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“‘Beggars at the Gates’: Vagrancy and Social Control in Sixteenth-Century Ulm”
I. Introduction: Vagrancy and Banishment in early modern Ulm
On 16 August 1596, the town council in Ulm, Germany punished seven urchins for panhandling. Describing the boys as “young, strong beggars ... all of whom had been in custody before,” the council (Ulmer Rat) ordered the executioner to flog them and expel them from the city. The Ulmer authorities had not seen the last of these lads, however, since three of them, Michel Maürer from Bettingen, Michel Winterlin from Irsingen, and Hanns Tiger from Nördlingen, entered the record again in February 1598 after breaking out of custody in the city hospital. They received another flogging before being led out of the city gates again, this time with a stern warning not to return. Maürer, at least, ignored this warning as well and in November 1598 the authorities arrested the “young beggar from Bettingen” for begging on the streets of Ulm for the fourth time. When a local official known as the Bittelmeister, charged with regulating the city’s indigent population, tried to expel Maürer violence ensued. According to the council’s official minutes, the incorrigible youth “hit the Bittelmeister and [also] bit him.” The Rat locked Maürer in the Strafturm (Ulm’s tower jail), but could not fine the beggar-lad “because he had nothing.” They did, however, banish him from the city for life (again), this time with the warning that if he ever returned he would be publicly whipped through the streets and expelled. Apparently, even this rather dire warning had little effect, because a Michel Maürer was expelled in March 1599 along with two female companions.[1]
Maürer’s case was far from exceptional, and Ulm’s criminal records abound with this sort of defiant recidivism on the part of seemingly powerless vagrants. The Ulmer authorities had long relied upon expulsion in an attempt to deal with the flood of vagrants into the territory, driving beggars away without trial or record. During the course of the sixteenth century, however, the local magistrates increasingly used formal prosecution to punish and control vagrants, handing down official banishment sentences to 333 of them. Thus, over eighty-two percent of the vagrants prosecuted by the Ulmer Rat during the 1500s suffered banishment, making expulsion the council’s principal means of dealing with these offenders. The vast majority of these banishment sentences were handed down after mid century (over ninety-eight percent), after a new patrician-dominated regime had come to power in Ulm. Accordingly, the official banishment verdicts themselves, recorded with an innovative bureaucratic efficiency, are products of a dramatic shift in local law enforcement and show this new patrician-controlled Rat’s determination to punish and control vagrants.[2]
However, as the Ulmer Rat’s experiences with Michel Maürer also illustrate, banished offenders often returned to the territory illegally, in some cases many times, challenging the local authorities’ ability to monitor and control the boundaries of their territory. Offenders identified as vagrants by the local magistrates were poor outsiders without legal rights in the territory, yet the resistance they offered took many forms and often crippled efforts to expel them through banishment. In the course of the sixteenth century, almost twenty-five percent of the vagrants banished from the Ulmer Herrschaft ignored their sentence and were subsequently prosecuted for returning illegally. This raises an interesting paradox. Despite the Ulmer Rat’s marked inability to enforce banishment sentences effectively, expulsion remained the local magistrates’ preferred means of dealing with vagrant outsiders apprehended in their domain. Throughout the period, banishment remained a problematic, but highly prevalent punishment in Ulm, a punishment that played a central role in the fluid political situation in the territory after mid century. While the magistrates’ banishment activities failed to staunch the flow of vagrants into the territory, the penal rituals that accompanied these banishments, rituals performed in the streets of the city, served important political purposes, displaying the power of the central authorities and eliciting popular support for their disciplinary activities.
