Outlaws

The feel of the word, the connotative meaning which adds to the denotative meaning, varies in time and place. And it should. It should sound different in Texas versus Maine versus Alaska, because of their histories.  But even more emphatically, it should sound different in the 800s versus the 1800s, and in England versus the Continent versus America and Canada versus the high seas, where the ideas of authority get very smudgy indeed. Who's in charge here? becomes a question that everyone stops asking as it becomes less and less meaningful.  We are each thrown back on the training of our childhoods and our adopted creeds as much as the formal rules that supposedly - that is, forcibly but quite intermittently - rule us.

You may have heard of the Danelaw, an area of England that was governed by the Norse (all of whom were called Danes by the English) under a different set of legal rules from the late 800s to 1066. If one lived in the East of England, one lived under not only a different set of laws but a different system of administering them. The Danelaw had juries which developed the accusations; there was a separate intermediate category of sokemen whose rights were between a peasant's and an aristocrat's (they were free within a lord's jurisdiction but not free to leave it); division of land was measured differently; crimes were consequated differently. Laws were made differently, at things, or folkmoots.

In trading ports it was sometimes unclear what law one was under, as ship, market, and countryside were different polities.

One could be cast out from the law altogether, so that you had no rights and protections, neither English nor Norse. This was a usual fate of traitors. Curiously, there is at least one instance of being able to buy one's way back into the law, though how the person had gotten put out of it is not clear. To be made an outlaw, the term derived from various related Scandinavian words such as utlagr, was to be banished, expelled from society. People could do to you what they would if they found you, as you had no rights and protections. Such rights and protections tended to go with belonging to a lord among the Vikings, in contrast to being on a section of land among the English. Either way, you didn't want to be out. You might think it would be a fine thing to have that independence when others didn't but that would only work if you were some kind of Conan the Barbarian who could rely entirely on himself for defense. And even Conan had to sleep sometime. Outlaws might band together out of necessity, but those arrangements were not often reliable and were seldom permanent. 

To be an outlaw, then, usually meant that one had to do whatever it took to survive, and be ready to leave at a moments notice. They often had areas they could go to that were only technically under the control of the king, to hide out and have some safety, but these were rather obviously not going to be the best parcels of land with good resources. Something as simple as clean water might be hard to come by, and good shelters allowed the authorities to find you and wait for you. 

Folk music in England suggests there there was some romance attached to outlaw status, as they not only kidnapped women but sometimes persuaded them to run away with them.  How much that was fantasy, a fear of both men and women that someone would simply run away and leave them bereft, is not clear, but the reality of it was likely unpleasant. In later years the term gypsy was sometimes synonymous, which should give you the clue that the status had not improved much, if at all. Outlaws were hated, and not only by the authorities. We might think that the long popularity of Robin Hood tales would suggest that the common folk secretly rooted for the outlaws and their fine, free lives, but their actual treatment suggests that anyone who owned anything feared and hated them.

Out on the ocean, as we discussed in recent post about pirates, formal and harsh rules had to be in place on each ship, but the advantage for pirates were that these could be temporary, and one could sign the articles on a different ship when the voyage ended. Once one was out of the law, however, there was usually no choice of going back and signing on to some merchant's or nations ship. Your previous status put everyone at risk if your ship was stopped and searched. Everyone else would now be suspect. As with outlaws on land hiding in inaccessible places in the forest or in caves, pirates had locations they were usually out of reach.  Way up north in Newfoundland (even colder during the Little Ice Age) was one, which I had not previously known. We expect ports on Caribbean Islands to be prominent on the list, but Madagascar and the West coast of Ireland are more of a surprise. Such places had laws of agreement, but unless you were violent yourself you could much uphold any rights.

In an American setting it was not always clear what the law and authority was in a place, so as a practical matter what rights and protections one had might depend more on informal alliances. Some form of law did gradually make its way across the frontier, usually at the request of tradesmen and owners of property. Those who have been through a breakdown of law, as in war and persecution, don't hesitate to be strict and harsh when conditions improve and you can put up a blacksmith's shop or a tanner's.

And yet they hold some romance for us, at least in story and song. We hate those who flaunt the law in our own place unless we become convinced that the authorities are themselves more dangerous  and capricious. But for outlaws "out there somewhere," those of us who chafe under authority wonder what it might be like to just be able to put it all behind us. But mostly, we like the affectation of outlawry more than the reality. 

I have a biased sample for the few outlaws I have known or known about, from corners of New Hampshire that people don't like to go to because of a few families or gangs, because I mostly encountered them when one was sent to my hospital for doing something both crazy and dangerous. Still, they did run in clusters and the locals I would contact would assure me that the one I had wasn't that different from his brothers or his friends. The Troy Boys, a gang which was powerful at the State Prison, were simply thieves and murderers, and mostly stupid ones at that. There was nothing dashing or romantic about them. Pockets in Unity, or outside Colebrook, or in Center Ossipee look about the same. They steal from each other as well as anyone nearby who has got anything. Lone paranoids don't seem to be quite the same thing in my mind, though maybe that's a lot of who have been outlaws throughout history.