Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany

Strangers and Misfits

Studies in Central European Histories Edited by

Thomas A. Brady, Jr., University of California, Berkeley Roger Chickering, Georgetown University Editorial Board

Steven Beller, Washington, D.C. Atina Grossmann, Columbia University Peter Hayes, Northwestern University Susan Karant-Nunn, University of Arizona Mary Lindemann, University of Miami David M. Luebke, University of Oregon H.C. Erik Midelfort, University of Virginia David Sabean, University of California, Los Angeles Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri Jan de Vries, University of California, Berkeley

VOLUME XLVII

Strangers and Misfits Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany

By

Jason P. Coy

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

Cover illustration: Marginalia from Anna Schumacherin verdict, StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 89 (1603). This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coy, Jason P. Strangers and misfits : banishment, social control, and authority in early modern Germany / By Jason P. Coy. p. cm. — (Studies in Central European histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16174-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Ulm (Germany)—History— 16th century. 2. Exile (Punishment)—Germany—Ulm—16th century. 3. Ulm (Germany)—Social conditions—16th century. I. Title. DD901.U4C68 2008 303.3’30943473—dc22 2008026942

ISSN 1547-1217 ISBN 978 90 04 16174 0 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Koninklijke Brill NV has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Amy

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................... List of Figures .............................................................................

ix xi

Introduction. Banishment and Social Control in Early Modern Germany ...................................................................

1

Chapter One. Banishment and Authority in SixteenthCentury Ulm ........................................................................... The Banishment of Rosina Schemerin ................................. Political Authority and Law Enforcement in Ulm ................ Banishment Practices: Prosecution and Purgation ................

11 11 15 24

Chapter Two. Vagrancy and Banishment ............................... The Banishment of Michel Maürer ...................................... Vagrancy Legislation and Urban Community ...................... Banishment and the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance ..................... Public Expulsion and Sociospatial Boundaries ......................

31 31 33 36 52

Chapter Three. Resident Aliens, Expulsion, and Exclusion ... The Banishment of Cathrina Mair ....................................... The Migrants’ Ordinance and the Regulation of Resident Aliens ................................................................................... Expulsion and Exclusion ........................................................ Property and Purity: The Banishment of Resident Aliens ...

57 57

Chapter Four. Moral Reform and the Banishment of Citizens .................................................................................... The Banishment of the Haüser Brothers .............................. Moral Reform and Social Control: The Church Ordinance of 1531/1581 ................................................... Banishment and Bürgerrecht: The Banishment of Citizens ..... Negotiation, Resistance, and Appeal .....................................

58 62 74 79 79 82 88 97

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Chapter Five. Public Expulsion Rituals and Early Modern Authority ................................................................................. The Ritual Expulsion of Simon Schlögel .............................. Displacement and Discipline: Banishment and Horizontal Social Control in Ulm ........................................................ The Therapeutic Role of Purgation ...................................... ‘An Image and Example’: Banishment, Public Penal Displays, and Political Authority ........................................

124

Conclusion ..................................................................................

137

Bibliography ................................................................................ Index ...........................................................................................

141 153

113 113 114 122

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My interest in banishment, and its role in supporting the exercise of authority, stems from the earliest days of my archival research on law enforcement in early modern Ulm. The first primary source that I consulted in the city’s municipal archives was a record of punishment verdicts, a large, leather-bound tome with a brass buckle that had the title Strafbuch 10 embossed on the cover. As I read through the hundreds of terse verdicts from the 1580s and 90s scrawled in dark ink on its yellowed parchment pages, I was struck at once by the frequency of banishment. Likewise, the wide range of crimes that merited judicial expulsion and the diverse sorts of suspects—men and women, vagrants and goldsmiths—that suffered banishment caught my attention. In the years that followed, as I pursued this topic by studying banishment practices in Ulm and elsewhere, I relied upon the generous assistance of many scholars and institutions. Above all, I benefited from the guidance and support of my dissertation advisor at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Sabean, who provided an inspiring model of teaching and scholarship. At UCLA, my work also profited greatly from the comments of the other members of my dissertation committee, Geoffrey Symcox and Stephen Frank, and the many participants in the History Department’s European Colloquium, a scholarly community that was at once collegial and rigorous and that provided me with a stimulating example of fruitful academic discourse. For their encouragement and their insightful commentary on the papers I presented in this colloquium, I would like to thank especially Lynn Hunt, Muriel McClendon, Kathryn Norberg, Gabi Piterberg, Hans Reill, and Teo Ruiz. Many other scholars have helped nurture this project and have provided invaluable suggestions for my research in conferences, colloquia, and conversations. I would especially like to thank Tom Brady, Robert Davis, Mary Lindemann, David Luebke, Terence McIntosh, Hans Medick, and Tom Robisheaux for their advice and encouragement. Several of my colleagues at the College of Charleston have also provided useful suggestions for revisions in the final stages of this project, including Rich Bodek, Tim Coates, and Bill Olejniczak.

x

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This study also owes a substantial debt to a variety of institutions that have provided resources and financial support. The director and staff of the Stadtarchiv Ulm offered access to the city’s archival records and cheerful assistance during many research visits. The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst furnished generous financial support in the form of an annual research grant. Research funds were also supplied by the University of California, Los Angeles, the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the College of Charleston. Finally, generous permission to use copyrighted material included in this work has been granted by archivists and editors on both sides of the Atlantic. The Stadtarchiv Ulm graciously allowed the reproduction of the images included in this work, all of which are from their collections. The editors of the Sixteenth Century Journal permitted the inclusion of material included in Chapter Two that will appear in the Sixteenth Century Journal 39 (2008) as “Beggars at the Gates: Vagrancy and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Ulm.” Finally, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing allowed the use of material in Chapter Three that appeared in the Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 20, no. 3 (Fall 2007) under the title “Earn your Penny Elsewhere: Banishment and Sociospatial Exclusion in Early Modern Germany.”

LIST OF FIGURES Cover. Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Fig. 3. Fig. 4. Fig. 5.

Marginalia from Anna Schumacherin verdict (1603) ............................................................................ Marginalia from Schemerin verdict (1597) .................. Woodcut of Ulm with gates and guardhouses (1570) ............................................................................ Marginalia from Keüblerin verdict (1593) ................... Marginalia from Alexi Schneider verdict [detail ] (1598) ............................................................................ Marginalia from Alexi Schneider verdict (1598) .........

000 13 42 48 78 131

INTRODUCTION

BANISHMENT AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY In 1491 the town council in Ulm, a prominent free imperial city in southern Germany, complained that, “many strangers and useless people linger here in Ulm, who should be outside the city rather than inside.”1 These concerns augured a campaign to rid the magistrates’ domain of undesirables, and in the course of the sixteenth century, the impulse to cleanse the town of miscreants led to the banishment of over 1,000 convicts. Banishment, a sanction involving the physical removal of criminals from a territory, is among the most basic of punishments and has been prevalent in societies throughout the world since ancient times.2 While most scholars of early modern jurisprudence have neglected banishment, the official expulsion of criminals and outsiders by central authorities was commonplace throughout Europe in the late medieval and early modern periods.3 Before the advent of See Stadtarchiv Ulm (Hereafter StAU) A 3669, fol. 101 (1491). For concise treatment of the historical development of banishment, see Terence D. Miethe and Hong Lu, Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 30–31. For the purposes of this study, the term banishment refers to official, recorded expulsion from a city and/or territory by magistrates or judges. The official sentences handed down by Ulm’s high court operated in tandem with unofficial, unrecorded correction by the council’s agents and horizontal, extrajudicial social controls exercised within the town’s households and neighborhoods. 3 Law enforcement and social control efforts in early modern Germany have attracted widespread scholarly interest, but banishment has remained peripheral to these discussions. In his pioneering examination of early modern criminal justice, Richard van Dülmen, for example, deals only cursorily with banishment. See van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 45–47. Similarly, in his exhaustive study of law enforcement in early modern Cologne, Gerd Schwerhoff devotes only a handful of pages to banishment, although he asserts its importance to early modern jurisprudence. See Gerd Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör: Kriminalität, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), pp. 148–53. Andreas Blauert also describes banishment practices in the course of his study of parole oaths in the German Southwest, but expulsion is not central to his study: Andreas Blauert, Das Urfehdewesen im deutschen Südwesten im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica, 2000). Ernst Schubert, on the other hand, analyzes banishment practices in some detail, but downplays the impact of expulsion before the seventeenth century, since it was reserved for serious crimes. As we shall 1 2

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penitentiaries and workhouses, magistrates relied heavily upon expulsion and cast thousands of convicts onto the roads in the name of order and decency. Cities in early modern Germany proved typical in this regard. Municipal authorities in Frankfurt, for example, banished 859 offenders between 1562 and 1696.4 Similarly, the magistrates in sixteenth-century Augsburg also made use of banishment, expelling 274 offenders between 1511 and 1520 and another 555 in the decade 1533–1542.5 Banishment was also among the most prevalent penalties handed down in early modern Cologne, and the authorities there banished 376 offenders in the period 1575–1588.6 This study examines how rulers in early modern Europe used banishment to punish and purge deviants and outsiders, as well as how these convicts—vagrants, laborers, and citizens alike—reacted to their expulsion, through an analysis of judicial expulsion practices in sixteenth-century Ulm. Investigation of banishment sentencing in one south German imperial city elucidates the operation of official expulsion, shedding light on the shared nature of civic norms, the purgation of offenders who failed to conform to these communal mores, and the role of expulsion rituals in early modern power relations. The local magistrates, like authorities throughout Europe, could not simply impose their will upon their subjects, owing to material constraints and customary restrictions on official law enforcement.7 Unable to rely solely upon see, this characterization does not hold for Ulm. See Ernst Schubert, “Mobilität ohne Chance: die Ausgrenzung des fahrenden Leute,” in Winfried Schulze, ed., Ständische Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität (München: Oldenbourg, 1988), pp. 155–56. Recently, however, a pair of articles on early modern Augsburg—one in German and one in English—has taken a serious look at banishment. See Carl A. Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis als Sanktionensmittel in der Reichsstadt Augsburg zu Beginn der Neuzeit,” in Hans Schlosser and Dietmar Willoweit, eds., Neue Wege strafrechtsgeschichtlicher Forschung: Konflikt, Verbrechen und Sanktionen in der Gesellschaft Alteuropas, Symposium und Synthesen (Köln: Böhlau, 1999), pp. 193–237 and J. Jeffery Tyler, “Refugees and Reform: Banishment and Exile in Early Modern Augsburg,” in Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow, eds., Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History: Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his 70th Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 77–97. According to Tyler, who views banishment as an expression of the “social and religious values” of the community and a means of preserving “civic order and godly community,” 701 banishment convictions survive in Augsburg’s criminal archives from the period 1564–1650. 4 See van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror, p. 139. 5 Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis,” pp. 204–5. 6 Schwerhoff, Köln im Kreuzverhör, pp. 148–53. 7 For the constraints facing late medieval and early modern urban magistrates in Germany in their law enforcement activities, and particularly the importance of gaining consensus and respecting communal traditions, see Gerhard Dilcher, “Gewalt, Friede

banishment and social control in early modern germany

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coercion, the council used expulsion to rid the community of particularly troublesome offenders, using the public rituals that often accompanied banishment to display civic norms, the boundaries of inclusion within the community, and the power of central authority. The use of banishment to rid society of deviants and outsiders culminated in the late sixteenth century, but as the 1491 mandate that opened this study suggests, these efforts had their origins in the late Middle Ages, as a wave of administrative reform swept Germany.8 While scholars have long viewed the Reformation as a watershed in the transition to a modern, secular, rational society, recent studies have undermined this modernization narrative and accentuate instead the striking continuities between late medieval and early modern developments.9 The examination of banishment practices provided in this study supports this view, revealing the medieval origins of the exclusionary und Recht—in der mittelalterlichen Stadt und außerhalb,” in Franz Dorn and Jan Schröder, eds., Festschrift für Gerd Kleinheyer zum 70. Geburtstag (Heidelberg: C.F. Müller, 2001), pp. 95–106. 8 Bernd Moeller examines efforts of the citizenry in Southwest German cities during the late Middle Ages to “perfect and consolidate the spiritual and moral life of the . . . community” and to uphold “as their ideal a civitas christiana, or holy city” through civic legislation. See Moeller’s classic study, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1982), pp. 92–93. Moeller also accentuates the involvement of the urban guilds in these efforts, arguing that alongside economic concerns these corporations sought to promote the spiritual well being of their members and the “civic community” at large. See Imperial Cities, pp. 47–49. Peter Moraw has provided perhaps the most thorough examination of the gradual administrative consolidation, or Verdichtung, that occurred in the Holy Roman Empire in the late Middle Ages and intensified after 1470. For Moraw, the 1470s and 80s were a dynamic period of economic recovery, technological innovation, ecclesiastical and political reform, and an emerging political dualism between Emperor and territorial and urban rulers that set the stage for later developments. See Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter, 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1985). For the role of the cities in these developments, see Moraw’s, “Cities and Citizenry as Factors of State Formation in the Roman-German Empire of the Late Middle Ages,” Theory and Society 18:5 (1989): 631–62. 9 Beginning with nineteenth-century historians and sociologists, including Leopold von Ranke and Max Weber, scholars have viewed the Reformation in teleological terms, as a milestone in the development of a rational, secular, civil society. Recently, however, this view has been challenged by scholars who accentuate either the medieval origins of the upheavals associated with the Reformation or the continuing premodern elements of Reformation-era society and thought, viewing it as part of a distinct “early modern period” bridging the Middle Ages and the modern period. See, for example, the work of Bob Scribner, collected in the volume, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400 –1800), edited by Lyndal Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2001). For a lucid examination of the historiographical legacy of the Reformation, see Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “The Protestant Reformation in German History,” German Historical Institute Occasional Papers 22 (Washington DC, 1997), pp. 9–34. See also Mack P. Holt, “The Social History of

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impulses and ambitious disciplinary efforts that fueled banishment prosecution in the wake of the Reformation. Analysis of banishment prosecution also sheds new light on early modern social control initiatives, efforts to discipline society through increasingly vigorous and intrusive law enforcement. Attempts by central authorities throughout Europe to define criminality and deviance, codify social norms, and police behavior have attracted intense scholarly interest in recent decades, often centered on the formation of the modern bureaucratic state. Two paradigms, both influenced by Max Weber’s theories regarding state formation and modernization, have dominated the scholarship on disciplinary initiatives in the Empire. The first, Gerhard Oestreich’s concept of social disciplining, views the imposition of coercive discipline by rulers, and the inculcation of standards of obedience among subjects, as driving forces in state building and social change during the early modern period.10 The second, the confessionalization model, introduced by Walter Zeeden in the late 1960s and subsequently expanded by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, accentuates the combined efforts of state and church in enforcing religious conformity and social control. According to adherents of this model, these efforts gradually led to the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state.11

the Reformation: Recent Trends and Future Agendas,” Journal of Scoial History 37:1 (2003): 133–44. 10 See Gerhard Oestreich’s macrohistorical study of the absolutist state, “Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus,” in Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1969). Works that approach the problem of social control from a perspective in line with Oestreich’s largely top-down model include Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600 –1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) and R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1989). For a lucid discussion of the “Social Discipline” paradigm, see Winfried Schulze, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff Sozialdisziplinierung in der frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 14 (1987), pp. 265–302. 11 The confessionalization model has proven exceptionally influential, particularly in Germanophone scholarship. For seminal works, see Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1965), Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1981), and Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52. See also Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383–404.

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Studies based upon these models—social disciplining and confessionalization—dominated the study of early modern social control efforts for decades, but recently such “top down” explanations have given ground to new interpretations. Increasingly, historians have focused instead on the limitations of state authority: how official regulation reflected popular behavioral norms; how political elites relied upon the cooperation of their subjects in implementing regulatory activities; and how the objects of disciplinary efforts resisted official control.12 Recent studies by innovative German historians, including Andreas Blauert, Gerd Schwerhoff, and Martin Dinges, present early modern social control as a shared enterprise between rulers and subjects, rather than a concerted effort by magistrates to “civilize” unruly subjects or impose “modern” behavioral standards on a benighted populace.13 The analysis of banishment prosecution contributes to this trend in the scholarship, providing clear evidence of the role of negotiation in early modern social control initiatives. The surviving banishment convictions provide ample evidence of such negotiation, expressed in the formulation of official legislation, the participation of the citizenry in law enforcement, and the resistance of defiant convicts. Throughout early modern Europe, townsfolk and villagers, beset by the tumults of the period, turned to customary authorities and traditional norms to provide order and 12 For the limitations of early modern central authority and the role of negotiation in power relations, see David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in early modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Bob Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation: from Sacramental World to Moralised Universe,” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and Bob Scribner, eds., Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), pp. 87–88, Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 14, 104–106, and Martin Dinges, “Justiznutzungen als soziale Kontrolle in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff, Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000). 13 See Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Mit den Waffen der Justiz: zur Kriminalitätsgeschichte des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993) and Kriminalitätsgeschichte: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der Vormoderne (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2000), and also, for a similar perspective, Martin Dinges, “Frühneuzeitliche Armenfürsorge als Sozialdisziplinierung? Probleme mit einem Konzept,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 17 (1991): 5–29. See also Stefan Brakensiek, “Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa: Pratiken lokaler Justiz, Politik und Verwaltung im internationalen Vergleich,” in Stefan Brakensiek and Heide Wunder, eds., Ergebene Diener ihrer Herren? Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005), pp. 1–21, for the role of popular cooperation in the exercise of authority in early modern Europe.

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security and actively supported official disciplinary efforts. This examination of banishment sentencing in sixteenth-century Ulm elucidates these elements of early modern law enforcement, showing the extent to which early modern authorities relied on the cooperation of their subjects in disciplinary initiatives. Concomitantly, it demonstrates that official social control did not represent the imposition of alien norms dictated from above by elites. On the contrary, early modern disciplinary initiatives were conservative, based upon medieval civic legislation with its origins in the guilds. While this traditional agenda was advanced through the cooperation of large segments of the populace, stubborn resistance offered by intractable offenders hampered official social control efforts, forcing authorities to rely upon negotiation. As we shall see, the actions of early modern magistrates were informed by the norms and expectations of their subjects just as surely as official coercion bounded the actions of these very subjects. Banishment practices also offer a fascinating glimpse into the religious and ideological currents that sparked and sustained early modern disciplinary efforts, issues that have also figured prominently in recent scholarship. Peter Blickle’s vision of the “communal” nature of Reformation-era social life, for example, has been particularly influential in understanding power relations in the Empire during the sixteenth century. According to Blickle, early modern subjects and rulers understood politics in terms of a communal ideal marked by widespread political participation, legal equality, and consensus.14 Recently, however, scholars have questioned this normative picture of early modern political life, using archival sources to demonstrate the prominence of contestation and competition within German communities. Recent studies of early modern social control initiatives suggest that popular support for reform often manifested itself not only in terms of communal cooperation and the common good, but also in support for rigid order and official repression. Thus, the appeal that religious reform held for subjects often centered on paternal authority, realized in support for magistrates’ 14 Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, translated by Thomas Dunlap (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992). This seminal work was originally published in German in 1985 under the title Gemeindereformation. Die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1985). See also Moeller’s Imperial Cities, pp. 42–46, 88–89, which traces the medieval origins of this “communal spirit” in German cities.

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attempts to create a godly community of stable, patriarchal households through the rigorous maintenance of Christian morality, efforts that galvanized support for the Reformation.15 These broad-based efforts to reorder society in the wake of the Reformation, undertaken by Protestant and Catholic rulers alike, were based upon a conception of society as a “Gemeinschaft,” meaning a community imagined in terms of a strict division between the enfranchised (nativeborn citizens and resident aliens) and the disenfranchised (marginal aliens, criminals, and deviants).16 Consequently, excluding outsiders from the community was crucial for both the expression of communal norms and the experience of cohesion. Efforts to expel convicts through banishment provide new insights into the role of exclusion in post-Reformation communities, demonstrating that the creation of the godly city was based not only upon disciplining citizens, but also upon purging deviants and outsiders. Banishment provided one of the most important means by which early modern authorities sought to regulate and remake society, efforts driven by traditional communal values. After mid century, banishment allowed Ulm’s patrician magistrates to begin constructing the evangelical community that the city’s craftsmen had sought since the late Middle Ages. Thus, the attempts of early modern authorities like Ulm’s town council to reorder society were based upon late medieval civic norms and rested on purgation as well as regulation. Analysis of banishment also clarifies the role of law enforcement, particularly the public application of punishment, in early modern state

15 For an insightful discussion of this scholarship, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 147–52. See also Roper’s Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), a seminal work that examines disciplinary initiatives in Augsburg in light of early modern gender relations. For concise treatment of Reformation-era discipline and its focus on the patriarchal household, see also R. Po-Chia Hsia, “The Structure of Belief: Confessionalism and Society, 1500–1600,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1450–1630 (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 355–77. 16 For lucid treatment of this “Gemeinschaft” ideology, see Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 225. See also Christopher R. Friedrichs, “German Social Structure, 1300–1600,” in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, pp. 238–47, for a discussion of early modern German cities, which examines the “most fundamental aspect of every city’s social structure: the division of its inhabitants into citizens and non-citizens.”

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formation. Since the appearance of Michel Foucault’s provocative work, Discipline and Punish, scholars concerned with the rise of the state have viewed penal rituals as instrumental to the application of authority.17 While scholars agree that public penal displays were central to early modern law enforcement, most have focused exclusively on executions. Like capital punishment, authorities often carried out banishment prosecution in public and included a profusion of formulaic, ritualized elements. Public expulsions, like hangings or beheadings, were elaborate performances intended to display communal norms as well as power relations. Examination of banishment practices in sixteenth-century Ulm demonstrates the place of these ritual elements in local disciplinary efforts, and also in the consolidation of a more oligarchic, more autocratic sort of political authority in the territory after mid century.18 As we shall see, the local magistrates relied upon the rituals that accompanied public expulsion to define and demonstrate their authority to regulate inclusion in the territory and to provide good discipline and order. The elaborate public performances that surrounded banishment allowed sixteenth-century rulers to display civic order and traditional authority amid unsettling change and disruption. Given banishment’s function in the display of power, its importance in official efforts to reorder society, and its role in policing inclusion in early modern communities, it is not surprising that it was so prominent in early modern law enforcement. During the turbulent decades after the Reformation, magistrates used rigorous new surveillance procedures and vigorous official prosecution in an attempt to punish and control criminals and deviants more effectively. Banishment was central to law enforcement and the maintenance of the boundary between the enfranchised and the excluded in societies throughout early modern Europe. In sixteenth-century Ulm, the town council used banishment in an attempt to expel and exclude aliens and deviants from the urban community, using purgation to define and defend the social and spatial 17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). This influential work was first published in 1975 in French under the title, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 18 For insightful examination of the increasingly “oligarchic” nature of power relations in south German cities after 1550, see Eberhard Naujoks, ed., Kaiser Karl V. und die Zunftverfassung: Ausgewählte Aktenstücke zu den Verfassungsänderungen in den oberdeutschen Reichsstädten (1547–1556) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1985).

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boundaries of their domain. Examining banishment practices, including the offenses that prompted expulsion, the sort of offenders who were expelled, and how these offenders reacted, elucidates how this punishment furthered the council’s attempts to construct a godly community in line with their subjects’ notions of order and morality amid unsettled times. Thus, expulsion served to display the limits of acceptable behavior and to relegate undesirables from the ordered urban community. Banishment provides a striking illustration of the aims, effects, and limitations of early modern social control efforts, and demonstrates that these efforts were not aimed exclusively at inculcating and enforcing Christian morality, but also at consolidating political authority. The authorities in Ulm increasingly relied on banishment in the second half of the sixteenth century, using purgation to rid the community of criminals and aliens. Chapter One examines these efforts, providing an analysis of law enforcement and banishment practices in sixteenthcentury Ulm and the links between banishment and political authority. As this investigation demonstrates, banishment affected different sorts of convicts, ranging from vagabonds to migrant workers to citizens, differently. Accordingly, the next three chapters examine the authorities’ efforts to use banishment to punish and control these various types of offenders and the attempts of these convicts to resist the magistrate’s disciplinary efforts. Offenders identified as vagrants faced categorical—and often public—expulsion from the territory. The town council’s attempts to purge the territory of the alien poor through banishment, and the efforts of vagrants to subvert these disciplinary activities, are the subject of Chapter Two. The magistrates’ efforts to protect the sanctity and the solvency of the territory by expelling unwanted resident aliens, migrant laborers convicted of criminal conduct or deemed to be a potential drain on civic poor relief, are examined in Chapter Three. Here official efforts to rid the city of female migrant workers convicted of adultery, verdicts that reveal the centrality of both morality and money on expulsion practices, will take center stage. Chapter Four examines the Ulmer authorities’ attempts to control wayward citizens through banishment, disciplining the deviant and the disorderly by expelling them, often temporarily, from the territory. Reformation-era morality, the impact of persistent recidivism, and the effects of supplication on early modern social control efforts will all prove central to this examination. Chapter Five provides an analysis of the council’s reliance on public banishment rituals to display the boundary between inclusion

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and exclusion in the urban community, the margin between acceptable and deviant behavior, and the growing divide between rulers and subjects. Finally, the conclusion places Ulm’s experience in its broader historical context, investigating the significance of banishment in early modern European society.

CHAPTER ONE

BANISHMENT AND AUTHORITY IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ULM The Banishment of Rosina Schemerin On August 12, 1597 the hangman in Ulm brought a bound prisoner named Rosina Schemerin to the town’s pillory for sentencing. As he delivered Schemerin from the tower prison to the pillory, the bells atop the adjacent town hall (Rathaus) tolled, drawing a crowd of onlookers to witness her punishment. The local magistrates, members of the town council (Ulmer Rat), reached their verdicts behind the closed doors of their council chambers and before punishing convicts they were careful to stage a formal sentencing ceremony where the town scribe read out a description of the convict’s heinous offenses and unrepentant nature. In Schemerin’s case the scribe related a long narrative of crime and defiance in order to elicit the support of the townsfolk for the verdict. Schemerin, the daughter of a local burgher, had first run afoul of the Ulmer authorities in March 1588, when she was arrested for “breaking into a saddler’s house in broad daylight, during the morning sermon, and stealing several pieces of cloth.” While theft was a capital offense in Ulm, the local authorities rarely hanged first-time offenders. Schemerin’s punishment was severe, however, and the magistrates had banished her from the territory, compelling her to “swear an oath that she would leave the city and the territory (Herrschaft), and stay two miles away from its borders, and that unless she was granted mercy, she would never return again.” Expelled from her native city, Schemerin was stripped of citizenship (Bürgerrecht), and joined the masses of disenfranchised vagrants struggling to survive on Germany’s roads. Consequently, it did not take long for her to end up in the tower again, and in July 1589 she was jailed for theft. This time the magistrates strengthened their case against her by writing to authorities in nearby towns regarding her criminal activities outside the territory. The town council’s minutes from 1589 record that since her expulsion from Ulm the previous year, Schemerin had been charged with theft and whipped out of Kaufbeuren and had been expelled from Memmingen after having her ears cut off as

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a reminder not to return. The Ulmer authorities proved more reluctant to use violence than the magistrates in Kaufbeuren and Memmingen and simply re-banished Schemerin, ordering her to “swear that she will go across the Rhine, without staying another night in the territory, and that she will not cross it again for the rest of her life, unless granted a full pardon.” Before expelling her, the authorities warned her that if she returned again she would risk “life and limb.” Schemerin disregarded even this dire warning, however, landing her at the pillory again eight years later, in August 1597, charged with several petty thefts. According to the official sentence read out by the council’s scribe, this time—at the very least her fifth arrest in nine years—the frustrated Ulmer authorities used force in an attempt to impel her to heed their verdicts. Before her sentencing, Schemerin was forced to renew her oath to remain across the Rhine for life and ordered to depart that very day (this time the authorities dropped the formulaic clause regarding the possibility of a pardon). Furthermore, the council decreed that, “after the sounding of the customary bells, the executioner is to bind the prisoner in the tower and bring her to the town hall for sentencing.” As Schemerin stood below, exposed at the pillory in the town’s busy marketplace, the council’s scribe read out the official verdict from the town hall’s balcony and detailed her crimes and her unrepentant nature for the crowd. After the proclamation of her sentence was complete, the executioner carried out the council’s sentence, subjecting her to the humiliating public punishment ritual known as “ußhauen”. After slicing off what remained of her ears, he whipped her through Ulm’s winding streets as his assistant struck a pair of cymbals to call the attention of the local populace. Using a bundle of birch rods, the hangman drove Schemerin at a run through the winding streets of the town and out the Frauenthor gate on the northern outskirts of town, reminding her never to return to the territory or else she would suffer an even worse fate. These grisly events are depicted in a sketch in the marginalia of the council’s verdict. The image presents Schemerin, stripped to the waist and crying, being beaten through the streets of the city by the executioner (Figure 1).1

1 This account is based upon Schemerin’s record in the Urgichtbuch: See StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 44–5 (Friday, 12 August 1597). This record appears in a slightly different form in the Ratsprotokolle, StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 47, fol. 342 (same date). Schemerin is also mentioned in StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 40, fol. 19b (Monday, 6 March 1588), StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 40, fol. 560, 563, 564b

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Fig. 1. Marginalia from Schemerin verdict, StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 44 (1597).

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The experiences of Rosina Schemerin at the hands of the Ulmer authorities provide important insights into the role of banishment in official attempts to establish order and regulate deviant behavior in early modern society. While Ulm’s magistrates had relied upon banishment to punish lawbreakers since the Middle Ages, after 1550 they began to deal with criminality and deviance with a new severity, posting mandates and decrees, eliciting denunciations and accusations, arresting and questioning suspects, and handing down and recording verdicts with exceptional vigor. Almost ninety-four percent of the total sentences handed down, carried out, and recorded by the local authorities during the sixteenth century date from after 1550.2 Along with sporadic banishment before mid century, these efforts resulted in a dramatic surge in expulsion, and the high court handed down official banishment sentences to 1,033 offenders in the course of the sixteenth century. Thus, over forty percent of the 2,531 offenders sentenced by Ulm’s town council during this period suffered banishment, and by the end of the century banishment had become the magistrates’ principal means of dealing with convicts.3 By stepping up their efforts to rid their domain of criminals and undesirables by expelling them from the territory, Ulm’s magistrates sought to reorder the urban commune through purgation. The town council used banishment to discipline and exclude penniless vagrants, disenfranchised servants, and wayward citizens, and these sentences

(Monday, 23 June 1589), and StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 126 (Wednesday, 2 July 1589). The appearance of similar marginalia sketches in the criminal records of early modern Cologne is documented in Franz Irsigler and Arnold Lassotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker: Randgruppen und Außenseiter in Köln, 1300–1600 (Köln: Greven Verlag, 1984), pp. 257, 260. 2 The increase in formal prosecution after 1550 is even more impressive in light of the fact that Ulm’s urban population was most likely contracting by the 1590s, the peak decade of sentencing. Reliable population figures from sixteenth-century Ulm do not survive, but according to recent estimates, Ulm had between 9,200 and 11,300 urban residents around 1550, and the city’s 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. See Annemarie Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein in der frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaft: Gesunde und Kranke in den Reichsstädten Überlingen und Ulm, 1500 –1700 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1995). There are no figures for Ulm’s rural population, but the inhabitants of the city’s extensive territory probably outnumbered the urban inhabitants by a ratio of at least two to one. 3 All conviction statistics presented in this study are drawn from a comprehensive database of all official criminal convictions handed down and recorded by Ulm’s high court during the sixteenth century that includes 2,782 convictions (but 2,531 offenders, given recidivism).

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serve as a vivid illustration of the shifting nature of local power relations, the crucial intersections between official disciplinary efforts and customary behavioral norms, and the role of social control initiatives in displaying and preserving the urban social order. Banishment was a flexible punishment that allowed a space for negotiation between authorities, offenders, and the local populace, negotiation expressed through the official enforcement of traditional behavioral norms, the denunciation of offenders who could not be controlled through unofficial social controls, and the ameliorating effects of the appellate process. Using banishment, the council sought to punish and control miscreants and deviants in an attempt to realize the late medieval dream of an orderly, disciplined community purged of the godless and the alien. Political Authority and Law Enforcement in Ulm The sixteenth century was a turbulent time for the cities of southern Germany, and after mid century the territory endured worsening political disruption and economic dislocation amid devastating outbreaks of warfare, famine, and disease. At the close of the fifteenth century, Ulm was a free imperial city and a prosperous commercial center, rich from textile manufacture. Ulmer fustian (a cloth woven from cotton and linen) was famous throughout Europe, and an extensive network of trade routes connected Ulm with farflung markets. Merchants from Ulm carried goods to northern Italy by way of Biberach or Kempten, to France by way of Strasbourg, and to Spain via Geneva and Lyons. Local wares also traveled to the Netherlands through Speyer, and to northern Germany by way of Esslingen and Frankfurt. Finally, Ulmer goods reached the Balkans via Augsburg or Regensburg or through Vienna by way of the Danube, which was navigable below Ulm using flat-bottomed riverboats.4 At the start of the sixteenth century, an impressive array of fortified walls protected the city’s interior, an urban landscape marked by narrow streets crowded with high-gabled houses. The prosperity of the local citizenry was manifest in their magnificent 4 For an excellent description of the situation in Ulm on the eve of the Reformation, see Gottfried Geiger, Die Reichsstadt Ulm vor der Reformation: Städtisches und kirchliches Leben am Ausgang des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971). For Ulm’s trade routes, see Gerhard Gänßlen, Die Ratsadvokaten und Ratskonsulenten der Reichsstadt Ulm inbesondere ihr Wirken in den Bürgerprozessen am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Köln: Ärzte Verlag, 1966), pp. 15–16.

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cathedral, the Münster, begun in 1377, shortly after the Ulmers had purchased the right to elect their own pastors from the Bishop of Constance. The notion of the community (Gemeinschaft) determined the local social hierarchy, and the most basic social distinction was the stark division of the city’s inhabitants—numbering around 17,000 in 1500—between those who had inherited or purchased citizenship and those who had not. The local citizenry was in turn composed of a small circle of wealthy patrician families on the one hand and dozens of families of honorable merchants and craftsmen on the other. Ulm’s tradesmen were further grouped into hundreds of craft households, rich and poor, attached to the city’s seventeen powerful guilds. These guilds themselves were not equal in size or importance and ranged from the wealthy merchant and goldsmith associations to the poorer guilds representing the interests of the shoemakers and the weavers. Resident aliens (Beywoner), who resided in the town at the pleasure of the local authorities, worked mostly as domestic servants or laborers in Ulm’s households and workshops. Not every Ulmer lived within the walls of the city, however, and along with the revenues from cloth manufacture and commerce, the city’s extensive holdings in the countryside provided lucrative tolls, tariffs, and taxes. The territory controlled by the city was among the most extensive of any sixteenth-century imperial city (Reichsstadt) and included over fifty villages and a trio of small towns: Geislingen, Langenau, and Leipheim. The inhabitants of these settlements, known as Landleute, were subjects of the town council and probably outnumbered the urban population by almost two to one.5 Throughout the Middle Ages, a struggle between Ulm’s powerful craft guilds and a clique of patrician families for control over municipal government dominated the local political situation. In 1397, a compromise constitution—known as the Grosse Schwörbrief—ended this deadlock by giving a majority of seats on the council to representatives of Ulm’s seventeen guilds. While Ulm’s guilds held thirty of the forty seats on the council, the patricians retained a foothold with ten 5 For the administration of the communities of the Ulmer territory during the sixteenth century, see Eberhard Naujoks, “Stadverfassung und Ulmer Land in Zeitalter der Reformation,” in Ulm und Oberschwaben: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kunst 34 (1955), pp. 102–19. The management of such urban territories by early modern imperial cities is examined by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., in Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 12–13. As Brady points out, Ulm had the largest territory of any south German free city, encompassing three subject towns and fifty-five villages.

