Rabauwen, vagebonden en andere ledige personen

Strafrechtelijke vervolging van criminele gezelschappen in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw

Samenvatting

Ruffians, Vagabonds and Other Idle People. Criminal Prosecution of Criminal Groups in the 17th and 18th Centuries

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the territory we now know as North-Brabant was made unsafe and its inhabitants terrorized by troupes of beggars and tramps. These groups of outlaws differed one from another in size and structure, origin of its members and organisation of its activities. Former soldiers, mercenaries and deserters, members of notorious families as well as gypsies and other drifters from abroad roamed the countryside. All these vagabonds wandered from one place to another and supported themselves not only by begging but also by extortion, theft, burglary and robbery. If necessary, they used force or threatened to burn down someone’s farm or house.

It was very difficult for the local authorities to bring such vagabonds to justice, mainly because their judicial competence was restricted to their own territory. Nevertheless, penal laws were drawn up in which beggars and tramps, especially when they had committed serious offences, were threatened by severe penalties, including death. To end the criminal activities of those vagabonds wandering from one jurisdiction to another, the officers of the law were authorised to track down and arrest all persons without a residence or a steady job. These persons could be interrogated and if necessary tortured to get a confession, after which they were trialed for all crimes they had committed during their peregrinations, even if these offences were committed a long time ago in another jurisdiction. In this essay, special attention is paid to one specific troupe of vagabonds that terrorized Brabant in the eighteenth century, giving insight into the criminal activities of its members, the judicial measures that were taken to track them down, and the penalties that were imposed upon them when they eventually were arrested and brought to trial.