Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective

By William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep

Scholarship on lynching has typically been confined to the extralegal execution of African Americans in the American South. The nine essays collected here look at lynching in the context of world history, encouraging a complete rethinking of the history of collective violence. Employing a diverse range of case studies, the volume’s contributors work to refute the notion that the various acts of group homicide called "lynching" in American history are unique or exceptional.

Some essays consider the practice of lynching in a global context, confounding the popular perception that Americans were alone in their behavior and suggesting a wide range of approaches to studying extralegal collective violence. Others reveal the degree to which the practice of lynching has influenced foreigners’ perceptions of the United States and asking questions such as, Why have people adopted the term lynching—or avoided it? How has the meaning of the word been transformed over time in society? What contextual factors explain such transformations? Ultimately, the essays illuminate, opening windows on ordinary people’s thinking on such critical issues as the role of law in their society and their attitudes toward their own government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813934150

Book preview

Introduction

WILLIAM D. CARRIGAN AND CHRISTOPHER WALDREP

AFUNNY THING HAPPENED to this book on its way to publication. When we began collecting the essays that make up this volume, we had three goals. First, we hoped to encourage scholars to study the spread of the American word lynching throughout the world, analyzing the reasons for its adoption in other nations and the evolution of the word's meanings in those disparate cultures. We next wanted to refute the popular notion that the various acts of collective violence called lynching in American history are unique or exceptional to the history of the United States, thereby encouraging historians to expand chronologically and geographically the study of the practice of lynching. Third, we sought to collect concrete examples of these new historical approaches, providing a sample of the diverse methods that historians might employ in the study of lynching in the future.

The process of writing a book includes subjecting the manuscript to critical evaluation by scholars before publication, and for this book, this part of the process taught us a great deal. So many scholars have written about lynching all over the world that anyone with basic access to a good library can easily learn that lynching is not uniquely American. Latin America has produced a particularly hardy band of lynching researchers, but India, Africa, and China have too. So why didn't we know about this work when we began this project? The answer is simple: as historians, we focused on history writing, and most of the work done on lynching outside the United States has been done by sociologists and, especially, anthropologists, very often focused on lynching not as history but as a current and ongoing phenomenon. These scholars have done courageous work, going into rough neighborhoods where lynching is common to interview the lynchers and their victims. Their insightful writing challenges our preconceptions to teach us a great deal, but it is not often historical. Anthropological inquiry often starts with current events and the ethnographically visible, the anthropologist Paul Farmer recently wrote. He makes a point we think needs to be repeated and emphasized: it can be hard to study lynching historically because suggesting a historical context for atrocities seems to excuse them. But, he concludes, it should be done anyway.¹

We think that Farmer is right and that there is value in studying lynching historically and globally. We make no claim that the essays in this book represent any kind of geographically comprehensive survey of world lynching. We were, however, interested in being chronologically and geographically expansive, demonstrating to readers and students of lynching that there are more options for the historical study of lynching than is traditionally perceived. The recent work by sociologists and anthropologists who employ the word lynching to describe mob behavior in a variety of settings underscores the need to proceed historically. Especially scholarly investigators of collective violence should keep in mind the rhetorical challenges the word lynching poses; the word has a history that changes over time for political reasons.

We also learned to stop thinking about lynching as a kind of exceptionalism, as uniquely American. It's questionable whether American lynch mobs have encouraged lynching in other countries with their behavior, but American lynching rhetoric has doubtlessly influenced mob violence in other countries. Some anthropologists explicitly compare lynchings in other countries with that in the American South. Carlos M. Vilas begins his magisterial essay about Mexican lynching with words designed to recall Billie Holiday's 1939 American lynching ballad: Extraños frutos colgaban de los árboles esa mañana de domingo en Zapotitlán (Strange fruit hung from the trees on that Sunday morning in Zapotitlan).² In their article about contemporary lynching in Bolivia, Daniel M. Goldstein and Fatimah Williams Castro recognize that the term ‘lynching’ (lincganuebti) is a cognate from English, derived from forms of popular justice-making in early U.S. history.³ Christopher Krupa explicitly compares contemporary Bolivian lynching with the American variety, urging anthropologists to more closely follow American scholars' policy of identifying with the victims rather than the perpetrators.⁴ Anthropologists who differentiate modern lynching from its American antecedents still implicitly or explicitly judge the violence against an American model. Latin American lynching, Leigh Binford and Nancy Churchill write, is quite different from American lynching in that it lacks the support of law enforcement.⁵