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seats and a few of the more powerful patrician families exerted a considerable influence over municipal government, owing to their wealth and connections within the Church and in wider political circles.6 The guilds dominated local politics during the early sixteenth century, however, directing diplomacy, collecting hearth and excise taxes, and administering local justice. The guilds also controlled Ulm’s economic policy, managing textile production in the territory, the engine of the local economy. By the early sixteenth century, the local textile market was quite volatile, since traditional, guild-based production of fustian could no longer keep up with demand and newer putting-out arrangements had begun to spring up in the countryside. To the consternation of the local weavers’ guild, the council permitted these rural weavers (Gauweber) to bring their merchandise to the city cloth market, breaking the guild monopoly on cloth production and filling municipal coffers with tax revenues.7 The Reformation came rather slowly to the Ulmer territory, and it was not until the early 1520s that local humanists began to petition the council, urging the introduction of evangelical preaching.8 As calls for Protestant preaching increased, the city fathers found themselves caught between the wishes of the local townsfolk and their duties to support imperial policy and the Catholic establishment. Fearing the political repercussions of allowing Protestant worship in their domain, the council was quite reluctant to allow the spread of the new faith in the territory. In 1521, the Ulmer authorities even imprisoned several Protestant preachers for preaching evangelical sermons in the territory.9 Despite such official efforts to slow the spread of Protestantism, itinerant preachers continued to spread the new faith in earnest, and local artisans—especially the poorer sort—agitated for the introduction of

6 The Schwörbrief of 1397 set the size of the town council at forty seats, thirty held by representatives of the local guilds and ten by members of Ulm’s patrician families. See Gänßlen, Die Ratsadvokaten und Ratskonsulenten der Reichsstadt Ulm, p. 16. 7 These developments are outlined by Hans Eugen Specker in Ulm: Stadtgeschichte (Ulm: Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977), pp. 57–58. See also Geiger, Die Reichsstadt Ulm vor der Reformation, pp. 40–41. 8 For a concise account of the Reformation in Ulm, see Martin Brecht, “Ulm und die deutsche Reformation,” in Ulm und Oberschwaben: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kunst 42/43 (1978), pp. 96–119. 9 Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, p. 107. This reluctance to embrace the Reformation was typical of urban magistrates throughout southern Germany, since they found themselves squeezed between the demands of evangelical townsfolk and their loyalty to the Catholic Emperor. See Brady, Turning Swiss, pp. 165–66.

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the Reformation in the city. In 1524, on the eve of the Peasants’ War, a group of local burghers appeared before the council and formally demanded the appointment of Protestant preachers in the town. In response to this growing pressure from the local craftsmen, the magistrates finally relented and in June 1524 permitted a noted Zwinglian preacher, Konrad Sam, to preach a series of sermons.10 On November 3, 1530, after the Diet of Augsburg and its famous Lutheran Confession, the council authorized a plebiscite of all adult male citizens on the subject of Protestantism. An overwhelming majority approved the Reformation, and the new learning spread through the town amid a wave of violent iconoclasm.11 The Reformation continued in the Ulmer territory and newly appointed pastors began to spread the evangelical message through visitations and catechisms. In 1531, Ulm’s new Protestant clergy issued a Zwinglian Church Ordinance (Kirchenordnung), a comprehensive legal code based upon rigorous Christian morality, the realization of late medieval moral activism promulgated by the town council and inculcated within the guilds. The same year, the council made the fateful decision to join the recently formed Schmalkaldic League of Protestant towns and princes, established to defend the new faith from imperial repression. This alliance would have dire consequences for the Ulmers. The day of reckoning came at the end of the 1540s, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V went to war with the Protestant princes and imperial cities of the Schmalkaldic League. Charles routed the armies of the League at Mühlberg in 1547, and at the height of his power, marched upon the rebellious cities that had dared oppose him. In 1548, imperial troops occupied the Ulmer territory and put a dozen villages in the city’s hinterlands to the torch. Gripped by plague and financially strapped by the economic blockade and agricultural disruption that accompanied the occupation, the besieged city sought terms from the emperor. Victorious, Charles arrived in Ulm, 10 Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 107–108. See also Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 234. 11 The town council was initially hesitant to break with the Catholic Church, and during the time of the Edict of Worms (1521) they remained loyal to the emperor. Only after the shock of the Peasants’ War in 1525 was evangelical preaching officially allowed in Ulm, and by the second Diet of Speyer (1529) Ulm had joined the ranks of the “Protestant” imperial cities. After the plebiscite of 1531 (in which one-third of the patricians voted against the Reformation), the council had begun to style itself the town’s “christliche Obrigkeit” in its edicts. See Gänßlen, Die Ratsadvokaten und Ratskonsulenten der Reichsstadt Ulm, pp. 90–91. For the cautious, conservative implementation of the Reformation in the south German imperial cities, see Brady, Turning Swiss, pp. 158–66.

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quartered a large imperial garrison, and demanded heavy reparations from the city. During the so-called Interim that followed the League’s defeat, the emperor ensured that Catholics might worship in occupied cities unmolested, but also allowed Protestant services to continue. In an attempt to prevent further resistance from the imperial cities, Charles also ordered sweeping political changes in over a score of rebellious towns, including Augsburg, Esslingen, and Ulm. In August 1548, Charles suspended Ulm’s medieval constitution, a document ratified in 1397 that ensured guild control of the council, in order to prevent further resistance to imperial overlordship. He also changed the composition of the council, handing power to a new, more conservative assembly of thirty-one seats, twenty-one of which were held by members of Ulm’s seventeen patrician families, a closed urban elite deemed loyal to the Emperor.12 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 civic magistrates. Thus, the guilds lost their autonomy. Henceforth, a municipal oversight committee composed of three council members, known as the Handwerksherren, administered their affairs.13 The emperor’s manipulation of local government paid off in 1552, when rebellious Protestant princes rose against Charles again during the so-called Fürstenkrieg. Ulm was invaded again, this time by the forces of the Protestant princes, but the city’s new patrician-controlled council ensured that the territory remained loyal to the emperor. The following year, Charles rewarded Ulm’s new patrician rulers for their

12 Charles issued Ulm’s new constitution, granting a majority of seats on the council to the patricians, on August 18, 1548. Ulm was not alone in this imperial manipulation and Charles V also suspended or modified the constitutions of twenty-six other south German imperial cities in the wake of the Schmalkaldic War. See Isenmann, “Obrigkeit und Stadtgemeinde in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Hans Eugen Specker, ed., Einwohner und Bürger auf dem Weg zur Demokratie: Von den antiken Stadtrepubliken zur modernen Kommunalverfassung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997), pp. 107–16. Thomas Brady examines the installation of these new, patrician regimes (known as Hasenräte) in the imperial cities of southern Germany in Turning Swiss, pp. 117–118, 221. Eberhard Naujoks also discusses this crisis, and its theological and political ramifications, in Kaiser Karl V. und die Zunftverfassung, pp. 10–31, 335–46. See also Moeller, Imperial Cities, pp. 103–115, Cameron, European Reformation, pp. 346–48, and Thomas A. Brady, Jr., The Politics of the Reformation in Germany (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997). 13 For the patrician-controlled council’s measures against the guilds, see Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, p. 137. For an overview of similar sanctions in Augsburg, see Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 36–38.

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loyalty, ennobling seventeen local patrician families. This imperial honor—bestowed on the city’s leading families, including the Baldinger, Besserer, Ehinger, Krafft, Löw, Neithart, Lieber, Günzburger, Geßler, Rehm, Reiching, Roth, Schad, Schermar, Stammler, Ströhlin, and Ungelter clans—served to increase the prestige of these patricians, who gradually adopted the trappings of an aristocratic habitus. The most prominent clans, like the Besserer, built opulent mansions in the city and country estates outside its walls to display their new nobility.14 Ulm’s patrician families increasingly socialized in exclusive drinking clubs and dancing halls, away from the eyes of their new subjects, and associated only with the city’s wealthy mercantile elite and leading families from the most prestigious guilds like the goldsmiths. After mid century Ulm’s patricians and wealthy members of the merchants’ guild dominated the most important posts within the local government, including seats on the powerful and secretive executive council known as The Five, the Lord Mayor’s office (Bürgermeisteramt), and judgeships, ensuring that the council remained a conservative body with shared interests. Together this oligarchic elite, intermarrying and controlling the most important governmental posts, dominated the territory.15 In 1556, Ulm’s constitution was changed again, this time by Charles V’s successor, Ferdinand. Issued in its final form in 1558, this constitution codified the political arrangements that defined local politics until the end of the Empire. Henceforth, the council would consist of twentyfour patricians and seventeen members of Ulm’s guilds, drawn from the wealthiest and most influential craft and merchants associations.16 While the local guilds were never completely excluded from political participation, the influence of the larger craft guilds was greatly diminished in favor of an oligarchic regime that privileged members of the city’s social and economic elite. On 22 August 1558, the magistrates that made up the new town council called the local populace together at the municipal armory (Zeughaus), where the male citizens swore an oath ratifying the new constitution. During this ceremony, the male townsfolk also swore to uphold the laws of the territory and pledged 14 For example, the recently ennobled Ulmer patrician Jacob Löw built Schloß Böfingen outside the city in 1586. Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 138–39. 15 For an analysis of these political shifts, see Theodore Brodek’s unpublished dissertation, “Society and Politics of Late Medieval Ulm,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1972. 16 See Eberhard Isenmann, “Obrigkeit und Stadtgemeinde in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 107–16.

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their obedience to the new regime.17 Whereas the council traditionally had presented their authority in terms of representing the “common man,” the 1558 constitution compelled the local citizenry to swear allegiance to their new rulers as subjects, and used religious language to justify this obedience.18 Thus, the new constitution proclaimed that: The honorable citizenry and community should display towards their lawful and God-given Magistrate and Authority, in every circumstance, right, genuine, and pious love through true, good-hearted actions, and swear [to exhibit] the noble and special obedience of a citizen. . . .19

Meanwhile, religious changes in the territory after mid century helped support these political re-orientations. While Ulm had initially been reformed on the Swiss model, after mid-century the territory joined the more conservative Lutheran ranks. Zwingli perished at Kappel in 1531, and his loyal follower Konrad Sam died in Ulm two years later, so the way was clear for the local authorities to adopt the Lutheran catechism after the Augsburg Settlement (1555). Sam’s most energetic successors, Martin Frecht (1494–1556) and Ludwig Rabus (1523–1592)

17 For the historical development of this civic oath-swearing ceremony, the Schwörtag, see Wolf-Henning Petershagen, Schwörpflicht und Volksvergnügen: Zur Verfassungswirklichkeit und städtischen Festkultur in Ulm (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1999). Gerald Strauss accentuates the role of such annual civic oaths, where citizens swore to preserve the peace, respect authority, and fulfill their fiscal and military duties, in the maintenance of “the commune as the agent of common interest” in German cities. According to Strauss, the “annual restatement of the oath, not only handed the government a legal instrument for enforcing civic obedience and punishing delinquency but also preserved the original declaration of mutual interdependence as a political ideology.” Thus, the civic oath formed at once the basis for communal identity and the basis of magisterial control. See Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Politics and Life between Middle Ages and Modern Times (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 70–71. 18 See Isenmann, “Obrigkeit und Stadtgemeinde in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 85–86. Eberhard Naujoks identified this “oligarchical tendency” in Reformation-era urban politics, arguing that this process began in the late fifteenth century, as patricians came to monopolize the most important offices in many German towns, and by 1500 to view themselves as rulers rather than officeholders. See Naujok’s Obrigkeitsgedanke, Zunftverfassung und Reformation. Studien zur Geschichte von Ulm, Esslingen und Schwäbisch Gmünd (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958), pp. 44–46. Thomas Brady also examines the “growth of oligarchy” in the imperial cities during this period, particularly after the revolts that plagued southern Germany between 1509 and 1514 impelled magistrates to “control social tensions—between rich and poor, master and journeyman, noble and servant, merchant and artisan, priest and parishioner—through persuasion, arbitration, police power, and, above all, the invocation of fundamental civic values.” Brady, Turning Swiss, pp. 13–15. 19 StAU A Urk. 1558 (August 22, 1558), quoted in Petershagen, Schwörpflicht und Volksvergnügen, p. 49.

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used their influence with the council to pursue a vigorous campaign against unorthodox beliefs in the territory.20 In return, in a remarkable sort of symbiosis, the Lutheran clergy used the pulpit to preach moral discipline and obedience to the local magistrates.21 In the wake of these sweeping political and religious changes, local economic conditions worsened, and particularly after 1570, waves of pestilence and crop failure wracked the territory. Crop failures and grain shortages became more frequent as the region experienced worsening climatic conditions after mid century.22 The council was forced to make emergency adjustments to local grain prices every year between 1565 and 1602 as well as distribute bread from the municipal granary to impoverished citizens.23 Alongside these subsistence problems, the frequency of epidemics also intensified at the end of the sixteenth century. The cyclical appearance of disease had long accompanied Ulm’s wideranging trading activities, and the territory experienced an epidemic in

20 For these developments, see Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 126–29. See also Konrad Hoffmann, “Das Ulmer Münster als Pfarrkirche in der Zeit von 1531 bis 1803,” and Bernd Breitenbach, “Münsterprediger und Münsterpredigten vom Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende der Reichsstadtzeit,” in Hans Eugen Specker und Hermann Wortmann, eds., 600 Jahre Ulmer Münster (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1984), and Bernhard Appenzeller, Die Münsterprediger bis zum Übergang Ulms an Württemberg 1810: Kurzbiographien und vollständiges Verzeichnis ihrer Schriften (Weissenhorn: A.H. Konrad Verlag, 1990). See also Moeller, Imperial Cities, pp. 112–14, who sees the growing absolutist pretentions of urban magistrates as a product of the decline of imperial cities and of Zwinglian religiosity after 1555, developments that fostered the demise of communal traditions. 21 For Lutheran theological support for obedience to the ruler, portrayed as a territorial father owed obedience according to the Fourth Commandment, see Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 42–45. 22 Historians describe this climatic deterioration in terms of a general reduction of temperature in all seasons, increased rainfall in high summer, and increasing glaciation in alpine areas. This cold, rainy period extended from 1566 to 1630 and resulted in lowered crop yields and agricultural shortages across central Europe during the late sixteenth century. The preceding period (1525–1565) is considered to have been relatively favorable for crop rearing and demographic expansion. For a concise survey of this scholarship, see Christian Pfister, “The Population of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History, 1450 –1630 (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 41–42, 52. 23 Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein, pp. 407–408. As Robert Jütte has pointed out the grain shortages and rising prices of famine years invariably caused impoverishment, rather than mass starvation, as townsfolk were forced to spend ever-greater proportions of their wealth on basic foodstuffs and/or suffer long-term undernourishment. This strained the rudimentary welfare organs of the time and thus ‘squeezed out’ the non-citizen poor. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 30, 74–75.

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every decade of the sixteenth century except the 1550s. The epidemics of the 1590s were particularly virulent and outbreaks occurred in the years 1591, 1592–94, and 1596–97. In 1596, the plague reportedly killed 1,500 people in five months, roughly six times normal mortality.24 Apparently, these developments affected the birthrate, as there was also a marked downward trend in marriage and baptismal rates. These rates began to decrease at the end of the 1580s and continuing to fall until the end of the century.25 Meanwhile, Ulm’s economic situation, in decline since at least mid century, worsened. During the sixteenth century the backbone of the regional economy—textile production and trade—shriveled in the face of gradual shifts in markets, production techniques, and tastes.26 The relationship among all these trends is difficult to determine, but by the 1590s Ulm was clearly becoming a less attractive place for potential citizens to live. Midway through this troubled decade the number of citizens resigning their citizenship and emigrating overtook the number of migrants purchasing citizenship for the first time.27 In these troubled times, as Ulm’s economic fortunes faltered, the local inhabitants turned to the council to avert God’s wrath and restore order by enforcing Christian morality and by purging the territory of aberrant and alien individuals.

Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein, p. 182. Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein, p. 121. 26 Barbara Filtzinger, “Ulm, eine Stadt zwischen Reformation und Dreißigjährigen Krieg: Studien zur gesellschaftlichen, politischen, kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung,” Ph.D. diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, 1992, pp. 351–59. See also Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 170–78. 27 By the 1590s, the economic picture was grim for most wage laborers and petty artisans: the entire sixteenth century was marked by the gradual worsening of their standard of living as prices outstripped wages. It has been estimated that an average building worker’s real wages diminished by half between 1500 and 1600; see Werner Rösener, “The Agrarian Economy, 1300–1600,” in Scribner, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History, p. 72. As mentioned earlier, detailed records chronicling fluctuations in Ulm’s population do not exist, but records of new admissions to and resignation of Bürgerrecht (citizenship) and admission of Beywoner (non-citizen residents) survive. In the years 1550–1650, the council admitted an average of 13.8 resident aliens and 8.7 new citizens per year (after epidemics these rates were temporarily reversed). In the 1590s the number of citizen admissions dwindled to zero and at mid-decade Ulm even experienced negative growth as citizens began to resign their Bürgerrecht at a faster rate than they could be replaced by in-migration. See Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein, pp. 60–61. 24 25

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chapter one Banishment Practices: Prosecution and Purgation

As Ulm’s political and economic situation worsened, the town council worked to police inclusion in the urban community more energetically, defining and accentuating the divide between honorable subjects and deviant outsiders. After 1550, the local magistrates finally began to enforce, in a systematic way, laws that had been on the books since the fourteenth century, and official criminal prosecution accelerated dramatically.28 As the ruling council of a free imperial city, the magistrates had the authority to draft laws, hand down verdicts, and apply punishment. In felony cases, these tasks fell to the twelve judges who comprised Ulm’s high court. These judges, drawn from members of the town council who served on a rotating basis, reflected the increasingly oligarchic character of civic government in the sixteenth century. The names of individual judges have not generally survived in Ulm, but a single document from the municipal archives contains the names of the justices who served between 1548 and 1550. During this period, each year’s justices included seven patricians and five “from the community.” Almost without exception, these non-patricians were members of wealthy local merchant clans like the Kobolt, Weickmann, Braun, Fingerlin, and Gienger families. The patricians who served stemmed from the most important patrician lineages, including the Besserer, Ehinger, Neithart, and Krafft families. A pair of powerful ex-Lord Mayors (Bürgermeister) also served as justices in these years: Sebastian Besserer in 1548 and Hanns Walther Ehinger in 1549 and 1550.29 These magistrates did not have a standing police force, just a town watch paid to keep order on the streets after dark, and generally relied upon informants from among the citizenry to identify malefactors. Once the magistrates received word of criminal activity, and decided to take up a case, they ordered the suspect taken into custody and imprisoned, usually in the Strafturm, a prison tower overlooking the Danube. Adjudicating on the basis of Roman law, introduced in Ulm

28 For the development of jurisprudence in German cities in the late medieval and early modern periods, see Franz Wieacker, A History of Private Law in Europe, with Particular Reference to Germany, translated by Tony Weir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, Erster Band: Reichspublistik und Policeywissenschaft, 1600 –1800 (München: Beck, 1988). 29 See StAU U 3391: Besetzung des Stadtgerichts: Namen der Richter (1548–50).

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in the late fifteenth century, and guided by the provisions laid out the 1532 imperial legal code known as the Carolina, Ulm’s high court relied upon the inquisitorial procedure in reaching its verdicts.30 Accordingly, in cases involving serious allegations, these magistrates questioned suspects to uncover crimes and frequently made use of torture in an attempt to elicit a confession. The magistrates usually relied upon the strappado, a pulley system used to hoist the suspect off the ground by his or her arms, after they had been tied behind the back, a torment that resulted in painful dislocation. In cases involving feeble suspects, or pregnant women, however, they also used thumbscrews to prompt confessions. Weighing the evidence extracted during questioning, the authorities reached their verdicts behind the closed doors of the council chamber, often in consultation with magistrates elsewhere or with the law faculty at the University of Tübingen. Like local authorities throughout early modern Europe, Ulm’s justices rarely ruled according to the letter of the law, and instead judged each case according to a complicated set of legal and political considerations. These included the social position of the offender, the particular circumstances surrounding the crime, and the expectations of their subjects, expectations based upon customary legal precedents.31 Eager to demonstrate that the official verdict conformed to legal precedent and to local custom, the magistrates often 30 An extensive literature regarding the gradual adoption of Roman law (an almalgam of academic Romanist legal precepts and ecclesiastical canon law procedures) and the inquisitorial procedure over accusatorial Germanic legal customs in late medieval Germany has developed on both sides of the Atlantic. The same is true of the influence of the 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (and its forerunner the 1507 Bambergensis), and the inquisitorial procedure that developed in German secular courts in the fifteenth century, on criminal law and adjudication in the Empire during the early modern period. For an excellect overview of this scholarship, see Wolfgang Sellert, “Zur Rezeption des römischen und kanonischen Rechts in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zum Beginn der frühen Neuzeit: Überblick, Diskussionsstand und Ergebnisse,” in Hartmut Boockmann, Ludger Grenzmann, Bernd Moeller, and Martin Staehelin, eds., Recht und Verfassung im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, vol. I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), pp. 115–66. See also Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, ed., Die Carolina: Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V von 1532 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986); Peter Landau and Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, Strafrecht, Strafprozess und Rezeption: Grundlagen, Entwicklung und Wirkung der Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984); John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Reinhart Maurach, Deutsches Strafrecht, 4th ed. (Karlsruhe: C.F. Müller, 1971); and Eberhard Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965). 31 Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, p. 77–78, 100, suggests that sentencing operated on a double axis of seriousness of the crime versus the qualities of the criminal,

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sought to have their verdicts retroactively approved by the townsfolk. Therefore, in felony cases they invariably delivered the official sentence to the convict in a formal declaration at the pillory, including incriminating evidence drawn from their investigation and the offender’s confession. The town council was meticulous in its recordkeeping, particularly after the 1540s when the bureaucratic nature of Roman law came to dominate the region. As a result, the verdicts handed down by the high court survive as thousands of short entries in a variety of sources in Ulm’s municipal archives, the most important of which is the council minutes (Ratsprotokolle), which run from 1501 to 1693.32 The court scribe (Stattschreiber) recorded official verdicts in these minutes, interspersed among thousands of folio pages of diplomacy, economic policy, and civic administration. Alongside the council minutes, a pair of important supplementary sources survive: a single surviving punishment book (Strafbuch 10), which covers the years 1588–1592, and the only remaining volume of Ulm’s Urgichtbücher, a collection of verdicts read out before capital punishments or public floggings, which runs from 1594–1630.33 These records usually overlap, since the council’s scribes generally recorded a given sentence in the council minutes and then copied it into the punishment books (which included an alphabetical register of offenders) or verdict books for future reference. In order to identify suspects and repeat offenders, the Ulmer authorities often recorded biographical data in these sentences, including the convict’s name, occupation, marital status, and hometown. Using this biographical information to reconstruct individual offenders’ criminal careers, I have compiled a database that includes 2,531 offenders, and—given a recidivism rate of around six percent and a handful of exceptionally persistent re-offenders—2,782 separate sentences from sixteenth-century Ulm.34 Cursory examination of this comprehensive database of criminal prosecution in sixteenth-century

arguing that since justice during this period meant reestablishing social harmony taking the social status of offenders into consideration was essential. 32 StAU A 3530: Ratsprotokolle (1501–1693). 33 StAU A [6590]: Strafbuch 10: Urteile des Rats in Strafsachen (1588–1592) and StAU A [6589]: Urgichtbuch (1594–1630). 34 For a similar approach, concerning law enforcement in Augsburg during the early sixteenth century, see Carl A. Hoffmann, “Strukturen und Quellen des Augsburger reichsstädtischen Strafgerichtswesens in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben 88 (1995), pp. 57–108.

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Ulm, constructed by compiling individual sentences handed down by the Ulm’s high court during the period 1500–1599, reveals several essential features of official disciplinary activity. Among the most prominent is the surge in prosecution that occurred after mid century. Of the 2,531 convicts sentenced by Ulm’s high court in the 1500s, over ninety-five percent appear for the first time after 1550. Almost sixty percent of these sentences date from after 1580 and over thirty percent from after 1590. Ulm was not alone in this disciplinary intensification after mid century, and scholars have noted a surge in criminal prosecution throughout Germany after 1550.35 While this increase in prosecutions may in part reflect more efficient record keeping later in the century, and while an unknown number of punishments no doubt went unrecorded, the increasing number of recorded verdicts after mid century nevertheless illustrates a more systematic approach to law enforcement and increasing reliance on official prosecution in local social control efforts. Once the high court passed sentence, if the verdict called for capital punishment the magistrates remanded the convict to the hangman and his assistants for execution. Punishment in serious cases could be extreme, but capital punishment was surprisingly rare. Of 2,531 offenders sentenced by the council during the sixteenth century, just 118 suffered hanging, thirty-five beheading, and thirty-three drowning in the Danube. Thus, these violent executions, reserved for the most heinous crimes and recalcitrant lawbreakers, made up just seven percent of the high court’s verdicts. The town council’s relative restraint in using capital punishment conforms to the sentencing practices of other south German magistrates, according to prosecution statistics compiled by Richard van Dülmen. The surviving records from nearby Augsburg, for example, indicate that the authorities there executed 208 offenders during the period 1545–1615, compared with 186 in sixteenth-century Ulm. Frankfurt executed 248 criminals during the period 1500–1600. Nuremberg, however, was apparently harsher in applying justice and executed 597 offenders from 1503 to 1600.36 Taken together, these figures suggest that despite scholars’ fascination with capital punishment,

35 This intensification in law enforcement was typical. Richard van Dülmen, for example, notes that the years 1560–1600 witnessed a particularly large number of executions in the Empire: see Theatre of Horror, pp. 82–84. Other scholars have noted this surge in criminal prosecution after 1550: see, for example, Joel Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, p. 249. 36 These figures are provided in van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror, p. 83.

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in Ulm, as in other German cities, executions represented a rather small part of overall prosecution.37 Even corporal punishment was relatively uncommon in sixteenthcentury Ulm and the local authorities proved somewhat reluctant to use physical violence to correct misbehavior. Accordingly, the Ulmer authorities sentenced just thirty-five convicts to mutilation, in the form of removing their ears, fingers, or tongues, and had 126 offenders flogged. Thus, even if capital punishment and non-lethal corporal punishment are taken together, only thirteen percent of the council’s verdicts involved physical violence. Most of the crimes the Ulmer authorities dealt with were relatively minor—petty theft, disorderly conduct, drunkenness—and consequently the penalties they handed down rather light. Accordingly, the bulk of official sanctions took the form of petty penalties like verbal admonishments and warnings (1,548 instances), fines (183), or short imprisonment (197). Within this constellation of penalties, banishment served as an important middle ground between capital punishment and petty sanctions, since it was flexible, reversible, and cheap.38 Given these advantages, the Ulmer authorities increasingly relied upon banishment in carrying out its law enforcement activities, and in the course of the sixteenth century banishment proved pivotal to local social control efforts. As we have seen, the town council banished 1,033 offenders during the 1500s, with over forty percent of those sentenced by the high court suffering this penalty. The significance of banishment is readily apparent when compared with the prosecution statistics above, which indicate that expulsion was second only to verbal reprimands in the local magistrates’ overall sentencing practices. Banishment was central to law enforcement throughout early modern Germany, and as mentioned in Chapter One the Ulmer authorities’ reliance on banishment is typical of other city-states in the Empire and beyond. A means of reordering and remaking the urban community as well as a form of punishment, banishment allowed magistrates to purge the territory of all sorts of offenders, offenders convicted of all manner of 37 For detailed examinations of capital punishment in early modern Germany, see Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror. For public executions in late medieval and early modern Cologne, see Irsigler and Lasotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker, pp. 228–65. 38 For the many advantages that banishment offered early modern magistrates, see Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis,” pp. 198–99.

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crimes. Accordingly, during the sixteenth century the council focused their energies on punishing a wide range of illicit activities through banishment. Morals offenses were the most common crimes listed in the banishment convictions handed down by Ulm’s high court. The local magistrates banished 586 offenders for some sort of breach of morals, particularly those relating to illicit sexuality. Accordingly, the council ordered 188 expulsions for premarital sexuality, and eighty-three for adultery, but only thirty-two for blasphemy. Given that the Ulmer magistrates punished 1,309 offenders for morals violations during the 1500s, banishment made up over forty-four percent of the penalties handed down in such cases. The local authorities also relied upon banishment to preserve the security of the town, by punishing disruptive and violent behavior. Of the 1,786 offenders sentenced for disturbing the peace in word or deed in sixteenth-century Ulm, 563 suffered banishment (thirty-one percent). Most of these convictions involved charges of disorderly conduct, with 144 banishment convictions, but assault (identified by the term geschlagen in the city records) and disobedience (insolent or defiant behavior called Ungehorsam) also figured prominently, with forty-five banishments each. Finally, banishment served as a means of protecting the city’s property. In the 1500s, the local authorities banished 582 offenders for violations involving property or economic activity, including 319 banishments for theft, 116 for unlicensed begging, and forty-six for fraud. With 1,221 offenders receiving punishment for these sorts of property crimes, banishment comprised over forty-seven percent of the total convictions in these cases. While these figures indicate what sorts of behaviors the council tried to control through their banishment efforts, the question of exactly whom the high court chose to expel remains. The magistrates aimed their penal activities mostly at male offenders, and 1,987 of the 2,531 offenders convicted by the council during the sixteenth century were male (seventy-eight percent). The banishment rates tell a similar story, since seventy-two percent of the 1,033 offenders who suffered banishment in sixteenth-century Ulm were men (746 convictions). As we shall see, however, in cases involving certain types of offenses, particularly those involving allegations of sexual misconduct, the conviction rate of females eclipsed that of males. Of 327 offenders banished for sexual offenses, for example, 183 were women (fifty-five percent), although as we have seen women received just twenty-eight percent of the total banishment sentences handed down by Ulm’s high court in the 1500s.

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Another prominent feature concerning the identity of the offenders banished by the council is the prevalence of citizens before the courts. The high court aimed the majority of its law enforcement activities at enfranchised members of the urban commune, rather than at noncitizens, like migrant workers or vagrants. Of the 2,531 offenders sentenced by Ulm’s high court during the 1500s, 876 can be identified as citizens from the biographical details included by the magistrates in the official verdict, 404 as vagrants, and 220 as resident aliens. While most of the high court’s verdicts involved suspects identified as citizens, this was not the case with banishment prosecution. In the sixteenth century, the authorities banished 333 vagrants, 231 citizens, and eightytwo resident aliens. Thus, the percentage of vagrants convicted by the high court in the 1500s who suffered banishment (eighty-two percent), dwarfs the percentage of convicted citizens (twenty-six percent) and resident aliens (thirty-seven percent) who faced expulsion. While these general statistics reveal overall sentencing patterns, only tracing the town council’s interaction with individual offenders, interaction often lasting years or even decades, can elucidate the role of banishment in official disciplinary initiatives, in purging society of criminals and outsiders, and in the consolidation of oligarchic authority in the territory after mid century.

CHAPTER TWO

VAGRANCY AND BANISHMENT The Banishment of Michel Maürer On 16 August 1596, Ulm’s town council punished seven street urchins for panhandling. Describing the boys as “young, strong beggars . . . all of whom had been in custody before,” the magistrates 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, Michel Winterlin, and Hanns Tiger, entered the record again in February 1598 after breaking out of custody in the city hospital. They received another flogging before being led through 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 the town beadle (Bittelvogt), an official charged with regulating the city’s indigent population, tried to expel Maürer the young vagrant resisted. According to the council’s official minutes, the incorrigible youth “struck the beadle and [also] bit him.” The council locked Maürer in the tower, 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 whipped through the streets and expelled. Apparently, even this grim warning had little effect, because a Michel Maürer was expelled in March 1599 along with two female companions.1 Vagrancy had been a major concern of the Ulmer authorities since the Middle Ages, and they had long relied upon expulsion in an attempt to deal with the flood of penniless outsiders into the territory. In these efforts, they mirrored the practices of rulers throughout early modern Europe. In an attempt to clear the city of the foreign poor (i.e., those 1 This account is based upon Michel Maürer’s criminal record in the Stadtarchiv Ulm and includes the following documents: StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 46: 375, 16 August 1596; StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 48: 84, 20 February 1598; StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 48: 545b, 28 November 1598; StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 49: 110, 110b, 14 March 1599.

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born outside the territory), patrolmen expelled indigent outsiders caught begging or squatting in the town without employment, driving them out without trial or record. As the 1491 mandate that opened this study makes clear, it was not a specific crime that prompted the magistrates to drive these unemployed strangers from the city, but rather their marginal status in the local social order. In this edict the council asserted that, “many strangers and useless people linger here in Ulm,” showing that the authorities’ determination to rid the town of vagrants also had a strong economic dimension.2 During the course of the sixteenth century, hyperinflation and economic stagnation fostered growing impoverishment, and the flow of vagrants into the city increased. Faced with a rising tide of illegal immigration, the local magistrates increasingly augmented traditional informal expulsions with formal prosecution, using official banishment sentences to punish and control the migrant poor. During this period, the Ulmer authorities handed down official banishment sentences to 333 foreign paupers they identified as vagrants, labeling them “beggars” or “tramps”.3 Banishment was the council’s principal means of dealing with the alien poor, and over eighty-two percent of the vagrants prosecuted during the 1500s suffered this penalty. Virtually all of these sentences (over ninety-eight percent) were handed down after mid century, as the council sought to remedy the growing vagrancy problem through banishment. Accordingly, the official banishment verdicts themselves, recorded with an innovative bureaucratic efficiency, are products of a dramatic shift in early modern law enforcement and show the council’s renewed efforts to punish and control vagrants.4 However, as the high court’s experiences with Michel Maürer illustrate, banished offenders often returned to the territory illegally, in some cases many times, challenging the local authorities’ ability to monitor and control the social and spatial boundaries of their domain. Offenders identified as vagrants by the local magistrates were desperate outsiders without legal rights in the territory, yet the resistance they offered often undermined official efforts to exclude them through banishment. In the

See StAU A 3669, fol. 101 (1491). The percentage of banished convicts identified as vagrants, thirty-two percent (i.e., 333 vagrants out of 1,033 banished offenders), mirrors that of early modern Augsburg, which stood at twenty-nine percent. See Tyler, “Refugees and Reform,” pp. 87–88. 4 In sixteenth-century Ulm, of 404 vagrants officially sentenced, 333 were banished (an eighty-two percent banishment rate). 2 3

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course of the sixteenth century, almost a quarter of the vagrants banished from the territory ignored their sentence and subsequently faced conviction for returning to the territory illegally. Nevertheless, despite the local authorities’ marked inability to keep the most intractable of the vagrants they banished from returning illegally to the territory, expulsion remained their preferred means of dealing with these outsiders. Through the expulsion of marginal elements of society, including the alien poor, the magistrates attempted to provide order in the community by excluding and relegating outsiders to the social and physical fringes of the territory. While the magistrates’ banishment activities failed to staunch the flow of vagrants into the territory, expulsion represented a crucial means of policing and marking the boundary between inclusion and exclusion in the urban community. Vagrancy Legislation and Urban Community Since the late Middle Ages, Ulm’s council had associated the wandering poor with idleness, criminality, and disorder and repeatedly issued edicts aimed at purging these outsiders from the urban community.5 The earliest surviving legislation issued by the council, for example, dating from the 1420s, proclaims the magistrates’ intention to rid their territory of vagabonds, characterized as arsonists, thieves, and robbers.6 By the 1490s the council had declared all unlicensed begging illegal and that foreign beggars were only allowed to remain in the city for a single night. Vagrants, once they took to the road again, would only be re-admitted after a month’s absence.7 During the Reformation, the local magistrates moved energetically to secularize and centralize poor relief in the city, efforts that included the stigmatization of the ‘undeserving’ poor, meaning alien and able-bodied vagabonds.8 In 1527, for

5 For late medieval efforts to deal with the wandering poor in the cities of the Empire, see Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung, pp. 296–301. 6 Carl Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch der Stadt Ulm (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1905). 7 StAU A [2001], fol. 46–53 (1492–3). These laws remained in effect throughout the period and were officially renewed in 1586 and again in 1601: see StAU A [4396] Hauß Ordnung der Armen Sonder Siechen (1586/1601). For a discussion of this legislation, see also Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 105–106. 8 As many scholars have described, dramatic shifts in attitudes towards the poor and in the nature of poor relief predated the Reformation. The marked rise of poverty and vagrancy all over Europe led to the development of a distinction within European poor laws between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor in the late fifteenth and early

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example, the council proclaimed that any migrants who hoped to work as servants or day laborers in Ulm had to appear before the council with their employer for approval. Any the authorities judged to be “useless” (unnütz), immoral, or disobedient were to be expelled from the town immediately.9 Furthermore, the Reformation-era council 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 the beadle 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 lost their right to live in the city and were to be expelled immediately.10 As the examination of Ulm’s history in Chapter One demonstrated, in the mid sixteenth century the city began a slow and inexorable decline, as Swabia’s commercial fortunes waned.11 Amid this worsen-

sixteenth centuries. Since the Imperial Diet at Lindau (1497), poor relief in the Empire was based on the principal of each community caring for its own indigenous poor. The first Protestant reform of poor relief, based on the rationalization and centralization of the system, was enacted by the city council in Wittenberg in 1520/1, at Luther’s urging. For a concise overview of these developments, see Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, 105–108, 145–47. For more detailed treatment of poor relief in Frankfurt am Main and Cologne, see also Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge in Deutschen Reichsstädten der Frühen Neuzeit: Städtisches Armenwesen in Frankfurt am Main und Köln (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1984). For a pioneering examination of poor relief and the treatment of beggars and wandering folk in medieval and early modern Cologne, see Irsigler and Lasotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker, pp. 17–68. See also Ernst Schubert, Arme Leute, Bettler und Gauner im Franken des 18. Jahrhunderts (Neustadt a.d. Aisch, 1983) and “Mobilität ohne Chance,” pp. 113–64, for interesting analysis of attitudes towards vagrants in early modern Germany. Ulm’s first poor laws appeared in 1508. Poor relief was dramatically centralized and secularized by the Almosenordnungen of 1528, which was re-issued throughout the century. StAU A [2002] Ordnung des neu aufgerichteten Almoskastens, 1528 and StAU A [4176/1] Almosenordnungen, 1581. On the development of Ulm’s poor laws, see Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 105–106. 9 StAU A 3785 Ordnung der Beywoner halben (first issued 1527 and re-issued 1581). For background on this legislation, see Andreas Baisch, “Die Verfassung im Leben der Stadt, 1558–1802” in Hans Eugen Specker, ed., Die Ulmer Bürgerschaft auf dem Weg zur Demokratie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997), pp. 197–203, and Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, p. 64. 10 StAU A [2002] Ordnung des neu aufgerichteten Almoskastens, 1528 and StAU A [4176/1] Almosenordnungen, 1581. 11 For concise treatment of the economic situation in southern Germany in the late sixteenth century, see Tom Scott, Society and Economy in Germany, 1300–1600 (New York:

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ing economic situation, 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 settled inhabitants began to contract.12 Meanwhile, the territory continued to draw a steady flow of impoverished outsiders from the countryside seeking work or alms in the city. Faced with these ominous trends, the town council intensified its efforts to drive impoverished outsiders from the city, issuing new edicts against vagrancy. A mandate read aloud to the citizenry in August 1544, for example, illustrates the council’s attitudes about the threat posed by the wandering poor. The decree rails against “tramps and vagrants, who create many nuisances and evil deeds, and everyday lie before the gates, many of whom steal into the city,” proclaiming once again that they should be expelled from the territory.13 In a 1551 edict the council ordered its officials to apprehend and punish all “foreign vagrants, sturdy beggars, and other idlers” found in the territory. This mandate was renewed in 1563, 1586, and 1590.14 The 1586 version also made it illegal for any of the council’s subjects to provide housing or charity to any “discharged soldiers, vagrants, sturdy beggars, and all other dissolute, loose, and good-for-nothing riffraff ” on penalty of a two Gulden fine.15 The legislation issued by Ulm’s magistrates provides valuable insight into what sorts of offenders they considered vagrants. The Ulmer authorities sought to rid the city not only of those who appeared both foreign and poor or unemployed, whom they labeled “sturdy beggars” or “idlers ”, but also dishonorable outsiders, rootless vagabonds identified as “tramps and vagrants.” After mid century, the council began to enforce these vagrancy statutes more energetically, using banishment in an attempt to bar the alien poor from the territory.

