for living on the country, and for occasional booty, which they could not resign when the enemy had retired. Their countrymen had to work for a second deliverance from their late defenders. In the East the brigand has had a freer scope, and has even founded kingdoms. David’s following in the cave of Adullam was such material as brigands are made of. “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him, and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.” Nadir Shah of Persia began in just such a cave of Adullam, and lived to plunder Delhi with a host of Persians and Afghans.
The conditions which favour the development of brigandage may be easily summed up. They are first bad administration, and then, in a less degree, the possession of convenient hiding-places. A country of mountain and forest is favourable to the brigand. The highlands of Scotland supplied a safe refuge to the “gentlemen reavers,” who carried off the cattle of the Sassenach landlords. The Apennines, the mountains of Calabria, the Sierras of Spain, were the homes of the Italian “banditos” and the Spanish “bandoleros” (banished men) and “salteadores” (raiders). The forests of England gave cover to the outlaws whose very much flattered portrait is to be found in the ballads of Robin Hood. The “maquis,” i.e. the bush of Corsica, and its hills, have helped the Corsican brigand, as the bush of Australia covered the bushranger. But neither forest thicket nor mountain is a lasting protection against a good police, used with intelligence by the government, and supported by the law-abiding part of the community. The great haunts of brigands in Europe have been central and southern Italy and the worst-administered parts of Spain, except those which fell into the hands of the Turks. “Whenever numerous troops of banditti, multiplied by success and impunity, publicly defy, instead of eluding, the justice of their country, we may safely infer that the excessive weakness of the government is felt and abused by the lowest ranks of the community,” is the judgment passed by Gibbon on the disorders of Sicily in the reign of the emperor Gallienus. This weakness has not always been a sign of real feebleness in the government. England was vigorously ruled in the reign of William III., when “a fraternity of plunderers, thirty in number according to the lowest estimate, squatted near Waltham Cross under the shades of Epping Forest, and built themselves huts, from which they sallied forth with sword and pistol to bid passengers stand.” It was not because the state was weak that the Gubbings (so called in contempt from the trimmings and refuse of fish) infested Devonshire for a generation from their headquarters near Brent Tor, on the edge of Dartmoor. It was because England had not provided herself with a competent rural police. In relatively unsettled parts of the United States there has been a considerable amount of a certain kind of brigandage. In early days the travel routes to the far West were infested by highwaymen, who, however, seldom united into bands, and such outlaws, when captured, were often dealt with in an extra-legal manner, e.g. by “vigilance committees.” The Mexican brigand Cortina made incursions into Texas before the Civil War. In Canada the mounted police have kept brigandage down, and in Mexico the “Rurales” have made an end of the brigands. Such curable evils as the highwaymen of England, and their like in the States, are not to be compared with the “Écorcheurs,” or Skinners, of France in the 15th century, or the “Chauffeurs” of the revolutionary epoch. The first were large bands of discharged mercenary soldiers who pillaged the country. The second were ruffians who forced their victims to pay ransom by holding their feet in fires. Both flourished because the government was for the time disorganized by foreign invasion or by revolution. These were far more terrible evils than the licence of criminals, who are encouraged by a fair prospect of impunity because there is no permanent force always at hand to check them, and to bring them promptly to justice. At the same time it would be going much too far to say that the absence of an efficient police is the sole cause of brigandage in countries not subject to foreign invasion, or where the state is not very feeble. The Sicilian peasants of whom Gibbon wrote were not only encouraged by the hope of impunity, but were also maddened by an oppressive system of taxation and a cruel system of land tenure. So were the Gauls and Spaniards who throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries were a constant cause of trouble to the empire, under the name of Bagaudae, a word of uncertain origin. In the years preceding the French Revolution, the royal government commanded the services of a strong army, and a numerous maréchaussée or gendarmerie. Yet it was defied by the troops of smugglers and brigands known as faux saulniers, unauthorized salt-sellers, and gangs of poachers haunted the king’s preserves round Paris. The salt monopoly and the excessive preservation of the game were so oppressive that the peasantry were provoked to violent resistance and to brigandage. They were constantly suppressed, but as the cause of the disorder survived, so its effects were continually renewed. The offenders enjoyed a large measure of public sympathy, and were warned or concealed by the population, even when they were not actively supported. The traditional outlaw who spared the poor and levied tribute on the rich was, no doubt, always a creature of fiction. The ballad which tells us how “Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred, By brave, free-hearted Bliss” (a rascal hanged for highway robbery at Salisbury in 1695) must have been a mere echo of the Robin Hood songs. But there have been times and countries in which the law and its administration have been so far regarded as enemies by people who were not themselves criminals, that all who defied them have been sure of a measure of sympathy. Then and there it was that brigandage has flourished, and has been difficult to extirpate. Schinder-Hannes, Jack the Skinner, whose real name was Johann Buckler, and who was born at Muklen on the Rhine, flourished from 1797 to 1802 because there was no proper police to stop him; it is also true that as he chiefly plundered the Jews he had a good deal of Christian sympathy. When caught and beheaded he had no successors.
The brigandage of Greece, southern Italy, Corsica and Spain had deeper roots, and has never been quite suppressed. All four countries are well provided with hiding-places in forest and mountain. In all the administration has been bad, the law and its officers have been regarded as dangers, if not as deliberate enemies, so that they have found little native help, and, what is not the least important cause of the persistence of brigandage, there have generally been local potentates who found it to their interest to protect the brigand. The case of Greece under Turkish rule need not be dealt with. Whoever was not a klepht was the victim of some official extortioner. It would be grossly unfair to apply the name brigand to the Mainotes and similar clans, who had to choose between being flayed by the Turks or living by the sword under their own law. When it became independent Greece was extremely ill administered under a nominal parliamentary government by politicians who made use of the brigands for their own purposes. The result was the state of things described with only pardonable exaggeration in Edmond About’s amusing Roi de la montagne. An authentic and most interesting picture of the Greek brigands will be found in the story of the captivity of S. Soteropoulos, an ex-minister who fell into their hands. It was translated into English under the title of The Brigands of the Morea, by the Rev. J. O. Bagdon (London, 1868). The misfortunes of Soteropoulos led to the adoption of strong measures which cleared the Morea, where the peasantry gave active support to the troops when they saw that the government was in earnest. But brigandage was not yet extinct in Greece. In 1870 an English party, consisting of Lord and Lady Muncaster, Mr Vyner, Mr Lloyd, Mr Herbert, and Count de Boyl, was captured at Oropos, near Marathon, and a ransom of £25,000 was demanded. Lord and Lady Muncaster were set at liberty to seek for the ransom, but the Greek government sent troops in pursuit of the brigands, and the other prisoners were then murdered. The scoundrels were hunted down, caught, and executed, and Greece has since then been tolerably free from this reproach. In the Balkan peninsula, under Turkish rule, brigandage continued to exist in connexion