Paul Brass warns against the post-hoc labeling common to anthropology.⁶ This wise warning can be difficult to heed, not just for anthropologists, but for historians, geographers, sociologists, and those outside the academy as well. At Amsterdam's famed art museum, the Rijksmuseum, visitors may view The Bodies of the De Witt Brothers, a painting attributed to Jan de Baen, ca. 1672–75. The label accompanying the painting, written in Dutch, ends with the word gelyncht. It is that last word that grabs the attention of an American tourist wandering down the long row of paintings and stops his or her progress through the gallery. In 1672 mobs blamed Johan de Witt when French and English troops swept through the republic in the Franco-Dutch War. He resigned his position as pensionary (similar to prime minister), but it was not enough. A mob killed not only Johan but his brother Cornelius as well, mutilating their bodies, cutting off the genitalia, noses, and fingers before carving deeper into their bodies for souvenirs, later sold on the street, and displaying the remains on a gallows.

Jan de Baen, The Bodies of the De Witt Brothers, ca. 1672–1675. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Holland)

In 1672 no one in Holland knew the word gelyncht because the Americans would not invent the word lynching for another century. Yet from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the Dutch curators working at the Rikjsmuseum thought the word lynching perfectly appropriate. What did they have in mind? A neutral, descriptive phrase relating an event without comment? Hardly: they clearly disapprove of the killings, calling the mob frenzied. The display of the butchered men, even the painting by an artist, recalls similar displays of African Americans and photography James Allen collected from America's lynching era and published in his book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The Dutch art historians apparently thought there was something American-like in the killing of the de Witt brothers.⁷

The difficulties that surround the word lynching are both similar to and different from the troubles facing an attempt to define any term. All human language is fraught with a certain degree of instability, but we do believe that in particular times and places some words become more politicized, less stable, and rhetorically more contested than other words. In the last two centuries, the American word lynching has been a case in point. However, we believe this rhetorical history, far from a hindrance to the study of collective violence, is especially promising for historians interested in understanding the minds of mob members, their defenders, and their critics.

The historical work that has been done on the behavior of lynch mobs in the United States over the past quarter century has been very illuminating. Thorough investigation of newspapers, government documents, court records, and other sources, historians have created a much richer understanding of acts of extralegal violence in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Although we believe that attention to the social reality is vital, we also conclude that at times there has been too much weight given to statistical details and not enough emphasis on the cultural world in which the acts of collective violence flourished.

A core assumption that we hold is that people care very deeply about crime and its punishment and take particular pains to defend their own views and criticize those who conceive of it differently. Thus rhetorical debates over how one defines legal and extralegal collective violence are a particularly good window for studying popular attitudes toward not only ethnic, racial, and religious minorities but also the law and the state itself. The study of this discourse of extralegal violence is, of course, much broader than the study of the American word lynching, but there are intriguing advantages to the study of lynching. Unlike other terms that are sometimes used to describe collective violence, like riot or rioting, lynching has a relatively recent origin in a discrete geographic area, 1780s Virginia. This makes studying the spread of this word both within the United States and abroad far easier than related terms. Compounding this advantage is the fact that the word has had for more than a century a particularly potent political value and thus appears more frequently in surviving historical records than related terms like vigilantism. In short, we encourage historians to study the discourse over extralegal violence broadly but recommend the study of lynching in particular because of its methodological benefits.

As an aid to those who might be interested in using the word lynching as a means of studying the attitudes of ordinary people toward the state as well as their attitudes toward lynching violence in the United States, we have created a table that summarizes this volume's attempt at tracing the spread of the word to other countries. One can note that it was transmitted first to those countries with close connections to the United States: Great Britain, France, and Mexico. During America's rise to power in the twentieth century, the word spread further, being introduced into eastern Europe and Asia.

