War Of The Gods, XXIX.
"No few outlaws heeded the call, and likewise men who were wretchedly poor or homeless. They had little to lose..." (p. 251)
Little to lose... What is the difference between a thief and a revolutionary?
"Barabbas was a bandit." (John, 18:40)
"Barabbas had been put in prison for a riot that that had taken place in the city, and for murder." (Luke, 23:19)
"At that time a man named Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder in the riot." (Mark, 15:7)
A bandit and a rebel are not the same thing.
If King Hadding had made some provision for the wretchedly poor and the homeless, then maybe they would have remained loyal to him and not have followed Tosti? I sympathize with their plight but not with their following that man.
19 comments:
Actually, rebels and bandits often switch roles and some who consider themselves rebels are functionally indistinguishable from bandits.
What was Robin Hood, after all?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirlling: I agree! And I could not help but note Robin Hood did not attack the professional military of his time, knights and men at arms, but CIVILIANS. Iow, he would be better called Robbing Hoodlum!
Paul: And the bits you quoted from the Gospels are good examples of how different writers can mention the same person or incident in somewhat different ways.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: he fought the Sheriff of Nottingham's men all the time.
Also, there was no "professional" military in England in that period, apart from a few Royal guardsmen; there was a military -class-.
All landowners were part of it. If you were rich and weren't a merchant, you were a member of the military caste.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I'm inclined to favor the Sheriff of Nottingham, not bandits! (Smiles)
I was unclear, by "professional military," I meant exactly that, landowners and their retainers trained and equipped for military service.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in the stories (and he's a story) Robin Hood fought rich landowners all the time.
As someone once observed, robbing from the rich is just going where the money is... something much more so in the medieval period than now.
There's an amusing coroner's report from the early 1300's -- England had coroners and a legal obligation to record deaths long before most places.
It's about a man who tried to break into a house by knocking a hole in the wattle-and-daub wall.
The women of the household (the men were away), took up their "swords" (the lengths of edged wood used to tamp down the weft on a loom) and beat him to death with them, then called the coroner (who was also the local squire) in the morning.
He arrived and registered the cause of death ("killed in self-defense", essentially), but then had to list whether the man had been killed outdoors or under a roof.
He noted that the man was still halfway through the hole, and that someone had come along and stolen his hose and shoes before the coroner arrived.
"Hence I am at a loss to say whether he met his end indoors or out, for his head and shoulders were under a roof, but his arse was naked to the sky of Heaven."
Sneak-thieves like that robbed ordinary people; organized gangs of bandits didn't often bother, because it usually wasn't worth their time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
An amusing story, what you said about the thieve and the coroner! It's probable one of those women stole the would be robber's hose and shoes.
My impression has been that organized bandits would prey on travelers, including traveling merchants, because they would be likely to have goods and large sums of money worth stealing.
Rich landowners would be more likely to have armed retainers capable of fighting bandits.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it depended on how orderly things were. Raids on villages or manors were a sign of public disorder and chaos; attacks on travelers (nobles traveled a lot, visiting different estates on a regular basis) somewhat less so.
Tackling a major noble's 'menie' would be very dangerous, since a noble's household who moved around with him were all expected to be armed and trained to fight even if that wasn't their main job -- which was why except for the laundry, all his servants would be men, incidentally.
It was called a "riding household" for the same reason.
But lesser gentlemen would have smaller retinues. Or you could go after, eg., monks collecting rents -- if you weren't afraid of excommunication and anathemas.
Banditry wasn't a safe profession.
Now, in a really lawless area, as the Anglo-Scots border was for centuries at a time, raids on villages or farmsteads were common as dirt.
Which is why settlements there were either fortified (the "peel' towers that dot the landscape) or deliberately built to be easily replaced if they were torched.
It was also why there weren't many orchards (too hard to guard from raiders) and why livestock were emphasized and a lot of potentially arable land was left in pasture -- you could hide livestock, or at a pinch steal it back, or steal someone else's, but grain-fields were sort of immobile.
Up there, -everybody- was a bandit when the opportunity offered and the reiver clans came out to "break the border".
A lot of the initial settlers in Ulster came from the Border shires on both sides, sent there when the early Stuart kings were pacifying the area after the Union of the Crowns -- the other method was mass drownings, incidentally.
They later came to America as the Scots-Irish, carrying many Border traditions with them.
The KKK's burning crosses on hilltops were a distant reflection of the 'balefires' lit on hills to give the alarm to turn out when there was a big border raid. Bandit nests like Liddesdale could turn out a thousand lances for a big raid, sometimes.
Note that Poul brings out the fact that kings and jarls in Viking-era Scandinavia had multiple estates, and that they regularly switched between them, traveling (often by sea, in Norway) as an armed force to do so.
The reason for moving around, btw, apart from keeping an eye on politics, was to spread the burden of maintaining a large household so that no one area would be eaten bare.
And it was also safer to go to the food and eat it where it was grown than to try and transport it, exposing it to theft. Selling it and transporting the money was done, but not where avoidable -- that was even riskier.
