‘To Help Him Recover from His Losses’: Royal Begging Licences in the Austrian Netherlands, 1760s-1780s

ABSTRACT

This article explores a collection of circa 400 applications for ‘begging letters’ conserved in the archives of the Privy Council of the Austrian Netherlands from the late 1760s to the early 1780s. Such Lettres de Quête were issued in the name of the Habsburg monarch to subjects who had lost their possessions to fire or other natural disasters, and allowed their bearers to travel around begging. By means of a qualitative reading of the materials, the article uncovers underlying administrative procedures while throwing light on the social selectivity, practices and gains associated with this little-known phenomenon. By demonstrating that such ‘begging letters’ were customary policy practice, as they probably were in neighbouring countries, it signals their importance as an early modern mode of disaster relief and highlights their ambiguous role as a policy paradox in the context of increasing criminalisation of begging and vagrancy.

KEYWORDS:

• Eighteenth-century
• begging
• vagrancy
• social policy
• disaster

Introduction

The criminalisation of begging in early modern Europe is an established theme in social history. Engaged in a strained relationship with cultural ideals of charity, poor relief policies in early modern Europe revolved around controlling the act of charitable giving and receiving. While their stringency varied through space and time, repeated efforts to centralise relief and regulate charity were aimed at confining donations to those considered to be deserving.¹ This sometimes included bans on begging and almsgiving, but more often restricted charitable giving to vetted categories of paupers at specific places and/or times. If begging was allowed, it was typically reserved for those designated as both deserving and belonging by local authorities, as a token of which they were to carry specific marks, licences, clothing, or badges so as to be recognised (or stigmatised) as such.² Begging by non-local poor or outside these designated contexts was increasingly criminalised and could be grounds for at times severe punishment under vagrancy legislation, including incarceration, forced labour, flogging and/or banishment.³

Customs and usages, however, put up a considerable fight against the growing stigmatisation of begging. Tim Hitchcock, for instance, eloquently described how in eighteenth-century London, many forms of begging continued in the eyes of most contemporaries to be considered legitimate, in the light of occupational-, religious-, gender-, age-, week- or season-specific conceptions and traditions. While navigating these norms required considerable agility, it suggests that popular conceptions of deservingness were considerably wider than those envisaged by the strict vocabulary of law.⁴ Likewise, the regularity with which so-called ‘vagrants’ received shelter and sometimes bread and soup from farmers in eighteenth-century Brabant, indicates a wide gap between the normative ruthlessness of official policy, and the relative lenience and compassion of personal encounters along the way.⁵ More generally, the repeated exhortations against begging and ‘indiscriminate’ almsgiving encountered in local, regional, and national legislation throughout the early modern period, and the complaints of their non-observance further support a picture in which practices of charitable giving, even those considered illegitimate according to official discourse, remained alive and kicking right into the eighteenth century.⁶

These examples, where begging in eighteenth-century Europe remained tolerated by the wider population, existed against the will of authorities wishing to maintain a more stringent legislation. Yet, in this paper, I would like to shed light on an at first sight counter-intuitive and little-studied policy instrument that not only allowed but even facilitated a custom of itinerant begging, namely the ‘begging letters’ issued by the highest authorities in the Southern Low Countries in the second half of the eighteenth century. The practice seems counter-intuitive because the second half of the eighteenth century in the Austrian Netherlands, as in many other European regions, was a time of intense social policy reform aimed at cracking down on begging and vagrancy. Yet the very same central authority that steered, monitored, and encouraged this social policy reform, i.e. the Conseil Privé or Privy Council, at the same time was the producer of large numbers of so-called Lettres de Quête, which in effect sanctioned and enabled a practice that was vilified in contemporary policy reform and discourse: that of itinerant begging.