GLOBAL SPREAD OF LYNCHING LANGUAGE

Sources: Most of these terms come from the essays in this volume, but see also Il Progresso Italo-Americano, 22 March 1891; and Thomas Lindenberg, Die ‘verdiente Tracht Prugel,’ Ein kurzes Kapitel uber das lynchen in Wilheminischen Berlin, in Physische Gewalt: Studien zur Geschichte der Neuseit, ed. Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Ludtke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 190–212. We thank Manfred Berg for the latter reference. William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Perspective (no series)

The best historical scholarship on lynching has long been sensitive to issues of public discourse, but we believe that this approach can be further expanded by attention to the rhetoric of lynching, both in essays specifically focused on the practice of lynching (part 1) and in studies that are largely centered on how non-Americans have grappled with the international meaning of lynching (part 2).

Part 1 of the volume takes on the task of studying the practice of lynching in a world context. These essays confound the popular perception that Americans were alone in their lynching behavior, but this is not the primary purpose of this section. Instead, these essays suggest a wide range of approaches to studying extralegal collective violence with varying degrees of attention to the rhetoric that is front and center in the essays in part 2. Some scholars of collective violence around the world write about what might be called lynching but carefully avoid the word. To represent this strain of thought we invited Rachel Monaghan to contribute an essay on her work in Northern Ireland. Other scholars feel comfortable using the word to describe lynching outside the United States or, as discussed in William Carrigan and Clive Webb's contribution, on the American borderlands. To represent this strain of scholarship, we solicited essays from Scott Morschauser and Brian Levack. Despite their varied approaches to the use of the term lynching and their differing degrees of concern for the relevant rhetorical history of the term, each of these essays opens a new, promising direction in the historical analysis of extralegal violence.

For part 2, we have grouped together four essayists who write about lynching outside the normal rhetoric of Gilded Age American lynching but still explicitly show the influence of American lynching. If this seems American-centric, we feel that in the case of lynching, this focus is fully justified. Americans have, in fact, invented a powerful word and exported it. We asked each of our authors to think about the rhetoric so that the word is used consciously. We also asked our authors to think historically, to see the word in its historical context, changing over time.

From their essays we can see that lynching has influenced foreigners' perceptions of the United States. In the Gilded Age, Britain revisited and revised its understanding of the nature of the American character in light of lynching violence. In both World War II and the Cold War, the enemies of the United States used lynching as a foreign policy weapon to attack Americans' pretense to moral rectitude. Americans' capacity for lawless violence has played an important role in shaping the image of the United States around the world.

These essays, we hope, will help readers and future researchers appreciate the power that the word has and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that power. On the one hand, the word can make narratives of violence more dramatic, as many journalists and scholars can attest in their more candid moments. On the other hand, there is a less often recognized downside. Using the word lynching to describe mob violence can obscure historical context, even imply that neither time nor geography matters by suggesting that there is a universal human behavior that can be objectively understood outside time and space. It is in this false objectivity that lynching carries its greatest rhetorical power. Just using the word lynching, or some variant or cognate, often makes a claim hidden under the guise of objectivity.

One Hawaiian scholar not represented in our collection unconsciously demonstrated this point when she described the lynching of Kamanawa II and Lonopuakau in 1840. Although RaeDeen Keahiolalo-Karasuda calls the hangings lynchings, she also acknowledges that they marked the start of a codified legal system in Hawai'i. She quotes a newspaper at length: The accused were allowed to challenge the jury, which consisted of twelve of the most intelligent Hawaiians, all of high rank. They were allowed to select counsel. To Keahiolalo-Karasuda, Hawai'i is not now legitimately a state and never legitimately belonged to white people. She calls these legal executions lynchings because the Americans could not legitimately govern Hawai'i; she uses the word to make a judgment.⁸ Making the rhetorical decision to call Kamanawa's death a lynching allows the author to compare the colonizers of Hawai'i to Gilded Age lynch mobs. Labeling a violent act a lynching is often a political act.

In sum, the use, adoption, and transformation of the rhetoric of lynching to other societies is a window into the minds of people in distant societies and the scholars who study them. Why do they adopt the term—or avoid it? How does the meaning of the word get transformed over time in that society? What contextual factors explain such transformations? These questions should open windows into the minds of ordinary people on such critical issues as the role of law in their society and their attitudes toward their own government.

