CHAPTER XXVI

SOME CRIMINAL SOCIETIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND LATER.
Honour among thieves ! then all honour to that fifteenth century close corporation known as the “Mercelots,” which numbered among its initiates no less a celebrity that Francois Villon, the great poet and beloved mauvais enfant.1
The prosperity of France, which had increased immensely owing to the gradual enfranchisement of the serfs, an object much encouraged by the Church from the eleventh century onwards, disappeared almost completely during the English Wars, 1336—1452. These wars gave rise to a dangerous class of criminal, who got the length of forming themselves into an order with their own Government, hierarchy, and laws, to say nothing of a separate language, specimens of which have been preserved to this day in the jargon poems of the student-poet mentioned above.
These Gueux or Beggars were recruited from malefactors escaped from the towns, ruined labourers, the unemployed in every trade, deserters from the armies, quacks, fortune¬ tellers, ballad-singers, bankrupt merchants, and, to complete the list, the declasses, sons of good families, clerks, and scholars fallen into evil ways. The hosts of crime were divided into five “Tribes”: soldiers; the pedlars or packmen, known as merciers, mercerots or mercelots (Villon was of this band) ; beggars, known as gens du Grand Coesre, du royaume de Thunes; gipsies; robbers.
Right up to the time of Louis XIV the Beggars and Mercelots formed two analogous twin bodies wherein all sorts of scoundrels were included. This order of iniquity was said to have been founded about the year 1455.
1 Auguste Vitu, Jargon et Jobelin de Francois Villon, Paris, 1889.
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According to a book published in 1 596 and entitled Pechon de Ruby, the grades in this fraternity were: (1) Pechon, or apprentice; (2) Blesche, the first degree of initiation, corresponding to Mercelot, petty trader; (3) Coesme, Coesmelotier, Coesmelotier Hure, wholesale merchant.1 All these titles were borrowed from the legitimate business and corporations of honest mercers. The Beggars had three superior degrees: Cagou or Pasquelin, provincial officers, who instructed the novices in villainy; Archi-suppots, who formed a sort of Upper Chamber of crime; Le Grand Coesre, the supreme chief. According to Sauval, this officer sometimes assumed the name of Roi de Thunes.
That this gang of scallywags should have stolen the phraseology of the Gild of genuine Merciers may be due to the fact that the latter possessed a strict code of moral duties, as is shown by a document of 1585. According to this evidence, a fellow of the Gild was obliged to guard another’s merchandise and work for him as for himself; none might attract another’s customer; he had to protect his fellow’s wife, and help her with money; to aid him in sickness; and to sell the merchandise of one who fell sick on a journey, and retain no more than a third of the profits for himself.
These admirable rules were parodied by the Beggars to suit their own ends. This French sodality forms a curious parallel to the somewhat similar English organization described by Thomas Harman. Some details about the initiation ceremony have come down to us,
After having made his first journey and sold his first bale, the Pechon became a candidate for the first degree of Gueuserie. After the fair was over, he stood treat to his superiors in the Order, whereupon one of his elders delivered a harangue about the rights and duties of the fraternity. The Pechon, with his head bared, raised his hand, and swore that he would not reveal the secrets to the Petits Mercelots who had not been initiated. He was then given a stick and a bale to prove if he could lade the bale on his back while he kept off a dog with the stick. Thereafter he was
1 Pechon means little child; Blesche, fool, or novice; Coesme, probably beggar.
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1 98 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
given a fencing lesson with the stick, and was passed to the degree of Blesche.
The parliament or general assembly of these sons of Esau was held in the Cour de Miracles, in Paris, and the genius of Victor Hugo in Notre Dame has made many of their customs common knowledge.
Almost at the same time, but probably a little later in the fifteenth century a similar association developed in England, and spread so rapidly that it became a public nuisance and danger in the reign of Elizabeth, when a Kent magistrate went to the trouble of writing a book to advise his fellow- justices how to deal with the crowds of wandering beggars and malefactors.
Like the French beggars, the English had evolved their own peculiar language or cant, and it is needless to remark that this custom has continued down to our own times. Harman, writing in 1567, says that this pedlars’ French or canting began “but within these thirty years, little above,” and that the “first inventor ” of it was hanged. This, if true, would place the date about the time of the suppression of the monasteries and the consequent increase in unemployment.
