171, no. 12, 2014.
[4] William C. Carroll. “Songs of Madness: The Lyric Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Poor Tom.” Shakespeare Survey. Cambridge UP. 2007.
[5] Jerome Rothenberg. “Tom O’Bedlam.” Jacket2. 2026.
[6] Harold Bloom. How to Read and Why. Scribner. 2000.
[7] Robert Graves. Introductory essay in Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite Verses of the XVI and XVII Centuries. Edited by Jack Lindsay. 1927.