These Lettres de Quête merit dedicated scrutiny because they help to better understand the complexities and ambiguities that characterised the stigmatisation of begging and vagrancy in early modern Europe, which extend beyond a narrative of top-down repression versus enduring popular charity. Instead, they lay bare the high degree of ambivalence towards begging and poverty that continued to permeate even the highest levels of political authority in eighteenth-century Europe. It has already been observed that not all poor were subjected to the normative trends of increased stigmatisation and repression to the same extent, as is exemplified for instance by the privileged treatment of so-called pauvres honteux or ‘shamefaced poor’, i.e. higher-status groups having fallen on hard times, whose loss was considered much greater than those born poor, and whose need to maintain ‘decency’ legitimised more generous and discrete measures of support.⁷ Similarly, mendicant orders typically remained exempt from begging bans for most of the early modern period. The practice of begging letters in the eighteenth-century Netherlands therefore serves as a reminder of A.K.L. Beier’s seminal observation that vagrancy – and I would add begging as well – was a status crime, in which people were convicted not for what they did, but for who they were, i.e. poor, unemployed, and migrant.⁸

These Lettres de Quête demonstrate how itinerant begging – a hallmark of the status crime of vagrancy – was not problematised uniformly by the authorities of the Austrian Netherlands. Quite the contrary, it was sometimes even viewed and facilitated as a solution to a problem unknown to the poorest, i.e. the loss of property and goods because of fire or natural disaster. By definition, the Lettres de Quête used in these instances, excluded the very poorest, who had no property to lose, but also the richest, who had access to more reliable means of risk-mitigation.⁹ A begging letter, in other words, exempted its bearer from what was in itself a criminal act of itinerant begging, by virtue of his or her (be it former) property-status, which it aimed to restore.

This article presents an exploration of a collection of some 400 applications for such Lettres de Quête issued by the Privy Council between the 1760s and 1780s and conserved in its collection of ‘Cartons’ in the National Archives of Belgium.¹⁰ It is based on a qualitative reading of the documentation in four voluminous boxes, focused primarily on uncovering underlying administrative procedures while collecting clues on the social selectivity, practices and gains associated with this little-known phenomenon. In what follows, I first discuss the institutional and administrative backgrounds of these Lettres de Quête in relation to other documentary series of the period. Secondly, I will elaborate on the procedure by which they were obtained. Thirdly, I will tentatively explore indications on the social selectivity of applicants. Lastly, I will use scarce indications to speculate on the value and efficacy of Lettres de Quête, before revisiting the policy paradox inherent in the custom of begging letters.

Lettres de Quête: Institutional and documentary background

The highest governmental council in the Austrian Netherlands, the Privy Council (Conseil Privé) was at the vanguard of the region’s well-documented social reform movement in the second half of the eighteenth century. Transferred from the Spanish to the Austrian Habsburg composite state in the early eighteenth century, monarchical rule in the Southern Low Countries was delegated to a Brussels-based governor-general (landvoogd), assisted by a Privy Council. Regional and local powers, however, retained a large degree of autonomy as well as their own institutions, privileges and customs throughout the early modern period.¹¹ The region’s eighteenth-century social reform movement, while encouraged by the Privy Council and the governor-general, primarily rested on the initiative and participation of local and regional authorities who devised new ways and/or renewed old efforts to deal with the increasingly problematised issues of poverty, begging and vagrancy.¹²

Local and regional reform projects springing from this eighteenth-century dynamic included the formalisation of settlement criteria to access local poor relief provisions,¹³ the expansion of poor taxes,¹⁴ the establishment of provincial correction houses,¹⁵ and the centralisation of relief efforts and revival of local begging bans in major cities.¹⁶ Another complementary strand of policy initiatives revived the criminalisation of the ‘wandering poor’: various local, regional and central regulations reiterated that the poor were to remain put and to be relieved by local charity only.¹⁷ Conversely, newly published ordinances on vagrancy and more policing personnel in town and country alike resulted in growing numbers of beggars and vagrants arrested and prosecuted by various local and regional courts, as begging outside one’s parish could suffice to warrant arrest.¹⁸