Palgrave, 2002), pp. 254–55. Scott also details the crop failures that afflicted Germany in the mid-1550s, 1569–74, 1586–89, and 1593–7: Society and Economy in Germany, pp. 65–67. See also David Sabean, Power in the Blood, pp. 6–9. 12 As mentioned in Chapter One, reliable population figures from sixteenth-century Ulm do not survive, but recent estimates suggest that Ulm’s population reached its apex in the 1580s at between 16,500 and 21,000 inhabitants before beginning to decline. See Annemarie Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein. 13 StAU A 3872 Rufes bettlens halben (1544). 14 StAU A 3688, fol. 21, 11 May 1551. See also A 3688, fol. 23 (1563), A 3688, fol. 27 (1586), and A 3688, fol. 32 (1590). 15 StAU A 3688, 11 April 1586.

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chapter two Banishment and the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance

After mid century, as official law enforcement intensified throughout the Empire, the punishment of vagrants in the Ulmer territory increased dramatically. Despite the local magistrates’ mounting determination to rid their domain of vagrants, however, as we have seen they faced a rising tide of illegal immigration. While Ulm had long attracted a steady stream of migration from the surrounding countryside, the flow of penniless vagabonds seeking refuge in the city intensified amid the famine and disorder that afflicted southern Germany during the late sixteenth century.16 Risking the council’s wrath, poor folk from the villages and towns of Ulm’s territory and beyond continually drifted into the city seeking work or alms during these lean years, as prices rose and poverty spread. Many of the impoverished migrants who entered Ulm found work and registered as resident aliens with the beadle, settling down as servants or day laborers. Those unable or unwilling to find work, on the other hand, were denied residency and increasingly risked being identified as vagrants and expelled by the local authorities. Throughout the century, many of these unfortunates were apprehended and driven away without formal sentence or record during the periodic mass round-ups of beggars (usually street urchins) carried out by local authorities. While these random expulsions generally went unrecorded, the local records preserve several glimpses of these informal activities. In the summer of 1575, for example, the council’s official minutes mention in passing “the twenty-one young beggar-lads and beggar-girls recently expelled by the beadle’s men (Bettelknechten),” giving a feel for the scale of this unofficial prosecution.17 These spontaneous expulsions continued throughout the period, although after mid century the Ulmer authorities began to deal with particularly troublesome vagrants with a new bureaucratic diligence. Accordingly, the city’s meticulous criminal records chronicle the council’s intensifying efforts to deal with the vagrancy problem through official prosecution. During the sixteenth 16 During this period most migrants came from the countryside, moving to population centers near their home villages. See Pfister, “The Population of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” pp. 55–56. 17 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 34: 275b, 21 June 1575. Such informal expulsion of vagrants was no doubt common throughout the Empire. According to Carl Hoffmann, for example, Augsburg’s patrolmen routinely drove vagrants from that city without formal prosecution and without an official record. See Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis,” pp. 211–12.

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century, Ulm’s high court handed down 404 formal convictions involving transient offenders, 396 of which occurred after mid century (ninetyeight percent). As the rate of official prosecution climbed, banishment remained the town council’s preferred means of punishing vagrants apprehended in the territory, regardless of their offense. Of the 404 transients convicted in sixteenth-century Ulm, at least 333 received official banishment sentences. The banishment rate of vagrants—as we have seen eighty-two percent—dwarfs the overall banishment rate, which stood at just under forty-one percent, and far outstripped the rate of population growth in Ulm. Furthermore, the banishment rate of vagrants climbed sharply as the sixteenth century wore on: while there were only four official banishment convictions of vagrants before mid century, in the 1550s alone there were twenty-four. In the 1560s the number of official banishments almost doubled, reaching forty-three, in the 1570s the number climbed to sixty-nine, and in the 1580s to seventy-five. In the 1590s alone 125 vagrants received formal banishment sentences. The prevalence of banishment in cases involving offenders identified as vagrants provides a clear illustration of the intensity of the magistrates’ efforts to rid their domain of the alien poor. These statistics indicate the general trajectory of the council’s efforts to punish and control vagrants through banishment, but detailed examination of local sentencing practices is more instructive about the nature of these expulsions. While the council’s efforts to expel vagrants remained sporadic before mid century, during the 1550s the local authorities began to use more systematic official prosecution and bureaucratic procedures in an attempt to punish and control the foreign poor. As a result, vagrants increasingly found themselves before the Ulmer bench. After mid century, Ulm’s magistrates pursued criminal prosecution in a more methodical manner, handing down and recording official verdicts with increasing frequency. The banishment campaign against vagrants was a central part of this penal revolution. By mid century the local authorities felt overrun by hungry outsiders: in 1552, a year of warfare and disruption, the council issued a mandate railing against vagrants, stating that “daily investigation and inquiry shows that the number of foreign and alien beggars here in this city . . . grows everyday.”18 Ulm’s magistrates sought to counter this threat through more rigorous law enforcement and on

18 StAU A 3672, fol. 246, 15 February 1552. Efforts to identify and expel the alien poor often accompanied these edicts. In June 1552, for example, the council ordered

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August 16, 1559, the town council issued new instructions to its beadles, the officials appointed to police vagrants and the undeserving poor.19 This detailed piece of legislation provided the blueprint for an aggressive new policy aimed at closing the city to foreign vagrants. The beadles and their assistants were instructed to carry out thorough surveillance and follow painstaking bureaucratic procedures. These officials were to patrol the entire city, every day, searching for “all beggarly people, local or foreign, but especially foreign.”20 When alien paupers were identified, the beadles were ordered to interrogate them, noting “what they are called, where they are from, and when and through which gate they had entered the city.” Hoping to preclude troublesome vagrants from re-entering the city, the authorities ordered its officials to make foreign vagrants swear not to beg in Ulm again and then to escort them back to the gate through which they had entered the city. Once the gatekeepers had gotten a good look at the offenders, the beadle was to expel them from the city. This section of the new ordinance, prescribing informal expulsion for unregistered foreign beggars found in the city, conforms to earlier practices, but now the council also called for enhanced bureaucratic procedures. After expelling the vagrant, the beadle was ordered to instruct the clerk stationed at that gate to record the information he had collected and to remain vigilant lest the offender slip by him again and gain access to the city. Despite these measures and the diligence of the town’s gatekeepers, the local authorities were aware that many of the vagrants they ousted were slipping back into the city after being expelled. Thus, the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance also addressed disobedient vagrants who broke their expulsion oath and returned to the territory after being banished. The new procedures instructed the beadle to apprehend illegal returnees, lock them in the Narrenheuslin, a cage-like holding pen on the marketplace, and send a written report to the Lord Mayor. Once the Lord Mayor ordered these offenders released, the beadle was to expel them again

the beadle to round up and expel all unemployed outsiders from the city immediately. See StAU A 3671, fol. 270–71, 3 June 1552. 19 StAU A 3693 Der Zwayer Bettelvögt Ordnung (1559). Augsburg had implemented similar procedures in 1546 to bar expelled vagrants from the city. See Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis,” pp. 218–19. 20 The wandering, able-bodied poor increasingly aroused the anxieties of magistrates across Europe during this period: see Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 165–66. For the development of these attitudes in Cologne, see Irsigler and Lasotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker, pp. 18–20.

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through the gate they had used to enter the city. This time, however, the beadle was instructed to deliver a “serious threat,” warning vagrants that if they ever returned they would be “worthy of the honorable council’s punishment,” meaning that they would be subject to formal prosecution. This time, after the expulsion, the beadle was to admonish the gate’s clerk and order him to pay closer attention. The Beggars’ Ordinance even deals with insubordinate vagrants “found begging here for the third time.” Such incorrigible offenders were subject to official prosecution. Consequently, the council’s agents were ordered to lock them in the tower for questioning, after which the “honorable council would judge them according to their guilt and punish them.” While these new guidelines in themselves represented a significant shift in law enforcement procedures, several questions remain. How did the high court deal in practice with defiant vagrants who returned to the territory? Also, how effective were these new procedures and how did vagrants react in the face of this official expulsion campaign? Finally, how did the council’s banishment efforts work to regulate social and spatial boundaries in the territory? After 1559 the town council, faced with large numbers of vagrant offenders who returned illegally to the city after being expelled, increasingly sought to use official prosecution to control these intractable offenders. While periodic, informal sweeps of the streets and alleys of the town continued throughout the century, after the appearance of the new Beggars’ Ordinance of 1559 the local authorities increasingly brought troublesome vagrants before the high court for sentencing. Of the 333 banishment sentences handed down to vagrant offenders by the town council during the sixteenth century, 317 occurred after 1559 (ninety-five percent). These verdicts involved transient offenders charged with a variety of offenses, including theft (129 convictions), unlicensed begging (106), and prostitution (seventy-four convictions). At least seventy-six convictions involved banished vagrants who returned to the territory illegally, a central concern of the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance.21 The court scribe recorded these official convictions in the council’s minutes, including pertinent details of each vagrant’s biographical information—always name, hometown, and previous convictions, but

21 It is important to note that these figures include multiple offenses and repeat offenders. Thus, while 333 vagrants were banished from Ulm during the sixteenth century there were 377 individual offenses.

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sometimes also including former occupation, nicknames or aliases, and known associates—to facilitate the identification of repeat offenders and banished vagrants who returned illegally to the territory. Owing to these new bureaucratic procedures, the high court was increasingly capable of identifying repeat offenders and punishing them more systematically. These more thorough bureaucratic practices not only allowed the magistrates to discover recalcitrant vagrants, but also permit modern historians to track many individual offenders across years and even decades as they came time and again before the court for sentencing. This sort of record linking sheds new light on an important aspect of early modern social control efforts: how authorities sought to delineate and police social and spatial boundaries within their domains and how they sought to keep those who were excluded from the closed social order outside the borders of the territory. Despite the Ulmer authorities’ more vigorous attempts to monitor and punish defiant vagrants, some incorrigibles proved exceedingly difficult for them to control. While the local magistrates never tired of banishing vagrants, they encountered great difficulty in keeping the most determined of them from returning to the territory illegally. Some exiles no doubt returned and remained in the city undetected, but as the local prosecution records show, many offenders who broke their expulsion oath and returned were identified and punished. As the analysis of sentencing patterns above indicated, in the course of the sixteenth century, the town council convicted seventy-six vagrants for returning illegally after being banished. As a result, almost a quarter of the vagrants banished from Ulm during the 1500s faced punishment subsequently for returning to the territory illegally. When we compare this figure with the much lower overall recidivism rate in sixteenthcentury Ulm, which was under seven percent, the high degree of resistance offered by banished vagrants is quite striking. Over eighty-nine percent of these convictions occurred after the local magistrates issued the new Beggars’ Ordinance. While these new procedures helped the local authorities to identify and punish many of the banished vagrants who returned illegally, their inadequate police forces (the magistrates had just a handful of patrolmen at their disposal) precluded them from halting such recidivism entirely.22

22 Magistrates throughout the Empire enacted similar measures to keep vagrants out of their cities, with similarly disappointing results. For such efforts in Augsburg, see Tyler, “Refugees and Reform,” pp. 88–90.

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Faced with these difficulties, the town council relied upon a formidable curtain of walls that ringed the city and marked its physical boundaries. These imposing walls were punctuated with a series of gate-towers, themselves protected by guardhouses and checkpoints manned by watchmen and scribes, who sought to monitor and control access to the city (Figure 2). The gates of Ulm were central to the local authorities’ efforts to control access to the city as well as the terminus of their efforts to exclude and expel those they deemed disorderly or dangerous. Unruly shantytowns sprawled before Ulm’s gates, a semilawless zone patrolled sporadically by the town watch and difficult for the undermanned authorities to control. Vagrants refused entry into the city camped in these settlements, in orchards, brick ovens, and barns, looking for a chance to slip into the city where they could find alms or bread. Throughout the period, the Ulmer authorities fretted over the indiscipline and danger that lurked “vor dem Thor,” in the liminal zone just outside their gates. In a typical mandate from 1586, for example, the council ordered measures to be taken against “the goodfor-nothing rabble before the gates.”23 Thus, official efforts to rid the city of unwanted outsiders began at the city gates, the frontier between the ordered urban community and the disordered zone before the city, and the council concerned itself not only with casting out criminals and deviants, but also with monitoring and controlling the boundaries of the city in an attempt to exclude undesirables.24 While the town council sought to protect the city’s boundaries with a series of checkpoints, guardhouses, and gates, manned day and night by watchful officials, a few troublesome vagrants sought to gain entrance through force or guile. A case from the winter of 1588 is typical of the violence sometimes exhibited by desperate vagrants. On February 21, 1588, the town watch arrested a “beggar” from Schweinenbach in the Allgäu named Hanns Weinman for “trying to push his way into the city by force at one of the gates.” The high court banished Weinman and ordered him to stay a mile away from the borders of the territory or else face an unspecified “serious penalty.”25 Other vagrants also resorted

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 38: 760 (1586). Urban magistrates throughout the Empire sought to bar vagabonds from entering cities by setting up checkpoints and gatehouses. See Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, p. 167. For detailed discussion of surveillance efforts in early modern Cologne, see Irsigler and Lasotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker, pp. 33–44. 25 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 40: 1b, 21 February 1588. 23 24

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Fig. 2. Woodcut of Ulm with gates and guardhouses, Stadtarchiv Ulm (1570).

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to open violence, threatening and assaulting the council’s agents. In June 1567, for example, the council ordered a vagrant from Newhausen named Michel Reizler questioned under torture after arresting him for “begging, blasphemy, and for striking the beadle.” Eventually, the authorities banished Reizler from the territory for life.26 Another “defiant” beggar, named Felix Wiert, threatened more serious violence in 1590, drawing a blade on one of the council’s officials. Arrested and locked in the tower, he too was banished from the territory and warned never to return.27 While this sort of belligerence was quite rare, many desperate vagrants relied upon cunning and sought to subvert the council’s authority by quietly slipping back into the city after being expelled. A vagrant banished in May 1592, for example, named Hanns Rümler, proved quite crafty in his attempts to give the local authorities the slip, never really leaving the city at all. Rümler was sentenced for oath breaking because after he was expelled, “he did not observe his punishment, but rather immediately after he was escorted out of one gate, he returned to the city through another.” The high court ordered Rümler expelled again, according to the terms of his previous expulsion oath, this time warning him to stay two miles away from the borders of the territory forever or else face a “serious” punishment.28 While Rümler’s case is rather comical, a series of linked records from the 1570s and 80s involving a vagrant woman named Appelonia Binderin who returned illegally to the territory after being expelled is more typical. Binderin’s experience before Ulm’s high court illustrates the sort of persistent recidivism that the local magistrates faced in their efforts to police their domain’s boundaries and how they sought to deal with such determined offenders. Appelonia Binderin first appears in Ulm’s criminal records in an entry from November 1574, when she was arrested for panhandling along with a pair of male companions. The vagrant woman was apparently evasive in her testimony, since the authorities listed her hometown as “either Wallenhausen or Newhausen.” After questioning, the magistrates sentenced the trio—identified as “beggar-people”—to two nights’ confinement in the Spital (a municipal poorhouse, hospital, and

26 27 28

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 30: 398, 399b, 401b, 18 June 1567. StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 272, 30 March 1590. StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 42: 337b, 26 May 1592.

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retirement home) on bread and water, a rather mild penalty. Although it is not specified in the official record, Binderin and her companions were no doubt expelled afterwards.29 The following summer, in June 1575, Appelonia Binderin appeared before the bench again, having been arrested during a mass roundup carried out by civic officials. Binderin, now listed as coming from Neidlingen, and two female beggars also listed by name in the official record received some leniency; the women were banished from the city and made to swear that they would stay a mile away from its borders for life. The eighteen male vagrants with whom they were imprisoned, on the other hand, identified only as “beggars” and “urchins,” were to be whipped out of town by the hangman, excepting those who seemed “pitifully sick or frail.”30 It did not take Appelonia Binderin long to run afoul of the high court again. Just two weeks later, on July 4, 1575, she was sentenced “once again, as a beggar and for violating her imposed sentence.” The magistrates banished Binderin again, but this time, having identified her as a repeat offender, they warned her that if she ever returned to the territory she would suffer corporal punishment.31 Even this warning did not dissuade her from returning to the city, and five years later she faced the high court again. This time the authorities labeled Binderin and a co-defendant as “two loose wenches,” and sentenced them for prostitution, charging that Binderin had plied her trade in the hayloft of a local tavern called “zum Ochsen.” Once again, the magistrates showed lenience towards Binderin, although prostitution had been illegal in Ulm since the Reformation.32 After the closure of the civic brothel in 1531, vagrant women plied this illicit trade in the back alleys of the city or in the squalid encampments outside Ulm’s gates. As early as 1543 the council ordered its patrolmen to sweep through these shantytowns, arresting “common and shameless women who circulate before the gates and engage in prostitution.”33

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 34: 76, 17 November 1574. StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 34: 275b, 21 June 1575. 31 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 34: 283b, 4 July 1575. 32 On the closure of civic brothels—prominent institutions in medieval German towns—during the early modern period, see Peter Schuster, “Hinaus oder in Frauenhaus: Weibliche Sexualität und gesellschaftliche Kontrolle an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit,” in Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Mit den Waffen der Justiz. On the links between the Reformation, the regulation of prostitution, and the use of banishment in early modern Augsburg, see Tyler, “Refugees and Reform,” pp. 86–88. 33 StAU A 3693, fol. 178 (1543). 29 30

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Despite this longstanding campaign against prostitutes, in Binderin’s case the frustrated authorities did not carry out their earlier threats. Instead, they simply re-banished her again, this time ordering the jailer to escort her out of the city over the Herdbruckertor bridge.34 The Ulmer authorities’ experience with Appelonia Binderin illustrates a central dynamic of their treatment of vagrant repeat offenders. While the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance called for three-time offenders to be “punished” by the council, Binderin, a known repeat offender, escaped any harsh correction and was simply re-banished. While the town council was energetic in its attempts to prosecute vagrants, to keep records of their transgressions, and to deliver stern warnings, they proved somewhat reluctant to actually follow through on their violent threats. Of the seventy-two official convictions of vagrants who had returned to the territory after being banished between 1560 and 1599 (i.e., after the appearance of the 1559 Ordinance), forty-seven were, like Binderin, simply re-banished without further punishment (sixty-five percent). Despite this reluctance, after mid century the town council relied more heavily upon intimidation, usually threats of corporal punishment or mutilation, in an attempt to dissuade banished vagrants from returning to the territory. In fact, the number of official banishment sentences involving vagrants that included a specific threat increased steadily during the sixteenth century. In the 1560s, under five percent of the banishment sentences involving vagrants included an official threat. By the 1580s, however, this percentage had climbed to over thirteen percent and by the 1590s to over eighteen percent. A series of linked cases from the summer of 1590, again dealing with vagrant prostitutes, provides a useful illustration of this trend. On June 9, 1590, the Ulmer authorities charged four “promiscuous wenches” with prostitution, releasing the women on their oath that they would leave the city and the territory and stay two miles away from its borders. The magistrates also warned them that if they ever returned the hangman would cut off their ears.35 One of these women, Barbara Keblerin, appeared before the court again a month later, however, and was sentenced on 7 July 1590 along with another vagrant, Maria Maürerin. The town watch had arrested the women, again identified as “promiscuous wenches” (leichtfertige weibsbilder), after finding them in “suspicious places” (verdechtigen

34 35

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 36: 97b; 98, 15 November 1580. StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 307, 9 June 1590.

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orten), presumably meaning areas frequented by prostitutes. The record notes that Keblerin had been imprisoned in Ulm “four weeks prior and expelled from the city and territory with several others.” The magistrates banished the two women, specifying that while Keblerin’s previous oath was sufficient, the other vagrant, Maria Maürerin, apparently a first-time offender, was to swear a formal oath binding her “to leave the honorable council’s city, territory, and domain immediately, and never to set foot within the territory again, or else her ears would be cut off.” Like her co-defendant Keblerin before her, Maria Maürerin risked the council’s wrath and soon returned to the territory. Exactly a month later, on August 7, 1590, Maürerin was back before the high court for sentencing. The magistrates’ verdict reads: Maria Maürerin again has committed fornication and been imprisoned in the tower. She should be released, according to her prior oath, and return to her previous punishment. Moreover, the hangman should escort her out of the town gate and inform her that if she returns again, she will have her ears cut off.36

As the experience of these vagrants before the Ulmer bench suggests, the local authorities often proved somewhat reluctant to carry out the threats they levied against expelled vagrants, especially in verdicts involving female vagrants who (like young urchins) might arouse widespread sympathy from the townsfolk who assembled for public punishments. Despite this apparent reluctance to resort to violence, the Ulmer authorities sometimes proved willing to follow through on their violent threats in their efforts to control particularly intractable convicts. In cases involving banished vagrants, the high court usually resorted to corporal punishment in a last ditch effort to dissuade the outcast from returning to the territory after expulsion. Usually, the local authorities had the convict flogged from the city (ußhauen), beaten through the streets of the town from the town hall to one of the city gates, generally specified by name in the official sentence, and expelled. Of the 333 vagrants banished from the Ulmer territory, sixty-eight received this aggravated form of expulsion (twenty percent). Over seventy-five percent of these sentences date from after 1559, as the council sought to use the procedures laid out in the Beggars’ Ordinance to stem the tide of unauthorized immigration into the city. The town council used 36 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 323, 7 July 1590; StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 340, 7 August 1590.

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this punishment above all to deter particularly threatening vagrants, namely able-bodied males, from returning to the territory after being expelled. Accordingly, while over forty-three percent of the vagrants banished from Ulm during the sixteenth century were female, sixty-three of the sixty-eight vagrants whipped from the city during the sixteenth century were adult males. A case from the autumn of 1593 illustrates how the local magistrates used the “ußhauen” penalty in an attempt to control seemingly dangerous vagrants. Having arrested a vagrant named Hannß Keüberlin on suspicion of theft, the Ulmer authorities wrote to magistrates in several nearby polities and learned that he already had a troubled past. Keüberlin had been arrested for stealing a horse in Leipheim, a town in the Ulmer territory, and had been exiled over the Rhine by the authorities in nearby Biberach. Convinced of the vagrant’s incorrigibility, the high court sentenced him to lifelong banishment over the Rhine, but ordered him first to be displayed at the pillory for public sentencing and then to be flogged through the streets of the town and expelled. Keüberlin’s record includes a crude sketch of a birch-bundle, the implement used for flogging convicts, as a grim symbol of the council’s penal authority (Figure 3).37 Of the many penalties at the magistrates’ disposal, such public flogging—a cruel penalty that mixed humiliation and corporal punishment—appears to have been most effective: just five of the sixty-eight vagrants whipped out of Ulm ever returned to re-offend. While the Ulmer authorities usually reserved such painful corporal punishment for males, they used other, less violent forms of public humiliation in an effort to keep banished females from returning to the territory illegally. In the course of the sixteenth century, the high court handed down fifty-three shaming penalties to banished vagrants, subjecting them to public humiliation before having them expelled (fifteen percent). In contrast to “ußhauen” convictions, a sizeable proportion of the recidivist vagrants subjected to these shaming punishments were female (twenty-six percent). These punishments took many forms. Nine involved the “Geigen,” a heavy, violin-shaped collar that immobilized the hands in front of the neck. Another thirteen vagrants were exposed at the pillory, which in Ulm was a tall, circular platform located on the town’s marketplace. In four cases the vagrant was clamped in leg-irons, and in twenty-seven cases the vagrant was locked in the holding pen

37

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 43: 442, 19 October 1593.

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Fig. 3. Marginalia from Keüblerin verdict, StAU A [3530] (1593).

known as the “Narrenheuslin.” A case from the autumn of 1589 is typical of these sentences meant to use humiliation to bring defiant vagrants to heel. In November 1589, the town council ordered the mayor of Leipheim, a town in its territory, to re-banish a “frequently imprisoned, unruly woman” named Maria Bairin. They had identified Bairin as a banished vagrant who had returned illegally: the marginalia of her sentence even includes a notation that her previous sentence could be found in Strafbuch 8, an indexed listing of punishments handed down by the high court. Before releasing her, the magistrates instructed the officials in Leipheim to order her to resume her previous banishment sentence, to remind her of the oath she had sworn before she was expelled last time, and to warn her that if she returned again an ominous “serious punishment” would follow. To hammer home the severity of this threat, the council ordered her to stand for an hour in public locked in the “Geigen,” exposed to the gaze of the townsfolk.38 In order to deal with particularly intractable offenders, the town council sometimes ordered several punishments in tandem, compounding humiliation with pain. In May 1553, for example, the high court punished a vagrant named Lorenz Welch for, begging, in violation of the Honorable council’s ordinance, and for drunkenness, and especially because he had, as he himself testified, twice been jailed in the tower and Narrenheuslin, and had sworn never to beg in the city again. He also wasted alms and became excessively drunk with wine.

The magistrates ordered the hangman to bind Welch and display the unfortunate vagrant at the pillory, and then to flog him through the 38

StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 186, 24 November 1589.

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streets of the town, expelling him from the territory for life.39 The Ulmer authorities’ treatment of Welch was not uncommon. During the sixteenth century, four vagrants were exposed at the pillory before being whipped out of town. Four others were displayed in leg-irons before being flogged through the streets and fifteen were exhibited in the Narrenheuslin before being whipped out of the city. Thus, over onethird of the vagrants flogged through the streets of Ulm and expelled also suffered some form of public humiliation before their expulsion, punishment rituals that centered on the crowded open spaces of the city. The pillory and the Narrenheuslin both stood in prominent places in the city’s central marketplace and the routes specified in “ußhauen” verdicts twisted from the town hall, Ulm’s ceremonial heart, through the crowded streets of the town to the gate-towers that marked the boundaries of the polity. Thus, these highly public expulsion rituals provided a visual display of the council’s determination to control the boundaries of its domain and regulate inclusion in the community. Like magistrates throughout the Empire, the Ulmer authorities sometimes resorted to more gruesome physical violence in their attempts to control unruly vagrants, using mutilation as a retributive punishment and as a deterrent. Mutilation not only served to cause pain, but also marked the victim as an outsider and criminal, making future identification easier if the offender ever returned.40 In June 1575, for example, the high court punished a vagrant called Matheüs Derelin from Mindelheim, who according to the authorities, “had been beaten out of here with birch-rods for wanton begging, stealing, and purse-cutting, and banished over the Lech, but had not complied.” Furthermore, according to the council, Derelin was also work-shy and “would serve no master nor do any work.” Having labeled Derelin a beggar and a thief, beyond hope of redemption (since he was an oath breaker and refused to earn an honest living), the magistrates ordered the hangman to cut off both his ears and then to expel him so that he might “resume his former punishment.”41 During the sixteenth century, the high court ordered the hangman to mutilate nine vagrants in this fashion, by

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 22: 311b, 15 May 1553. For the role of these sorts of degrading physical punishments in attempts to control vagrancy in early modern Europe, see Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 161, 165. These efforts were commonplace throughout the Empire: see Irsigler and Lasotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker, pp. 267–70, for such measures in early modern Cologne. 41 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 34: 261b, 3 June 1575. 39 40

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chopping off their ears. All of these cases date from the lean years after 1570 and eight of them from after 1580, as the town council intensified its efforts to identify repeat offenders and to control desperate vagrants amid widespread famine and economic stagnation. The increasing severity of the high court in its use of violence in dealing with incorrigible vagrants is also apparent in its use of capital punishment. While the local magistrates appeared somewhat reluctant to use the most terrible punishments at their disposal, and sentenced only twenty-three vagrants to the gallows ( just five percent of the 404 recorded sentences), all of these cases date from after 1559. Almost three quarters of the sentences date from the 1580s and 90s. Most of these vagrants were executed for violent crimes (the most common was highway robbery), but in some cases the authorities also sentenced incorrigible expellees to the gallows. A series of linked cases from the early 1580s provides an example of this sort of capital punishment. On the day after Christmas, 1582, the magistrates interrogated a vagrant, suspected of theft, who had been reported to the authorities by an anonymous informer. The council subjected him to torture with the strappado. According to his criminal record, the authorities interrogated him not only about his alleged “thefts, but also to find out why he had lied about his name.” After several interrogation sessions, the magistrates were convinced of the vagrant’s guilt and had discovered that his real name was Christan Boß and that he once had worked as a tailor in the nearby village of Nellingen. Apparently, Boß had lied about his name in an unsuccessful attempt to hide the fact that he had already been expelled from the territory, and the high court punished him harshly as a repeat offender. On January 9, 1583, the hangman cut off Boß’s ears, physically marking this convict who had already sought to evade the growing bureaucratic power of the local authorities. Having marked Boß physically, the executioner flogged him out of the city, sending him away to resume his previous banishment over the Rhine. Even this violent punishment did not keep Boß from slipping into the territory, however, and seven months later, on 14 August 1583, he appeared before the Ulmer bench again, owing to “several more confessed thefts.” Unfortunately for Boß, the magistrates decided to write other nearby cities inquiring about his activities there, another example of their enhanced bureaucratic capacities. While they did not record their findings, the replies the council received from other magistrates must not have improved their opinion of Boß. On August

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23, 1583, the high court sentenced the repeat offender to the gallows, proclaiming that: Christan Boß, who had been banished twice over the Rhine, and recently, because of the offenses he had committed, had his ears cut off and was flogged from the city—not only violated this sentence, but also returned and committed many more thefts and swindles, and is sentenced to be hanged.42

In Ulm, hangings were carried out at the gallows on a small hill just outside the town gates, known as the Galgenberg. The executioner dragged the bound convict up a ladder to the top of the gibbet and slipped a noose around his or her neck before shoving the condemned from the rungs. The body was left hanging from the gallows until it decayed and fell, a grisly scene recorded in the marginalia of many local death sentences of the period. Despite the terrifying spectacle that these brutal public executions presented, they failed to deter desperate vagrants from returning to the territory illegally, and prosecution for this offense continued unabated. Given the weakness of the council’s policing capabilities, and the strong economic pull that Ulm and its territory exerted on the surrounding countryside, it is not surprising that many of the wretched people the high court expelled refused to stay gone.43 As we have seen, local prosecution records indicate that the Ulmer authorities punished almost twenty-five percent of the vagrants they banished for subsequently returning to the territory illegally, proving that many offenders—facing the hardship and hunger that plagued the dispossessed poor—chose to ignore the council’s banishment sentences and the ominous threats that accompanied them. As we shall see in Chapter Four, exiled burghers, who enjoyed legal rights in the territory, were able to petition the council for full pardons or permission to return to the territory temporarily. Banished vagrants, on the other hand, outsiders without local connections or formal legal rights in the territory, could not rely on such clemency and instead defied the council by ignoring their banishment sentence and returning illegally.

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle 37: 111, 126, 389b, 400b, 26 December 1582. Throughout early modern Europe the expulsion of the alien poor proved an ineffective solution to the vagrancy problem, as it merely served to shift the problem to other jurisdictions. See Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, p. 167. 42

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chapter two Public Expulsion and Sociospatial Boundaries44

As this examination of the town council’s attempts to purge their domain of vagrants through banishment has illustrated, the local authorities sought to use banishment not only to punish criminal behavior, but also to exclude criminalized deviants and outsiders from the urban community. The council policed inclusion in the community carefully and sought to bar marginals, especially the alien poor, from residing within the city’s walls.45 Through banishment the local authorities removed the marginal and the criminal from the community, both physically and socially. Thus, expulsion served to mark and to regulate the social and spatial boundaries of the Ulmer territory. As the cases examined here have demonstrated, the local magistrates’ attempts to banish vagrants were central to their law enforcement and social control efforts, but these authorities often proved incapable of enforcing banishment sentences effectively. Faced with the debilitating recidivism exhibited by desperate vagrants, and lacking the resources to police its borders effectively, the town council proved unable to keep determined expellees from drifting back into the territory. In an attempt to compel troublesome vagrants to remain outside Ulm’s borders, the local authorities increasingly turned to the power of words and relied upon unenforceable “symbolic” sentences delivered at public penal displays, official pronouncements intended to make their authority manifest and to deter banished offenders from returning to the territory. In the absence of effective enforcement Ulm’s magistrates substituted grandiose verdicts, read aloud during public banishment rituals, verdicts that commanded the expelled vagrant to remain a specified distance, usually a mile, from the council’s domain. As the crisis of the late sixteenth century deepened and the flood of vagrants into the territory intensified, the town council made increasing use of these symbolic sentences. Accordingly, over fifty-eight percent of the banishment sentences the high court delivered to vagrant offenders ordered the convict to remain a specified distance from the borders of

44 The term “sociospatial” is used here to indicate that banishment from the Ulmer Herrschaft simultaneously entailed both societal (social) and physical (spatial) exclusion. 45 For the expulsion of marginal offenders in early modern Germany as a form of “purification of the community,” see Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, p. 235.