In England, even as in France, there was a variety of different professions among these ruffians. According to one recorder, by the beginning of the eighteenth century they had even adopted the custom of electing a king, though it is doubtful if this title were ever conferred by any general assembly of the profession. Bamfylde Moore Carew, who in his autobiography claimed the honour as his own, may not have been strictly veracious. Born of a good West-country family, he ran away from school to join a band of gypsies, and spent years in vagabondage. If the ceremony of his enthronement as monarch of the mumpers ever took place, it probably had no more significance or validity than has a modern initiation into the Worshipful Society of Froth- blowers.
At any rate in the days of Elizabeth there was no supreme head of the beggars’ order, but the authority was divided, according to districts, among a series of petty chiefs who might be compared to the robber barons of an earlier day.
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These rulers of a district were known as the Upright Men, and seem to have won their authority by brute force and pugnacity.
Any thief, beggar, horse-stealer, trull, sham-madman, or any other member of the various degrees of crime who frequented the countryside where one of the Upright Men held sway was obliged to become a loyal subject, and submit to the taxation which loyal subjects all the world over have levied on them by their governors.
The Upright Man also acted as the initiator in the curious ceremony by which a novice in the art of begging was bound to his new fraternity. These initiatory rites were known as “Stalling to the Rogue,” and a full account of what took place has come down to us in the book already mentioned. 1
With the spelling modernized this account runs thus:
“These Upright Men will seldom or never want; for what is gotten by any Mort or Doxy ( woman or mistress) if it please him he doth command the same. And if he meet any beggar, whether he be sturdy or impotent, he will demand of him, whether he was ever stalled to the rogue or no. If he say he was, he will know of whom and his name that stalled him. And if he be not learnedly able to show him the whole circumstance thereof, he will spoil him of his money, either (or) of his best garment, if it be worth any money, and have him to the bowsing ken (ale-house) which is to some tippling house next adjoining; and layeth there to gage (pawns) the best thing that he hath for twenty pence or two shillings: this man obeyeth for fear of beating. Then doth this Upright Man call for a gage of bowse, which is a quart-pot of drink, and pours the same upon his peeled pate, adding these words: ‘I, G.P., do stall thee, W.T., to the Rogue, and that from henceforth it shall be lawful for thee to Cant,’ that is to ask or beg, ‘for thy living in all places.’ Here you see that the Upright Man is of great authority. For all sorts of beggars are obedient to his hests and he surmounteth all others in pilfering and stealing.”
1 Thomas Harman, A Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors Vulgarly called Vagabones, 1567.
200 FAMOUS SECRET SOCIETIES
The Order of Upright Men, says Harman, was recruited from disbanded soldiers and masterless serving-men, dis¬ playing scars “got in the Gallic wars,” disdaining to beg charity, but never missing a chance to rob women or defenceless travellers on the king’s highway — the prototype of to-day’s ex-officer motor-bandit.
Some of the vagabonds, however, had a hereditary yearning for a life on the roads. “I once rebuking a wild rogue because he went idly about, he showed me that he was a beggar by inheritance — his grandfather was a beggar, his father was one, and he must needs be one by good reason.”
Among the different professions practised by the Eliza¬ bethan beggars were those of the Hooker or Angler, who stole linen from hedges and clothes from houses by means of a hook at the end of a long stick ; the Prigger of Prancers, who was a horse-thief; the Palliard or Clapperdudgeon, who went begging in company with a female who passed as his wife . . . “and if any doubteth thereof he showeth them a testimonial with the minister’s name . . . there be many Irishmen that go about with counterfeit licences”; these people also raised sores on their bodies by the use of herbs to evoke pity. Then there was the Abraham Man, who shammed madness; the Counterfeit Crank, who simulated epilepsy; the Dommerar, who feigned dumbness; the Bawdy Basket, a woman pedlar who stole more than she sold ; Walking Morts and Doxies, who formed the harem of the Upright Men, and added to their income by pilfering and prostitution; and at the summit of the female side of the Order of Canters, the Autem Mort, who was a married woman, if not strictly respectable, being, in Harman’s phrase, “as chaste as a cow I have” that had a catholic taste in mates.
There were degrees of apprenticeship to these dismal trades. The Dell was a young girl being reared up to join the ranks of the Morts and Doxies; a Kynching Mort was a much younger girl ; while a Kinchen Co was a young boy brought up “to such peevish purposes as you have heard of other young imps before, so that when he grows up he is fit for nothing but the gallows.”
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No wonder that the profession tended to become hereditary !
Such was one of the aspects of social life in Merry England in the good old times, and since it is one over which we do not willingly linger, let us, in their historian’s fine alliterative phrase, turn over the leaf on “all these rowsey (rough), ragged rabblement of rakehells.”