It was in this policy context of increased criminalisation of begging and vagrancy that the retrieved Lettres de Quête were issued by the Privy Council. The French word quête in Lettre de Quête is etymologically related to the English words quest and request, but here it means ‘collection’ as in ‘to take up a collection’. A Lettre de Quête was an official letter that allowed its bearer to move around begging, hence my translation as ‘begging letter’. The begging letters issued by the Privy Council were drafted in the name of the Habsburg monarch or her/his representative, i.e. the governor-general (landvoogd) of the Austrian Netherlands. They contained a fixed discourse in which the monarch addressed all subordinate ecclesiastical and worldly authorities to inform them that s/he had allowed the bearer of the letter, identified by name and place of residence, to ‘solicit for alms’ in a designated area for a designated length of time – typically, the province of residence for a period of 3 months – ‘to help him/her to recover from the losses s/he has suffered’.¹⁹ It also specified the cause of these losses and exhorted the addressees to treat the bearer graciously (gracieusement), to grant alms, and to recommend him/her to the charity of others. It closed by stating that the bearer had to present this letter to the local police officer beforehand, who had to sign the letter with his ‘visa’ as indication of approval.

A Lettre de Quête thus combined the functions of (a) a passport or laisser-passer in that it was to protect its bearer from harassment by officials during travel by declaring respectability and local belonging, (b) a begging licence in that it explicitly allowed the bearer ‘to request alms from charitable persons’, and (c) an endorsement letter that encouraged charity to a worthy cause. The collection contains various original Lettres de Quête, most of which are handwritten but some printed, which all contained the same wording and clauses – apart from minor modifications over time, to which I return below. As a documentary species, these Lettres de Quêtes derived from a landscape of intersecting policy domains, monitoring begging, poor relief, personal reputation, local belonging, and spatial mobility, and as such need to be understood in a long-term genealogy of a wide and diffuse array of ‘materialities of identification’ that were practised in the context of widening ambitions of social control in early modern Europe, including passports, ‘security cards’, health certificates, baptismal records, settlement certificates, military certificates, ‘proofs of good conduct’, feuilles de route, and suchlike, which fused with age-old traditions of personal recommendations for charity by elite figures.²⁰

Although not exact equivalents, these begging letters resemble documentary practices attested in existing studies for other regions, of which the so-called Charity Briefs or Kings’ Briefs in England and Wales have been studied best. Traceable to the late Middle Ages, Kings’ Briefs were in essence particular calls for charity endorsed by the Royal Seal, typically dedicated to a specific cause, ranging from personal losses due to fire, warfare, piracy, … via collective disasters such as plague or the Great Fire of London, to collective endeavours such as the building or repair of churches or alms’ houses.²¹ Although these originally took the form of an official letter that recommended its bearer on his or her ‘begging round’, by the eighteenth century, Kings’ Briefs were so bureaucratised that they were sent out in print by a dedicated office to local and church officials, who then were to organise the collection of alms – typically during church service – and send back the proceeds, apparently so onerous and complex a procedure that beneficiaries were often willing to farm out their ‘right to collect’ to middlemen in return for a fixed sum.²² Although there are sparse indications in the existing literature that begging letters being carried around by their beneficiaries still existed in eighteenth-century England, as well as for instance in France (typically then emanating from subordinate authorities),²³ I know of no dedicated study on these practices in Europe. Although not a completely unknown phenomenon, then, the absence of existing studies on the practice of itinerant begging licences makes it all the more relevant to take a closer look at the extensive collection of begging letters conserved for the late eighteenth-century Southern Low Countries.

Procedure: Applying for a begging letter

So far, I have been able to locate and explore four voluminous boxes that contain documentation pertaining to Lettres de Quêtes in the archives of the Privy Council conserved in the Belgian State Archives dating mainly from the late 1760s to the early 1780s. The conserved collection suggests that in the 1770s an average of 50 begging letters were applied for each year.²⁴ Although I have not been able to locate earlier collections, Lettres de Quête were clearly no new phenomenon, and analogous practices may well have been around for centuries.²⁵ The conserved documents attest to a relatively standard procedure by which subjects of the Austrian Netherlands could apply for these royal begging letters, and of which the archival traces at the Privy Council typically include a request, a local attestation, a decision, and, sometimes, a Lettre de Quête and other follow-up documentation.

