IV.

Criminals

The concept of the criminal is relatively recent. But a series of stereotype offenders appear to have been present in the Middle Ages. These were gradually reshaped in the early modern period, and then remoulded as the “criminal class” or classes, or simply as criminals, principally during the 19th century.

Robber knights and robber barons were a phenomenon of the Middle Ages eventually brought under control by the armed might of kings and princes but also, it has been argued, by an increasing gentility of manners among the ruling elites (see Feudalism). The growth of capitalism led to a new kind of robber baron whose offences were not necessarily against the law. However, capitalism and industrialization fostered the development of the white-collar offender who defrauded both companies and investors. It has been estimated that as many as one in six of the company promotions in Victorian Britain were fraudulent. But, aside from various relatively short-lived panics about individual robber barons in the feudal world, or about white-collar offenders in the capitalist world, criminal stereotypes have rarely been situated among the elite.

At times the robber knights of the Middle Ages might have been scarcely distinguishable from bandits, but bandits have had a much longer existence. Bandits could acquire a romantic aura, but often not until after their deaths. Robin Hood is the obvious example, and a man who, allegedly, robbed the rich to give to the poor. There is doubt about the existence of Robin Hood himself, but plenty of other bandits acquired his romantic image from the Middle Ages onward. In reality, however, few ever showed much solidarity with the peasantry and the poor. Bandit groups appear most often to have been united by kinship and friendship. They commonly had links with some local power holders who might even employ them as their own strong-arm men. Individuals sometimes embarked on bandit careers fired by motives of revenge for personal wrongs. They could also be involved in large-scale entrepreneurial activity such as smuggling and rustling. The internal customs barriers in countries such as ancien régime France, for example, created magnificent opportunities for smuggling, both petty and large scale. The best-known bandit of 18th-century France, Robert Mandrin, was involved in massive contraband expeditions with large numbers of armed escorts to protect his enterprise and fight off police and troops. The bandit of the medieval and early modern period was, in this respect, a forerunner of the modern gangster involved in the illegal entrepreneurial trafficking of alcohol, drugs, and people.

Bandits might also be drawn from marginal groups. In the Middle Ages there was concern about the rootless vagabond. Of course, there were indeed vagabonds and beggars, some of whom, most notoriously deserters and discharged soldiers still armed with their military weaponry, could be dangerous. There were also groups, such as entertainers, tinkers, and Roma (Gypsies), whose way of life put them on the road. Particular trades were stigmatized because of the filth or general unpleasantness that surrounded them—knackers (slaughterers of horses), skinners, and tanners are the obvious examples. These were considered dishonourable people—unehrliche Leute they were called in the German lands—who, while their tasks might be based in the urban world, were compelled to live on the edge, or even outside, of the towns. Also significant among the marginalized and the ostracized, were Jews. These individuals and groups, excluded by rural and urban communities, are found in court records charged with various offences from highway robbery to arson. The problem is in assessing the extent to which the stigmatization was self-fulfilling. Once such individuals were excluded, denied ordinary civil rights, and labelled as dangerous, there could have been a strong incentive for them to commit criminal acts as the best way, perhaps the only way, of ensuring a living.

The obsession with the vagrant as criminal had a remarkable longevity from the medieval period until well into the 19th century. The men who argued for a reform of the English police in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, for example, all expressed concern about vagabonds and those individuals who, the reformers believed, preferred a life of idleness and looked for luxury, rather than indulging in respectable labour for an honest wage. Yet while there were continuities in the perception of the offender, there were also shifting perceptions regarding his or her motivation, and these are easier to substantiate than a shift from violence to theft.

As European society became more secular so the perception of criminal offending shifted from a form of sin, prompted by the Devil, to the responsibility of the offender making rational choices. This shift was gradual, but was accelerated by a series of developments particularly during the 18th century. First, the population began to grow faster than the economy, and thousands were forced on to the roads looking for work; a conservative estimate has it that 5 per cent of the population of the German lands were in this situation at the beginning of the 18th century. Some of these probably did resort to brigandage and highway robbery, but the large numbers on the roads served to increase insecurity and fears of crime and criminals. At the end of the 18th century the behaviour of crowds during the French Revolution accentuated fears about the urban poor. In the early 1840s a French police administrator, Henri Frégier, coined the term les classes dangereuses, and this struck a chord with those among the propertied classes fearful of revolution, and fearful especially of the poor in the burgeoning slums of the big cities and the new industrial regions. It was easy to elide dangerous classes and criminal classes.

Towards the end of the 19th century, influenced by new understandings of evolution, a school of criminological thought emerged perceiving the criminal less as someone morally responsible acting as a result of free will, and more as an individual dominated by his or her physiological nature (see Criminology). The principal mover in this way of thinking was Cesare Lombroso, who claimed to have begun to develop his ideas while serving as a military doctor during the Brigands’ War of the 1860s in the south of Italy, and specifically when he examined the head of a notorious, dead brigand, Giuseppe Vilella. Lombroso constantly refined his notion of the born criminal, as did his successors. They increasingly included a number of other elements as working upon the potential offender: feckless parents, drink, poor housing, and so forth. Such ideas suited well with contemporary concerns about race degeneration and the science of eugenics. It encouraged some governments, notably in some states in the United States and in Scandinavia, to introduce sterilization into their penal policy; and it found its worst manifestation in Nazi Germany (see National Socialism).

Away from the stereotypes of bandits, vagrants, members of the criminal class, and born criminals, however, some generalizations can be made about criminals through time. First, the evidence suggests that the majority of people responsible for both offences against property and offences against the person were men, and primarily young men. Women figure most prominently in offences relating to prostitution. In some countries the evidence of recidivism (relapsing back into crime), and this is obviously something that depends on the kind of careful records kept from the 19th century, suggests that women were repeat offenders in greater numbers than men. This is probably due to the stigma of prison, and to the difficulty experienced by women with this stigma in finding respectable work and restoring some vestige of expected feminine morality. Most property crimes did not involve violence or the threat of violence. A high percentage of assaults, from pub brawls to rapes, generally seem to involve people who knew each other, even people who were related. There was stranger-on-stranger violence, especially in offences involving bands of brigands, burglars disturbed in the act, individual highwaymen, or footpads (unmounted highwaymen). But the violence of professional criminals was often committed among those themselves as, for example, when criminal gangs fought over territory for illegal enterprises such as prostitution, illicit gambling, or the supply of heavily taxed or prohibited goods.