It is the particular essays, the concrete examples from our third stated goal, that are the keys to this volume. For scholars interested in the behavior of mobs, the essays in part 1 illustrate several models for how to study the practice of extralegal collective violence outside of the American South. Sociologists and anthropologists, particularly those working in Latin America, have shown how mob violence can feel empowering both to the individuals in the mob and to their communities. That important contemporary work has much to teach us. The essays in part 1 look at earlier episodes to find historical parallels and context for the mob violence that continues today.

For scholars interested in exploring the public discourse that has surrounded extralegal collective violence, the essays in part 2—through their analyses of the rhetorical history of the American word lynching—chart a fruitful direction. As our introductions to each of the sections make clear, there are strengths and weaknesses in either confronting or sidestepping the troublesome issue of the varying words that people have used to describe that violence. In the final analysis, we hope that this volume will help a wide range of scholars and students as they explore the important and illuminating history of collective violence.

NOTES

The volume editors would like to thank the members of Rowan University's work-in-progress seminar for their valuable comments on an early draft of this introduction. They would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers of the book proposal and the first draft of the volume for their insightful and useful suggestions.

1. Paul Farmer, An Anthropology of Structural Violence, Current Anthropology 45 (June 2004): 305–17.

2. Carlos M. Vilas, (In)Justicapormanopropia: Linchamientos en el Mexico Contemporaneo, Revista Mexicana de Sociologia 63 (January–March, 2001): 131.

3. Daniel M. Goldstein and Fatimah Williams Castro, Creative Violence: How Marginal People Make News in Bolivia, Journal of Latin American Anthropology 11 (November 2006): 401n8.

4. Christopher Krupa, Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador, American Ethnologist 36 (February 2009): 25.

5. Leigh Binford and Nancy Churchill, Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico, Anthropologica 51 (2009): 302.

6. Paul R. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 386.

7. Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt: Statesman of the True Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 218; James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).

8. RaeDeen Keahiolalo-Karasuda, A Genealogy of Punishment in Hawai'i: The Public Hanging of Chief Kamanawa II, accessed March 12, 2011, http://www.ksbe.edu/spi/Hulili/Hulili_vol_6/7_A_Genealogy_of_Punishment_in_Hawai'i.pdf.

PART 1

The Practice of Lynching

From the Ancient Middle East to Late Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland

FOR THIS SECTION WE HAVE CHOSEN essayists who demonstrate that crowd violence occurs in a variety of geographies and times. Clearly a lot of lynching-like violence has happened in many places, some of it authorized by governments, some of it carried out by government agents, some of it carried out by criminal gangs. But just as clearly governments had a stake in suppressing news of violence they considered anarchic. Utilizing the methods employed by ancient historians to eke out meaning from scant source material, Scott Morschauser traces threads in ancient mob violence, finding, for example, that mobs often made special targets of outsiders. Unavoidably, this research takes Morschauser into the difficult terrain of distinguishing mob violence from warfare. He finds that nothing makes mob violence more likely than rebellions, wars, and dynastic struggles, liminal situations. Morschauser's discussion of the formation of law in the Fertile Crescent suggests something fundamental to all human society throughout time: assertions of power of private groups undermine community stability.

Brian Levack offers a comprehensive survey of witch lynchings from the fifteenth century to the present. Levack is interested in the common features of these illegal executions of witches. Mobs formed to lynch witches far more often in small towns and villages than in urban centers, he finds. In addition, local officials often promoted lynching by signaling toleration or even encouragement of the violence. Finally, popular doubts about the competence and efficacy of the formal criminal justice system seems to have been necessary before lynchings could occur. Levack, in other words, charts the cultural and social structure of societies likely to carry out lynchings. The structure he outlines is hardly unique to the United States—it can be found anywhere in the world.

William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb study the 1928 extralegal execution of Rafael Benavides in Farmington, New Mexico. They argue that his killing proved to be a turning point in the history of anti-Mexican mob violence in the American Southwest. Prior to Benavides's murder, public opinion had been shifting on the relative value of lynching to the social order. Whereas once it had been as an essential remedy to the unstable conditions of the frontier, it was—in an era of more powerful legal institutions—increasingly seen as an embarrassing symbol of the West's lack of modernization. Criticism of the Benavides lynching from many quarters—from New Mexico's Spanish-speaking population, from Anglo editors, and from the Mexican government—forced New Mexicans and other westerners to reevaluate what they thought about lynching and vigilantism. The murder of Benavides thus tipped the balance of public opinion and became the last episode of its kind.