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the territory or to remain across either the Rhine or the Lech rivers.46 Virtually all of these symbolic sentences were handed down after mid century, as the town council intensified its banishment campaign against vagrants and sought to deal with the vagrancy problem more systematically. All of the 146 verdicts where the vagrant was ordered to remain a specified number of miles from the borders of the territory date from after 1559. Likewise, all twenty verdicts where the offender was sent over the River Lech were handed down after mid century, and of the twenty-eight cases where the vagrant was sent over the Rhine, all but one date from after 1559. These symbolic sentences relied upon a calculus of exclusion that sought to remedy deviance with distance: the more dangerous and incorrigible the offender, the farther he or she was ordered to remain from the borders of the territory. Furthermore, the geographic boundaries at the heart of these sentences had a symbolic significance, particularly those involving waterways. For the authorities crossing back over this natural boundary was a conscious act, an aggravated form of defiance that merited more serious punishment. Ironically, while these sentences were vital to the council’s attempts to regulate the boundaries of the territory, they were also categorically unenforceable. Since these sentences applied to areas that lay outside the council’s jurisdiction, it appears that the undermanned Ulmer authorities did not expect to enforce many of the official banishment sentences they issued. Instead they hoped to deter banished vagrants from returning illegally by using official speech to relegate them beyond distant borders miles from the territory before physically expelling them from the city. The high court also made examples of the most incorrigible vagrants through violent public punishment rituals, rituals that also served as a stage for the town council to delineate the boundary between the respectable citizenry and vagrant outsiders. A final case from 1586, involving a troublesome vagrant named Jacob Burckhart, illustrates the nature of these symbolic banishment sentences. On Wednesday, 15 June 1586, the town council sentenced Burckhart, charging that he had “swindled people, committed petty theft, and had uttered evil, threatening speech.” The Ulmer authorities Ulm was not alone in banishing offenders across such natural boundaries. According to Carl Hoffmann, the Augsburg authorities sometimes ordered expellees to remain over the Danube, thereby sending them in the direction of Ulm! See Hoffmann, “Das Stadtverweis,” pp. 195, 197–98. 46

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banished the vagabond, ordering him to stay across the River Lech for the rest of his life and warning him that if he ever returned to the territory he would be flogged from the city. This threat did not dissuade Burckhart, however, and less than a month after his expulsion, in July 1586, he was in custody again. Imprisoned in a crude jail called the Blockhaus, the troublesome vagrant was questioned repeatedly by the authorities. Apparently his health suffered during this confinement, since the next time he entered the official record, at the end of August 1586, the council ordered that he be transferred from convalescence in the Spital to continued questioning in the tower jail. This time the magistrates ordered Burckhart to be questioned under torture about his “misdeeds.” On September 2, 1586 the high court handed down its verdict. Proclaiming that Burckhart “had not held to his previous punishment, but rather had committed further thievery and other mischief,” the council re-banished him. The magistrates ordered Burckhart to resume his previous banishment across the Lech, warning him once again that if he crossed this natural boundary and returned to Ulm he would suffer corporal punishment. The sentence that the town council levied against Jacob Burckhart in 1586 is typical of its use of spatial categories in its banishment sentences, thereby amplifying the severity of punishment by increasing the distance between the convict and the territory. First, the court commanded the convict to remain across the river Lech, a prominent natural boundary that lay outside the territory, for the rest of his life. Once he violated the terms of this banishment sentence, the magistrates delivered a grim threat, warning Burckhart that if he ever returned to Ulm he would face corporal punishment.47 Rather than merely drive Burckhart from the city, the Ulmer authorities sought to use the power of words—official speech delivered in the council’s council chamber and recorded in its punishment books—in an attempt to control the persistent lawbreaker. The banishment of vagrants like Jacob Burckhart worked to display the town council’s disciplinary authority, but also marked the limits of inclusion in the urban community as well as the magistrates’ role in policing these boundaries. The high court, in accordance with Roman law, investigated crimes and reached verdicts behind the closed doors

47 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 38: 681, 714b, 717, 787b, 791 (Wednesday 15 June 1586; Friday 8 July 1586; Monday 11 July 1586; Wednesday 31 August 1586).

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of their dungeon and council chamber. With the carefully constructed verdicts they read to the crowd before public punishments, the authorities sought to garner popular support for their decisions by highlighting the dangerous, incorrigible nature of the alien convict. The carefully staged penal rituals that followed, from exposing vagrants at the pillory to flogging them through the streets of the city and casting them out, also transmitted messages about inclusion and exclusion. Through repetition the relatively mild sentences handed down by the high court—over sixty-five percent of the vagrants sentenced for ignoring their banishment sentences and returning illegally to the territory after 1560 were simply re-banished without further punishment—served to display before the citizenry the authorities’ dogged efforts to ensure that threatening outsiders remained outside the borders of the territory. Despite the town council’s efforts to compel banished vagrants to remain beyond the boundaries of the territory, as we have seen the local archives are replete with examples of this sort of recidivism as desperate convicts sought refuge in the city after expulsion. The Ulmer authorities’ vagrancy campaign provides a vivid illustration of the limitations inherent in early modern social control initiatives, and while they were able to expel hundreds of vagrants from the territory, keeping them from returning was a different issue. Consequently, the irony of the council’s banishment policies was that while the frequency of official banishment sentences increased dramatically after 1559, the local authorities consistently proved unable to keep defiant expellees from returning to the territory illegally. Given the weakness of the council’s enforcement apparatus and the harshness of life on the road, it should come as no surprise that many of the wretched people the high court expelled refused to leave the territory for good and that the local authorities failed to police the boundaries of their domain effectively. Thus, the main targets of the council’s banishment efforts—rootless vagrants—often proved the hardest to keep from returning. Seemingly weak, vagrants were mobile and had little to lose and as a result the undermanned Ulmer authorities often proved powerless to keep the most determined of these outsiders outside the territory. Consequently, the high court relied upon a combination of public punishment and symbolic banishment sentences to deal with those illegal returnees identified by its patrolmen or informers, using expulsion as a stage to mark the boundaries of inclusion in the civic community. By purging the city of vagrants, Ulm’s magistrates sought to rid the community of the alien poor, presented as shiftless and dangerous in the mandates and

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verdicts they promulgated. However, in convictions involving migrant workers—the subject of Chapter Three—the town council did not rely upon categorical expulsion and carefully weighed the economic utility and the moral respectability of these resident aliens, laborers crucial to the local craft economy.

CHAPTER THREE

RESIDENT ALIENS, EXPULSION, AND EXCLUSION The Banishment of Cathrina Mair On Monday, August 27, 1576, the Ulmer authorities arrested a maid named Cathrina Mair for having an adulterous affair with her employer, the weaver Jacob Wagner. The unmarried Mair, who hailed from a village in Ulm’s territory, had given birth to a child recently and as she awaited the high court’s verdict in the tower dungeon, the city’s poorhouse (Armen Heußlin) cared for the infant. After questioning Mair and her employer, the authorities reached a verdict and sentenced the pair on 3 September. They ordered Wagner, a citizen and guildsman, to deliver a hefty fine to the city treasury—fifty Pfund Heller—and returned him to his wife. The town council also commanded the housefather to compensate his maid, ordering him to give her a pair of shoes for her stolen virginity and a pair of Gulden for her lying-in expenses.1 Along with this paltry compensation, Cathrina Mair received a harsh punishment. The magistrates banished her from the territory, ordering her to stay at least a mile away from the borders of the city-state and never to return. Mair was never to see her child again: the authorities instructed Wagner to claim the child at the poorhouse and raise it himself.2 Cathrina Mair’s expulsion from Ulm was typical of the local authorities’ treatment of resident aliens (Beywoner), laborers permitted to remain

1 One Gulden was worth sixty Kreuzer during this period, while one Pfund Heller was equivalent to 240 Heller or forty-three Kreuzer, and one Pfennig was worth two Heller. See the conversion chart supplied in the appendix of Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen, 1650 –1900: Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), p. 656. In early modern Schweinfurt banished convicts were given a baked roll, which cost four Pfennige, upon their expulsion, giving a rough indication of the buying power of these currencies. See Dirk Hesse, “Der Strafvollzug der freien Reichsstadt Schweinfurt,” Ph.D. diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, 1975, p. 95. 2 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 34: 611b, 612, 621, 672 (Monday, 27 August 1576; Monday, 3 September 1576). Apparently, Wagner did not shoulder his responsibility to raise his illegitimate child for very long, because a year later (1577) the council ordered officials in the poorhouse to re-admit the child. See StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 34: 835 (Monday, 3 June 1577).

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in the city only at the pleasure of the authorities. The council monitored the activities of these migrant workers closely: they were allowed to remain within the city’s walls so long as they were economically useful and did not cause disruption. These twin concerns—solvency and stability—had long been anxieties shared by the local authorities and citizenry alike. Thus, the Ulmer authorities’ use of banishment to punish and control resident aliens serves as an example of how expulsion furthered the council’s attempts to construct a disciplined community in line with their subjects’ notions of order and morality, as well as their economic interests. Examination of the Ulmer authorities’ banishment practices in cases involving migrant laborers demonstrates the role of expulsion in policing both the physical borders of their territory as well as inclusion in the urban commune. The council worked diligently to purge unwanted migrant workers from the community and expelled eighty-two of the 220 resident aliens it sentenced during the sixteenth century (thirty seven percent). These verdicts serve to elucidate the sorts of behaviors and offenders the local authorities sought to ban from the territory. They also show how the local magistrates regulated the social boundaries of the urban commune, marking publicly the dividing line between inclusion and exclusion, between acceptable behavior and deviancy, and between insider and outsider. As examination of the town council’s efforts to punish and control migrant workers through banishment will illustrate, after 1550 the local authorities sought to expel resident aliens who seemed to threaten the community’s prosperity or its morality, using purgation to regulate the boundaries between social and physical inclusion and exclusion. The Migrants’ Ordinance and the Regulation of Resident Aliens Throughout the early modern period, the economy of German-speaking Europe relied heavily upon migrant workers, with rural youths of both sexes providing crucial temporary and seasonal labor in the markets, households, and workshops of nearby cities and towns.3 Male villagers often secured positions as day laborers in urban marketplaces 3 For the role of migrant workers in the economy of early modern Germany, see Christian Pfister, “The Population of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” pp.

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and warehouses or as wage laborers within the guilds, particularly in the late sixteenth century as opportunities to attain the rank of master diminished.4 Female migrants, on the other hand, usually found work as domestic servants as they saved up enough money to marry.5 In Ulm, such resident aliens were crucial to the urban workshop economy and workers constantly flowed into the town from the countryside in search of wages. Fortunate migrant workers were able to find positions in the city’s workshops and households soon after they arrived in the town, usually through fellow villagers who had already settled there. Those without skills or connections, on the other hand, were forced to wait each morning in a corner of the marketplace to be hired as day laborers. Too poor to purchase citizenship (Bürgerrecht), migrant workers were retained or discharged according to local economic conditions and thus their total numbers fluctuated constantly.6 Concerned with the disruptive potential these resident aliens introduced into the households and workshops of the town, the Ulmer authorities sought to control their activities through a variety of detailed ordinances. Like their efforts to centralize poor relief examined in Chapter Two, the local magistrates’ attempts to regulate the activities of migrant workers were part of the surge in civic legislation that swept the Empire in the late Middle Ages. In Ulm, the earliest edicts pertaining to migrant laborers date from the late fifteenth century, with mandates concerning migrant workers in the rote Buch, the city’s earliest surviving law code.7 Beginning in the 1490s, these ordinances sought to control the daily life of resident aliens, regulating how they sought work, married, and even socialized. In 1527, amid the fervor of the early Reformation, the town

55–58. See also Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 83–92, for female migrant workers. 4 On the liminal position of journeymen and apprentices, who were members of the guild establishment but non-citizens, see Merry E. Weisner, “Gender and the Worlds of Work,” in Scribner, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History, pp. 224–26. 5 Of the migrant workers who applied for residence in Ulm during the period 1550–1559 and whose employment can be determined, some fifty percent were hired as domestic servants. Of these domestics, females outnumbered males about two to one. See Kinzelbach, Gesundbleiben, Krankwerden, Armsein, pp. 59–63. 6 Most migrant workers during this period were from rural families with few ties to landholding. They changed their place of residence frequently in search of jobs (particularly those working as domestic servants), but usually migrated only during their youth and within the orbit of the nearest large town. See Christian Pfister, “The Population of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” p. 56. 7 See Carl Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch and Eberhard Naujoks, “Ulms Sozialpolitik im 16. Jahrhundert,” Ulm und Oberschwaben, 33 (1953), pp. 88–98.

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council issued a comprehensive legal code that collected and expanded upon these late medieval ordinances. The result of this Reformation-era codification was a detailed and highly restrictive legal code known as the Ordnung der Beywoner halben (Migrants’ Ordinance). While the Ulmer authorities first issued this piece of legislation in 1527, they reissued it verbatim in 1581, a clear example of the continuity in law-making in sixteenth-century Ulm as rulers and subjects worked together to police inclusion in the urban community by enforcing standards of evangelical morality and guild-based thrift within the territory.8 Given these conservative impulses, the central concerns of the Migrants’ Ordinance were fiscal and moral, providing detailed provisions for regulating resident aliens’ economic utility and respectability. In order to protect the solvency of the civic poor chest, the authorities sought to exclude unemployed laborers from the city, since according to the preamble to the Ordinance, “in lean years, this city, and in particular the honorable council’s common citizens, have spent too much on handouts from the civic grain stores, the hospital, the orphanage, and the poorhouse.”9 While the city’s workshops and storehouses relied upon a steady stream of cheap labor from the countryside, migrants were permitted to reside in Ulm for only as long as they had stable employment. Non-citizens residing in the city were to earn their keep, and the council went on in the Ordinance to proclaim that: . . . according to the word and command of God, no one is to be idle. Therefore, each must earn and win his bread by the sweat of his brow. So must each day laborer, not afflicted with bodily infirmity, and without steady employment, wait on the market each morning for work. . . . Those who do not find work should return after midday and wait again. Those who do not do this, and do not earn wages, but rather appear too many times to be idle, should be expelled from the city and not tolerated here as residents any longer.

As this mandate suggests, the town council drew strong distinctions between the laboring poor, those migrants who were “pious, good, and tolerated here,” and the unemployed, or “useless,” the latter presumed to be a drain on the poor chest. Consequently, verifying the employment status of non-citizens was a crucial component of the authorities’ disciplinary efforts. As soon as migrants found work, they had to 8 For the continuity between late medieval and early modern civic legislation in German cities, see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 147–48. 9 StAU A 3785 Ordnung der Beywoner halben (1527; re-issued 1581).

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appear before the council with their prospective employers and apply for official permission to reside in the city as non-citizen inhabitants. Married applicants had to bring along their spouses and report “truthfully, how many children they had, along with their ages.” Meanwhile, the citizen hoping to employ the migrant had to testify that he would support the worker, even if he or she fell ill, without the assistance of the Spital or the poorhouse. The council ordered that the town scribe (Stattschreiber) was to record all this information and further decreed that migrant workers had to swear an oath that if they were discharged by their employer, or left the employ of their master voluntarily, they were to report to the authorities and then leave the city, with their spouse and children, within eight days. Furthermore, each resident alien accepted by the council was required to appear before the authorities each year with his or her family, or else leave the city. Once migrant workers gained permission to reside within the walls of Ulm, the regulation of their daily existence only intensified. Shut out of civic politics, these resident aliens nonetheless had certain responsibilities, such as paying taxes and fighting fires. The council sought to control the daily lives of migrant workers to a remarkable extent, proclaiming that they were not allowed to keep dogs and that they were to remain at work, summer and winter, from the tolling of the work-bell in the morning until it rang in the evening, with a meal break from eleven to twelve. Resident aliens were not allowed to drink alcohol outside their own homes on workdays, and were specifically barred from entering taverns or gambling during the workweek. Migrant workers were allowed to drink toasts on holidays, but the council commanded that they were not to consume more than a single measure of wine at a sitting.10 The local authorities also made it illegal for young apprentices or journeymen to assemble after dark, a law aimed at curtailing boisterous nighttime festivities.11 Any deviation from the rules laid out in the Migrants’ Ordinance called for expulsion, and resident aliens who fell ill, took poor relief, married without permission, or ran afoul of the law were to be driven from the territory.12 In policing the activities of migrant workers, the town council conformed to longstanding

10 A measure of wine was known as a Maß and equaled approximately 1.8 liters: see appendix in Landwehr, Policey im Alltag. 11 StAU A 3681 Vorhälte und Rüfe (1560), fol. 183–4; A 3681 Vorhälte und Rüfe, fol. 296–7 (1574); A 3681 Vorhälte und Rüfe, fol. 299 (1574). 12 StAU A 3785 Ordnung der Beywoner halben (1527/1581).

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norms based upon utility and respectability, norms enforced through banishment, a form of sociospatial exclusion that worked to rid the community of unwanted laborers. Expulsion and Exclusion Throughout the sixteenth century, the Ulmer authorities used informal expulsion to control the activities of non-citizens, according to the provisions laid out in the Migrants’ Ordinance. Hence, the town beadle no doubt expelled many migrant workers who violated these ordinances by simply turning them out, without generating a formal sentence or recording any details of the case. After mid century, however, the town council proved increasingly energetic in using official criminal prosecution, and formal banishment sentences in particular, in an effort to rid the city of troublesome migrant laborers. Although the Migrants’ Ordinance had been in effect since 1527, the systematic use of formal banishment sentences began in the 1550s. The frequency of official banishment sentencing in cases involving migrant workers accelerated dramatically in the course of the sixteenth century. In the 1500s Ulm’s high court banished eighty-two resident aliens, and all of these convictions occurred after mid century, with the rate of banishment convictions rising steadily into the 1590s. Banishment was pivotal to the local authorities’ efforts to purge the city of unwanted migrants and of realizing the late medieval ideal of an orderly, godly urban community by ensuring the workshops and households of Ulm harbored only hardworking, pious, obedient laborers.13 While the town council’s efforts to rid the city of unwanted migrant laborers reflected traditional civic morality, financial concerns also played an important role. Thus, the high court used banishment to deal with a major concern of the Migrants’ Ordinance, protecting the city’s finances by expelling indigent migrant workers. In July 1587, for 13 For an insightful discussion these Reformation-era moral reforms, see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 147–52. For concise treatment of Reformation-era discipline and its focus on the patriarchal household, see also R. Po-Chia Hsia, “The Structure of Belief: Confessionalism and Society, 1500–1600,” pp. 355–77. See also see Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, p. 225. Additionally, Christopher R. Friedrichs, “German Social Structure, 1300–1600,” in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, pp. 238–47, discusses early modern German cities, highlighting the “most fundamental aspect of every city’s social structure: the division of its inhabitants into citizens and non-citizens.”

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example, the authorities banished a day laborer named Hanns Weiler for squandering his wages and for “poor housekeeping (ubel Haushaltung),” a charge that meant his household was either disorderly, or insolvent, or more likely both. Weiler’s record notes that his wife and four children were being supported in the city’s poorhouse, a clear violation of the provisions of the Migrants’ Ordinance. The magistrates banished Weiler, commanding the day laborer to stay out of the territory for life.14 Nine resident aliens like Weiler faced banishment in the sixteenth century for falling into debt and resorting to poor relief. In protecting the property of its citizens, this was not the local authorities’ only concern, and they also expelled migrant laborers convicted of stealing. In carrying out its penal activities, the town council invariably relied upon denunciations and complaints lodged by the local inhabitants, and in cases involving resident aliens accused of theft, the injured party who initiated court proceedings was usually the migrant’s employer. Many of these denunciations involved allegations of petty larceny, as migrants sought to supplement their meager wages by stealing cash or household items. Of the 101 offenses the council recorded in banishment convictions involving migrant workers, twelve involved charges of theft. A banishment conviction from 1588 is typical of these cases. On 29 November of that year, a maid named Appolonia Haintzlerin was convicted of “stealing several petty things from her master, Michel Atzlern.” The magistrates imprisoned the maid in the tower and, after she paid her prison expenses and swore her parole oath, ordered her to leave the territory and “earn her Pfennig somewhere else.”15 Aside from using such official expulsion to protect the property of the town against indigent or thieving migrants, the town council also strove to preserve the honor and respectability of their domain by expelling resident aliens convicted of disruptive or scandalous misbehavior. In its efforts to stamp out such misbehavior, the high court frequently concerned itself with the unruly behavior exhibited by rowdy young journeymen and apprentices laboring in Ulm’s craft workshops, particularly those affiliated with the city’s poorer guilds. Of these troublesome

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 39: 386 (Friday, 14 July 1587). StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 7 (Friday, 29 November 1588). On the role of parole oaths—pledges to keep the peace after release that are known as Urfehde in the sources—in the intensification of social control in early modern Germany, see Andreas Blauert, Das Urfehdewesen im deutschen Südwesten im Spätmittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica, 2000). 14 15

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guildsmen, the weavers are the most prominent in local sentencing records. Most of these convictions involved rowdy male offenders and alcohol consumption and the associated crimes of drunkenness and brawling. Convictions for assault prompted the most banishment convictions with thirty instances, followed by disruptive public intoxication with twenty-four convictions. A case from December 1582 involving an unruly journeyman weaver named Jacob Hirtman provides a useful example of the city fathers’ efforts to rid the territory of disruptive migrants. Hirtman had been arrested for “shouting and crowing on the streets by night in an undisciplined manner, for the third time.” The court ordered the town scribe to comb his records for any prior convictions involving Hirtman, as the magistrates built their case against the weaver. Hirtman had indeed faced the court before, having been reprimanded in the summer of 1577 for his involvement in a nighttime street fight. Given his history of rowdy late-night behavior, the council banished the disruptive journeyman, commanding him to “leave the city and earn his Pfennig somewhere else.”16 The local magistrates’ definition of disorderly behavior encompassed more that just brawling and drunkenness, and they also vigorously prosecuted migrants for exhibiting behavior that they deemed to be insolent or insubordinate. Twelve official banishment sentences mention the convicted migrant’s “disobedient” (ungehorsam) conduct. While this disobedience took a variety of forms, perceived threats to the council’s authority through disrespectful speech were most threatening and therefore resulted most frequently in expulsion. In the spring of 1597, for example, a journeyman from Bavaria, enraged that he had been denied permission to spend the night in the city, had “horribly cursed and blasphemed God and also uttered unseemly words about the honorable council.” Worse still, he had committed all of these outrages “in the presence of the Lord Mayor.” The high court informed the impetuous journeyman that by law they could have cut out his tongue for blasphemy, but instead he was to be banished from the city with the warning that if he ever returned to Ulm he would face corporal punishment.17 As these cases demonstrate, the town council used banishment in an attempt to stamp out all manner of violent or disorderly behavior.

16 17

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 34: 866 (Friday, 12 July 1577). StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 48: 171 (Monday, 2 May 1597).

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The authorities also relied upon expulsion to punish resident aliens who threatened to tarnish the town’s respectability through immoral behavior. Migrants who engaged in premarital or extramarital sex proved to be the primary focus of these efforts. While violent and disruptive conduct was usually the precinct of male migrants, banishment convictions involving scandalous sexual behavior generally involved female laborers. Of the twelve resident aliens banished for sexual offenses, ten were females. Of course, female migrants were also banished for other offenses (as was Appolonia Haintzlerin, whose conviction for theft was examined above), but they were most frequently cast out of the city for sexual misconduct. Thus, of the seventeen offenses stipulated in the banishment convictions of female migrants, ten were of a sexual nature. As several recent studies have demonstrated, since the late Middle Ages, civic elites—both secular and ecclesiastical—throughout the Empire tried to ensure marital stability and to enforce standards of sexual morality through exhaustive legislation.18 In Ulm, ordinances aimed at the regulation of sexual conduct survive from the 1380s, but enforcement of these edicts remained haphazard at best.19 During the Reformation period, however, more vigorous moral reforms superseded these essentially conservative medieval promulgations. By the 1520s and 30s, secular authorities across Germany had wrested jurisdiction over sexual crimes and marriage disputes from the Church. Responding to calls for more rigorous moral policing, voiced by clerics and laymen alike, civic elites redoubled their efforts to monitor and enforce public morality (Sittlichkeit). The institution of marriage, seen by religious and secular authorities as the very bedrock of settled society, was at the heart of these reforms. In the wake of the Reformation, the concern with preserving the sanctity of the marital bond prompted local authorities to shift their focus towards increased regulation of illicit sexuality that threatened marriage. Above all, this meant stamping out adultery and prostitution. Consequently, secular officials reissued and expanded existing morals legislation, and began to pursue and punish sexual offenders in a more systematic manner.20 In sixteenth-century Ulm, banishment proved central in the intensified regulation of sexual conduct, particularly in cases involving wayward migrant workers.

18 19 20

See, for example, Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society. See Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, pp. 19–24, 92–95.

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Given the town council’s concern with punishing open vice and with keeping unwanted children from drawing public funds, female migrant workers convicted of fornication invariably faced expulsion. The impulse to purify the city by removing female laborers charged with extramarital sexual contact was so strong that it even extended to cases in which the authorities determined that the woman had been seduced. A case from June 1588, involving a pair of servants, provides a useful example of this dynamic. These migrants, Thoman Leigtlin from a village near Ehingen and Anna Ulmerin from a hamlet near Blaubeuren, were employed in the household of Sebastian Wörlin, a baker on the busy square called the Weinhof. After Ulmerin turned up pregnant, the pair was charged with fornication (Unzucht).21 The official record maintains that during questioning Leigtlin had confessed to having taken Ulmerin’s virginity ( Jungfrauschaft) and impregnating her. The court banished the couple, making them swear that they would leave the city and never return.22 This verdict is typical of the council’s efforts to protect the city’s poor chest from the hungry mouths of illegitimate children and to uphold standards of Christian morality, efforts that usually resulted in the expulsion of both partners in fornication cases involving migrants. Convictions for extramarital sexual relations between resident aliens and citizens sometimes followed a similar pattern, as a representative case from the spring of 1596 suggests. This fornication case, involving a male citizen and a female migrant, began with the arrest, on 1 March 1596, of a citizen named Wolf Müller. Müller worked in the municipal storehouse and had been charged with deflowering and impregnating a migrant woman from Aufheim, a village in the territory, named Maria Bösingerin. The council decreed that Müller should be interrogated about the affair but banished Bösingerin immediately. The high court ordered the beadle “to have her swear that she would leave the city at once and stay a mile away, because she is not a citizen here.” Several days later the court banished Müller as well, although the magistrates noted on his record that he was to remain outside the territory “until pardoned,” offering the possibility of redemption to the wayward citizen.

In early modern sources, the term “Unzucht” referred to undisciplined, disorderly behavior that was sexual in nature. For a discussion of the connotations of this term, see Roper, Holy Household, pp. 123–24. 22 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 40: 143 (Wednesday, 12 June 1588). 21

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Bösingerin, on the other hand, identified specifically as a non-citizen, was not given any such hope of redemption.23 Early modern justices considered illicit sex that not only offended public morality, but also upset social relations, to be doubly threatening. Adultery topped the list of those aggravated sexual offenses and represented a major challenge to the state’s role as protector of public peace and the local social order.24 Consequently, adultery prosecution was a major part of Ulm’s courtroom activity, resulting in 263 convictions during the 1500s. Adultery prosecution involving illicit sexuality between citizens and servants provides perhaps the best view into the complex interplay of behavioral norms, gender, and social status in the town council’s use of banishment to punish and control resident aliens. Seeking to preserve a stable social order in its domain, the high court’s overriding goal in adultery prosecution was protecting local marital bonds.25 Thus, Ulm’s sixteenth-century penal codes stated that first-time adulterers were to receive a penalty known as the “Habermuß straff.” This traditional punishment entailed an eight-day imprisonment in the Strafturm (increased to a month after 1581) on porridge, bread, and water, followed by an official reprimand. Offenders who ignored this “fatherly punishment and warning” and continued their adulterous affairs faced banishment from the territory.26 In convictions involving a pair of local citizens, the court usually followed these rather lenient sentencing guidelines closely. A typical case from 1545 shows that while the authorities were indeed vigorous in punishing adultery among its enfranchised subjects, the penalties handed down to these offenders were usually light. Thus, in March 1545, the town council prosecuted Martin Gerwickh, because “as a married man, he had engaged in dishonor with Basti Brigel’s wife, Appolonia.” According to the statute, he received the traditional punishment for adultery: eight days in the Strafturm on

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 46: 107b, 115b (Monday, 1 March 1596). See Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, p. 16. 25 In such cases, banishment served to purify the community. For this point, see Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, pp. 235–36, who argues that whereas the goal in sentencing insiders was to “restore, by fine or penance, lost status in the community, marginal offenders had no such status to regain. Instead, the focus here was on public humiliation of the offender and purification of the community from the same undesirables, usually by physical banishment.” 26 For mentions of this penalty in local statute, see StBibU 27 488 Kirchenordnung (1531), and StAU A [4844] Gesetzbuch (1581). 23 24

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porridge, bread, and water. The justices also ordered him to appear in their closed council chambers after his release, for a stern verbal reprimand (strefflich Red). A few days later, his co-defendant, Appolonia Briglin, received the same sentence.27 With these relatively mild punishments, the authorities censured the illicit liaison, but also ensured that the errant couple did not suffer permanent dishonor. By sparing the offenders humiliating public ridicule or the executioner’s touch—either of which might permanently damage their personal honor—the council sought to ease their re-entry into the local social order.28 Once the adulterous affair had been punished, and the scandal publicly expiated, the damaged marriages might be salvaged and the offenders could be reintegrated into local society without tainting the collective honor of their families, neighbors, or guild associates. In these potentially disruptive cases, the council was eager to repair the social fabric, stepping in to facilitate public atonement. Somewhat paradoxically, making adultery a matter of (albeit discreet) public record might actually have served to repress public scandal. According to contemporaneous legal practice, once an offender had served his or her jail term, further gossip was subject to prosecution for slander (Schmach reden).29 The court’s treatment of Gerwickh and Briglin was typical, and the Ulmer authorities prescribed this relatively lenient “Habermüß straff ” for both partners in almost sixty percent of the adultery cases involving a pair of local citizens. By relying so heavily on this customary punishment, unique to adultery prosecutions and situated carefully between punishment and penance, the high court sought to restore collective honor, reassert the marital order, and—perhaps most important—repress private vendettas. This sort of semi-public chastisement served to display the council’s judicial might, but also to provide an opportunity for the offender

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 18: 141b, 143 (Monday, 16 March 1545; Friday, 18 March 1545). 28 For the dishonoring effects of certain official punishments, see Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. See also “The Executioner’s Healing Touch: Health and Honor in Early Modern German Medical Practice,” in Max Reinhart, ed., Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998), an earlier article by the same author that deals with similar issues. 29 For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, see David Warren Sabean, “Village Court Protocols and Memory,” in Heinrich R. Schmidt, André Holenstein, and Andreas Würgler, eds., Gemeinde, Reformation und Widerstand: Festschrift für Peter Blickle zum 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Bibliotheca Academica Verlag, 1998), pp. 12–15, 21–23. 27

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to atone for his or her crime. In scandalous cases, involving notorious sexual behavior, the courtroom reprimand may have also helped restore a cuckolded husband’s honor, making it easier for him to take in his wife again and for the couple to re-enter respectable society. By showing mercy, the authorities demonstrated not only their power to punish, but also their duty to salvage troubled marriages. Thus, adultery sentencing in cases involving citizens sought to deter offenders (with an unpleasant jail stint and closed-chamber warning), but stopped short of imposing permanently dishonoring corporal and/or public punishment. In adultery cases involving resident aliens, however, the court did not usually display such leniency and often departed from the statutes by banishing the errant migrant. As discussed in Chapter One, early modern magistrates rarely ruled according to statute, and instead judged each case according to the social position of the offender (of which gender was a major component), along with the particulars of the crime.30 These sentencing discrepancies on the basis of social status and gender distinctions are readily apparent in cases involving sexual impropriety between a local master—or mistress—and a servant from outside the city. In these cases the Ulmer authorities proved less lenient and often relied upon expulsion to rid the town of the adulterous migrant. While modern scholars disagree about the frequency of such illicit sexual relations within the early modern household, evidence from Ulm suggests that sexual liaisons between employers and servants were not unknown.31 The early modern craft household was more than a familial entity, and its economic functions ensured that a cadre of young unrelated servants lived alongside the housefather and his family. During the 1500s, eighteen adultery cases involving guild masters and their maids arose within Ulm’s households and prompted formal convictions. In punishing adultery between a supposedly steadfast local housefather and a female servant in his employ, the town council’s primary objective seems to have been the preservation of marital—and therefore social—stability. In practice, this usually meant punishing the male See Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, pp. 77–78, 100. An example of the scholarly disagreement over the frequency of illicit sexual relations between masters and servants can be seen in the work of Joel Harrington and Isabel Hull. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, pp. 227–28, suggests that most males who appeared before the courts in the Palatinate committed adultery with lower-status females. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, p. 36, on the other hand, doubts that such “sexual abuse” was very widespread. 30

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citizen with short imprisonment and a warning while banishing the non-citizen partner in the affair.32 A representative adultery case from March 1563 bears out this impression. Wolff Gaügen, a householder in the town of Söflingen in the Ulmer territory, was sentenced to the “customary time” (eight days) in the Strafturm on porridge, bread, and water for committing adultery with his maid while his wife was sick. His maid, Barbara Algöwerin from Beüren, on the other hand, received a much harsher sentence. After recording that she had uttered “several threatening and unseemly words” during questioning, the council ordered her released from jail, only to banish her from the territory for life.33 While circumstances including Gaügen’s wife’s illness or Algöwerin’s insolent behavior before the court may have influenced the magistrates’ decision, the verdict was typical. Thus, in most adultery cases involving a master and his servant, sentencing practices did not follow the letter of the law. The municipal ordinance called for “single people and apprentices” to receive the same adultery punishment as married folk (eight days on bread and water in the tower). In practice, however, it was usually only the enfranchised male defendant that received the statutory punishment, while his migrant female codefendant often faced expulsion from the territory, as in the adultery conviction that opened this chapter.34 Given the secret nature of the crime of adultery, carried out behind the closed doors of the household, most master-maid adultery cases came to the attention of the authorities only when the maid was found to be pregnant. Likewise, pregnancy affected sentencing, since adultery prosecution often came down to the question of the maid’s sexual purity and because, according to learned medical opinion of the time, copulation could result in pregnancy only if both partners enjoyed the sexual act. Thus, pregnancy was considered clear evidence that the female defendant had been a willing partner to the adultery, if not the sexual aggressor, and often prompted her expulsion.35 In a typical case from 14 May 1568, for instance, “Master Anthoni Selzlin” appeared before the court to answer allegations that he had committed 32 This dynamic has been identified in early modern Augsburg as well: see Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 151. 33 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 28: 384, 386 (Friday, 12 March 1563; Wednesday, 17 March 1563). 34 For Ulm’s adultery statutes, see StAU A [4844] Gesetzbuch (1581). 35 See Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 46–47.

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adultery with “Sara Höllin, his pregnant maid.” We do not know how the case came to the council’s attention, but most likely Selzlin’s wife or another servant denounced Sara when her pregnancy began to show. Alternatively, Sara herself, her prospects ruined by her pregnancy, might have brought the case before the court, seeking damages, although she could not have expected much sympathy from the authorities.36 The magistrates locked Selzlin in the tower for questioning. Three days later, they imprisoned Sara Höllin, who had apparently already given birth, since her record maintains that she had already “lain in the childbed (Kindbett) for four weeks.” The court also ordered Selzlin’s wife to care for the infant during Höllin’s imprisonment. Although the archival record does not reveal their interrogation methods, by 19 May the authorities had collected enough testimony to assert that Selzlin had indeed “committed adultery with his maid, and also had robbed her of her virginity.” They ordered him to be released from the tower after a week upon his swearing the standard parole oath and paying his prison expenses (Turmgeld ). Furthermore, Selzlin was bound to appear before the council for a formal admonition, to pay a fine of fifty Pfund Heller, and to refrain from visiting the city’s taverns until further notice. The court’s decision also called for compensation for the maid, and Sara received from her employer the traditional damages for defloration, a pair of coins for her lying-in expenses and a pair of shoes for her stolen virginity (called her Magthumb—her maidenhead—in the records). Three weeks later Sara also received something from the council for her troubles: she was banished from the territory and three miles from its borders for life.37 This example, which could be multiplied by several similar cases in Ulm’s municipal archives, dramatically illustrates the disparity in applying adultery statutes. The high court chastised Selzlin for corrupting his maid, punished him (a criminal penalty), and forced him to compensate his maid (a civil judgement). In the end, however, despite his guilt, they refused to break up an established local household, and Selzlin was permitted to return to his wife and his position at the head of his

36 See Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, pp. 249–50, who argues that the early modern state was still reluctant to cross the threshold of the individual household and, as a result, usually prosecuted only in notorious cases where “open concubinage” or pregnancy fostered denunciations. 37 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 30: 766, 769, 771, 784, 791 (Friday, 14 May 1568; Monday, 17 May 1568; Wednesday, 19 May 1568; Friday, 11 June 1568).