II. Vagrancy Legislation
At the close of the Middle Ages, Ulm stood among the most powerful and wealthy of the German Imperial cities, ruling a vast hinterland of subject towns and villages, a territory rivaled in extent only by that of Nürnberg. Ulm had built its economic and political influence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the textile trade and by the close of the medieval period Ulmer fustian (a cloth woven of cotton and linen) was famous throughout Europe. The city, situated on the Danube in Swabia, was well positioned for long-distance trade with a commercial network that stretched from Venice to Lübeck and from Vienna to Lyons. By the start of the sixteenth century, however, the city-state had begun a slow and inexorable decline as the high-quality textiles produced under strict regulations by its weavers’ guild lost market share to rural producers working for large, proto-capitalist entrepreneurs like the Fuggers of Augsburg. As Ulm’s economic fortunes declined in the face of this intense competition, the admission rates of new citizens declined, since the city no longer attracted large numbers of solvent immigrants capable of buying citizenship. As a result, during the sixteenth century the city’s population growth slowed and the number of inhabitants began to contract. Reliable population figures from sixteenth-century Ulm do not survive, but according to the most recent estimate, Ulm had between 9,200 and 11,300 residents before 1550, and the local population peaked in the 1580s with somewhere between 16,500 and 21,000 inhabitants. By 1600, the figure had dropped to between 11,300 and 19,000.[3] Faced with these ominous trends, the Ulmer Rat, an oligarchic town council made up of thirty representatives from Ulm’s most wealthy and exclusive guilds and ten from the city’s closed patriciate, pursued policies aimed at limiting the number of impoverished outsiders looking for work or alms in the city.[4]
Before Ulm’s judicial bench, staffed on a rotating basis by twelve magistrates from the Ulmer Rat, vagrancy had long been associated with idleness, criminality, and disorder.[5] The earliest surviving legislation issued by the Ulmer Rat, dating from early fifteenth century, includes mandates aimed at halting the flow of vagrants into the Herrschaft. An early entry from this law code, dating from the 1420s, proclaims the Rat’s intention to rid its territory of vagabonds, characterized as arsonists, thieves, and robbers.[6] As early as the 1490s, this guild-controlled Rat forbade all unlicensed begging in their domain, and ordered the local poor to register with the authorities and wear a pauper’s badge. Most important, foreign beggars were only allowed to remain in the city for a single night and could only return again after a month.[7] In a 1491 mandate that proclaims the Rat’s determination to rid the town of vagrants, the magistrates asserted that, “many foreign and useless people linger here in Ulm, who should be outside the city rather than inside.”[8]
While the craft guilds had pushed for Protestant preaching in Ulm since the 1520s, the conservative city fathers, drawn from the city’s patriciate and wealthiest guilds, were slow to adopt the new faith formally and it was not until 1531 that the Mass was abolished in the city. However, in pursuing one of the most important agendas of the urban Reformation, the institutionalization of poor relief, Ulm’s magistrates were not so cautious. Following a trend that spread throughout Protestant Europe during the sixteenth century, the Ulmer Rat worked energetically to centralize the city’s charitable efforts, secularizing functions traditionally performed by Catholic institutions. The Rat established a civic Poor Chest and appointed officials to monitor and register the so-called ‘deserving poor’ -- local widows, orphans, and seniors, as well as sick or crippled townsfolk -- and distribute food and money to these households. The dark side of this centralized poor relief scheme was that it amplified the stigmatization of the ‘undeserving’ poor, meaning “foreign” and able-bodied vagabonds.[9] Accordingly, during the Reformation period, the town council repeatedly issued mandates making it illegal for their citizens to shelter such “strangers” and proclaiming their “struggle against discharged soldiers, beggars, and riff-raff.”[10] In 1527, for example, the Rat proclaimed that any migrants who hoped to work as servants or day laborers in Ulm had to appear before the Rat with their employer for approval; any who were judged to be “good-for-nothing”, immoral, or disobedient were to be immediately expelled from the town.[11] Furthermore, the Reformation-era Rat stepped up its efforts to monitor the poor, reiterating in 1528 their ban on begging “in the city, before the city, before or under the city gates, in or before the Churches, in the taverns or other houses, whether by day or night,” and ordering their Bittelmeister to enter the dwellings of the resident poor each month to inspect “how they keep house, what sort of work they do, how they are deficient, and how they are ailing.” Any “useless beggars” or “dishonorable people” discovered during these monthly rounds were to be punished, serving as an “example and illustration” for the rest; any resident aliens who failed to appear for inspection were to be immediately expelled from the city.[12] A mandate read aloud to the citizenry in August 1544 further illustrates the Rat’s attitudes towards the wandering poor, labeling them “tramps and vagrants, who create many nuisances and evil deeds, and everyday lie before the gates, and many of whom steal into the city,” and proclaiming once again that they should be expelled from the Herrschaft.[13]
In the 1540s, Ulm’s diplomatic fortunes took a devastating turn, resulting in a thorough political transformation that had dramatic consequences for the city’s policies towards the vagrant poor. Having joined the Schmalkaldic League, a confederation of militant Protestant principalities and cities, Ulm was drawn into a disastrous war against the staunchly Catholic Emperor Charles V. The League was soundly defeated in 1547 and Ulm suffered a costly and humiliating imperial occupation. In 1548, the victorious Emperor imposed a new civic constitution upon the defiant citizens of Ulm, part of a sweeping program of political changes forced upon the cities and towns of south Germany.[14] On August 18, 1548, Charles V suspended Ulm’s medieval constitution, a document ratified in 1397 that ensured guild control of the Rat. Fearing the radical political orientation of the guilds, Charles ordered them to disband, forcing them to sell off their assets and hand control of the city’s economic activities to the local magistrates. Charles V also changed the composition of the Rat, handing power to a new, more conservative Rat of thirty-one seats, twenty-one of which were held by members of Ulm’s seventeen patrician families, a closed urban elite deemed more loyal to the Emperor. In 1556, Ulm’s constitution was changed again, this time by Charles V’s successor, Ferdinand. Issued in its final form in 1558, Ferdinand’s reforms codified the political arrangements that defined local politics until the end of the Empire. According to the provisions of this document, Ulm’s guilds regained some of their political and economic power, but Ulm’s patricians retained their majority on the Rat. Henceforth, the council would consist of twenty-four patricians and seventeen members of Ulm’s guilds.[15] The guildmasters who sat on the Rat during this period, however, were usually drawn from the elite merchants’ guild, a wealthy and exclusive organization that identified closely with the interests of the city’s patrician caste. While wealthy members of the merchants’ guild were not part of the patriciate, they enjoyed their own exclusive drinking club modeled after the patricians’ Obere Stube and often arranged marriages between their offspring and members of the patriciate. The patrician domination of the most important posts within the local government, including seats on the powerful and secretive executive council known as the Five, the Burgermeister’s office, or judgeships, was even more marked after mid century.[16] Thus, while the local guilds were never completely excluded from political participation, the influence of the larger craft guilds was greatly diminished in favor of a regime that favored members of the city’s social and economic elite, an exclusive circle of patricians and wealthy merchants.