Joël Michel considers mob violence in France, observing that the structural forces usually understood as foundational for a lynching culture did not exist. The French have a strong police apparatus and no hesitation about using it. As a result, there have been few acts of violence that might be called lynchings in France since the 1860s. Nonetheless, Michel argues that France had a lynching spirit not so different from the Americans. Until 1940, French authorities staged public executions as lynching-like spectacles, complete with jeering crowds. In World War II French mobs attacked collaborators, especially women, who collaborated horizontally with German soldiers. In these incidents, mobs formed and performed summary justice. Yet most French saw these mobbings as acts of war and did not consider them lynchings. Michel concludes that the horrific mob spectacles in Mississippi and Texas would be impossible in Europe in peacetime.

Rachel Monaghan looks at paramilitary punishments in Northern Ireland after 1973. She finds that Northern Ireland has a long history of informal justice, a history of violence closely associated with community cohesiveness and approval. Throughout Irish history violent organizations have formed to solicit community support and approval, establishing informal justice systems. These groups punished disloyalty but also such normal crimes as vandalism, rape, and mugging. In some cases they acted when they judged the formal criminal justice system ineffective or overly lenient.

These essays demonstrate just how pervasive mob violence has been in human history, and they provide several models for how scholars might fruitfully study lynching-like violence across time and space.

Vengeance Is Mine

Lynching in the Ancient Near East?

SCOTT MORSCHAUSER

FOR MANY READERS OF THE BIBLE, the following passage is most disturbing:

Let seven of Saul's sons be given to us, so that we may hang them up before the Lord.…And King David gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hung them on the mountain before the Lord, and the seven of them perished together.¹

Not only does the act occur with the full approval of David—the sweet singer of psalms and the beloved of God—but regardless of the cause, the execution of his royal predecessor's offspring appears to be nothing less than a lynching. A group of essentially innocent bystanders is handed over to a band seeking vengeance for past wrongs, with the victims' crime being their relation to a long-deceased and now disgraced monarch. Cynics point out that the incident is hardly isolated in Scripture. However, this biblical case points to some of the difficulties one faces in dealing with vigilantism in antiquity. There were certainly approved bodies for the punishment of criminals, but sometimes the line that would distinguish legal and extralegal mechanisms for enforcement is unclear. Why would a king abrogate his well-accepted role as executor of justice to nonroyal parties? Moreover, while there are examples of what might be regarded as frontier or ad hoc justice, on closer examination, one discovers that ruling authorities have either granted permission to individuals or groups to deal harshly with targeted parties or that such approval is tacitly implied. This suggests that under certain circumstances, the broader community was regarded as a legitimate extension of official power, beyond the formal personnel of the courts. Yet this also raises the questions of whether the societies of the ancient Near East were then plagued by what amounted to uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence, with parties able to take the law into their hands at will. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes's sweeping caricature of premodern existence as being nasty, brutish, and short² has been quoted approvingly by Enlightenment critics as an apt description of life in the ancient Near East.

At a cursory glance, available evidence does suggest wide-ranging societal violence in the ancient Near East. Apart from ubiquitous texts pertaining to warfare, various sources testify that inhumane practices were standard and acceptable tools of law in antiquity. Literary and pictorial references to the unapologetic torture of criminals and suspects abound, with punishment of those judged guilty assuming macabre forms—beating, bodily mutilation, blinding, forced suicide, drowning, stoning, decapitation, strangulation, hanging, impaling, and burning—sometimes in combination.³ The official—and very graphic—use of such brutality to dissuade malefactors was strongly sanctioned, especially in religious texts. Cosmogonies of the ancient Near East portrayed the universe as arising out of a bloody conflict between opposing forces, representing the gods of order on the one hand and chaos on the other.⁴ The triumph of the former provided the basis for a resulting political cosmology: ruling authorities would justify coercive policies by claiming divine permission to carry on the never-ending battle against contemporary agents of nihilism. Royal imperialism is the prime expression of this ideology, with military campaigns ending in the public execution of captives before cheering throngs, often as the climax to a sacral drama that served to reinforce the nation's foundational myth.⁵