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family. The wretched maid, on the other hand, her honor tainted by illegitimate pregnancy and a likely future burden on the town’s poor chest, suffered banishment.38 As discussed in Chapter One, the town council applied its judicial authority within a rigid set of customary restraints, and accepted practice required that justices base their verdicts upon a complicated equation of the offender’s social standing and the particulars of his or her crime. The role of these complex considerations in sentencing, and especially the impact of social standing, are readily apparent in cases where the authorities punished enfranchised females—local housewives—for engaging in adultery with male migrants. Although female adulterers posed a serious threat to patriarchal authority, the local magistrates emphasized repairing broken marriages rather than expelling unfaithful wives. Thus, female citizens whose marriages might be salvaged were reintegrated, while marginal males and unforgiven wives were expelled. Most of the surviving cases involve affairs between citizen females and migrant males—in the parlance of the time, these alien seducers were called “cuckoos,” after birds that leave their eggs in another bird’s nest to be hatched and raised.39 Before the Ulmer court, status considerations came to the fore once again, and the male resident alien bore the brunt of sentencing. A case from 1590 involving a local housewife named Ursüla Shneiderin and a footloose weaver from Waltzen named Michel Hertzog, for instance, is illustrative of how the relative social status of convicts influenced adultery conviction. At the adulterous couple’s sentencing, the magistrates decreed that the male, Michel Hertzog, “as a stranger ( frembder)” was to be banished three miles from the territory. By contrast, Ursüla Shneiderin, identified as “impregnated by the above-mentioned Michel Hertzog,” was required only to stand “as an adulteress” before the council for a reprimand.40 Here the authorities banished a migrant male—explicitly because he was an outsider—while merely subjecting his citizen co-defendant to a measure of discreet shaming. This glimpse of the authorities’ motives See StAU A 3785 Ordnung der Beywoner halben (1527/1581). See, for example, StBibU 1110 Casparum Huberinum, Jesus Syrach. Spiegel der Haußzucht genannt, Sammpt einer kurtzen Außlegung für die armen Haußväter und ir gesinde, wie sie ein Gottselig leben gegen meniglich sollen erzeigen. Darinnen der Welt lauff begriffen und wie sich ein ieglicher Christ in seinem beruff und in der Policey ehrlich und löblich solle halten (Nuremberg, 1587). 40 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 41: 137b (Wednesday, 27 May 1590). This case is also recorded in StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 315 (Monday, 22 June 1590). 38

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suggests that they labeled insiders according to what they did (adulteress), but outsiders according to what they were (stranger). Furthermore, the record barely mentions Shneiderin’s pregnancy, probably because as a citizen she was far less likely to become a public charge. In cases involving adultery between female citizens and male migrant workers, the authorities banished the outsider male, while reintegrating the insider female into local society. Evidently, in terms of expulsion one’s place in local society was the driving force in sentencing, as authorities used banishment to police the margin between inclusion and exclusion within the territory.41 As we have seen, like authorities elsewhere Ulm’s magistrates sought above all to preserve existing marriages, the basis of citizenship and civic identity. Consequently, when an adulterous local wife could not persuade her wronged husband to take her back she might face banishment. One such conviction, sent up to the council from Geislingen, a town in the Ulmer territory, appears in the records on 17 January 1592. In the initial entry, we find out that a miller’s apprentice from Gerstetten named Peter Benckeler had been sent to the tower in Ulm for having an affair with the wife of a local named Esias Glogker. The authorities released Benckeler on a parole oath, forced him to pay his prison expenses, and banished him from the territory, with the warning that if he returned he would receive a severe punishment.42 With the next entry, from 21 January 1592, the high court sentenced Glogker’s wife. Her record states: The wife of Esias Glogker from Geislingen, [who] committed adultery, was imprisoned first in Geislingen and then brought to the tower here in Ulm. Owing to this matter, her husband still will not take her back at this time. So she shall be released on a parole oath and payment of her prison expenses—which her husband, who brought the complaint, should pay. Next, bound by her sworn oath, she shall go out of the city, territory, and one mile away, and—unless pardoned—should never return.43

41 Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, pp. 236–37, notes similar adultery sentencing patterns in the Palatinate (sentencing of married women was similar to that of married men in adultery cases, whereas the treatment of male servants before the courts was like that of servant females). 42 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 577 (Monday, 17 January 1592). The record includes a pair of failed appeals (5 June 1592; 8 June 1593). It is also recorded in StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 42: 248 (Monday, 17 January 1592). 43 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 578 (Friday, 21 January 1592). It is also recorded in StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 42: 253 (Friday, 21 January 1592).

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It seems that Glogker’s wife was banished primarily because her husband (who brought the charges in the first place) would not accept her back into the household.44 Interestingly, Glogker had to pay his banished wife’s prison expenses: either she simply did not have the money or the council sought to provide a disincentive to husbands who refused to take back a wayward spouse. Husbands were not the only ones who held power to decide the fate of adulterous partners and sometimes the authorities banished a local housefather for having an adulterous affair after his spouse refused to take him back.45 Property and Purity: The Banishment of Resident Aliens The town council’s attempts to police the activities of resident aliens through banishment provide several useful insights regarding the role of expulsion in early modern disciplinary efforts, as well as its place in the maintenance of central authority. Migrant workers held only conditional status within Ulm and, as this analysis has demonstrated, the local authorities regulated their activities and measured their utility carefully. Expulsion proved central to these efforts, and as we have seen the local authorities banished eighty-two of the 220 resident aliens they sentenced during the 1500s (thirty-seven percent). While this expulsion rate is much lower than that experienced by vagrants (eighty-two percent), it is higher than the banishment rate of citizens (twenty-six percent), as the examination offered in Chapter Four will show. Several factors help to explain this disparity in banishment rates. Unlike vagrants, migrant workers were crucial for the local economy and held at least provisional permission to reside in the territory, and therefore did not risk categorical expulsion. On the other hand, resident aliens did not enjoy citizenship and the legal protections and support

44 The essential role of marital stability in sentencing gains further support from another entry scrawled in the margin of the Strafbuch next to the Glogker case. Eight months after her expulsion, in September 1593, the council pardoned Glogker’s wife, explicitly because “her husband willingly accepts her again.” She was required, however, to appear before the council for a stern order to pursue “better living.” This appeal is recorded in StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 578 (13 September 1592 [sic]). 45 One such example is the adultery case involving a weaver named Paül Shmid and his maid, Barbara Zellerin, recorded in StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 175–76 (Monday, 10 November 1589). Shmid was banished from the territory, but allowed to return after the council received several petitions from his estranged wife.

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networks it entailed, and therefore they proved more vulnerable to banishment prosecution. Given their liminal status within local society, tolerated but not fully enfranchised, migrant workers that the town council deemed a threat to the property or the propriety of the urban community often faced banishment. Thus, in cases involving resident aliens, whose place in the urban social structure remained somewhat ambiguous, banishment served to regulate and to display the boundary between inclusion and exclusion in the territory, a means of enacting the social distinctions laid out in the Migrants’ Ordinance. By banishing errant migrant workers, the Ulmer authorities sought to provide order within the territory in a time of disruption and anxiety. Concomitantly, expulsion was an important tool in the local magistrates’ efforts to sharpen distinctions between insiders and outsiders in the territory after mid century. In an attempt to ensure stability and uphold morality, the local magistrates purged society of threatening migrants defined in both fiscal and moral terms. Above all, however, banishment served to underscore and protect the social hierarchy by highlighting distinctions between enfranchised insiders and unwanted outsiders.46 Through sentencing and expulsion, the high court marked local social boundaries and power relations, not only through expulsion but also through rare displays of mercy, which also served to demonstrate the magistrates’ authority. In some cases, banished migrant workers were able to secure pardons and permission to return to the territory, but only after years of persistent appeals to the council for clemency. A married journeyman weaver named Peter Thomman, for example, was banished in October 1590 after he “laid between two maids in a bed in his master’s house” and then attempted to flee punishment. The high court recorded that after his arrest Thomman refused to confess to any sexual misconduct (Unzucht), but the authorities decided to banish him from the territory anyway. Thomann’s wife, while no doubt in dire economic straits (she seems to have survived by begging as is suggested by a reference to a “Shilt” or beggar’s badge in her record), waited prudently until January 1591 to petition for her husband’s reinstatement. She was denied in this appeal and in a series of subsequent petitions, totaling nine between January 1591 and March 1593. The last, on March 14, 1593 was successful. In the official record the

46

See Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 150–51.

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council stated, “Peter Thomman is released from his punishment, but his petitioning wife is to be informed that when he returns here he must appear before the Lord Mayor for a serious warning about his previous behavior and urged towards better living.”47 Since the late Middle Ages, Ulm’s magistrates and its citizenry had sought to keep the city financially solvent by excluding unemployed migrants and penniless beggars from the territory. After mid century, as the region’s economic fortunes faded, the local magistrates redoubled these efforts in an attempt to solidify the city’s precarious financial base.48 Meanwhile, the individual urban craft household—a traditional mainstay of the local economy—was under tremendous economic pressure, as markets retreated and the real value of wage labor plummeted after 1550. Thus, efforts to monitor the employment status of resident aliens and to purge the city of unemployed migrants through banishment during this troubled period can be viewed as a shared effort by Ulm’s magistrates and its enfranchised citizenry to protect the social hierarchy. Accordingly, justices often used banishment to rid the city of migrants who appeared to be work-shy or to be a potential drain on the civic poor chest. The town council’s sentencing patterns in cases involving resident aliens also demonstrate, however, that fiscal concerns were not the only impulse driving banishment sentences. The local magistrates also used expulsion to purge the city of migrant laborers who threatened the respectability of the city or disrupted the peace. Given its overriding concern with protecting the sanctity of local marriages and the solidity of local households, the council sought to root out potentially destructive elements. In their effort to preserve social stability, the Ulmer magistrates sought to reintegrate enfranchised locals and expel disruptive aliens,

47 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 376 (Wednesday 21 October 1590). Thomman lodged unsuccessful appeals on 4 January 1591, 19 February 1591, 26 May 1591, 25 August 1591, 10 November 1591, 15 December 1591, 4 August 1592, and 30 October 1592, before being reinstated on 14 March 1593. 48 For the fiscal pressures facing the early modern state, and its efforts to harness the productive household for taxation, see Sabean, Power in the Blood, pp. 200–13. See also Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, pp. 37–38, for official efforts to shore up taxable households. For Ulm’s Steueramt and tax structures, see Adolf Kölle, “Ursprung und Entwicklung der Vermögenssteuer in Ulm,” Württembergische Vierteljahrshefte für Landesgeschichte VII (1989), pp. 1–24 and Kurt Rothe, Das Finanzwesen der Reichsstadt Ulm im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1991).

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thereby forcing marginal outsiders to endure the rigors of punishment. Adulterous servants, usually recent migrants from the city’s hinterlands, were considered expendable, and usually faced banishment. In dealing with sensational cases involving sexual delicts that offended public morality the high court generally staged a public expulsion to accompany their banishment conviction. These elaborate displays portrayed the local authorities as protectors of public order and morality, responsible for purging the city of dangerous, alien elements. A case from the winter of 1598, at the height of the sixteenth-century council’s attempts to rid the city of disruptive migrants through expulsion, shows the nature of these expulsion rituals. Alexi Schneider, a “young farm laborer” from the village of Jungingen, was arrested for a scandalous sex crime and sent to Ulm for sentencing. Schneider stood accused of the heinous crime of incest and was interrogated under torture in the tower, where the authorities discovered that he had “slept with a mother and daughter”, robbing the latter of her virginity and “doing the work of the flesh with her.” According to sixteenth-century legal definitions, incest prohibitions included sexual contact with pairs of brothers or sisters or with parents and children.49 Under questioning, Schneider revealed that, having had sex with the daughter, Anna Wengin, he slept six times with her mother, Agnes. Having built its case, the high court handed down a trio of convictions: Anna, deemed to be less responsible, received a stern reprimand; her mother, Agnes, lifelong banishment across the Rhine; Schneider, having knowingly committed the carnal sin of incest, was to be publicly whipped from the town. Schneider was exposed at the pillory as the court clerk detailed his crimes and read out the magistrates’ verdict and was then flogged through the streets of the town by the executioner and expelled. The Urgichtbuch, Ulm’s record of judicial penalties, includes a striking pictorial representation of his punishment, a graphic representation of the council’s formidable penal authority as well as official efforts to police the boundary between inclusion and exclusion in the urban community through the purgation of unwanted migrant laborers (Figure 4).50

See Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society. StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 50 (Friday, 3 February 1598). The case is also recorded in StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 48: 53b, 56b, 57 (Wednesday, 1 February 1590). 49

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Fig. 4. Marginalia from Alexi Schneider verdict [detail], StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 50 (1598).

As we shall see in the next chapter, Chapter Four, the Ulmer authorities did not restrict their use of banishment to ridding the town of dangerous outsiders. Rather, in their efforts to police misbehavior and inculcate evangelical morality, the local magistrates often used banishment to curb wayward citizens, townsfolk who were at once agents and targets of official disciplinary efforts.

CHAPTER FOUR

MORAL REFORM AND THE BANISHMENT OF CITIZENS The Banishment of the Haüser Brothers In the summer of 1598 Ulm’s town council banished a pair of local butchers, known as the Haüser brothers, after receiving “information about their evil living and great blasphemy.” The high court released the brothers, Hanns and Matheüs, from the tower, ordering them to leave the territory and to remain three miles away from its borders for the rest of their lives. In its official verdict, the magistrates also declared that the brothers fully deserved to have their tongues cut out for their blasphemy, but the court chose to be merciful. Finally, the sentence turned to the Haüser brothers’ mother, Appolonia Haüserin, who was also in custody. The authorities released her, after she paid her prison expenses and swore the customary parole oath, warning her that if she did not stay out of trouble she would suffer banishment as well. The banishment of the Haüser brothers was the culmination of over a decade of running conflict between the troubled household, their neighbors, and the Ulmer authorities. In the fall of 1586, the council had sentenced Hanns Haüser to fourteen days in jail for “his scandalous behavior and evil cursing against his mother and brother.” A few years later, in April 1589, another entry in the council’s minutes mentions the unruly butcher. Citing his “entirely immodest, insolent, defiant, and outrageous conduct towards his mother and his brother,” the court ordered Hanns Haüser to pay a fine that he owed to the misdemeanor court (Ainunger), or else face banishment. This warning did not deter the defiant butcher, however, and in February 1590, “on the complaint of his mother, Appolonia Haüserin,” the magistrates imprisoned Hanns Haüser again. Once he was in custody, the council’s investigation into Haüser’s misconduct moved beyond his domestic squabbles. The Ulmer authorities ordered him yet again to pay the fine he apparently still owed to the misdemeanor court, warning him that if he did not deliver the money within a month’s time he would be banished from the city. Finally, they informed Haüser that they had

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received information (Kundschafft) about some recent “strife” between the troublesome butcher and Hanns Rietmann, another butcher with a criminal past. The authorities released Haüser, but directed the misdemeanor court to look into the matter. A month later, the Haüser family was in trouble with the law again, with Appolonia Haüser in custody for keeping “a notorious, suspicious house.” The authorities released her on May 9, 1590, with a “serious reprimand, warning her henceforth to refrain from such behavior.” The council also instructed the Lord Mayor to summon Hanns Haüser and to “admonish him with all seriousness about his mischievous behavior and to inform him that he was to work or else be banished from the city.” On May 29, 1590 the magistrates finally made good on their threats, banishing Hanns Haüser for “squandering and especially for his evil and criminal treatment of his mother.” They commanded Haüser to leave the city and the territory, to refrain from accumulating any more debts, and to begin to work for his living and save his wages. They also warned him that if he returned without permission, he would face serious punishment. Apparently, Hanns Haüser was eventually allowed to return to Ulm, but not for long, given the expulsion of both Haüser brothers in June 1598.1 The high court’s efforts to control the Haüser family, ending in the expulsion of Hanns and Matheüs, illustrate the distinctive ways that the Ulmer authorities used banishment in their attempts to control wayward citizens. The long case history, marked by a series of escalating punishments, including official reprimands, fines, jail stints, and finally expulsion, are all typical of the council’s efforts to punish and control unruly citizens. The prominent role played by denunciation is also apparent here, as neighbors and relatives turned to the authorities to curtail the excesses of miscreants who could not be controlled by the rough justice of horizontal social control.2 Finally, the ability of ban-

1 This account is based upon a series of records involving the Haüser family (Hanns, Matheüs, and Appolonia) from Ulm’s criminal archives in the Ulmer Stadtarchiv, including StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 39: 77b, 102b (Monday, 7 November 1586); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 75 (Friday, 4 April 1589); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 241 (Wednesday, 11 February 1590); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. (Monday, 9 March 1590); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 301 (Monday, 25 May 1590); and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 48: 272b, 284 (Wednesday, 14 June 1598). 2 For fascinating analysis of “horizontal social control,” the unofficial sanctions levied by family members, neighbors, and friends against unruly or disreputable members of the community that operated in tandem with official law enforcement, see Herman

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ished convicts with citizenship rights to elude control and regain entry after expulsion is also significant. As the cases examined in preceding chapters have demonstrated, banishment and the threat of banishment were among the council’s principal means of imposing order within its domain. Despite the difficulties the local authorities often encountered in enforcing banishment verdicts, expulsion served important political, social, and even economic functions within local society. The town council’s banishment practices, supported by the local populace through denunciation and participation in public expulsion rituals, represent a shared social control initiative where hundreds of individual sentences worked gradually to advance a broad disciplinary agenda based upon traditional notions of order and respectability.3 Thus, expulsion marks the limits of the authorities’—and the citizenry’s—tolerance for misbehavior, serving as a last resort in dealing with notorious criminals and deviants. While the preceding chapters have shown that the Ulmer authorities used banishment to purify the urban community of alien elements, they also used expulsion to purge their domain of criminal and deviant elements of the citizenry. The majority of these banishment convictions involved alleged breaches of the territory’s Reformation-era morals legislation, and represented an attempt to realize a utopian vision of “good Christian living” through purgation. Under the influence of Roman law, the town council gradually collected, recodified, and disseminated the confusing array of medieval vice laws during the 1500s. Armed with these new editions of longstanding legislation, the local authorities worked diligently to punish “open vice and other indiscipline” and to encourage evangelical morality in the territory. As examination of the Ulmer magistrates’ banishment practices reveals, the council’s subjects generally supported these efforts, as they turned to the authorities to enforce shared behavioral norms preached since the late Middle Ages. Thus, expulsion proved extremely useful to rulers and subjects alike in dealing with troublesome members of the local urban community, and as we have seen over a quarter of the offenders banished during the sixteenth century were citizens. The council’s efforts to use banishment

Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg, eds. Social Control in Europe, 1500–1800 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004). 3 For an interesting discussion of the cumulative effects of individual cases in longterm disciplinary efforts, see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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to deal with disruptive behaviors exhibited by members of the community, male and female citizens crucial to the urban craft economy and the supposed bedrock of the town’s collective honor and morality, are particularly instructive about the relationship between banishment, social control, and political authority in sixteenth-century Ulm. Moral Reform and Social Control: The Church Ordinance of 1531/1581 Given the fervent impulse towards moral reform in late medieval and early modern Ulm, it is not surprising that most of the citizens banished by the high court were convicted for morals offenses (Sittenzucht). These convictions represented violations of morality regulations, regulations in turn based upon codes of honorable behavior fostered within the guilds during the late Middle Ages and amplified during the Reformation.4 Throughout the fifteenth century, the town council had issued detailed criminal statutes prescribing penalties for offenses associated with immorality and disorder, offenses ranging from adultery to theft. After the Reformation, the council intensified this legislative campaign and issued a comprehensive, Zwinglian Kirchenordnung (Church Ordinance) in 1531, pursuing an ambitious campaign to reform morality within the territory. This important legal code sought to impose “good Christian living” upon their subjects, largely by stamping out “all sinful, unchristian vice.”5 This legislation, part of a comprehensive program of morals reform that swept southern Germany during the Reformation, included provisions for administering religious practice in the territory through preaching, the appointment of pastors, catechisms, and visitations. Citing the duty of rulers to provide “brotherly, friendly punishment” and to instill “order and Christian discipline,” the Church Ordinance also included disciplinary ordinances, declaring the council’s intention to stamp out a variety of crimes and vices. The 1531 legisla-

4 For analysis of this widespread campaign of guild-based morals reform that occurred throughout post-Reformation Germany, see Roper, The Holy Household, and Scribner, “Reformation and Desacralisation: from Sacramental World to Moralised Universe.” For an excellent account of the development of morals legislation in early modern Germany, see Isabel Hull’s Sexuality, State and Civil Society, pp. 92–106. See also Joel F. Harrington, “Bad Parents, the State, and the Early Modern Civilizing Process,” German History 16 (1998), pp. 24–26. 5 StBibU 27 488 Kirchenordnung, fol. 33 (1531).

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tion prohibited a wide range of behaviors that threatened to undermine Christian piety and the peace of the urban community. According to the Ordinance, the council sought to punish crimes that included swearing, drinking, gambling, usury, prostitution, adultery, rape, defloration, and pandering, “with such fervor and severity so as to instill fear in the entire community.” The Ulmer authorities closed the Ordinance by reiterating their God-given duty to provide order with a prayer to God, asking him to restore all that is “good, healthy, and Christian” in society. In order to publicize this reinvigorated campaign to stamp out “sinful, unchristian vice,” the Ulmer authorities ordered that the Ordinance be read out throughout the territory on 6 August 1531. The 1531 Church Ordinance was based upon longstanding behavioral norms and while more overtly religious in tone, mirrored earlier disciplinary legislation closely. Throughout the sixteenth century, the town council issued new editions of this comprehensive civic code. Instead of appeals to evangelical religiosity, however, later, Lutheran editions of the Ordinance, issued in 1558 and 1581, reminded the local citizenry of their civic obligation to obey their “God-given magistrate.”6 Despite such changing justifications, the notions of criminality and deviance expressed in these law codes remained strikingly constant throughout the sixteenth century. Statutes involving drunkenness provide a useful example of this continuity. In 1502 the council forbade “that immoderation in drinking and squandering that is not only contrary to God and a deadly sin, but also opposed to all human reason and nature, [and] practiced a bit here in Ulm.”7 In a similar mandate from 1549, after Charles V had imposed his oligarchic constitution upon the city, the new patrician-dominated council continued this campaign against excessive drinking, condemning the “abuses and mischief ” that stemmed from drunkenness and complaining that, “from olden times

6 See, for example, the preamble of the comprehensive law code issued in 1558, StAU A [010] Eines Ehrbaren Rats der Stadt Ulm Ordnung in Straf offenbarer Laster und anderer Unzucht (1558), the same year as the final version of Ulm’s imperial constitution: StAU A Urk. 1558 (August 22, 1558). For the transformation in the language of authority in sixteenth-century Ulm, see Eberhard Isenmann, “Obrigkeit und Stadtgemeinde in der frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 85–86. For the role of the local Lutheran clergy in supporting these new political arangements, see Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 126–29. For the 1558 Schwörtag, see Petershagen, Schwörpflicht und Volksvergnügen. 7 StAU A 3688 Gesatzbuch, fol. 1 (1502).

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German manhood has been held in contempt by all foreign nations owing to this vice.”8 As this example demonstrates, throughout the sixteenth century, despite the city’s dramatic political reorientation at mid century, the sorts of behaviors criminalized by Ulm’s magistrates reflected behavioral norms prevalent in south German urban culture since the late Middle Ages. This legislative tradition included a wide range of prohibitions, but three major categories can be discerned. Perhaps the most prominent element in the town council’s morals legislation was a concern with upholding civic honor and respectability by outlawing illicit sexuality. Concerns about the protection of property and the solvency of the local poor chest are also fundamental in this legislation, including edicts concerning theft, squandering, and idleness. Finally, the Ulmer authorities sought to preserve peace and quiet in the civic community by prohibiting violence and disorder with regulations concerning brawling, drunkenness, and disruptive speech. While the content of official morals legislation remained remarkably constant throughout the period, after mid-century the council proved more energetic in enforcing these edicts and increasingly relied upon banishment to rid the city of citizens who refused to adhere to Christian notions of order and discipline. Thus, in sixteenth-century Ulm, banishment served to reorder the community not only through the exclusion of aliens, but also through purgation of criminal and deviant elements of the citizenry. The council’s subjects, particularly those enjoying citizenship, generally supported these efforts by informing on wayward neighbors and relatives, using the courts to advance the late medieval desire for an orderly, godly community, a utopian vision amplified by Reformation-era religiosity. The local citizenry fueled the town council’s disciplinary initiatives by denouncing lawbreakers to the authorities, particularly in cases involving breaches of the morals codes that occurred behind closed doors, beyond the gaze of the magistrates. Due to the deficiencies inherent in early modern penal institutions, particularly rudimentary police forces, state officials brought relatively few cases before the courts. Instead, most crimes came to light through the assistance of informers, local inhabitants who delivered denunciations to the authorities. The state depended upon these unofficial informants for its intelligence, a

8

StAU A 3971 Polizeiordnungen (1549).

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situation common throughout early modern Europe.9 The evidence we have for the operation of denunciation practices in early modern Ulm is admittedly rather sparse—a few scattered references in statute and the marginalia of cases—but traces can be found already in the city’s earliest surviving legislation. Already in the late medieval law code known as the rote Buch, the important role that informers played in local penal practice is evident: in swearing ( fluchen) cases, witnesses were obliged to report offenders to ecclesiastical authorities. This early entry is rather vague, but it seems the authorities even paid for denunciations, giving the offender’s three-Pfennig fine to the informant who brought the allegations. The church was not the only institution that sought denunciations, as the secular authorities were also eager to collect information (Kundschafft) about wrongdoing in the town. Thus, the edict goes on to command anyone who heard such swearing to appear before the misdemeanor court immediately and testify under oath. According to the edict, the misdemeanor court was to seek out other witnesses and collect information from them as well. When they had collected all of this information, they were to bring the entire case before the full council, who would extract punishment from the miscreant’s “body or goods.”10 Thus, from the late Middle Ages, secular authorities in Ulm not only relied on informers, but also established guidelines on how their agents were to process the information they collected. This included setting the compensation for informers, stipulating where informers were to deliver their accusations, and establishing a civic duty to report transgressions. The Ulmer authorities were especially careful to assert this obligation,

9 For more extensive analysis of the Ulmer authorities’ efforts to collect information about criminal activity, see Jason Coy, “Our Diligent Watchers and Informers: Official Surveillance, Private Denunciation, and the Limits of Authority in Sixteenth-Century Ulm,” in Mary Lindemann, ed., Ways of Knowing: Ten Interdisciplinary Essays (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 153–70. Isabel Hull points out the importance of informants in early modern law enforcement, in Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, p. 28, but does not investigate their activities. See also the pioneering collection of essays on denunciation edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately in the Journal of Modern History 68 (December 1996). While the essays deal primarily with modern totalitarian states, the editors maintain that the obligation of subjects to report crimes and the payment of informers were both quite common in premodern times: see Fitzpatrick and Gellately, “Introduction to the Practices of Denunciation in Modern European History,” Journal of Modern History 68, pp. 759–60. See also a special edition on modern informing practices in Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen 27:2 (1998), entitled “Denunzianten in der Neuzeit: Politische Teilnahme oder Selbstüberwachung?” 10 See Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch, p. 197.

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the obligation of every inhabitant of the town “rich or poor” to report any transgressions they witnessed. The above mandate from the rote Buch was printed and reissued in 1529, and a few cases survive where the authorities punished reluctant witnesses for suppressing a local delict.11 In March 1565, for example, the misdemeanor court confronted a pair of tanners named Claüs Memminger and Matheus Renlin for failing to report a fight they had witnessed. The petty court reprimanded the tanners, ordering the men “in future, in such matters and in other cases, to appear more obedient,” an indication that for the authorities denunciation was a matter of subordination.12 As this case demonstrates, the Ulmer authorities proved eager to receive denunciations during the sixteenth century, an interest that increased as the century progressed. A mandate from the early 1500s illustrates the council’s growing hunger for information on illicit behavior. The mandate, declaring the authorities’ determination to stamp out “swearing, blasphemy, and other vice,” was read to the assembled townsfolk from the pulpit in the cathedral on St. George’s Day, 23 April 1510. The magistrates decreed that “its diligent watchers and informers had been instructed and ordered . . . to report and denounce blasphemers.” The mandate went on to direct officials to “censure and punish all offenders, by collecting information and in other ways.”13 Evidently, the authorities viewed the collection of “information” to be their primary means of bringing offenders to justice. This information took two forms: that extracted from suspects and witnesses during questioning and that elicited from private informers.14 While it is not entirely clear whether the “watchers” mentioned in the 1510 mandate were the council’s appointed patrolmen or freelance informers, a 1516 edict is clearer on this point. This mandate, concern-

StAU A 3688 (1529), p. 8. StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 29: 368b, 408 (Friday, 23 March 1565; Friday, 4 May 1565). 13 StAU U 5890 (1510). 14 A typical example of the local magistrates collecting evidence from witnesses during their investigations is found in a 1576 adultery case involving Süsanna Mairin, where the magistrates were instructed to “listen to information [i.e., testimony] from various neighbors.” Mairin’s case is in StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 34: 450, 457b, 459b, 463 (Friday, 27 January 1576). The council did not usually save such testimony after they had handed down their verdict. Aside from scant marginalia in the Urgichtbuch, recorded testimony survives—by chance—in only a single instance: a manslaughter case from Jüngingen in 1549, where the suspect’s neighbors and relations were questioned about what they knew about the crime. See StAU A [6526] (1549). 11 12

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ing drunkenness, explicitly mentions the compensation of private informers, specifying that anyone who “lodged a complaint” with authorities concerning another’s excessive drunkenness was to receive “one Gulden from the four Gulden fine.”15 During Ulm’s Reformation, officials intensified calls for such “reports,” but explicit mention of compensation disappeared from the Zwinglian Church Ordinance of 1531. Instead, the authorities used religious rhetoric and appeals to the civic duty of all Ulm’s inhabitants to report transgressions to the “godly Magistrate” in order to prompt denunciations. In the case of swearing, for example, the ordinance states, “whosoever from another hears [swearing], should without delay, according to their [civic] oath, tell the misdemeanor court (Ainunger).” The misdemeanor court was in turn to collect more information from witnesses before sending the case up to the high court. The magistrates included a single caveat: the only “exception” to the obligation to report crimes was that “no one is bound to report outside of his own house what he heard within,” thereby preserving the authority of housefathers within their own abodes.16 With the intensification of the town council’s social control efforts after mid century, and the concomitant increase in criminal prosecution, eliciting denunciations became increasingly prominent in local jurisprudence. In the comprehensive legal code of 1558, for example, denunciation had become so commonplace that the authorities used the phrase “offenders reported by the informers,” to mean any drinkers who had been arrested.17 This suggests that by the 1550s the authorities considered denunciation to be the primary means of identifying such wrongdoers. Despite shifting justifications for eliciting denunciations, the payment of informants survived the century. The marginalia of a 1600 edict against “adultery . . . or other whoremongering” includes the “information money (kundtschefft gellt),” the bounty paid to informants, as part of the fine.18 The town council’s penal activities served the interests of many of their subjects, and hundreds of informers came forward to denounce their neighbors and relations for all sorts of illicit behavior. It is StAU A 3669 (1516). StBibU 27 488 Kirchenordnung (1531). This Reformation-era ordinance was reissued in slightly modified form in 1558 as StAU A [010] Eines Ehrbaren Rats der Stadt Ulm Ordnung in Straf offenbarer Laster und anderer Unzucht (1558). 17 StAU A [010] Eines Ehrbaren Rats der Stadt Ulm Ordnung in Straf offenbarer Laster und anderer Unzucht (1558). 18 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 50: 103 (Monday, 17 March 1600). 15 16

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important to remember that Ulm’s sixteenth-century morals legislation was based upon ordinances crafted by the local guilds during the late Middle Ages, shaped by the popular religiosity of the Reformation period. Whether prompted by genuine concern for morality and order, cash bounties, fear of the divine wrath thought to follow unpunished sin, simmering local animosities, or deep-seated religiosity, these accusations helped to fuel the intensification of the local magistrates’ social control efforts, including the surge in banishment after mid century. In these efforts Ulm’s magistrates were forced to negotiate with their subjects at every turn.19 The council’s ability to settle local disputes and punish persistent lawbreakers and deviants prompted informers from among the local populace—men and women, rich and poor alike—to deliver denunciations to the court. In turn, these denunciations allowed the council to flex its judicial muscle and displaying its authority; in a sense, denunciations even compelled the local authorities to act. Once the local magistrates had constructed judicial machinery efficient enough to pursue the allegations in earnest, their subjects proved only too eager to denounce local deviants and misfits for all manner of transgressions. Early modern social control was in this sense horizontal; in other words it was regulated by the local community rather than imposed from above by authorities. In sixteenth-century Ulm, banishment proved increasingly important in dealing with the miscreants denounced to the authorities by their neighbors, co-workers, and relatives. Banishment and BÜRGERRECHT : The Banishment of Citizens As this analysis of the town council’s legislation and surveillance efforts has established, the local authorities sought to protect the respectability, property, and tranquility of the urban commune by punishing wayward citizens, efforts often supported by their subjects. During the 1500s, banishment was central to these disciplinary activities. The Ulmer authorities used banishment extensively in their attempts to rid the

19 As discussed in the introduction to this work, scholars increasingly accentuate the prevalence of negotiation in the application of early modern authority. For pioneering work on this aspect of European social control, see the collections of essays edited by Andreas Blauert and Gerd Schwerhoff, entitled Mit den Waffen der Justiz (1993) and Kriminalitätsgeschichte (2000). See also the insightful introductory essay to Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle, eds., The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

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town of errant citizens, relying upon expulsion to remove disruptive citizens and correct their behavior, while leaving open the possibility of their reintegration into local society. Furthermore, banishment also preserved the honor of guilds, families, and neighborhoods that would be besmirched by more violent punishment.20 Local prosecution figures bear out these impressions. Ulm’s high court formally sentenced 876 offenders identified as citizens during the 1500s. Of these enfranchised convicts, 231 suffered banishment at some point in their interaction with the authorities. Thus, over twenty-six percent of the citizens sentenced by the high court during the sixteenth century suffered banishment. When we look at these figures by decade, we find that the vast majority of the enfranchised offenders formally banished by Ulm’s high court were sentenced after the political shifts of mid-century (ninety-five percent). As we have seen, the Christian behavioral norms enforced by the town council in the sixteenth century had their basis in the late medieval utopian religiosity that marked civic life throughout southern Germany. Accordingly, moral reform stood at the heart of the local authorities’ law enforcement efforts. Railing against blasphemy, fornication, and drunkenness, the stolid guildmasters who controlled the council at the dawn of the sixteenth century sought to enforce notions of proper behavior based upon ideas of honor and order inculcated within the guilds in the late Middle Ages.21 During the Reformation, evangelical fervor enhanced these calls for godly behavior, and as early as 1526 the council called upon the town’s honorable housefathers to police the behavior of their families, apprentices, and servants.22 As the municipal criminal records attest, however, many of the town’s housefathers fell short of the ideals of proper behavior and were hauled before the high court for punishment. Male citizens engaged in a range of scandalous behavior that was censured by the council, including sexual delicts, improper speech, drunkenness, disorderly conduct and assault, and dissolute living. The high court dealt with most of these well-placed offenders with kid gloves, sparing their families, guilds, and neighborhoods the shame 20 Kathy Stuart examines notions of collective honor in early modern Augsburg in Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. 21 For the role of evangelical religiosity and honor concerns, fostered within the guilds, in this sort of legislation, see B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 210–12. 22 See StAU A 3971 Polizeiordnungen (1526).

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of public punishment by reprimanding (and fining) errant housefathers behind the closed doors of the council chamber. In particularly serious cases or in instances involving incorrigible repeat offenders, however, the magistrates turned to banishment, a non-violent and reversible punishment that was central to their efforts to control the behavior of enfranchised convicts. Despite the patriarchal authority they wielded within their households, unruly members of Ulm’s guilds proved to be the central focus of the local authorities’ efforts to punish and control the local citizenry through banishment. Male misbehavior was particularly threatening to public order and seventy-nine percent of the enfranchised Ulmers banished during the sixteenth century were males.23 Among citizens banished by the town council, members of the local guilds made up the largest subgroup (152 banishments). Before the Schmalkaldic War guild courts would have dealt with most of these offenders, fining their members for immoral or violent behavior. After 1548, however, the new constitution imposed upon the town by the Emperor dissolved these guild courts. Increasingly, these cases fell to the council as the local inhabitants turned to the central authorities to uphold order and respectability.24 The high court used banishment to deal with a wide range of offenses committed by troublesome guildsmen, most of which stemmed from the rowdy drinking culture of the guilds. Accordingly, the most prevalent offense that prompted the expulsion of guild members was brawling (fifty-six banishment convictions). Drunken violence was not the council’s only concern, however, and guildmasters also faced banishment for various sexual offenses (thirty expulsions), theft (twenty-six expulsions), poor housekeeping (twenty-two expulsions), disobedience to civic authorities (twenty-one expulsions), and drunkenness (twenty expulsions). As these banishment statistics indicate, the most important facet of the town council’s efforts to control guildsmen through expulsion involved punishment of aggressive and disruptive behavior.25 By night, Ulm’s

23 While 185 male citizens were banished during the sixteenth century, compared with only forty-nine citizen females, the percentage of such convicts who suffered banishment was similar (twenty-six percent of citizen males and just under twenty-seven percent of citizen females). 24 For the patrician-controlled council’s measures against the guilds and the dissolution of the guild courts, see Brodek, “Society and Politics,” pp. 645–55. 25 For the disruptive aspects of masculinity during this period, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 107. However, I am not entirely convinced by Roper’s assertion that urban magistrates tolerated male disorder because bellicose masculinity was needed

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streets were quite violent, and drunken insults often led to bloodshed, as dozens of surviving prosecutions for brawling attest. Generally, these sorts of altercations resulted in a night in a holding cell known as the Keller and small fine. When local guildsmen showed a pattern of repeated disorderly conduct, however, the high court often responded by banishing the offender. The magistrates’ experience with a mason named Lienhart Leser in the 1590s provides a useful illustration. On a February night in 1595 Leser had been drinking in a tavern called the “Güldin Adler” with several companions and on his way home caused a disturbance. When someone called the town watch, Leser turned violent, insulting and then striking one of the watchmen, “bloodying his head.” The court took these charges seriously, since an assault upon their agents represented a dangerous challenge to their authority, and questioned Leser in the tower. The authorities placed the mason under house arrest while they collected testimony from witnesses and from the tavern keeper. These measures did not deter Leser, however, and a month later he was in custody again, because “during Faßnacht, at nighttime, here and there through the streets he caused all sorts of disruption and acted with arrogance.” Faßnacht, a rowdy holiday marked by disruptive, carnivalesque behavior had long troubled the city fathers and clergy, and the high court acted aggressively against Leser.26 The magistrates banished him from the territory, ordering him to stay away “until he was pardoned” and not to return “on the threat of corporal punishment.” The authorities were also careful to record that Leser was “a presumptuous, insolent, dissolute sort, who within a short time had been involved in two disturbances.”27 As Leser’s sentence suggests, it was not only his crimes that prompted his expulsion, but also the council’s assessment of his character. This assessment no doubt was based largely upon his reputation within the town, since the authorities invariably questioned neighbors and associates about local miscreants’ repute before reaching their verdict.

for civic defense. The sixteenth century was a time of increasing military professionalism and mercenary armies rather than civic militias dominated warfare during the period. For these developments, see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 26 For the council’s efforts to suppress Faßnacht festivities in early modern Ulm, see Petershagen, Schwörpflicht und Volksvergnügen. 27 See StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 45: 72b, 94, 120b (Thursday, 13 February and Monday, 10 March, 1595).