Alongside these sweeping political changes, this new patrician-dominated regime also usurped the traditional judicial functions of the city’s guilds and clerical establishment. After the dissolution of the city’s guilds, which had policed the behavior of their members for generations, the Rat asserted its right to punish errant guild members. After mid century, the Rat also gradually took over important activities in the realm of marital regulation and morals control from the local Protestant Church, a process accelerated after 1555 as the local clergy began to conform to Lutheran orthodoxy.[17] As a result, the local townsfolk were increasingly forced to rely upon the penal authority of the new patrician-controlled council in order to enforce the law and censure behavior that violated long-standing social norms. At the same time, Ulm’s new patrician rulers aggressively asserted their judicial power, in an attempt to garner support for their new political primacy and gradual consolidation of their authority. Thus, the patrician-dominated Rat issued and re-issued legislation based upon traditional notions of morality that the guilds had promulgated within the town since the late Middle Ages. Given the long-standing animosity of the town’s settled merchants and craftsmen to vagrants and foreign beggars, official legislation aimed at these outsiders -- legislation disseminated in public -- represented an important means for the Rat to display its penal authority and gain the support of the local populace. Accordingly, they re-issued long-standing statutes against vagrancy and issued more innovative mandates as well. [18] In 1551, for example, the Rat ordered its officials to apprehend and punish all “foreign vagrants, sturdy beggars, and other idlers” found in the Herrschaft. This mandate was renewed in 1563, 1586, and 1590.[19] The 1586 version also made it illegal for any of the Rat’s subjects, particularly innkeepers, to provide housing or charity to any “discharged soldiers, vagrants, sturdy beggars, and all other dissolute, loose, and good-for-nothing riff-raff” they encountered on penalty of a two Gulden fine.[20]
III. Enforcement of Vagrancy Statutes: Banishment and Resistance
While the aggressive legislation issued by Ulm’s new patrician-controlled regime helped to solidify its political position, law enforcement, and the public punishment of vagrants in particular, was even more valuable in this regard. Consequently, as the post-Schmalkaldic, patrician-dominated Rat worked to shore up its control over the territory after mid century, official criminal prosecution intensified. Despite the local magistrates’ increasing determination to rid their domain of vagrants, however, they faced a rising tide of illegal immigration. While Ulm had long attracted a steady flow of migration, the flow of penniless vagabonds from the surrounding countryside intensified amid the famine and disorder that afflicted southern Germany during the late sixteenth century.[21] Risking the Rat’s wrath, poor folk from Ulm’s hinterlands and beyond continually drifted into the city seeking work or alms during the lean years of the late sixteenth century, as prices rose and poverty spread. Many of the impoverished migrants who entered Ulm found work and registered with the Bittelmeister, settling down as servants or day laborers. The unlucky, however, were either unable or unwilling to find work and increasingly risked punishment by the local authorities. Throughout the century, many vagrants were apprehended and driven away without formal sentence or record, owing to their low status and the periodic mass round-ups of beggars (usually street urchins) carried out by local authorities. In June 1552, for example, the Rat ordered the Bittlemeister to round up and expel all unemployed outsiders from the city immediately.[22] While these spontaneous expulsions continued throughout the period, after mid century the Ulmer authorities began to deal with particularly troublesome vagrants with a new bureaucratic diligence. Accordingly, Ulm’s meticulous criminal records chronicle the Rat’s efforts to deal with the vagrancy problem through official prosecution. Ulm’s high court handed down 404 formal convictions involving transient offenders during the sixteenth century, 396 of which occurred after mid century (ninety-eight percent).