The Spanish criminal was even more fortunate in finding a biographer; he enlisted no less a genius than Cervantes, who in one of his “Exemplary Novels,” Rinconete y Cortadilla, has depicted the Fagans and Artful Dodgers of his day and nation with a humour and exactitude of detail that could only have sprung from careful personal observation.
The story tells how two young rogues named Rincon and Cortado, aged fifteen and seventeen respectively, came to Seville, and began to ply the only trades they knew — thieving and trickery. Another promising youth, a native of the city, having caught them red-handed in a theft, congratulated them on their address, and then enquired why they had not been to the custom-house of Senor Monopodio? This evoked the not unnatural question from Rincon, whether a duty on thieves were payable in Seville; on which he was informed that all of this fraternity had to register themselves with Monopodio, who was their father and master and protector, and it would be as well for the new-comers to swear fealty to him at once, for if they ventured to go on stealing without his permission it would cost them dear.
Rincon and Cortado accordingly went to the house of Monopodio, who on discovering their genius in the profession accepted them as full members of his band and dispensed with the usual year of novidate. The disabilities of a novice consisted in having to hand over more of the proceeds of his thefts, and to do menial duties such as going round to collect contributions from the older members. They were not allowed to drink what they pleased nor to make a feast without permission of one of the older Brethren; and were obliged to hand over half their takings when one of these seniors should happen to demand such a subvention.
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Monopodio was on good terms with the police; and was ever ready to render a quid pro quo to the alguaciles who afforded him protection. He inculcated morality of a sort in his band, for his decree ran that each thief out of his earnings should devote a small sum from the proceeds of every successful piece of business towards providing oil for the lamp that burnt before the shrine of a famous saint. This is quite on all fours with the custom later prevailing in the Neapolitan Camorra; whether the alms in either case ever passed through the chief’s hands into the sacred lamp is quite another matter.
The usual contribution payable by every member of the band went to swell a common fund, which was divided among the members according to their merit and usefulness.
The fraternity had its own jargon and laws. A considerable part of its revenues came from undertaking to revenge the timorous-hearted on their enemies, and a fixed tariff existed for such deeds as slashing a man’s face with a dagger or nailing a Sanbenito, a scapular with a St. Andrew’s cross, to the door of a man’s house, as an insinuation that his family was of Jewish origin, since the Inquisition compelled relapsed Jews to wear such a badge.
A much later Spanish secret society, which though lawless was of quite a different type of criminality to that presided over by Senor Monopodio, may, though out of due order, be given a mention here.
A criminal association existing among Latin immigrants to the United States, and known as the Black Hand, occasioned a great deal of outrage and violence in the early years of the present century, and since its origin has been ascribed to a Spanish society of a similar name, this will be a convenient place to give a short account of the latter as it existed in its country of origin.
The association of the Mano Negra, the “Black Hand,” arose in the south of Spain about the year 1835. Its sup¬ porters were drawn from agricultural labourers and small peasants who had been deprived of their rights on the communal lands, where they had been used to cut timber and pasture their herds.
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The Mano Negra had a centralized organization, and resorted to assassination or incendiarism as its ultima ratio. Its manifestations, like those of all agrarian societies, have been sporadic. There was a particularly fierce outbreak of this type of civil war in Andalusia in 1883. Whether this was due to a society revived in accordance with country tradition or betokened that the peasants’ league for self¬ protection had never died, it is impossible to say. In either case the movement was a purely local one, begotten of oppression and hunger. It is said that foreign anarchists on visiting Spain attempted to utilize the Mano Negra to further their own subversive schemes, but were unable to gain any influence with it.
Blasco-Ibanez’s novel La Barraca presents in fictional form an excellent description of the agrarian situation in Valencia which might have given rise to the Mano Negra or any other similar secret society having its sinews in the soil.
The criminal society of the same name which has at times provided occupation for the police of the United States probably had nothing to do with this peasants’ league of Southern Spain.
Another Latin society that existed for redressing grievances, occasioned some stir, and is still remembered, was the Bead Paoli. This was a secret society that arose in Sicily on a model similar to the Vehmgericht, and proceeded against those whose power was too great to be attacked openly. It had some partially salutary effects by restraining the arbitrary licentiousness of the nobles and tribunals; for in time it was spread all over the island, and inflicted death, mutilation, and corporal punishment at will. The society continued to exist till the eighteenth century, when it was finally stamped out, though memories of it still linger in the popular mind. “Ah, if the Bead Paoli were still in being! ” exclaims the Sicilian on receiving some injury from which the law will not protect him.