But this worldview also included the upholding of law against domestic malefactors, the important caveat being that the king—or some centralized authority—was to be chief administrator of justice.⁶ In actual practice, sentencing of capital cases was reserved with few exceptions for the monarch, who was held responsible for the taking of human life. By extension, rulers who abused subjects at whim or allowed their officials to settle personal scores through physical intimidation were suspected of being illegitimate.⁷ Consequently—and perhaps surprisingly to modern assumptions—there is well-attested abhorrence toward vendettas occurring outside approved channels, and a leader who too readily approved of such practices was regarded with suspicion. A lack of judicial restraint was proof that the king was a bad or false shepherd: he was either too weak to maintain order or, worse, willing to abide outrages to his flock by others, threatening the land with the very anarchy he was supposed to restrain.⁸

Given this reality, mob violence and lynching are rarely mentioned in royal inscriptions of the ancient Near East—the Bible itself being a notable exception. For the most part, official records carved onto stelae and temple walls—or what are termed display texts—largely focus on a monarch's positive achievements and gloss over or ignore anything that would mar the portrait of the just and benevolent sovereign. If societal discord is referred to at all in this type of public literature, the phraseology is tendentious, frequently used as a literary device to blacken the name of a predecessor and to serve as a contrast with the idyllic reign of the current leader.

Perhaps more than for the other eras addressed in this volume, the availability of sources for the ancient Near East is thus highly problematic. The propagandistic nature of royal accounts makes it necessary for the scholar of ancient violence to turn to broader avenues to find evidence for vigilantism in antiquity. Unfortunately, despite the survival of thousands of documents pertaining to judicial matters—including law codes and court records—there are few cases that involve the carrying out of private justice in any sort of useful detail, apart from the commission of murder itself.⁹ There are references to acts of personal vengeance, but this is a special, technical category that was limited to certain circumstances.¹⁰ For the most part, allusions to mob or group violence are elusive¹¹ and must be gleaned and teased out from a variety of genres, including ritual and religious texts, letters, and literary writings.

Bearing in mind the interpretative difficulties inherent in these sources, this essay will summarily address the topic of extralegal violence with respect to (1) terminology, (2) some representative cases, (3) the issue of vengeance, and (4) group violence in the Old Testament.

TERMINOLOGY

In the ancient Near East, societal lawlessness was generally described by the extraordinarily broad terms injustice or wrongdoing or it is couched in dramatic phrases such as fury/uproar, and violence.¹² Occasionally, storm and flood metaphors are employed to depict a nation swept away by discord and instability, while at times, mayhem could be described in the language of sickness and ritual pollution.¹³ Less frequent are those cases where strife is portrayed as brother killing brother, sometimes attributed to the anarchic condition of each person doing what is right in his (own) eyes.¹⁴ The difficulty is that this otherwise picturesque—and often highly exaggerated—imagery is maddeningly imprecise.¹⁵ Injustice/wrongdoing could encompass anything that was amiss, while other terminology describes events ranging from foreign invasions to local protests and strikes. To be sure, this sort of language—sometimes encompassing periods of political instability—might well have included acts of revenge and the private settling of scores, but such collateral violence is rarely singled out for mention.

A further problem is that a genuine act of vigilantism in modern eyes might receive no particular designation in a text, being subsumed instead under the umbrella of royal authority. This is probably the case in descriptions of some incidents along border areas, which have been depicted as the prosecution of a full-scale war, with the limitless host of the king defeating equally numerous hordes that had threatened his realm. Upon closer examination, such events often appear to have been little more than members of an isolated fortress rounding up bands of troublemakers for infringements against local property of the Crown, such as trespassing or cattle rustling.¹⁶ This suggests that local garrisons were given carte blanche to deal with problems on their own. In the same manner, more literary reports of assaults against royal personnel—soldiers, officials, envoys—in which travelers are portrayed as having been bushwhacked by groups in foreign territory tend to reflect the viewpoint of the writer. There is little attempt to provide