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While Ulm’s magistrates primarily concerned themselves with excessive drinking that led to disorderly conduct, they also used banishment to punish chronic alcohol consumption that undermined the stability and solvency of the craft household, bedrock of the urban commune. A carter named Hanns Amman, for example, was banished in May 1585 because “out of excessive drunkenness he beat his wife and his horse, blasphemed God, and also kept bad house.”28 The last of these charges, poor housekeeping, proved central to the town council’s attempts to reorder society through banishment in the sixteenth century. Banishment convictions involving charges of poor housekeeping often resulted from long patterns of scandalous, disruptive behavior reported by the neighbors and relatives of the offender. The frustrated wife of a weaver named Conrat Ferr, for example, denounced him to the authorities in July 1580 for excessive wine drinking and for dereliction of his household responsibilities. Ferr failed to appear before the Lord Mayor to answer the charges and promptly skipped town. A year later, however, he was back in Ulm and was sentenced by the high court for “useless housekeeping” and for treating his wife badly. The marginalia of his record also maintains that Ferr was a “two-time adulterer whose wife had taken him back.” Exasperated with his repeated refusal to toe the line, the authorities banished Ferr, ordering him to remain two miles away from the territory.29 Like Conrat Ferr, many of the guildsmen banished from the territory had exhibited a longstanding pattern of troublesome behavior and their sentences invariably mention a plethora of crimes and undesirable traits. In most cases, the council initially attempted to control disruptive guildsmen by trying to curb their excessive drinking through conduct oaths that limited drinkers’ consumption to a certain amount (usually one Maß of wine) and/or barred them from the taverns or from association with their companions. Only after a rowdy guildsman proved incorrigible by breaking his oath to moderate his drinking, usually several times, did the authorities resort to banishment. Accordingly, a sizeable proportion of the enfranchised offenders banished by Ulm’s high court during the sixteenth century were recidivists. These repeat offenders, who had

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 38: 161 (Wednesday, 5 May 1585). Records relating to Conrat Ferr’s dealings with Ulm’s high court include: StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 35: 653b, 664, 681, 682 (Monday, 7 September 1579); StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 35: 1027b (Friday, 22 July 1580); and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 36: 348 (Wednesday, 5 July 1581). 28 29

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ignored earlier warnings and penalties, were prominent among the guildsmen banished by the council and made up twenty-eight percent of the banishment convictions.30 The local authorities’ efforts to control a rowdy citizen named Anthoni Memminger and his wife, Anna Stöcklin, an escalating series of encounters that spanned twenty years, provide an instructive example of this dynamic. The long-running conflict between Memminger and the authorities began in December 1567 when the citizen and his wife received a reprimand for obstructing the activities of the beadle. The town council commanded the couple to “remain more obedient to the authorities (Obrigkeit),” a warning that seems to have worked for a time. In January 1584, however, Memminger ran afoul of the authorities again for his continued “disobedience and poor housekeeping.” The magistrates issued another warning, ordering Memminger to be more obedient or else face a “severe punishment.” A sign that Memminger’s household finances were in serious disarray, the court also ordered his Pfleger, a custodian assigned to monitor the activities of debtors, to keep records of all of his financial transactions. Again, Memminger stayed out of trouble for several years, but in January 1587 he and his wife appeared before the council, owing to their “repeated disobedience, useless householding, squandering, and other evil living.” This time the authorities made the couple promise “as if they were bound by a solemn oath” to “abstain from wine drinking whether in or out of the city.” Furthermore, they ordered the pair to stop entertaining company at home and to focus instead on getting their household affairs in order. In June 1590, someone reported that Memminger had broken his pledge and the magistrates fined the troublesome citizen. For the first time, the high court also threatened Memminger with banishment, ordering him “not to persist or else he would be banished from the city altogether.” In December 1592 the hammer fell. The magistrates imprisoned Memminger and his wife, charging that the couple “had allowed all manner of Unzucht and Leichtfertigkeit to go on in their house.” These rather euphemistic charges implied that the couple had permitted some sort of “indiscipline” and “disorder” under their roof, but Stöcklin’s sentence spells out the exact nature of the scandal in her home. According to the council she had “engaged in adulterous relations and prostitution

30 In sixteenth-century Ulm, forty-two of the 150 guildsmen banished by the high court were repeat offenders (twenty-eight percent).

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with several unmarried youths.” The magistrates banished the pair from the territory and commanded them “to remain two miles from its borders forever or else face an even greater punishment.” Three local men, including a journeyman goldsmith, were also banished for having patronized Memminger’s makeshift brothel.31 As the local authorities’ experience with the Memminger household demonstrates, the council carefully monitored the sexual behavior of its citizens, but usually only resorted to expulsion in egregious cases. Defiant guildsmen like Anthoni Memminger were not the only target of the town council’s disciplinary activities, and twenty-six of the banishment convictions the high court levied against enfranchised members of the urban commune involved the children of citizens. These banishment convictions frequently involved unruly minors who had long proven troublesome to the authorities and to their parents. In the summer of 1586 the town council encountered one such incorrigible in Jacob Sailer, known by the nickname “Hopfenbrüder” (hops-brother), perhaps an allusion to his beer drinking. On 4 July 1586 the high court sentenced Sailer, “because of his immodesty” and also because he had ignored the council’s command to abstain from drinking wine “many times.” The authorities ordered Sailer “clamped in irons for half a year, in accordance with the ordinance.” The council had not seen the last of Sailer, however, and in September he was before the court again after “letting himself out of the irons.” Furthermore, “afterwards, when the town watch had encountered him, and brought him to the dungeon, he had uttered miserable cries, threatening to kill himself.” This time the high court showed little mercy, banishing Sailer from the territory and commanding him to stay three miles from its borders for the rest of his life.32 Like the local magistrates’ attempts to use banishment to bring unruly guildsmen to heel, many of the cases involving the children of its citi-

31 See StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 30: 593b (Wednesday, 3 December 1567); StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 37: 988b (Wednesday, 16 December 1584); StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 39: 157b (Wednesday, 11 January 1587); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 303 (Monday, 1 June 1590); and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 42: 630b, 631 (Monday, 4 December 1592). In a separate entry in Strafbuch 10, on fol. 631, Jacob Shmid from Senden, a servant at the “Crone” tavern, Hanns Jacob Müller, the journeyman goldsmith, and Hanns Reitzin were banished and ordered to remain two miles from the territory for “behaving dishonorably with Anna Stöcklin.” 32 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 38: 705b (Monday, 4 July 1586) and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 39: 6 (Wednesday, 14 September 1586).

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zens also featured a long series of court appearances involving alcohol, confrontations that ultimately led to expulsion. In December 1589, for example, Hannß Jorg Birglin was discharged from the Blockhaus after his father, a local miller, appealed to the council to have him released. The authorities commanded the younger Birglin “to refrain from drinking wine outside of his father’s house, to avoid keeping companions, and to remain, both day and night, at home.” While the record does not list formal charges, these restrictions indicate that Birglin had been arrested for habitual drunkenness. In January 1592 Birglin was before the court again, having ignored the council’s injunctions. According to his sentence, the troublesome youth had “gone about the streets by night, and when he was questioned by the night watch, he struck them, and also spewed out highly criminal speech. As a result he was brought to the tower.” The authorities released Birglin, but required him to appear before the misdemeanor court (Ainunger), and delivered a “most serious warning that by his sworn oath wine drinking and taverns are forbidden.” The council also fined Birglin ten Gulden and placed him under house arrest, ordering him “above all, both day and night, not to let himself be found outside his house.” A year later Briglin was in trouble with the authorities again for his carousing and the court took serious action. After arresting Briglin for a “Gassenfrevel” (street-crime) involving nighttime disorderly conduct, and noting that he “had never held to any previous punishment,” the magistrates banished the youth from the territory.33 While the town council focused most of its disciplinary activities upon the misbehavior of males, it also used banishment to punish the wives and daughters of its subjects, generating forty-nine banishment sentences. Most of these cases involved allegations of immorality, usually illicit sex. A case from October 1589 shows the severity of the magistrates’ treatment of women accused of sexual incontinence, as well as their palpable contempt for such offenders. On 27 October 1589, the high court sentenced Katharina Hailerin, the daughter of a local citizen, for engaging in premarital sex, ordering that “the frivolous whore, who desires admittance into the Spital, after being impregnated by a married man, should be made to swear to go away by the Spitalmeister.”

33 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 194 (Wednesday, 10 December 1589), StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 580 (Friday, 21 January, 1592), and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 43: 65, 67 (Thursday, 8 February 1593).

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Hailerin, however, was not deterred and spent several years in legal and illegal attempts to return to her native city. In late November 1589, for example, the council permitted Hailerin temporary refuge within the city walls, recording that although she had been, punished with banishment, due to the coldness of this wintertime, she is permitted to remain until Faßnacht . . . in the poorhouse, but afterwards must resume her previous punishment and take her child with her.

Apparently, she refused to leave peacefully, because on March 6, 1590 the council ordered the beadle to turn her out of the city again. Four months later, in July 1590, Hailerin returned, and the magistrates had her driven from the city again. In October 1590 the council recorded that Hailerin, “was forbidden from the city, but has appeared at the city hall, and should be locked in the Narrenheußlin, on bread and water, until she herself asks to go away from the city.” Even this did not deter her, and a year later, in December 1591, the council despaired that Hailerin was “present once again” and repeated its previous ruling that she should be confined in the Narrenheußlin. A final entry, from the early seventeenth century, records that the town council refused a request from Hailerin to have her banishment sentence lifted.34 As the analysis of adultery convictions involving migrant workers in Chapter Three showed, the Ulmer authorities balanced a conflicting set of goals as they sought to use banishment to punish and control the sexual conduct of their enfranchised subjects. On the one hand, the council attempted to preserve citizens’ marriages, and concomitantly the city’s tax base. On the other, the authorities sought to punish “open vice” and thereby maintain order and uphold standards of morality and respectability propagated among the citizenry since long before the Reformation. Given this complicated nexus of considerations, the wishes of wronged spouses sometimes influenced the high court’s sentencing practices. In May 1569, a local wife named Barbara Scheiffelerin received a banishment sentence after indulging in an adulterous affair with an apprentice. Her record maintains that she was to be banished “because her husband will not take her in again.”35

34 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 170, 172–3 (Monday, 27 October 1589). Subsequent appeals date 24 November 1589, 6 March 1590, 22 July 1590, 19 October 1590, 8 December 1591, and 6 December 1602. 35 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 31, fol. 241, 245 (Wednesday, 25 May 1569; Thursday, 31 May 1569).

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In another case, from the winter of 1576, Agatha Widenmännin, the wife of Thoman Keßlin of Asselfingen, a village in the territory, was brought before the high court on charges of adultery. The Ulmer authorities had her examined in the Spital to determine if she was pregnant and made written inquiries in Asselfingen about her conduct, particularly on the subject of whether “she treated her husband poorly.” Having concluded that Widenmännin had in fact “acted in an indecent manner” and that “recently, out of drunkenness, at Schrotenhofen near Giengen, exchanged marriage promises with a farm laborer, and laid with him through the night,” the authorities had her arrested and imprisoned in the tower. The high court banished Widenmännin from the territory and ordered her to remain a mile away from its borders, specifying that, “if her husband does not appeal on her behalf, she is also to suffer corporal punishment.” While the council’s minutes do not record whether Widenmännin’s husband chose to intercede, the case demonstrates the influence that spouses might exercise on court proceedings in early modern Ulm.36 Sexual misconduct was the most common charge in banishment cases involving female citizens, but the Ulmer authorities concerned themselves with other sorts of female transgression as well. Consequently, twenty-three percent of the total banishment convictions levied against enfranchised women involved other sorts of misconduct. While the most prevalent of these non-sexual offenses was theft, the high court also banished enfranchised women for disorderly conduct, including violent assault, generally considered a male form of misbehavior. In one such case, from August 1568, the authorities banished the widow Cathrina Reizin from the territory and ordered her to remain a mile from its borders for life after she “attacked Hanns Senfften’s wife, with blows” and exhibited “other unseemly conduct,” in the presence of the Lord Mayor.37 Negotiation, Resistance, and Appeal As these banishment convictions involving citizens, male and female, adult and minor, demonstrate, expulsion was often the culmination of escalating patterns of disruptive behavior and running conflict with the 36 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 34: 435, 444b (Friday, 9 January 1576; Friday, 20 January 1576). 37 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 31: 24b, 27 (Wednesday, 25 August 1568).

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local authorities. Many of the citizens the local authorities banished, and the guildsmen in particular, had extensive criminal records by the time they were expelled from the territory and the authorities’ attempts to correct their behavior through less extreme means met with frustration. Despite the magistrates’ absolutist pretensions, their efforts to control unruly citizens often faltered in the face of what they identified as “disobedient” or “insolent” defiance. Just as the Ulmer authorities relied upon the cooperation of their subjects—serving as informers—in order to monitor behavior and identify potential suspects, they also depended upon the obedience of these very suspects in executing punishment. While most suspects delivered themselves to the authorities and submitted to official sanctions, others, labeled “disobedient” by the authorities, refused to cooperate. Sometimes these “defiant” offenders proved capable of obstructing the council’s efforts to establish effective social control by refusing to cooperate with the city’s justices before, during, or after their day in court. This sort of disobedience was not new in sixteenth-century Ulm, but the magistrates’ attempts to use criminal prosecution to put a stop to it certainly were. As we have seen, after mid century, the Ulmer authorities sought to establish a more rigorous control over their domains, and moving against behavior they considered insubordinate was crucial to these efforts. The most common type of disobedience involved offenders who refused to deliver themselves when summoned by the council or its agents. The second sort of insubordination concerned inappropriate behavior before the court, involving offenders who failed to play the role of obedient subject in the juridical drama scripted by the justices and staged in the courtroom. The final type of disobedience involved offenders who did not comply with the decisions of the court, mostly by refusing to pay fines or to observe the injunctions of the court. Most offenders appeared before Ulm’s courts for questioning in response to an official summons, and such formal requests were so commonplace that they elicited scant mention in contemporary legislation. We generally catch a glimpse of this central activity only in the breach, in exceptional cases where an offender openly defied the council’s authority. Summonses appear a few times in local legislation, however, and as with the denunciation practices examined earlier, the first mention is from the medieval compilation of civic regulations known as the rote Buch. This undated mandate, most likely issued in the late fourteenth century, established that anyone, “man or woman, young or old,” summoned by the council, the high court, or the misdemeanor

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court, was bound to appear. The next entry, in a fifteenth-century hand, set the penalty for those who ignored a summons from the misdemeanor court: eight days banishment from the town.38 The issue of judicial summons does not appear again in Ulm’s legislation until 1529, in a mandate barring anyone from “hindering a servant of the council, while he brings in someone.”39 The authorities reissued this edict in a more detailed form in 1540.40 A final undated mandate, probably issued in 1539 or 1540, concerned all sorts of official summonses, but pertained to judicial ones as well. It ordered that “Anyone summoned ( gebeten) by Lord Mayor, council, or Guildmaster, should behave modestly and obediently.”41 The rather vague wording of these edicts begs the question whether the council was concerned with offenders “obediently” showing up in court, or behaving “obediently” once they were there. Most likely both, since Ulm’s criminal record indicates that during the sixteenth century the authorities often had problems with troublesome citizens on both counts. A look at disobedience prosecutions from the Ulmer archives that involved stubborn no-shows, involving exceptional offenders who refused to heed official summonses, shows how unruly citizens might hamper the high court’s social control efforts. As we have seen, Ulm’s high court relied almost entirely on judicial summonses to bring in suspects, a situation which proved quite problematic. In addition, the city’s populace was not bound to report transgressions that occurred within their own residences, since traditional norms had long held the threshold of private homes inviolable.42 As a result, the authorities had to deliver summonses and hope the suspect delivered him or herself to court. By the 1500s, the authorities had already employed this inefficient subpoena system for well over a century. Consequently, while the ability of the court to hand down sentences depended upon suspects heeding their summons to appear, sixteenthcentury authorities remained highly reluctant to drag suspects into court by force. Instead, they haphazardly prosecuted the most defiant

See Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch, p. 35. StAU A 3680, fol. 182 (1529). 40 StAU A 3680, fol. 285–86 (1540). 41 StAU A 3680, fol. 279–80 (o.d., probably 1539 or 1540). 42 For the sanctity of the threshold of the private household, see Harrington, “Bad Parents, the State, and the Early Modern Civilizing Process,” pp. 16–28. See also Hermann Heidrich, “Grenzübergänge: Das Haus und die Volkskultur in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Richard van Dülmen, ed., Kultur der einfachen Leute: Bayerisches Volksleben vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 1983), pp. 17–41. 38 39

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truants, usually those who failed to appear in court several times. In fact, almost half of the forty-five stubborn offenders prosecuted for failing to respond to official summons had done so several times (about seven times the overall recidivism rate for sixteenth-century Ulm).43 Most of the offenders prosecuted for ignoring repeated official summons were enfranchised local tradesmen, who, shielded by craft and clan, could afford to keep the magistrates waiting.44 It is impossible to know whether these truant citizens were simply afraid to face the court, or whether they truly sought to defy the council’s authority. For the magistrates, however, the issue was clear: repeated failure to appear in court was a dangerous sort of “disobedience.” While the authorities clearly viewed this sort of behavior as an open challenge to their authority, they acted slowly to deter such disobedience. Only after mid-century did the high court begin to move systematically against stubborn no-shows (over ninety-five percent of convictions for this form of resistance occurred after 1550). Furthermore, suspects who ignored official summonses before mid century usually received relatively minor sentences. In 1541, for example, a carter named Peter Thoman, who “disobediently stayed away from the misdemeanor court three times, and failed to appear,” received only a verbal warning from the court. As in the majority of such cases, the original offense did not appear in Thoman’s record; apparently, the more serious insubordination charge crowded the original offense off the docket.45 As the examination of local prosecution patterns in earlier chapters has demonstrated, after mid century, the town council sought to reinforce their political authority by enforcing laws that had been on the books for decades. Consequently, after 1550 the high court proved more forceful in cases involving open affronts like failure to appear in court, prosecuting stubborn offenders with renewed vigor. When compared with cases from the first half of the century (like Thoman’s above), we

43 Of forty-five total “failure to appear” prosecutions, twenty-one involved offenders who failed to respond to multiple summonses (forty-six percent). 44 The rough social standing of twenty-six of the forty-five offenders charged with failure to appear can be ascertained through the identifying information provided in the surviving records. Twenty-two of these twenty-six offenders were male citizens from the craft guilds (eighty-four percent). If we add wives of craftsmen (two convictions) convicted for failure to appear, over ninety-two percent of these offenders can be considered enfranchised locals, members of the local artisan establishment. Of the forty-five total convictions for failure to appear, over eighty-four percent were men. 45 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 15: 218, 244 (Monday, 7 February 1541).

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find that suspects who refused to appear before the courts after mid century fared much worse, once the authorities finally compelled them to present themselves. Whereas earlier truants merely received a warning, in 1550 the high court imprisoned a miller named Jörg Spitzenberg for defying the courts. The justices locked Spitzenberg in the tower, because he had “been summoned before the misdemeanor court several times, and had failed to appear, disobediently staying away.”46 While most such truants were male, men were not the only ones who displayed this sort of stubborn defiance. In 1552, for example, the court locked a local woman named Margreth Beckhin in the tower for ignoring three summonses from the misdemeanor court. Three years later, she was banished for refusing to pay a small fine to this petty court. Again, the authorities did not record her original offense in either entry; their main concern was her disobedience.47 This sort of prolonged disobedience was common, and by the troubled 1580s, the frequency of such prosecution had increased. Even youthful offenders might challenge the council’s authority, as when a “young weaver” named Peter Hempel was summoned before the Lord Mayor in March 1589. Hempel was to appear to answer for an unpaid debt, but he declined to do so and the magistrates imprisoned him in the tower. Even though subsequent investigation revealed that Hempel had already paid the debt in question, the authorities released him from the tower with a stern warning “to henceforth display better obedience, and to give no cause for other punishment.” Apparently, Hempel was not convinced, because two years later the magistrates locked him in the tower again for ignoring another summons. The court fined him again and repeated its earlier reprimand. In frustration the magistrates “warned him about his disobedience, and told him to henceforth behave more obediently.”48 Unable or unwilling to force suspects to respond to their summonses, the authorities continued to rely upon these sorts of verbal admonitions in an attempt to cow the more stubborn truants. Compelling suspects to answer charges was not the justices’ only problem, and they also had to deal with offenders who behaved in a “disobedient (ungehorsam)” or “disrespectful (respectlosig)” manner before

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 21: 31 (Wednesday, 5 February 1550). StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 22: 82, 82b (Monday, 23 May 1552), and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 23: 376b (Friday, 1 February 1555). 48 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 60 ([Saturday], 1 March 1589), and StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 484 (Monday, 14 June 1591). 46 47

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the court. Given the constraints of traditional legal custom, the town council proved unable or unwilling to rely exclusively upon violent coercion, relying instead upon outward displays of power and deference. Thus, in local law enforcement the appearance of magisterial authority and popular homage were as important as brutal punishment.49 Early modern urban society was intensely hierarchical, and symbolic displays of the magistrates’ power and their subjects’ subservience were pervasive. In Ulm, the most important of these displays was the communal symbolism of the annual Schwörtag, where the local inhabitants came together to witness the Lord Mayor’s oath of office and swear their own oath to obey their rulers. As the townsfolk ranged themselves below the balcony at the Schwörhaus, ordered by gender, age, and guild membership, they made the social structure of the town manifest.50 Nowhere, however, was this sort of display more ritualized than in penal practice. Justices staged the ritual performances that surrounded punishment and mercy carefully, performances that included interrogation, sentencing, and punishment, in order to present their own authority and to accentuate the distance between ruler and subject. Consequently, the Ulmer authorities sought to stamp out what they termed “disrespect (Respectlosigskait),” insolent behavior that undermined the majesty of these displays. The town council had long sought to shore up the local social order by prosecuting insubordination, and the impulse to punish all manner of troublemakers who defied their “natural” masters predated the sixteenth century. Since the late Middle Ages, the Ulmer authorities had prosecuted unruly children who defied their parents, apprentices who ran away from their masters, and parishioners who did not show ample respect towards their pastors. After mid century, however, another sort of insubordination case came to the fore, as the court began to move energetically against those who defied their God-given Obrigkeit: the town council. This did not necessarily mean open defiance, and after 1550, the sentences handed down by Ulm’s justices suggest that they 49 For a fascinating discussion of the role of authoritative displays in the exercise of power, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For the use of ceremonial display by magistrates in medieval and early modern Europe, see Dietrich W. Poeck, Rituale der Ratswahl: Zeichen und Zeremoniell der Ratssetzung in Europa 12.–18. Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2003). 50 For Ulm’s Schwörtag during the sixteenth century, see Specker, Ulm: Stadtgeschichte, pp. 140–42. Petershagen provides an excellent study of the transformation of this event during the early modern period: see his Schwörpflicht und Volksvergnügen.

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considered all sorts of unseemly behavior in their presence as a sign of insolence. A typical case from June 1560 illustrates this tendency: the authorities jailed Hanns Schmalzigaüg, a member of a rowdy old-Ulmer artisan family, merely for showing an unspecified “lack of respect” towards the Lord Mayor.51 Behavior that the authorities deemed disrespectful was even more serious when it occurred in the courtroom, where the justices demanded that suspects and witnesses alike assume an air of passive docility before the court. The magistrates staged intimidating courtroom confrontations in an attempt to scare defiant offenders, to force its more free-willed subjects to respect its authority. Offenders who failed to cooperate, by appearing disobedient or displaying anger during testimony, faced the wrath of the court. Once again, local guildsmen served as the primary targets of the council’s prosecution efforts in such cases.52 Thus, when Jörg Müller struck Benedict Hörmann during an audience with the Lord Mayor in 1570, the authorities reacted aggressively. They ordered him to pay a very costly penalty—10,000 bricks for the city’s building projects (Statt Baw)—or else deliver himself into custody in the tower. Although Müller did not direct his outburst at the Lord Mayor, the magistrates viewed his lack of restraint as a challenge to their authority nonetheless.53 In January 1592, the town council used intimidation to deal with another insolence charge brought by the Lord Mayor. The record in question begins ominously, with the assertion that the defendant, Lienhart Gündelfinger, deserved a more serious punishment for his insolence and was spared imprisonment only through the pleas of his pregnant wife and his in-laws. The authorities went on to state that Gündelfinger’s “recent . . . defiance and arrogance against the Governing Lord Mayor and the Authorities is to be reprimanded with grave seriousness by the assembled council.”54 Forced to stand, hat in hand, before the haughty magistrates who made up the town council, Gündelfinger also received a warning that the next time he appeared before the court he would not get off so easily. StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 27: 40b, 44 (Friday, 14 June 1560). Ulm’s criminal records contain twenty-four convictions for this type of “disrespectful behavior”: the rough social status of the offender can be determined in eleven of these prosecutions. Of these, seven convictions involved guildsmen (sixty-three percent) and twenty-three of the twenty-four total convictions involved males (ninety-five percent). 53 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 31: 621 (Friday, 14 July 1570). 54 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 578 (Friday, 21 January 1592). See also StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 41: 251, 252b (Wednesday, 19 January 1592). 51 52

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The town council’s reliance on informers to identify malefactors and the difficulties it encountered in bringing offenders before the courts—as well as eliciting their obedience once they appeared—highlight some of the constraints that hampered early modern law enforcement. Nevertheless, it is important to note that taken together the convictions for courtroom misbehavior presented in this chapter equal just 127 cases, or five percent of Ulm’s total prosecution during the 1500s.55 Disobedience cases were also relatively rare: prosecution for false accusation and failure to appear make up well under three percent of total sentencing in sixteenth-century Ulm. Thus, the vast majority of Ulmers—and even most convicts—cooperated with the authorities’ law enforcement activities, because they recognized the council’s God-given duty to punish wrongdoing and because official social control efforts conformed to traditional notions of civic morality. Meanwhile, penal activity remained central to the local authorities’ efforts to consolidate their power and control the behavior of their subjects. Consequently, the courtroom and the pillory became central loci of the council’s attempts to elicit the support of its subjects and thereby display its power. Despite widespread support for the town council’s disciplinary activities, as we have seen a troublesome few openly resisted official efforts to apply social control in the territory after mid century. Some resorted to oblique forms of protest like posting anonymous critiques, vandalism, and voicing scurrilous songs and jests.56 A few defiant citizens, however, proved even more tenacious in their efforts to resist the council’s authority, and hampered official social control by ignoring the sentences imposed upon them by the high court altogether. Many of the court’s verdicts, including drinking bans, house arrest orders, and banishment sentences, relied upon the tacit cooperation of convicts to hold themselves to the terms of their sentence. Consequently, the council sought to stamp out this dangerous threat to its penal authority by punishing defiant offenders who ignored the high court’s injunctions.

55 This figure (127 convictions) includes thirty-six convictions for false denunciation, forty-five convictions for failure to appear in court, twenty-four convictions for disrespect before the court, and twenty-two convictions for failure to pay court-ordered fines. 56 For statutes concerning broken windows and scurrilous songs, see, for example, StAU A 3680 and StAU A 3681. While no Pasquille—anonymous written protests or satires posted in public or delivered to the authorities—survive from the sixteenth century, examples from the seventeenth century have been documented. See Hans Eugen Specker and Gebhard Weig, eds., Die Einführung der Reformation in Ulm: Geschichte eines Bürgerentscheids (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981).

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In November 1579, for example, the magistrates jailed Endriß Herlin, intractable member of a local family of weavers, “once again, for his useless housekeeping and for breaking the conditions of his imposed punishment.” The last part of the charges no doubt referred to a ban on public drinking, because the high court’s verdict ordered Herlin to abstain from drinking outside of his own house and forbade him from entertaining companions at home. Herlin’s financial situation was also a concern, since the justices also ordered him to refrain from gambling and to pay an outstanding fine owed to the misdemeanor court. The official record also reveals the magistrates’ growing frustration with Herlin, stating that their verdict was rendered “with the further codicil that if he is not restrained by this sentence, this will be the last time, and the honorable council will banish him from the city.” Banishment often served as the last resort in dealing with such incorrigibles, and the Ulmer magistrates finally made good on this threat, expelling Herlin in the fall of 1583. In July 1584, however, the authorities found him in the city again and proclaimed that, “Endriß Herlin, who is in custody for the twelfth time, shall have his fingers cut off and be banished across the Rhine for the rest of his life, according to his publicly proclaimed verdict.” The brutal mutilation Herlin suffered conformed to the traditional punishment for oath breaking. It involved chopping off the oath fingers, the first and second fingers of the right hand, which were raised during judicial oaths, a punishment that permanently marked the convict as an oath-breaker and deprived him of his personal honor. Apparently, even this did not bring Herlin to heel. In 1591 his wife, Andrea, was herself threatened with banishment for “harboring her banished husband in her house for three entire years.”57 While Endriß Herlin chose to risk corporal punishment by illegally returning to the city after being expelled, other banished citizens chose more subtle means of subverting the council’s authority. Even the most troublesome offenders, if they enjoyed citizenship, could rely upon formal supplication to blunt the authorities’ penal efforts and gain re-admittance to the city. As we learned in Chapter One, the sentences handed down by the high court were recorded in the council’s official minutes.

57 See StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 37: 808 (Friday, 17 July 1584), StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 38: 287 (Wednesday, 18 August 1585), StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 486 (Monday, 21 June 1591).

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These verdicts were recopied, along with any subsequent appeals, in a series of punishment books (Strafbücher), which had an alphabetical index of offenders. Only one of these punishment books, Strafbuch 10, survives, but this valuable source, which records punishments for the years 1588–1592, permits a glimpse into the role of supplication in the town council’s banishment practices. Over sixty percent of the citizens banished by the high court whose sentences are recorded in Strafbuch 10 subsequently petitioned to have their sentence overturned.58 Of the forty-three surviving petitions from these enfranchised offenders banished from the territory, twenty-one were eventually pardoned (forty-eight percent), although most had to appeal many times over the course of several years. It is important to note that since only a single volume of the city’s punishment books survives, this is likely just a fraction of the supplicants who appealed to the council in an attempt to have their banishment sentences lifted. As the statistics presented above suggest, the citizens banished by the town council, unlike the resident aliens or vagrants who suffered expulsion, had recourse to appeal and expellees or their families often petitioned the local authorities in an attempt to get their banishment sentences overturned.59 We know next to nothing about the lives of banished citizens, or how they maintained themselves while exiled from their home city, since this was not a concern of the local authorities and hence absent from the records. It is clear from the surviving records, however, that many banished citizens worked tirelessly to earn reentry to the city and to regain their social position. Relying upon the protection of citizenship and familial connections some enfranchised offenders leveraged their standing in local society in order to resist the social control efforts of the Ulmer authorities. Consequently, certain well-placed citizens, from prominent families and prestigious guilds, proved exceptionally troublesome and appeared before the high court repeatedly to answer for their crimes. Protected by their social position and economic importance, it was difficult for the magistrates to apply effective pressure to these intractable offenders, who were sometimes

58 Of the ninety-two enfranchised offenders whose banishment sentences are recorded in Strafbuch 10, fifty-seven petitioned to have their sentences overturned ( just under sixty-two percent). 59 For the efforts of banished citizens, and their families, to petition the authorities in Augsburg, often with the assistance of influential patrons, see Hoffmann, “Der Stadtverweis,” pp. 227–31.

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able to make a mockery of the council’s attempts to control their behavior. One of the most persistent repeat offenders the town council confronted in the sixteenth century was Anthoni Leipheimer, who stemmed from an important family that operated the city’s hammer-mill and whose experiences before the court provide a clear example of the role of status in deflecting the local magistrates’ disciplinary efforts. Leipheimer’s rowdy behavior first came to the attention of the Ulmer authorities in February 1588 when he was jailed after a brawl with a group of baker’s apprentices, having shoved one of them through a bakery window. In October of the same year, Leipheimer stood before the high court again after a fight with a dyer named Stoffel Maüren. The magistrates admonished Leipheimer and gave him a stern warning to stay out of trouble. However, in April 1589 he served a stint in the tower on bread and water for engaging in an adulterous affair with the wife of Hans Scheifelin and was ordered to stand before the council in their chambers for another stern reprimand. The details of this meeting were not recorded, but a clue survives from April 1589 when Leipheimer was granted permission to consume “a modest amount of wine at the wedding of Daniel Baürn,” suggesting that the authorities had ordered him to refrain from drinking, at least in public. Anthoni Leipheimer appears to have stayed out of trouble for a time, but in March 1591, he was punished for disregarding the council’s command to abstain from drinking wine, for getting in yet another brawl, and also for “evil swearing and useless behavior.” The court informed Leipheimer that although he fully deserved a very serious penalty, out of consideration for the pleas of his sick parents, he was to be released and ordered to live obediently under the conditions of his prior sentence. The magistrates also warned him that if they received any further complaints about him they would banish him from the city. Despite this warning, a month later Leipheimer was in jail again after another fight, this time in front of the city treasury (Steuerhaus). The magistrates “admonished him with utmost seriousness for his disorderly conduct” and sentenced him to house arrest in the home of his father, ordering him not to emerge unless granted mercy by the court. Two months later, in June 1591, Leipheimer or his family appealed his sentence and the authorities released him from house arrest. It did not take him long to re-offend, and in October 1591 the high court finally banished Anthoni Leipheimer, after he impregnated a woman named Agatha Wain. Leipheimer admitted to being the father and agreed to pay for

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the child’s upbringing, but this did not appease the court. The magistrates banished the couple for fornication, with Leipheimer ordered to swear that he would leave the city and its hinterlands and that he would not return without the council’s permission. Three months later, in January 1592, in spite of his long record of disruptive and defiant behavior, Leipheimer gained a pardon and was allowed to return to the city. His record states that the magistrates had lifted his sentence after receiving petitions from his mother and other supplicants.60 Wayward housefathers and guildsmen were not the only Ulmers who could blunt the effects of banishment through petitions to the council, and female citizens also successfully appealed their own banishment sentences or the expulsion of a family breadwinner. Given the male monopoly on guild membership, and harsh restrictions on independent female economic activity, the absence of even a bad husband imperiled the household.61 Accordingly, even in cases involving long histories of domestic discord and violence, wives petitioned to have their banished husbands readmitted to the territory. In March 1589, for example, the wife of a troublesome carter named Lorentz Schmid (her name is not recorded in the record) appealed to have her husband’s banishment sentence lifted. Schmid had been arrested the previous November, because “he behaved criminally and violently towards his wife,” and banished from the “city and it environs until granted mercy from the honorable council.” The high court’s 3 March 1589 decision states that “because the wife of Lorentz Schmid, who has been banished from the city, will take her husband in again, so shall he be pardoned. However, he is to be warned with the utmost seriousness by the Lord Mayor about his dangerous behavior.” The council’s efforts to control Schmid seem to

60 StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 39: 676b (Monday, 19 February 1588); StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 40: 286, 295 (Monday, 14 October 1588); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 83 (Wednesday, 16 April 1589); StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 40: 461 (Wednesday, 19 March 1589); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 450 and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 41: 477 (both Friday, 26 March 1591); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 461 (Friday, 16 April 1591; 14 June 1591); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 547–78 (Monday, 25 October 1591; 12 January 1592; 31 May 1592). For background information on Anthoni Leipheimer and his family, see Karl Schwaiger, Geschichte der altulmer Familie Leipheimer (Ulm: R. C. Schwenk, 1937). 61 For an influential and fascinating examination of gender relations in the early modern craft household, see Roper, Holy Household.