Incidentally, the presence of a lot of tall, imposing-looking "footmen" in the entourage of a British aristocrat of the Victorian era was a faint, far-off echo of the "riding household".
By then, the actual work of the house was mostly done by women, and the footmen were decorative luxuries -- one of the marks of a really upper-class Great House was that the table service at a formal dinner would all be done by the footmen, not by maids.
As late as the 18th century, though, "footmen" were also expected to be guards (against highwaymen, or mobs) and also to act as "muscle" when His Lordship wanted someone made an example of.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
An esp. INTERESTING series of comments from you! Besides the anarchic Anglo/Scots borderlands, there were times when pretty much all of England collapsed into the kind of chaos wherein bandits would prosper. One being the civil war between King Stephen and Henry I's daughter Empress Matilda (from about 1135 to 1150). Even the wildest baron had had enough of anarchy by the time Stephen died and was succeeded as king by the strong willed Henry II (Matilda's son).
Besides laundry, I would think women would also take care of the cooking for a baron's household.
Yes, I can see lesser gentry, with far fewer retainers, being susceptible to bandit attacks.
Interesting to think cattle rustling was not just an Old American West thing!
And it wasn't just in Norway that we see mention of kings making the rounds of their estates. THE LAST VIKING mentions how it was Edward the Confessor's habit, when not in London or Winchester, to make progresses around the kingdom, from estate to estate.
So remnants of baronial menies survived until the 1700's, with those burly, muscular "footmen" also being guards!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no, up until quite late all the kitchen staff would be men in an upper-aristocrat's household. Think of it as like being cooks in the Army, because a great noble's household was a fighting unit.
The big turning point between the medieval "riding household" and the later gradual feminization of domestic service was the reign of the Tudors.
Coming to power at the end of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors went to great lengths to break up the military power of the upper aristocracy, by strictly limiting "livery and maintenance" and other measures.
(Other European governments were doing the same, as the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and then the Early Modern period. Though some, like Poland, flubbed it, with drastic consequences.)
After the Tudors made it impossible for the major aristocrats to maintain their own militaries, and nationalized the militia, keeping all those men on staff went from "necessary cost" to "pure cost".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I forgot about what what it logically meant for an upper ranking baron's riding household and menie implied: things like the cooking would be handled by those men themselves, as is usually done in military units.
Yes, beginning with Henry VII, the Tudors gradually put limits on how many armed and liveried retainers the barons could. And the first Tudor used the Court of Star Chamber and Justices of the Peace to enforce his will thru out England. Analogous, as you said, to what was going on elsewhere in Europe.
For a peer to keep excessive numbers of liveried male retainers became exercises in mere swank rather than a political or military necessity by late Tudor times.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: precisely. The surprising thing is how long the "swank" factor persisted, tho' on a non-military basis having some strong-arm boys on the staff did remain useful for a long time.
Sort of a move from military to police functions.
If you read early 18th-century novels like "Pamela", it's taken for granted that a wicked nobleman can imprison a virtuous maiden -- as long as it's done out in the countryside at an isolated estate.
Kaor, Mr. Stlrling!
Considering how INNATE vanity is with human beings, I'm not surprised the "swank" factor was so long lasting when it came to a peer's "footmen." Plus, considering how there were no real police forces till the 1800's, it made sense for a peer to keep some strong arm boys on his staff.
And I'm sure some peers behaved exactly as described in PAMELA, if only occasionally.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: some did; if you were a wealthy landowner, a "he said, she said" situation wasn't likely to get into the courts.
It was increasingly risky to act that way, though.
In the 1760's, foreign visitors were astonished to see a British peer taken to Tybourne in a cart through the streets with a halter around his neck, and there hanged for murdering his valet.
That would never have happened in, say, pre-revolutionary France. In Hungary or Prussia or Russia it would have been a joke to even think of it.
Both England and Europe underwent a lot of legal reforms in the 1700's and 1800's; one interesting contrast is that in Europe, the tendency was to extend privileges that nobles had previously had in the legal system to ordinary people (starting with the untitled affluent), whereas in England it was to treat upper-class types the way ordinary people always had been.
(Combined with a general tendency towards greater humanitarianism everywhere, of course.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And prosecutors don't like "he said/she said" cases. Because they can be so hard to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
I was interested enough to look up the execution of the fourth Earl Ferrers. Yes, his execution was a sensation! But it was not a valet the Earl murdered, but an upper servant, a Steward acting as a business agent. And the Earl was allowed some concessions on the day of his hanging, being taken to Tyburn in his carriage.
I don't think executions of powerful aristocrats for crimes, rather than political reasons, was totally unknown in pre-Revolutionary France, however. I have read Charles Williams account of Gilles de Rais, in the former's book WITCHCRAFT. That nobleman sank into utter depravity and occult practices, becoming a serial killer of many children. He too was hanged. Granted, it was rare and a French peer had to be egregiously outrageous before being convicted and hanged.
Ad astra! Sean
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