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have failed: in January 1590 he received another official reprimand after he “battered his wife on the street, while in a drunken state.”62 Lorentz Schmid was not the only citizen who ran afoul of the Ulmer authorities after obtaining a pardon. A footloose weaver named Thomman Graßer, who had fled the territory, was arrested upon his return in April 1589 and charged with a variety of offenses. According to the authorities, Graßer had been “disobedient, had wandered aimlessly about, and long under suspicion of using sorcery (Zauberey), had left the territory and then returned without permission.” The high court sent Graßer away again, banishing him from the city and the territory for six months and warning him not to return or else face other, unspecified penalties. Graßer did not wait six months to petition the court and his appeals in August and October 1589 were denied. Finally, the council bowed to pressure from his family, and on November 21, 1589 recorded that Graßer “owing to the supplication ( firbit) of his household and relatives is pardoned, but he shall appear before the Lord Mayor and abstain from such matters and sorcery or else meet with other [punishments].” Graßer did not stay out of trouble for long, however, and in January 1591 the high court banished him again for “displaying great immodesty and evil cursing and swearing on the streets.” The unruly weaver was warned with “utmost seriousness about his swearing” and ordered to stay two miles away from the territory “and not to come back here again until he was granted mercy by the honorable council.” After a pair of failed petitions (May 1592 and November 1592), Graßer was finally readmitted in March 1593, but warned “to abstain from swearing henceforth, or else he would be banished from the city forever.”63

62 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 5 (Wednesday, 27 November 1588); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 62 (Monday, 3 March 1589); and StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 236 (Friday, 30 January 1590). These sorts of appeals were not uncommon in early modern Ulm. Boß Morenhauser’s wife, for example, secured a pardon for her husband in November 1581 after he had been banished from the territory for a series of drunken altercations on Ulm’s streets. See StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 473–474 (Friday, 21 May 1591), and subsequent appeals dated 27 August 1591, 13 October 1591, and 24 November 1591. 63 See StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 90 (Friday, 25 April 1589), and appeals dated 20 August 1589, 13 October 1589, 21 November 1589, 21 March 1593. A separate entry in the Strafbuch on Graßer [StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 418 (Monday, 18 January 1591)], with marginalia directing the reader to his 1589 conviction, includes another pair of appeals from 3 May 1592 and 6 November 1592.

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Family members often petitioned on the behalf of their relatives, but in some cases these appeals, even when repeated regularly for decades, fell upon deaf ears. While the magistrates usually heeded the appeals of close relatives or influential patrons, as in Thomman Graßer’s November 1589 petition examined above, in some cases such intercession was insufficient to gain re-admittance to the territory for a banished citizen. Invariably, these cases involved a notorious breach of morality that upset social relations or threatened civic honor. The authorities often proved sensitive to the interests of victims and sought to provide verdicts that respected the concerns over honor and respectability harbored by guilds, families, and neighborhoods, allowing their subjects to influence the re-integration of banished citizens. In one such case, from January 1592, the town council punished Barbara Beürin, the daughter of a local cabinetmaker, “owing to her promiscuity (leichtfertigkeit)” and for having premarital intercourse with a man named Samuel Stadelberger. The high court banished Beürin and Stadelberger from the territory and made the pair swear that they would remain two miles from its borders and never return. In an attempt to get his daughter reinstated, however, the cabinetmaker Jacob Beüren submitted a persistent and long-running series of supplications to the Ulmer authorities. These desperate appeals, delivered in August 1592, March 1593, October 1593, November 1593, February 1594, June 1594, March 1595, and March 1596, were all curtly refused. After receiving the last of these supplications the authorities informed Jacob Beüren that his petition was denied and that he should discontinue his appeals to the court.64 After this final appeal, neither father nor daughter appears in the local records again. In enforcing its edicts, the town council sought to control the behavior of wayward citizens through a range of sanctions, sanctions levied in the interest of protecting order and decency in the territory. Waging war on “open vice”, above all drinking, fornication, and fighting, and seeking to construct a godly community, the local authorities relied upon petty fines, short jail terms, and formal admonishments to intimidate troublesome citizens, male and female. When confronted with citizens who remained defiant in the face of these minor penalties, the authori-

64 See StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 581 (Friday, 21 January 1592), including appeals dated 23 August 1592, 14 March 1593, 5 October 1593, 7 November 1593, 15 February 1594, 19 June 1594, 10 March 1595, and 8 March 1596.

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ties turned to banishment. Banishment represented a flexible, reversible punishment that did not permanently damage convicts’ honor, facilitating their eventual reintegration into local society if the council chose to demonstrate their benevolent mercy. The town council’s subjects, seeking order in troubled times through the realization of their forbearers’ dream of a cohesive community governed by Christian morality, supported these efforts by monitoring the behavior of neighbors, co-workers, and even kin and reporting offenses to the authorities. In the context of these efforts to construct a godly community, banishment provided the means of removing not only dangerous aliens, but also of purging the community of disruptive citizens. Thus, post-Reformation efforts to reorder society and promote moral behavior were carried out not only through the inculcation of evangelical religiosity and new behavioral norms, but also through the purgation of stubborn offenders defined according to traditional behavioral norms that emerged in the late Middle Ages. While the town council’s efforts to punish and control citizens through banishment rested upon the cooperation of its citizens, they also reveal the tensions inherent in early modern social control. Defiant citizens proved difficult for the local authorities to control and often hampered law enforcement efforts through dogged recidivism and by ignoring official sanctions. Even banishment, the physical removal of troublesome citizens, sometimes failed to intimidate defiant recidivists as banished citizens used influential patrons or relatives to gain pardons and return to the territory. As we have seen, some of these returning incorrigibles even went on to re-offend after being allowed to re-enter the urban community. A final case, involving an intractable offender named Jacob Bitterolf, from a prominent local guild family, illustrates the role of supplication and recidivism in undermining the council’s disciplinary efforts. Bitterolf ’s first recorded sentence is from November 1585, but the record reveals that he had been in trouble with the authorities before. The November 1585 verdict charges him with breaking a prior pledge to abstain from wine-drinking and records that he had already been imprisoned in the Blockhaus for a month as punishment. Upon Bitterolf ’s release, the court ordered him to live more obediently under his sentence or else face banishment. Several years later, in July 1591, Bitterolf was before the Ulmer bench again, having been jailed for starting a disturbance with several soldiers (Landsknechten), and also for his persistent intractability. According to the high court’s verdict, “he never held to any punishment, or [did] what he was ordered.”

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Consequently, the high court banished Bitterolf from the city and the territory, ordering him never to return. They also gave him an explicit warning not to come back without permission, threatening that if he “ever returned he would receive a very serious punishment.” Despite his troubled past, Bitterolf did not wait long to appeal the magistrates’ decision. A few months after his expulsion, in October 1591, he petitioned the court, asking them to lift his sentence. He was denied, but even this did not deter him, and a subsequent appeal in March 1592 was successful. The town council lifted Bitterolf ’s sentence, with the proviso that upon his return he was to appear before the Lord Mayor and swear (again) that he would not drink wine or associate with his companions outside his own house. He also received a stern warning: if the authorities received any further complaints about him, he would suffer perpetual banishment. Despite these warnings, Bitterolf could not stay out of trouble, and in June 1595—a decade after he first appeared before the court—he was charged again for a horrific crime. In a drunken rage, he had beaten a little girl peddling herbs so severely that her life was endangered.65 The outcome of this final case is not preserved, but the magistrates’ frustrating experiences with Jacob Bitterolf serve as an illustration of their desperation in dealing with defiant citizens. The banishment of offenders who enjoyed the legal and social protection of citizenship demonstrate at once the fervency of the local inhabitants’ attempts to construct a Christian commune and the authorities’ troubled efforts to control unruly citizens through banishment.

65 See StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 38: 381b (Monday, 1 November 1585); StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 497 (Wednesday, 14 July 1591; 15 October 1591; 10 March 1592); and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 45: 282b (Monday, 16 June 1595).

CHAPTER FIVE

PUBLIC EXPULSION RITUALS AND EARLY MODERN AUTHORITY The Ritual Expulsion of Simon Schlögel On Monday, 15 February 1552, the bell atop the town hall rang to draw a crowd of onlookers to Ulm’s marketplace, where the city’s pillory stood, for the sentencing and punishment of a troublesome vagrant named Simon Schlögel. The façade of Ulm’s imposing town hall, painted with murals that depicted classical and biblical scenes of virtue and vice, served as a fitting backdrop for the penal display that followed. The court scribe, perched on a balcony that overlooked the marketplace, read the high court’s verdict to the crowd, as Schlögel waited below at the pillory. The reading of the official verdict, constructed to portray the danger posed by the criminal, began as always by drawing the crowd’s attention to “the bound and convicted man standing on the market” and identifying the offender by name. Next the magistrates described the convict’s crimes and his unrepentant nature. The authorities informed the onlookers that Schlögel had been imprisoned in the tower many times, most recently for breaking his expulsion oath and returning to the city after being banished. According to the official verdict, Schlögel had been locked in the town jail, along with twentyone companions, for “stealing, begging, and causing other disorder,” but had been released, “and along with the customary release oath, had sworn an oath to almighty God that he would leave the honorable council’s city, territory, and domain, and would never return.” Worse yet, the magistrates maintained that he “had also been informed that if he did not comply, he would be flogged from the city with birch rods.” Building the case against Schlögel, the court scribe went on to inform the crowd of the vagrant’s most recent offense, proclaiming that the defiant vagrant had nevertheless “returned to the city, breaking his oath.” Having detailed the charges against Schlögel, the scribe read out the official sentence, presenting the solemn authority of the “honorable council” and asserting the legitimacy of its verdict, reached, according to the formulaic language of these official pronouncements, “unanimously

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and in accordance with the law.” First, the magistrates reminded the vagrant that he was still bound by his “recently sworn oath” and commanded him to remain across the river Lech for the rest of his life. Next, they warned Schlögel that if he ever returned to Ulm he would be drowned, a particularly terrifying form of capital punishment. As a painful reminder of his oath and to hammer home the severity of the official verdict, the council ordered the hangman to beat Schlögel through the winding streets of the city, through the Herdbruckertor gate, and from the town. The marginalia of the case includes a sketch of a birch-bundle, the instrument used to flog convicts, a graphic depiction of the town council’s penal authority.1 The banishment of Simon Schlögel, a vagrant whose defiance threatened the magistrates’ authority to police the boundaries of its domain and whose crimes threatened civic order, illustrates the nature of the public expulsion rituals enacted by the town council. These penal productions, carefully choreographed by the authorities, served to display before the citizenry the dangers posed by notorious or incorrigible strangers and misfits. At the same time, they also presented the role of the council in protecting the community and its social and spatial boundaries by excluding and expelling these dangerous outsiders through banishment. Displacement and Discipline: Banishment and Horizontal Social Control in Ulm As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, in sixteenth-century Ulm banishment served as a means of regulating inclusion in the community and preserving stability in unsettled times. By staging public expulsion rituals, the local magistrates displayed communal notions of order and decency and underscored their own diligence in defending these values. Staging and witnessing the ritual expulsion of dangerous offenders, the local magistrates and their subjects worked together to police inclusion in the urban community, using expulsion to represent and realize a shared evangelical vision of the ordered, moral community. While Ulm’s magistrates presented themselves as a “God-given Authority” after mid-century, like rulers throughout early modern Europe they

1

StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 22: 12 (15 February 1552).

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exercised their authority by negotiating with their subjects. As discussed in the introduction, several recent studies have demonstrated that the early modern state could not rely exclusively upon violent coercion and instead depended at every turn upon the acquiescence of its subjects. As the noted urban historian Christopher Friedrichs argues, regarding political life in early modern city-states: . . . no city could be governed without the involvement and cooperation of the citizens. No matter how exclusive a grip on political authority the council maintained and no matter how loftily its members might assert their noble status, no urban government commanded the means to rule by coercion alone. Effective government always required a substantial measure of consent. . . .2

This observation certainly fit sixteenth-century Ulm, and in many ways, the local citizenry—the subjects of the town council—granted their consent and even facilitated official disciplinary efforts after 1550. The town council’s reliance upon the acquiescence of its subjects in its attempts to apply social control stemmed in large part upon the lack of coercive power at its disposal. As the banishment cases analyzed in this study suggest, the local authorities constantly faced an undercurrent of resistance, not only from their more troublesome subjects, but also from disenfranchised offenders like resident aliens and vagrants. The manpower at the disposal of the magistrates was woefully inadequate to force compliance. At most, the council could muster a pair of watch commanders with sixteen patrolmen, a town beadle with a few assistants, and a handful of bailiffs.3 Moreover, this small force frequently proved incompetent and the council minutes are replete with examples of patrolmen accepting bribes, brawling, and drinking on duty.4 Lacking a reliable police force, the local authorities had difficulty bringing defiant offenders to justice, since suspects could ignore court orders or

2 Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450–1750 (London: Longman, 1995), p. 268. 3 The number of patrolmen (Gassenknechte) in Ulm is given in StAU A 3965. 4 See, for example, the council’s 1558 warning to the local gatekeepers about drinking and gambling (StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 25, fol. 270b); a similar 1571 warning to the beadle and his assistants about excessive drinking on duty (StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 25, fol. 98); and another warning to the town watch—including a threat of banishment—for shirking their duties in 1587 (StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle, Nr. 39: 480, 506b). These examples could be supported by dozens more preserved in the local archives.

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even flee the territory altogether to avoid punishment.5 Resistance was particularly pronounced in cases involving disciplinary efforts aimed at traditionally tolerated behaviors like the competitive drinking fostered within the guilds. As the futility of the authorities’ efforts to control rowdy drinkers like Anthoni Memminger, encountered in Chapter Four, illustrate, persistent offenders were able to subvert official social control efforts by refusing to comply with sanctions or by obtaining pardons. Despite these limitations in official coercive power, this sort of resistance remained rather rare. For example, just 182 of the 1,033 offenders banished from the territory faced subsequent prosecution for breaking their oath and returning to the territory illegally (seventeen percent). Recidivism statistics also demonstrate the rarity of prolonged resistance to the council’s penal authority. Of 2,531 offenders convicted in sixteenth-century Ulm, only 179 went on to re-offend after their initial punishment (seven percent). Only thirty-eight offenders (under two percent) faced the high court a third time and over ninety-two percent of these (thirty-five offenders) suffered expulsion from the territory for their repeated recidivism. Despite the frustration the Ulmer authorities often experienced in disciplining these particularly defiant offenders, in the long run these relatively infrequent instances of persistent resistance did not hamper the operation of official penal activities. The evidence from Ulm shows that most of the council’s subjects proved at least somewhat cooperative, willingly reporting on their neighbors or delivering themselves to answer to the local authorities and beg the mercy of the court.6 Eager to maintain stability and respectability within the town, most of the local citizens cooperated in the Ulmer authorities’ efforts to exclude threatening outsiders and deviants from the community.

5 In 1988, Bob Scribner pointed out the often-insurmountable obstacles facing early modern law enforcement, particularly the ability of suspects to escape justice by simply leaving town. See Robert Scribner, “Mobility: Voluntary or Enforced? Vagrants in Württemberg in the Sixteenth Century,” in Gerhard Jaritz and Albert Müller, eds., Migration in der Feudalgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), pp. 78–81. The Ulmer authorities repeatedly passed legislation prohibiting suspects from fleeing punishment, but to little effect. See, for example, StBibU 27 488 Kirchenordnung (1531), and StAU A [010] Eines Ehrbaren Rats der Stadt Ulm Ordnung in Straf offenbarer Laster und anderer Unzucht (1558), p. 32. 6 Work on modern totalitarian states supports this picture of everyday cooperation in official surveillance and social control. See Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately in Journal of Modern History 68, p. 752.

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The sixteenth century was a period of chronic unrest, and across Europe subjects turned to their rulers to reinforce social stability and squelch disorder amid alarming social and economic change. The public expulsion of convicts served to publicize official efforts to answer these calls to punish vice and maintain order. In the flush of the early Reformation, Ulm’s inhabitants backed reforms as helping to establish a pious community and avert God’s wrath, manifest in repeated outbreaks of famine and plague. As we have seen, the city’s guilds dominated the council until 1548, and the Reformation-era magistrates based their legal codes upon an urban artisan’s conception of Protestant morality, respectability, and honor. An anonymous poem from Ulm, dated 1526, for example, praised the strict laws laid down by the local magistrates as well as their religiosity: Lord God, I say your praise and honor your Holy word and teachings. Through your works and your power, you have created so much for us. Now in Ulm there is a wise council, learned in the word of God.7

Popular support for the town council’s disciplinary initiatives is not surprising, given the continuity that existed between official law enforcement and traditional norms and legislation. Furthermore, with the council’s increased regulation of public behavior, many influential social groups saw their own authority enhanced concomitantly, especially the clergy and enfranchised, God-fearing housefathers. Like magistrates throughout the Empire, the town council delegated extensive powers to these housefathers, who in turn policed the behavior of their workers, household servants, and family members. Likewise, the clergy in town and country performed crucial surveillance and promulgated the council’s mandates from the pulpit. In return, these patriarchal authorities supported the magistrates’ attempts to build a more godly community, a community based upon evangelical notions of Christian morality and artisanal conceptions of honorable behavior.8 The support offered by the local citizenry for the town council’s social control efforts continued throughout the sixteenth century, despite the constitutional changes of mid century, owing to the remarkable

StAU U 8956 (1526). For the council’s attempt to co-opt local household heads into their surveillance and disciplinary activities, see StAU U 9106 (1530). For the religious rhetoric of the council’s Reformation-era moral reforms, see StBibU 27 488 Kirchenordnung (1531). 7 8

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continuity in local legislation throughout the period. The oligarchic council’s emphasis on official prosecution after 1548 did not represent the imposition of disciplinary measures upon a hostile mass of subjects or the inculcation of elite behavioral norms at the expense of some traditional popular culture. Rather, after mid century the authorities assertively pursued a disciplinary agenda crafted during the surge in municipal legislation at the close of the Middle Ages. In order to encourage popular support for its law enforcement initiatives the local authorities ensured that these efforts conformed to traditional practice as much as possible in both legislation and execution. The title of the comprehensive criminal code the town council issued in 1581, Eins Erbaren Raths der Statt Ulm Gesatz unnd Ordnung inn Straff Offenbarer Laster, makes this abundantly clear. Translated as “The Honorable Council of the City of Ulm’s Law and Ordinance in Punishment of Open Vice,” the implication was the Ulmer authorities concerned themselves with open—meaning notorious—offenses. As we have seen, most convictions resulted from denunciations and the council had an obligation to provide justice and preserve social harmony for its law-abiding citizenry. Accordingly, Ulm’s magistrates sought not to root out secret crimes, but rather to appease their staunchly religious subjects by investigating “open vice,” crimes which had entered local gossip and which were particularly disruptive to the local social order. In prosecuting adultery, as we have seen, the council did not seek to expose and punish all adulterers, but merely to investigate notorious cases that caused social strain and threatened the smooth functioning of local households. As this investigation of banishment prosecution has shown, in enforcing its edicts, the town council relied upon the active participation of its subjects. In order to ensure the acquiescence and even elicit the active cooperation of Ulm’s settled inhabitants, the council not only responded to the calls of its citizenry for judicial action, but also aggressively solicited popular support for its law enforcement activities. The council was careful to include justifications for its penal authority in its mandates and edicts, legislation that was posted throughout the town and read aloud at the city hall and from the pulpit in the churches throughout the city and the towns and villages of the territory. The council’s 1581 law code, for example, ends with a grandiose rationale for pursuing law enforcement:

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. . . Christian zeal, and also the cultivation and preservation of civic obedience, discipline, and respectability, as well as other necessary and good reasons, including the aversion or moderation of God’s wrath.9

The last of these reasons for law enforcement, the idea that unpunished crimes prompted God’s wrath, was quite prevalent during this period and was particularly persuasive. This ideology provided Ulm’s settled population, beset after mid century by the disruptive effects of military defeat, epidemic disease, and economic depression, with a powerful incentive to cooperate in the authorities’ efforts to enforce “Christian living” within the territory. The town council’s intensification of social control after mid century also gained substantial support from the local Lutheran clergy, who helped promulgate the notion that crime left unpunished might bring divine wrath upon the entire community, shoring up official disciplinary efforts.10 An ominous sermon from Ulm, for example, printed in 1546 and entitled How people in these dangerous times behave, and arouse the fury of God against the World, illustrates the clergy’s role in supporting this ideology.11 The notion that crime might bring divine wrath upon the entire community provided a central means of garnering popular support for official law enforcement efforts.12 Accordingly, Ulm’s secular and ecclesiastical authorities constantly portrayed the administration of justice as a necessary prerogative of rulers, a means of protecting the community from bad fortune in an uncertain age. The Ulmer authorities invariably justified their penal authority in these terms, especially in the turbulent times after mid century. The preamble of Ulm’s 1581 criminal code, for example, warned the local inhabitants of the calamities that divine wrath had unleashed on their sinful society. Before proclaiming their renewed offensive against vice in 1581, the authorities declared that:

StAU A [4844] Eins Erbaren Raths der Statt Ulm Gesatz unnd Ordnung inn Straff Offenbarer Laster (1581). 10 For the symbiotic relationship between state and church in Ulm during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Norbert Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft: Die Lutherische Orthodoxie in Ulm, 1640 –1740 (Mainz: Verlag P. von Zabern, 1992). 11 StBibU Schad 11865: Michael Höfer, Wes man sich inn disen gefährlichen zeyten halten, und wie man dem zorn Gottes so über die Welt entzündet ist züvor kommen soll Auch was die ursach solches zorns sey. Durch Michael Höfer, Diener am hailigen Evangelio zü Werthaim gestellt. M.D.XLVI (n.p., 1546). 12 For a fascinating discussion of this early modern ideology, see Karl Wegert, “The Social Context of State Terror in Early Modern Germany,” Canadian Journal of History 26 (1991): 32–33. 9

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chapter five God the Almighty has demonstrated His anger through well-deserved punishments, with war, the spilling of blood, pestilence, and other terrible and previously unheard of sicknesses, prolonged price increases, and other plagues.13

Life in the Ulmer territory was uncertain during the late sixteenth century, and in these chaotic times most of the council’s subjects supported the magistrates’ law enforcement efforts as means of averting God’s wrath and providing all-important order within local society. The council’s banishment verdicts, carried out before crowds of townsfolk throughout the century, must be understood as an effort to enforce long-standing legislation based upon evangelical Protestant religiosity, traditional patriarchal and hierarchical social norms, and artisanal expectations of respectable behavior. The town council’s disciplinary activities resonated primarily with the guilds that long formed the foundation of the urban community. Judicial power was central to the application of authority in early modern Europe, since magistrates relied heavily upon their traditional role as dispensers of justice in order to legitimize their rule.14 Thus, the town council staged public penal displays in part to appease the local townsfolk, since Ulm’s inhabitants expected the authorities to preserve order by punishing criminals and deviants alike. The local magistrates’ social control initiatives, and banishment in particular, also proved useful to their subjects in handling social problems and in conflict resolution. As we have seen (Chapter Four), the high court’s ability to settle local disputes and punish persistent lawbreakers and deviants prompted informers from among the local populace—men and women, rich and poor alike—to deliver denunciations to the court. In turn, these denunciations provided the council with an opportunity to flex its judicial muscle and display its authority. The magistrates’ legal functions also gave them an important basis for expanding their powers and provided a major incentive for their subjects to cooperate in the penal process. The willingness of authorities to act upon their subjects’ complaints no doubt enhanced the state’s pretensions to act as

StAU A 4844 Gesetzbuch (1581). For the central role of official judicial functions in early modern state building, see Eberhard Isenmann, “Obrigkeit und Stadtgemeinde in der Frühen Neuzeit,” pp. 78–82. 13 14

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sole arbiter in local disputes.15 Accordingly, most of the denunciations that the authorities received were probably the result of long patterns of deviance or troublesome behavior that neighbors, employers, or family members could no longer tolerate or control through unofficial means. Most of these troublemakers promptly answered the court’s summonses and through the frequent display of benevolent mercy towards these compliant miscreants, the magistrates displayed their judicial power, shoring up their position atop the local hierarchy.16 The town council’s efforts to punish and control unruly and incorrigible offenders show that the social control efforts that accompanied early modern state formation were not aimed exclusively at marginalized outsiders. Rather, most of the local authorities’ disciplinary activities were intended to correct the behavior of enfranchised members of local society. Analysis of the Ulmer authorities’ banishment practices also provides useful insights into the political utility of these efforts. Although particularly intractable offenders managed to elude control, arresting and punishing criminals and deviants classified according to long-standing behavioral norms served several important purposes. Public punishment made Ulm’s new patrician rulers appear responsive to the needs of the local citizenry, who increasingly relied upon official law enforcement to uphold traditional notions of morality and order in the territory after the council usurped the judicial functions of the guilds and the clergy. Thus, by eliciting the cooperation of their subjects in identifying and convicting offenders through denunciation and courtroom testimony, Ulm’s magistrates reinforced their monopoly on judicial authority and made themselves useful to the town’s respectable citizenry. Finally, by using banishment to punish unruly guildsmen who refused to acquiesce to official warnings and commands, the new patrician-controlled council countered open defiance to its authority and displayed its formidable penal authority before the local populace.

15 As Fitzpatrick and Gellately point out, in the modern context, the Nazi and Soviet states each tried to build a bond with their citizens based upon “[the State’s] willingness to respond to their appeals, act upon their denunciations, invest their grievances, and arbitrate their quarrels, no matter how trivial.” See Journal of Modern History 68, p. 758. 16 For the importance of clemency and the display of mercy in early modern judicial proceedings and how these actions enhanced the power of judicial authorities, see van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror, pp. 31–32.

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chapter five The Therapeutic Role of Purgation

As we have seen, the public expulsion of miscreants served to appease Ulm’s respectable households, afraid of the terrible retribution prompted by sin left unpunished. However, these elaborate penal performances also supported efforts to fashion a purer, more pious community purged of criminal and alien outsiders. As our examination of prosecution statistics in Chapter One demonstrated, the town council banished 1,033 offenders in the course of the sixteenth century, sentences that amounted to over forty percent of the high court’s total verdicts. The local authorities relied upon banishment in an attempt to cleanse the community by purging all sorts of threatening offenders, offenders convicted of a wide range of illicit activities. Consequently, the council used banishment to punish and control criminals from all levels of the social hierarchy, ridding the community of unwanted vagrants, migrants, and citizens through expulsion. As we have seen, of the offenders whose social status can be ascertained from their criminal record, the high court banished 333 vagrants, 231 citizens, and eighty-two resident aliens in the 1500s. The types of offenses that the local magistrates punished with these banishment verdicts are equally instructive, illustrating what sorts of behaviors and offenders they sought to purge from the community. In the turbulent decades after 1550, the council generally used expulsion to purge their domain of offenders convicted of three major types of misbehavior: crimes relating to property, morality, and security. The town council, ruling a territory that drew its economic lifeblood from commerce and responsive to the concerns of the city’s guildsmen, relied upon banishment to protect the property of the citizenry. These expulsions fell heaviest upon the alien poor, as the magistrates sought to rid the territory of vagrants and beggars excoriated as thieves and parasites. Alongside the expulsions for vagrancy and unlicensed panhandling examined in Chapter Two, vagrant offenders were also prominent in banishment convictions for theft. Of 280 such expulsions, ninety-eight were handed down to offenders identifiable as vagrants. Apparently, larceny was also predominantly a male activity: 229 of the convicts banished for theft were male. The high court also tried to preserve the city’s wealth by expelling household heads charged with squandering their resources through “poor housekeeping.” Forty-four housefathers faced expulsion in the sixteenth century for dereliction of their household responsibilities. Most of these spendthrifts were citizens,

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wayward members of the proud guilds that stood as the honorable bedrock of the urban social order. The Ulmer authorities also used expulsion to purify the community by casting out offenders convicted of vice crimes, breaches of morality the magistrates often termed “drinking, swearing, and whoring” in their edicts. Offenses relating to illicit sex proved most common, with 327 expulsions for illegal sexual contact, including both premarital and extramarital copulation. In its painstaking efforts to preserve standards of sexual morality in its domain the town council relied heavily on banishment, and females outnumbered men in such expulsions. Consequently, of the 327 offenders banished for sexual offenses, 183 were women (fifty-five percent). Expulsions for excessive drinking and intemperate, blasphemous speech, on the other hand, usually involved males. For example, of the forty-three convicts banished for habitual drunkenness, all but two were men. The vast majority of these convicts (thirty-two) were citizens, members of the city’s guilds, associations that served at once as the fonts of civic morality and the engines of drunken disruption. Given this dual role played by Ulm’s guilds, defenders of civic respectability and frequent disturbers of the peace, the high court frequently confronted unruly guildsmen deemed disruptive or disobedient. In drafting their ordinances and carrying out their penal activities, the local magistrates sought above all to maintain “discipline and order” within the territory, and therefore sought to counter the destructive excesses of riotous masculinity through reprimands, fines, and banishment. Consequently, the high court levied most of its banishment sentences at males, and 746 of the 1,033 offenders banished in the 1500s were men (seventy-two percent).17 With these expulsions, the local authorities sought to control not only the disruptive, but also the disobedient. Accordingly, while the magistrates banished 327 miscreants for disorderly conduct, they also expelled thirty-two for disobedience 17 The percentage of men banished by the magistrates in nearby Augsburg between 1564 and 1650 stood at just over sixty-six percent (465 male expelees out of 701 total banishment convictions). As Tyler points out, this represents the continuation of a trend documented by Carl Hoffmann, who demonstrates that in the early decades of the sixteenth century females made up sixty-seven percent of those expelled by Augsburg’s magistrates, until this pattern was reversed in the 1530s and the percentage of women banished from the city stabilized at just over thirty percent. See Tyler, “Refugees and Reform,” pp. 82–84.

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or insubordination, displaying before the townsfolk the consequences of defying the council. The magistrates’ effort to expel stubborn offenders who defied central authority, and to publicize these expulsions, is nowhere more apparent than in cases involving intractable recidivists. The council’s dogged attempts to break defiant recidivists invariably resulted in banishment, banishment displayed through a public expulsion ritual, as the frustrated magistrates sought to bar persistent repeat offenders from the territory. Thus, while the local magistrates banished only eleven percent of the 559 two-time offenders they sentenced in the 1500s (sixty-seven convicts), they expelled over ninety-two percent of the triple recidivists that appeared before the high court. The magistrates’ experience with one of these three-time offenders, the vagrant woman Rosina Schemerin whose case opened this study, is illustrative of their efforts to purge the community of criminal aliens who sought to evade justice. This dynamic is even more striking in the handful of verdicts involving hardcore recidivists, invariably wayward citizens: of the eight four-time offenders the high court confronted in the 1500s, six, like the roving weaver and sorcerer Thomman Graßer encountered in Chapter Four, ultimately faced banishment. Likewise, all seven of the five-time offenders and both of the six-timers suffered expulsion, usually the end of the road for particularly intractable convicts. Here the town council’s exasperating confrontations with irredeemable citizens who refused to heed official warnings and petty sanctions—incorrigibles like the disobedient wastrel Anthoni Memminger and the rowdy brawler Anthoni Leipheimer, both encountered in Chapter Four—demonstrate the limits of early modern social control. At the same time, however, the public expulsion of these defiant repeat offenders demonstrates the role of penal rituals in early modern law enforcement and legitimation. ‘An Image and Example’: Banishment, Public Penal Displays, and Political Authority Ulm’s town council used banishment in an attempt to rid the community of the destitute, the disorderly, and the disobedient, using expulsion to protect the solvency and the sanctity of their domain. At the same time, however, public expulsion rituals served to mark abstract distinctions between licit and illicit behavior and between acceptable and unacceptable inhabitants and to display these boundaries before the council’s

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subjects. As analysis of the high court’s banishment practices has demonstrated, a dramatic acceleration in banishment verdicts occurred after mid century. Of the 1,033 convicts banished in sixteenth-century Ulm, only thirty-six suffered expulsion before 1550 and just 377 before the surge in purgation that began in the 1580s as economic conditions worsened in Swabia. Thus, over ninety-six percent of the convicts banished by Ulm’s high court in the sixteenth century were expelled after Emperor Charles V installed a new patrician-controlled council in the wake of the Schmalkaldic War. After 1550 the oligarchic town council also used banishment, and the elaborate public displays that often accompanied these verdicts, to assert its own authority.18 Early modern rulers, their power hampered by ineffective coercive capabilities and traditional constraints, continually reinforced their authority through public rituals.19 In the language of ordinances and sermons, the council’s judicial hegemony served as a major justification for its dominion over its subjects.20 Within early modern society, the judicial function of rulers was crucial, because the act of judging was central to conceptions of rulership. Concerning the divinely sanctioned judicial authority of rulers, a Lutheran pastor known as Huberinus, who preached in the Ulmer territory during the sixteenth century, wrote:

18 Sociologists and criminologists charting the development of official sanctions have long recognized the symbolic value of public banishment in terms of social cohesion and political authority. According to one recent work, “acts of banishment and exile also have strong symbolic value as punishments and may uniquely enhance community solidarity. The public degradation ceremonies in which these sanctions are pronounced may serve to dramatize the evil of the offender and the offense, ultimately leading to greater community solidarity and reinforcing the prevailing power relations in the community.” See Miethe and Hong Lu, Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective, pp. 30–31. 19 For these constraints in early modern England, see Griffiths, Fox, and Hindle, eds., The Experience of Authority, pp. 1–2. For the “symbolization of domination by demonstrations and enactments of power,” see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 45–47. For theoretical approaches to the role of ritual—repeated, formulaic performances staged in a sacralized space and meant to transmit messages or display relationships—in power relations, see also David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991), and Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a lucid overview of the role of ritual in early modern Europe, see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 20 The Ulmer town council expressed this justification for their authority in the preamble of their 1581 law code, for example. See StAU A [4844] Gesetzbuch (1581).

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chapter five God the Lord places the Authorities in their office, and provides them with three means and instruments to judge, settle, and pass sentence over all matters, cases, offenses, and crimes, to speak the law and to punish. The first is wisdom, the second is the law, and the third is the sword, which God the Lord has given the Authorities.21

In light of such an ideology, public penal displays served to project an image of the council as a divinely sanctioned magistrate, a magistrate with the God-given duty and power to punish. Through theatrically staged punishment rituals, including the public expulsion of banished offenders, the Ulmer authorities sought to reify these abstract principles and display them before their subjects, presenting themselves as divinely-ordained and legitimate rulers and making their terrible penal authority manifest.22 However, elaborate banishment rituals not only represented the social order, but also worked to transform it. Thus, these performances served to impose a vision of civic order based upon traditional, conservative norms, to make that order appear natural and legitimate, and to shape the way that the crowd perceived the enforcement of that order in their lives. At the same time, through participation in these public performances the townsfolk not only upheld traditional categories within their community—ruler/subject, insider/outsider, law abider/criminal—but also reconceptualized and reordered these standards. These carefully constructed expulsion spectacles, marked by tightly controlled actions and formal performative speech, fostered passive participation and tacit compliance. As onlookers the townsfolk were afforded little space for recalcitrance, and thus were compelled to acquiesce in the gradual transformation of political authority and law enforcement in the territory.23 The experience of watching political rituals like the expulsion of criminals made the council’s power tangible and elicited the implicit subordination of the citizenry, proving more effective than coercion in

21 StBibU 1110: Casparum Huberinum, Jesus Syrach. Spiegel der Haußzucht genannt. It is interesting to note that a copy of this work is preserved in Ulm’s municipal archives in the collection of the Schad family, a patrician clan active in local politics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Key passages like the one above are marked in red and marginalia is provided in an early modern hand. 22 For the political uses of such punishment rituals, see Karl Wegert, “The Social Context of State Terror in Early Modern Germany,” pp. 21–41. 23 For a discussion of these functions of political rituals, see Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, pp. 21–22, 66–67.

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supporting the exercise of authority.24 Thus, the Ulmer magistrates’ banishment practices served to buttress their penal and political authority despite their inability to enforce all of the banishment sentences they levied. As the examination of banishment cases provided in this study has illustrated, the local authorities—lacking the resources to police its borders effectively—proved incapable of keeping the most defiant or desperate of the offenders they banished from drifting back into the territory. However, the rituals that surrounded banishment displayed the limits of inclusion in the territory and the authorities’ role in enforcing these boundaries. Constrained by traditional legal practices, and unwilling to introduce potentially disruptive and unpopular innovations in judicial customs, the high court turned instead to the power of words, relying upon official pronouncements and unenforceable symbolic sentences delivered at public penal displays. In the absence of effective means of coercion Ulm’s magistrates substituted grandiose verdicts, read aloud during public banishment rituals, verdicts that commanded the expelled offender to remain a specified distance from their domain. The high court relied extensively upon such symbolic sentences, and 633 of the 1,033 banishment sentences the magistrates handed down in the 1500s ordered the convict to remain a specified distance from the borders of the territory or to remain across either the Rhine or the Lech rivers. Virtually all of these sentences were issued after 1550 (over ninety-eight percent), as the oligarchic council intensified its law enforcement activities and its banishment campaign in particular. Of the 436 verdicts where a vagrant offender was ordered to remain a specified number of miles from the borders of the territory, 310 date from the lean years after 1580. Likewise, thirty-five of the seventy-one verdicts where the offender was sent over the River Lech were handed down after 1580, and of the 126 cases where the convict was sent over the Rhine, seventy-two date from after that year. Thus, over sixty-five percent of these total verdicts date from after 1580, as the local magistrates, beset by economic and demographic decline, increasingly sought to restore order in the territory through expulsion. As our analysis of banishment and vagrancy in Chapter Two demonstrated, the natural and imagined boundaries imposed by these symbolic sentences lay beyond the limits of the town council’s jurisdiction.

24 For the efficacy of ritual in supporting political authority, see Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, pp. 135–36, 140.

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Thus, it appears that the magistrates, incapable of keeping determined convicts from returning to the territory after expulsion, sought to deter the rest with symbolic speech. The magisterial pronouncements issued by the undermanned authorities were intended to remove convicts not merely from the city or the territory, but to relegate them beyond imagined frontiers far from borders of their domain. By issuing these symbolic sentences the authorities proclaimed their determination to rid the community of defiant criminals and deviants, making examples of these dangerous outsiders through violent public punishment rituals, rituals that also served as a stage for the town council to present the boundaries of inclusion in the community and display its authority over subjects and convicts alike. At first glance it appears paradoxical that sentences so difficult to enforce consistently remained so central to early modern law enforcement. As we have seen, however, a new paradigm based upon mediation and negotiation between rulers and subjects has emerged among scholars who study early modern social control.25 Analysis of the town council’s banishment practices contributes to the current shift away from vertical explanations of social control by highlighting the chronic inability of sixteenth-century authorities to enforce their statutes effectively, their reliance on popular support in carrying out their judicial functions, and the role of punishment rituals in bridging this gap between authorities’ absolutist pretensions and the actual policing power at their disposal. The high court’s banishment practices provide a vivid illustration of these limitations, and while the local authorities were able to expel over 1,000 offenders from the territory, making them stay gone was a different issue. Consequently, the irony of the council’s banishment policies was that while the frequency of official banishment sentences increased dramatically after 1550, the authorities consistently proved unable to keep the most intractable offenders from returning to the territory illegally. Given the weakness of the magistrates’ enforcement apparatus and the harshness of life on the road, it should come 25 For works that advocate a model of social control based upon negotiation between rulers and subjects, see Bob Scribner, “Police and the Territorial State in Sixteenth-Century Württemberg,” in E.I. Kouri and Tom Scott, eds., Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, Martin Dinges, “Justiznutzungen als soziale Kontrolle in der Frühen Neuzeit,” and the essays included in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Social Control in Europe, 1500–1800 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004).

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as no surprise that many of the convicts they expelled refused to leave the territory for good and that the authorities failed to control the movement of particularly defiant expellees effectively. Consequently, Ulm’s magistrates relied upon a combination of public punishment and symbolic banishment sentences to deal with banished offenders who returned to the territory illegally, using penal rituals as a stage to demonstrate their role in defending the social norms and hierarchy that defined the urban community. The Ulmer authorities made extensive use of violent public expulsion and 126 of the 1,033 banishment convictions from sixteenth-century Ulm called for the offender to be whipped from the town (ußhauen). The majority of these convictions were levied against vagrants, and these outsiders suffered sixty-seven of the ritual expulsion sentences. While the local magistrates used the ußhauen ritual to punish a variety of illicit behaviors, over twenty-two percent of these public expulsion verdicts involved offenders charged with returning illegally to the territory after being banished. The grandiose sentences the council’s officials read to the crowd during public punishment rituals (e.g., banishing convicts across the Rhine for life) served to shore up the legitimacy of the patrician-dominated council, a regime imposed upon the town by imperial fiat in 1548, after the Schmalkaldic War. This oligarchic council had from the start used its judicial authority to buttress its political power and vice versa. In a mandate from 1585, for example, the town council demanded the obedience of its subjects as the “proper Magistrate and Authority established by God the almighty.”26 In the wake of Ulm’s mid-century political transformation, such claims had to be asserted and re-asserted publicly, through ritual displays that presented the magistrates’ formidable penal authority in a visible way. The public expulsion of convicts provided the authorities with an opportunity to deliver just such a powerful political performance.27 These grisly public productions served a dual purpose: on the one hand, corporal punishment demonstrated what might happen to defiant transgressors. Banished convicts, presented as irredeemable criminals and dangerous outsiders, suffered pain and humiliation for their crimes. On the other hand, public punishment StAU A 3672, fol. 338 (8 July 1585). As the political scientist James C. Scott argues, “every visible, outward use of power . . . is a symbolic gesture of domination that serves to manifest and reinforce a hierarchical order.” See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 45–47. 26

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displayed the council’s power before the crowd, reifying its authority and bringing the implicit threat of naked violence that stood behind official edicts into the open.28 As the preceding chapters have illustrated, the Ulmer authorities often included chilling sketches in the margins of the official verdicts recorded in their punishment books, known as the Urgichten. These drawings, likely viewed only by the magistrates and their clerks, portrayed in painstaking detail the terrible spectacle presented by the expulsion ritual and illustrate the importance of these rituals in local jurisprudence. Several of the banishment cases examined in this study, including the expulsion of Simon Schlögel that opened this chapter, the banishment of Rosina Schemerin examined in Chapter One, and the expulsion of Alexi Schneider analyzed in Chapter Three, include these disturbing images of pain and power. The illustration that accompanies the expulsion of Alexi Schneider is typical and records the public expulsion ritual in grisly detail (Figure 5).29 Like Schlögel’s record, the sketch includes a symbolic image of a birch-bundle, metonymically representing the council’s penal authority, but it also includes a chilling depiction of key elements of the expulsion ritual.30 In the foreground, Schneider, a young farmhand arrested in Jungingen for sexual misconduct, is shown being whipped out of Ulm by the executioner, running at the end of a length of rope. In the background, he is shown bound atop the pillory, the executioner holding the birch bundle as his assistant approaches the ladder below. This compression of time and space is typical of these illustrations, as different phases of the penal ritual are shown together, accentuating the cumulative effect of the public display. These sketches, drawn in the margins of official documents that were not posted publicly, invariably showed the most painful and humiliating elements of the banishment ritual: the convict standing at the pillory, being punished by the executioner or exposed to the gaze of the crowd. The subject of these depictions was always the act of punishment, the council’s terrible penal authority, rather than the trial or the actual expulsion of the criminal, suggesting that for the authorities the public display 28 For the political uses of violence in early modern England, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 1–34. 29 StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 50 (Friday, 3 February 1598) and StAU A [3530] Ratsprotokolle Nr. 48: 53b, 56b, 57 (Wednesday, 1 February 1598). 30 For the metonymic relationship between symbols of power and actual authority, see Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, p. 64.

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Fig. 5. Marginalia from Alexi Schneider verdict, StAU A [6589] Urgichtbuch, fol. 50 (1598).

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of authority and the terror of the penal ritual were paramount. The Ulmer authorities’ depictions of the penal act illustrate the dramatic character of these carefully staged ritual performances, repeated time and again in the late sixteenth century. Like these brutal images, the town council’s banishment sentences—read aloud to the spectators and punctuated by the terror of the violent expulsion ritual—demonstrated the authorities’ majesty and penal power, underscoring the seriousness of the convict’s crimes. The town council’s high court, ruling according to Roman law, investigated crimes and reached verdicts behind the closed doors of their dungeon and council chamber. Thus, the carefully constructed verdicts read to the crowd before public punishments served to garner popular support for the local magistrates’ decision by highlighting the majesty of their judicial authority and the dangerous, incorrigible nature of the convict. The carefully staged penal rituals that followed, from exposing offenders at the pillory to the tolling of bells to flogging them through the streets of the city and casting them out, also transmitted messages about inclusion in the urban community—the Ulmer Gemeinschaft—and about the power of the town council. These gruesome public punishment ceremonies provided the authorities with an opportunity to display their frightening penal authority before the assembled crowd, using terror to cow law-breakers and law-abiders alike. Meanwhile, like the townsfolk crowded around the pillory, most offenders punished by the town council participated in these penal rituals, participation expressed in confessing to their crimes, standing at the pillory for sentencing, and leaving the territory on the day of their expulsion. Given the magistrates’ sentencing practices, the convicts they expelled probably participated in order to avoid harsher punishment, since tacit cooperation often meant the difference between mutilation or flogging, being whipped out of town or simple expulsion, corporal punishment or a warning. Consequently, while 181 of the offenders that the Ulmer authorities banished during the century were subsequently punished for returning illegally to the territory (seventeen percent), the vast majority of these incorrigibles (153) were simply re-banished. After a warning about oath breaking and perhaps a flogging, the local authorities drove them from the city again. Ironically, even the relatively mild sentences handed down by the high court served to provide additional opportunities to stage penal displays that marked the limits of tolerated behaviors and offenders in the territory. The application and display of judicial authority was crucial to early modern state-building efforts, and as Ulm’s new rulers attempted

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to consolidate their hold on the territory, penal practice—the display of “judicial hegemony”—took center stage.31 Even when the Ulmer authorities permitted unruly citizens to return to the territory after being banished, they compelled them to stand before the council for a formal admonishment. By compelling troublesome locals to appear in court, doff their caps, and swear to amend their behavior, the magistrates displayed their authority over the local populace and reinforced the new subject-ruler hierarchy imposed by imperial fiat after 1548 that had replaced older communal traditions. The experiences of a needle-maker named Hannß Mercklin provide a glimpse of the humiliation involved in such closed-door penal rituals. Mercklin had been banished from the territory for swindling his customers in April 1589 and after a series of unsuccessful appeals (August 1589, July 1590, and November 1590) was finally allowed back into Ulm in August 1592. Upon returning to the city, however, Mercklin was forced to appear before the council for a formal reprimand. In the council chamber (Ratssaal), adorned with a massive painting of the Last Judgment, a graphic depiction of the divine majesty of judgment and the horrific wages of sin, the magistrates chastised Mercklin for his misdeeds. The guildsman was also compelled to swear a solemn oath that he would not venture outside of his own house, except to visit the bathhouse or Church, until granted “mercy by the honorable council.” He was also warned that if the authorities heard any complains about him or if he did not “live according to the honorable council’s ordinance” he would be punished severely, reinforcing the magistrates’ authority over him.32 Given the political utility of these sorts of judicial displays, it is not surprising that the town council required unruly guildsmen to appear for official reprimands and warnings with such frequency. It was especially vital for the council to demonstrate their new authority over the guilds, the same guilds that had dominated local politics until 1548. For the ambitious magistrates who sat on the town council during the latter half of the sixteenth century, establishing and maintaining their legitimacy was paramount. Penal practice served as an indispensable tool in this process, despite—or even owing to—the dogged resistance offered by offenders and the persistent inability of judicial authorities to enforce their edicts effectively. Central authority was a work in 31 On the role of “judicial hegemony” in early modern political domination, see Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society, p. 119. 32 StAU A [6590] Strafbuch 10, fol. 87 (Friday, 19 April 1589; 20 August 1589; 1 July 1590; 2 November 1590; 28 August 1592).

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progress during the sixteenth century, its assertion a gradual process that involved negotiation and resistance as well as the naked use of violence. Local rulers had to reinforce their dominance continually, not only through elaborate displays like official processions or public executions, but also by eliciting everyday displays of deference from their subjects. In sixteenth-century Ulm, the symbolic acquiescence involved in swearing courtroom oaths and petitioning the council for mercy was a central part of such coerced shows of submission to central authority. Thus, the dramatic surge in the council’s efforts to punish and control offenders through expulsion was an integral part of the major political transformation that swept Ulm in the wake of the Schmalkaldic War, as the territory’s new patrician rulers sought to display their authority over criminals and law-abiding citizens alike and to cast themselves as protectors of the local social order. The brutal public expulsion that offenders like Simon Schlögel endured at the hands of local executioner involved a variety of ritual elements. Repeated hundreds of times during the sixteenth century, Ulm’s public penal performances were marked off in time and space by the customary tolling of the “poor sinner’s bells” and the ritualized spaces of the pillory and city gate. The roles played by civic officials, executioner, convict, and crowd followed an unwritten script repeated at every performance. As the bells drew an audience to the marketplace, the executioner brought the offender—always bound in the tower jail beforehand—along a prescribed route to the pillory. Next, the council’s appointed scribe read out a formulaic statement of the offender’s confession (Urgicht) to the crowd, which in turn granted its tacit approval for the penal performance by witnessing the ritual. After the sentence was read out, the executioner carried out the penal act itself, under the watchful eyes of the magistrates and the audience. The expulsion ritual, performed according to detailed instructions contained in the convict’s sentence, often included a variety of symbolic elements. These ritualized aspects included retributive torments, meant to intensify the power of the penal performance, and formal expulsion through one of the town gates, a means of effecting and signifying loss of both physical and social place.33

33 For the role of passage through doorways or gates as signs and means of changing social status, see Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, p. 36.

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According to the town council, these performances served a dual purpose: punishing offenders in public provided an “image and an example” for the crowd.34 On the one hand, public punishment provided an “example” of what might happen to transgressors. On the other hand, penal rituals displayed the council’s power before the townsfolk, creating an “image” of the magistrates’ authority and making explicit the coercive violence that stood behind official edicts. Observing the gruesome penal ritual, spectators received a two-fold lesson in subordination: the authorities did not tolerate deviant behavior and wielded judicial power of the most terrible sort. They also, however, displayed the limits of inclusion in the urban community before the local inhabitants. By presenting an image of exclusion, the town council also made the boundaries of the territory manifest, as well as its duty and its authority to regulate them through banishment. While the council’s penal performances drew crowds of onlookers from among the local townsfolk, these spectators’ attitudes towards official punishment are somewhat elusive. The harsh sentences and official pronouncements handed down by Ulm’s magistrates do not reveal how their subjects responded to the public expulsion rituals played out in the squares and streets of the city. A local shoemaker named Sebastian Fischer, however, was present in August 1552 when the local magistrates had a pair of young vagrants whipped from the town, and recorded a description of the spectacle. Fischer’s homespun account of the incident, included in a chronicle of notable political, economic, and even meteorological events, affords a unique glimpse into the local citizenry’s attitudes towards the increasingly public violence that the high court inflicted upon even the youngest expellees: On Thursday, the 18th day of August, in the afternoon, two young lads were beaten with birch-rods from the Herdbrucker gate to the Glöckler gate and out of town. They had cut grapes from the [vineyards on] St. Michelsberg, had stolen other things, and had committed all manner of villainy. I observed that they could not have been more than twelve years old. . . . I do not think, and no man in Ulm is old enough to remember, that the hangman ever beat lads so young out of town with birch-rods. It has happened, however, that people so young were whipped in the tower, at the council’s command.35

See StAU A [010] for the use of these terms. Sebastian Fischer’s chronicle was printed in a local historical journal in the latenineteenth century: Karl Gustav Veesenmeyer, ed., “Sebastian Fischers Chronik,” Ulm 34 35

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As Sebastian Fischer’s brief account of this public expulsion suggests, the shoemaker considered the magistrates’ harsh treatment of these young urchins to be somewhat exceptional, but apparently acceptable. In fact, he did not seem overly concerned that the authorities had broken accepted practice by moving their punishment of such young convicts from the tower jail, where it had traditionally been carried out, to the streets of the town. Fischer accepts both the high court’s assertion that the urchins’ petty thefts had amounted to “villainy” and the authorities’ right and responsibility to banish these troublemakers from the territory for their crimes. Consequently, their punishment was a notable event insofar as it represented an interesting intensification of the penal authority wielded “at the council’s command.” The shoemaker’s description of this violent expulsion ritual shows not only the morbid popular interest in public punishment during this period, but also the respect for authority and its violent execution that such penal displays elicited among the townsfolk in the crowd. For Fischer, the dangerous disorder that these unruly urchins spread within the town merited banishment, a penalty that served to safeguard the community and its values from dangerous misfits and outsiders.

und Oberschwaben: Mitteilungen des Vereins für Kunst und Alterthum in Ulm und Oberschwaben 5–8 (1896). For the original, see StAU G1 1554: Sebastian Fischers Miscellan-Chronik. For background material on Fischer and his chronicle, see Volker Pfeiffer, Die Geschichtsschreibung der Reichsstadt Ulm von der Reformation bis zum Untergang des Alten Reiches (Ulm: Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981), pp. 18–29.

CONCLUSION As this analysis of banishment practices in sixteenth-century Ulm has illustrated, judicial expulsion was ubiquitous in early modern society and magistrates cast thousands of offenders onto the highways for all manner of offenses. The experiences of these convicts, preserved as sentences in archives across Europe, afford scholars a stark view into the operation of early modern power relations and social control. Throughout the period, judicial expulsion was central to regulating inclusion in rural and urban communities alike, as rulers and subjects cooperated to define and defend the boundary between enfranchised insiders and excluded outsiders, between accepted and unacceptable behaviors. Through banishment, the magistrates and citizens of German city-states like Ulm worked together to regulate behavior according to standards of evangelical Christian morality promulgated since the late Middle Ages, norms given renewed vigor during the Reformation. In Ulm, Reformation-era social control initiatives represented a continuation, an intensification of the late medieval dream of building a “godly city” cleansed of sin and vice. As scholars have pointed out, the disciplinary potential of the Reformation for urban craftsmen—as well as the extent to which it conformed with traditional, conservative civic values with roots in the late Middle Ages—helps to explain its appeal in the cities of southern Germany in its early years. Our examination of banishment practices in sixteenth-century Ulm supports this view. The town council’s law enforcement efforts display remarkable continuity with medieval antecedents in both legislation and implementation. In all facets of the magistrates’ disciplinary activities we see a common pattern: initial legislation in the late medieval period, followed by a re-articulation of these legal precedents during the Reformation, and finally efforts to use official prosecution to enforce these statutes in a systematic manner only after the installation of the oligarchic council after mid century. Thus, the council’s attempts to rejuvenate poor relief and the regulation of vagrants through the 1559 Beggars’ Ordinance, encountered in Chapter Two, as well as efforts to overhaul the supervision of migrant workers with the Migrants’ Ordinance of 1527/1581 and to monitor the moral life of citizens through the Church Ordinance of 1531/1581 presented in Chapters Three and Four, fit this pattern well.

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Amid the demographic and political upheavals of the latter sixteenth century, the authorities reiterated late medieval legal precedents in all three of these areas, but launched more systematic enforcement only after 1550. Despite this intensification in sentencing, punishment remained highly traditional in its implementation. Thus, in enforcing its edicts the local magistrates relied heavily on banishment, a customary penalty, but increased its use dramatically as they sought to bring good order and discipline to the troubled territory. Banishment prosecution was a shared enterprise and as our examination of morals policing in Chapter Four illustrated, the authorities’ efforts to rid the town of miscreants relied upon the denunciations delivered by spouses, parents, neighbors, and employers. These denunciations also reflected traditional, conservative civic norms enunciated in the territory since the late Middle Ages, and as we have seen the authorities proved responsive to their subjects’ calls for enforcement in cases dealing with unruly citizens and undesirable outsiders alike. Ulm’s householders supported the council’s banishment activities, because expulsion had a therapeutic effect, purifying and restoring the community by publicly ridding it of threatening criminals and deviants. Together, Ulm’s rulers and subjects sought to remake the urban community in the wake of the Reformation not only through discipline, but also through expulsion. Banishment provided a cheap, and highly visible, means of defining and regulating the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable people and behaviors. While material constraints often hampered the authorities’ ability to enforce the banishment sentences they levied, expulsion served to remove misfits and miscreants the townsfolk had considered dangerous for generations: shiftless vagrants, wayward migrants, and unruly citizens. Thus, banishment did not represent the imposition of alien, elite norms onto a docile populace, but rather the intensification of efforts to enforce traditional, conservative civic values first articulated in the medieval period. Banishment and the ceremonies that accompanied it also had an important role in the ritual display of authority, enacting power relations and social hierarchy before the eyes of the townsfolk. For the local authorities expulsion displayed both their mercy and their diligence in purifying and protecting local society. It provided a useful “middle way” between grisly, disruptive executions and clemency that also accentuated the council’s authority to regulate inclusion in the territory. As we have seen, for the local citizenry, banishment served as a visible means of ridding the urban community of outsiders and deviants that

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threatened its prosperity or its purity. Albeit such removal often proved only temporary, given the dogged resistance offered by determined expellees. Despite this resistance, banishment, and public expulsion in particular, worked to regulate and to display the sociospatial boundaries and behavioral norms that defined the urban community as well as the town council’s authority to police them. Meanwhile, the public expulsion of undesirables served to display the council’s judicial power as the local magistrates used the courtroom and the pillory as stages where power relations and the margin between inclusion and exclusion were made manifest. While the town council ruled as a legitimate Obrigkeit, its power buttressed by both constitutional and traditional supports, the local magistrates sought to justify their rule through claims to provide order and punish infractions. Banishment was central to these claims, as well as the authorities’ attempts to display their assiduous performance of these functions. The oligarchic civic regimes of the late sixteenth century used public expulsion rituals, not just communal civic oath ceremonies or bloody executions, to display community boundaries and power relations. Accordingly, through the public banishment of outsiders and deviants, Ulm’s magistrates sought to enhance and display both civic cohesion and central authority in a troubled age.

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INDEX adultery 9, 29, 65, 67–69, 69 n. 31, 70, 70 n. 34, 71–73, 73 n. 41, 74 n. 45, 82–83, 86 n. 14, 87, 96–97, 118 Ainunger (Misdemeanor court) 79, 87, 95 assault 29, 64, 89, 91, 97 Augsburg 2, 2 n. 3, 7 n. 15, 15, 18–19, 19 n. 13, 26 n. 34, 27, 32 n. 3, 36 n. 17, 38 n. 19, 40 n. 22, 44 n. 32, 70 n. 32, 89 n. 20, 106 n. 59, 123 n. 17 Augsburg Settlement 21 authority ix, 3, 5, 5 nn. 12–13, 6, 8–9, 21, 21 n. 17, 24, 30, 43, 47, 52, 54, 64, 72, 74–75, 77, 82, 83 n. 6, 87–88, 88 n. 19, 90–91, 98, 100–105, 113–121, 124–125, 125 nn. 18, 20, 126–127, 127 n. 24, 128–130, 130 n. 30, 132–135, 138–139 banishment of vagrants 54 of resident aliens 74 of citizens 88 of men 94 of women 44 and humiliation 129 and mutilation 45, 49 and ritual expulsion 114, 129 Beadle 31, 34, 36, 38, 38 n. 18, 39, 43, 62, 66, 93, 96, 115, 115 n. 4 Beggars’ Ordinance 38–40, 45–46, 137 begging 29, 31–34, 39, 43, 48–49, 75, 113 Beywoner: see resident aliens blasphemy 29, 43, 64, 79, 86, 89 Blauert, Andreas 1 n. 3, 5 Blickle, Peter 6 boundaries 3, 9, 32, 39–41, 43, 49, 52–53, 53 n. 46, 54–55, 58, 75, 114, 124, 127–128, 135, 138–139 capital punishment 8, 26–28, 28 n. 37, 50, 114 Carolina 25

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 18, 19 n. 12, 20, 83, 125 Church Ordinance 18, 82–83, 87, 137 citizens; citizenship 2, 7, 7 n. 16, 9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21 n. 17, 22–23, 23 n. 27, 30, 35, 59–60, 62 n. 13, 63, 66–69, 72–74, 78, 80–82, 84, 88–90, 90 n. 23, 94, 96–100, 100 n. 44, 104–106, 106 n. 59, 108–112, 115–116, 121 n. 15, 122–124, 133–134, 137–138 clergy 18, 22, 83 n. 6, 91, 117, 119, 121 coercion 3, 6, 102, 115, 126–127 Cologne 1 n. 3, 2, 14 n. 1, 28 n. 37, 34 n. 8, 38 n. 20, 41 n. 24, 49 n. 40 community ix, 2 n. 3, 3, 3 n. 8, 7–10, 15–16, 21, 24, 28, 33, 34 n. 8, 41, 49, 52, 52 n. 45, 54–55, 58, 60, 62, 67 n. 25, 75, 77, 80 n. 2, 81–84, 88, 110–111, 114, 116–117, 119–120, 122–124, 125 n. 18, 126, 128–129, 132, 135, 138–139 corporal punishment 27–28, 44–47, 54, 64, 91, 97, 105, 129, 132 council 1, 1 n. 2, 3, 7–9, 11–12, 14–17, 17 n. 6, 18, 18 n. 11, 19, 19 nn. 12–13, 20–23, 23 n. 27, 24–34, 34 n. 8, 35–37, 37 n. 18, 38–41, 43, 45–57, 57 n. 2, 58, 60–64, 66–74, 74 nn. 44–45, 75–77, 79–86, 86 n. 14, 87–90, 90 n. 24, 91, 91 n. 26, 92–115, 115 n. 4, 116–117, 117 n. 8, 118–125, 125 n. 20, 126–130, 132–135, 137–139 criminality; criminals 1, 1 n. 3, 2 n. 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 14, 14 nn. 1, 3, 24, 25 nn. 30–31, 26–27, 27 n. 35, 30, 31 n. 1, 33, 36–37, 41, 43, 49–50, 52, 62, 71, 80, 80 n. 1, 81–84, 85 n. 9, 87, 89, 95, 98–99, 103 n. 52, 113, 118–122, 124, 126, 128–130, 134, 138 denunciation 14–15, 63, 71 n. 36, 80–81, 84–85, 85 n. 9, 86–88, 98, 104 n. 55, 118, 120–121, 121 n. 15, 138

154

index

deviants 2–3, 7–8, 15, 41, 52, 81, 88, 116, 120–121, 128, 138–139 Dinges, Martin 5 discipline: see social control disease 15, 22, 119 disobedience 29, 64, 90, 93, 98–101, 104, 123 disorderly conduct 28–29, 89, 91–92, 95, 97, 107, 123 display 3, 8–9, 20–21, 48–49, 52, 54–55, 68–69, 75, 77, 101–102, 102 n. 49, 104, 113–114, 120–121, 121 n. 16, 124–125, 125 n. 19, 126–130, 132–134, 137–139 drunkenness 28, 48, 64, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 92, 95, 97, 123

71 n. 36, 74, 76, 76 n. 48, 79, 90, 92–94, 99 n. 42, 108, 108 n. 61, 109, 117, 117 n. 8, 118, 122, 138 Huberinus, Caspar 125 humiliation 47–49, 67 n. 25, 129, 133

exclusion 7, 10, 33, 52 n. 44, 53, 55, 58, 62, 73, 75, 77, 84, 135, 139 executioner 12, 31, 50–51, 68, 77, 130, 134 expulsion: see banishment

Landleute 16 law enforcement ix, 1 n. 3, 2, 2 n. 7, 4–9, 26 n. 34, 27, 27 n. 35, 28, 30, 32, 36–37, 39, 52, 80 n. 2, 85 n. 9, 89, 102, 104, 111, 116 n. 5, 117–121, 124, 126–128, 137 legislation 3 n. 8, 5–6, 33, 33 n. 7, 34 n. 9, 35, 38, 59–60, 60 n. 8, 65, 81–82, 82 n. 4, 83–85, 88, 89 n. 21, 98–99, 116 n. 5, 117–118, 120, 137 Leipheim 16, 47–48 Lord Mayor 20, 24, 38, 64, 76, 80, 92, 97, 99, 101–103, 108–109, 112 Lutheranism 18, 21–22, 22 n. 21, 83, 83 n. 6, 119, 125

famine 15, 22 n. 23, 36, 50, 117 fines 28, 80, 98, 104 n. 55, 110, 123 flogging 26, 31, 47, 55, 132 fornication 66, 89, 108, 110 Foucault, Michel 8 Frankfurt 2, 15, 27 Frecht, Martin 21 Friedrichs, Christopher 115 gatekeepers 38, 115 n. 4 Gemeinschaft 7, 7 n. 16, 16, 132 God’s wrath 23, 117, 119–120 guilds 3 n. 8, 6, 16–17, 17 n. 6, 18–19, 19 n. 13, 20, 59, 63, 82, 88–89, 89 n. 21, 90, 90 n. 24, 100 n. 44, 106, 110, 116–117, 120–121, 123, 133 hangman: see executioner high court 1 n. 2, 14, 14 n. 3, 24–30, 32, 37, 39–41, 43–44, 46–55, 57, 62–64, 66–68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 87, 89–92, 92 n. 29, 93, 93 n. 30, 94–101, 104–113, 116, 120, 122–125, 127–128, 132 honor 20, 63, 68–69, 72, 82, 84, 89, 89 nn. 20–21, 105, 110–111, 117 hospital 31, 43, 60 households 1 n. 2, 7, 7 n. 15, 16, 58–59, 62, 62 n. 13, 63, 66, 69–71,

imprisonment 28, 67, 70–71, 103 incest 77 informers: see denunciation Interim 19 interrogation 50, 71, 102 judges: see high court Kaufbeuren

11–12

magistrates 1, 1 n. 2, 2, 2 n. 7, 5–9, 11–12, 14, 17 n. 9, 18–21, 21 n. 18, 22, 22 n. 20, 24–25, 27–28, 28 n. 38, 29–33, 35–37, 38 n. 20, 40, 40 n. 22, 41 n. 24, 43–50, 52, 54–55, 57–59, 63–64, 66, 69–73, 75–81, 83–84, 86, 86 n. 14, 87–88, 90, 90 n. 25, 91–96, 98, 100–102, 102 n. 49, 103, 105–108, 110, 112–115, 117–118, 120–123, 123 n. 17, 124, 126–130, 132–135, 137–139 marginalia 12, 14 n. 1, 48, 51, 85, 86 n. 14, 87, 92, 109 n. 63, 114, 126 n. 21 marriage 23, 65, 68–69, 72–73, 76, 96–97 Memmingen 11–12 mercy 11, 69, 75, 94, 102, 107–109, 111, 116, 121, 121 n. 16, 133–134, 138

index migrants 9, 23, 30, 32, 34, 36, 36 n. 16, 56, 58, 58 n. 3, 59, 59 nn. 3, 5–6, 60–66, 69–70, 72–77, 96, 122, 137–138 Migrants’ Ordinance 60–63, 75, 137 morality (Sittlichkeit) 65 mutilation 28, 45, 49, 105, 132 negotiation 5, 5 n. 12, 6, 15, 88 n. 19, 128, 128 n. 25, 134 norms 2–8, 15, 62, 67, 81, 83–84, 89, 99, 111, 117–118, 120–121, 126, 129, 137–139 Nuremberg 27 oaths 1 n. 3, 11–12, 20, 21 n. 17, 38, 40, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 61, 63, 63 n. 15, 71, 73, 79, 85, 87, 92–93, 95, 102, 105, 113–114, 116, 132–134, 139 Oestreich, Gerhard 4, 4 n. 10 order 2, 2 n. 3, 5–6, 8–9, 14–15, 23–24, 32–33, 39–40, 48, 58, 67–68, 74 n. 44, 75, 77, 81–84, 88–90, 96, 102, 104, 110–111, 114–115, 117–118, 120–121, 123, 126–127, 134, 138–139 outsiders 1–3, 7, 24, 30–33, 35, 37, 38 n. 18, 41, 49, 51–53, 55, 58, 72–73, 75, 77–78, 114, 116, 121, 122, 126, 128–129, 137–139 patricians 7, 16–17, 17 n. 6, 18 n. 11, 19, 19 nn. 12–13, 20, 20 n. 14, 21 n. 18, 24, 83, 90 n. 24, 121, 125, 126 n. 21, 129, 134 pillory 11–12, 26, 47–49, 55, 77, 104, 113, 130, 132, 134, 139 poor housekeeping 63, 90, 92–93, 122 poor relief 9, 33, 33–34 n. 8, 59, 61, 63, 137 poorhouse 43, 57, 57 n. 2, 60–61, 63, 96 power; power relations 2–3, 5 n. 12, 6, 8, 8 n. 18, 15, 18–19, 21 n. 18, 50, 52, 54, 57 n. 1, 69, 74–75, 102, 102 n. 49, 104, 115–117, 120–121, 121 n. 16, 125, 125 nn. 18–19, 126–130, 130 n. 30, 132, 134–135, 137–139 pregnancy 70–71, 71 n. 36, 72–73 prosecution 4–5, 8, 14 n. 2, 24, 26–27, 27 n. 35, 28, 30, 32, 36, 36 n. 17, 37, 39–40, 51, 62, 67–68, 70, 75, 87, 89,

155

91, 98–100, 100 n. 43, 101, 103, 103 n. 52, 104, 116, 118, 122, 137–138 prostitution 39, 44, 44 n. 32, 45, 65, 83, 93 Protestantism 17–18 punishment ix, 1, 7–9, 11–12, 15, 24, 26–28, 28 n. 37, 29, 36, 39–40, 43–49, 49 n. 40, 50, 53–55, 57, 64, 67–68, 68 n. 28, 69–70, 73, 75–77, 80, 82, 85, 89–91, 93–98, 101–103, 105–106, 109, 111–114, 116, 116 n. 5, 118, 120–121, 125 n. 18, 126, 126 n. 22, 128–130, 132, 135, 138 Rabus, Ludwig 21 recidivism 9, 14 n. 3, 26, 40, 43, 52, 55, 100, 111, 116 Reformation 3, 3 n. 9, 4, 6–7, 7 n. 15, 8–9, 15 n. 4, 17, 17 nn. 8–9, 18, 18 n. 11, 21 n. 18, 33, 33 n. 8, 34, 44, 44 n. 32, 59–60, 62 n. 13, 65, 81–82, 82 n. 4, 84, 87–89, 96, 111, 117, 117 n. 8, 137–138 Reinhard, Wolfgang 4 resident aliens 7, 9, 16, 23 n. 27, 30, 34, 36, 56–63, 65–67, 69, 74–76, 106, 115, 122 resistance 5–6, 19, 32, 40, 100, 115–116, 133–134 ritual 2–3, 8–9, 12, 49, 52–53, 55, 77, 81, 102, 114, 124–125, 125 n. 19, 126, 126 nn. 22–23, 127, 127 n. 24, 128–130, 132–135, 138–139 Roman law 24, 25 n. 30, 26, 54, 81, 132 rote Buch 59, 85–86, 98 Sam, Konrad 18, 21 Schilling, Heinz 4 Schmalkaldic League 18 Schwerhoff, Gerd 1 n. 3, 5 sentencing 2, 6, 11–12, 14 n. 2, 25 n. 31, 27–28, 30, 37, 39–40, 46–47, 62, 64, 67, 67 n. 25, 69–70, 72–73, 73 n. 41, 74 n. 44, 75–77, 96, 102, 104, 113, 132, 138 servants 14, 16, 21 n. 18, 34, 36, 59, 59 nn. 5–6, 66–67, 69, 69 n. 31, 70–71, 73 n. 41, 77, 89, 94 n. 31, 99, 117 social control 1 nn. 2–3, 4, 4 n. 10, 5–6, 9, 15, 27–28, 40, 52, 55, 63 n. 15, 80, 80 n. 2, 81–82, 87–88, 88 n. 19, 98–99, 104, 106, 111,

156

index

115–116, 116 n. 6, 117, 119–121, 124, 128, 128 n. 25, 137 state formation 4, 121 subjects 2, 4–6, 9–10, 16, 16 n. 5, 18, 20–21, 24–25, 35, 39, 56, 58, 60, 67–68, 81–82, 84, 85 n. 9, 87–88, 95–98, 102–104, 110–111, 114–118, 120–121, 125–126, 128, 128 n. 25, 129–130, 133–134, 137–138 summonses 98–100, 100 n. 43, 101, 121 supplication 9, 105–106, 109–111 symbolic sentences 52–53, 127 territory 1, 1 n. 2, 8–9, 11–12, 14, 14 n. 2, 15–16, 16 n. 5, 17–23, 28, 30–33, 35–41, 43–55, 57–58, 60–61, 63–64, 66–67, 70–74, 74 n. 45, 75–76, 79–83, 91–92, 94, 94 n. 31, 95, 97, 104, 106, 108–109, 109 n. 62, 110–113, 116, 118–129, 132–135, 138 theft 11–12, 28–29, 39, 47, 50–51, 53, 63, 65, 82, 84, 90, 97, 122 threats, judicial 39, 45–46, 51, 54 torture 25, 43, 50, 54, 77 town scribe 11, 61, 64 town watch 24, 41, 45, 91, 94, 115 n. 4

Ulm and demographics 127, 138 and economy 17, 23, 56, 59, 74, 76, 82 and politics 61, 133 and Schmalkaldic War 125, 129, 134 Ußhauen 12, 46–47, 49, 129 vagrants ix, 2, 9, 11, 14, 30–32, 32 nn. 3–4, 33, 34 n. 8, 35–36, 36 n. 17, 37–38, 38 n. 19, 39, 39 n. 21, 40, 40 n. 22, 41, 43–55, 74, 106, 113–115, 122, 124, 127, 129, 137–138 Van Dülmen, Richard 1 n. 3, 27, 27 n. 35 verdicts: see sentencing violence 12, 28, 41, 43, 46, 49–50, 84, 90, 108, 130, 130 n. 28, 134–135 Weber, Max

3 n. 9, 4

Zeeden, Walter 4 Zwinglianism 18, 22 n. 20, 82, 87