The typical starting point for archival documentation in the archives of the Conseil Privé is when a subject submits an official request for such a Lettre de Quête, which tends to be addressed to the governor-general or the Habsburg monarch. Requests were almost always written by trained hands. Some were identifiable as the work of agents of the Privy Council,²⁶ the ‘professional lobbyists’ who specialised in drafting and promoting petitions to the central government.²⁷ That several were signed off with either a cross or unpractised signature by the applicant,²⁸ strengthens the impression that professional scribes wielded the pen in most cases, and that applicants may have presented their case orally in Brussels.²⁹ Requests in less practised writing were far and few between, and even then not necessarily autographs.³⁰

These petitions were to be accompanied by an official attestation from the local authorities of the place of residence to corroborate the calamity that had befallen the applicant. When applicants filed a request without such a local attestation, notes in the margin show that they were instructed to obtain and submit one before their request could be taken into consideration.³¹ There are few if any traces on actual deliberations on the request, and most applications were treated in a swift and routine manner: decisions were typically dated the same day or the day following the presentation of the petition. This decision was added in the margin on the original request, typically stating that a Lettre de Quête was granted, its date of issue, geographical remit, and duration.

For most cases conserved in this Privy Council series, the marginal note on the petition specifying the resolution, was also the last archival trace. Yet sometimes, applicants would file requests for renewals, on various grounds which I will discuss below. As the procedure required them to hand in their original Lettre de Quête before they could be issued with a new one, this explains why the archival series regularly contains original Lettres de Quête, which are essential not only to understand the documentary nature of this source but also provide valuable insight into the actual practices of begging rounds – as we will see below.

Social selectivity

Who, now, were the applicants for a Lettre de Quête? All testified to have been the victim of a natural disaster that had resulted in loss of property and sometimes life. With a few exceptions, applications dealt with singular calamities and individual losses. In almost all cases fire was the source of damage. In rare instances, we find reference to a tempest or thunderstorm. Most applicants were peasants, referring to incidents where their farmsteads had gone up in flames, sometimes including barns, cattle, grain reserves and other possessions. At times, other occupations appear among the applicants, including a stonecutter, carpenter, and innkeeper. Virtually all were from rural settings, and the impression that fire wreaked greater havoc in the countryside than in cities, receives support in a statement by the city magistrate of Mons that ‘(in) cities (…) an inhabitant does not suffer as great a risk of fire as in the countryside’.³² The lion’s share of applicants was male, but women also appeared as applicants, both as sole applicant and together with their husbands.³³

Although applicants had, by definition, held property, there appears to have been considerable variation in their (former) wealth. Some referred to small homes they had built with their own hands or the loss of tools as their main damages, while others mentioned a long list of farmsteads, barns, storehouses, stables, kitchens, and other buildings that had been ruined, together with stocks of grain, cattle, and linen. Some even specified the monetary value of the losses incurred. Joseph Quinart, for instance, attested he had taken out a loan of 150 guilders to build a house 3 years before it was burned to the ground in 1782, which represents the upper limit of the yearly wage equivalent of a male rural labourer.³⁴ Quite a different level of wealth was mentioned in the attestation of Jean de Waeghemaeker from Landregem, whose loss of two windmills and a house in a thunderstorm in 1781 was estimated to have incurred a loss of up to 5,000 guilders or more than 33 such yearly wage equivalents.³⁵

With authorship complicated by the role of intermediary scribes, the requests for a Lettre de Quête often echoed the discourse of trustworthiness, compassion and deservingness that suffuses the genre of early modern charitable petitions,³⁶ although – as we will see below – it mattered little for acceptance, and some requests were rather short and punctual. Apart from enumerating material losses, some also referred to the loss of family members in the fire.³⁷ The more verbose ones often elaborated on how the calamity had happened through no fault of their own, but from exterior causes. Almost universal was reference to the extreme distress to which the applicants had suddenly been reduced, often exacerbated by family responsibilities, leaving an appeal to charity the only recourse open to them, and stating the (partial) recovery of their losses as the aim of such an appeal – as when Jean Abraham Menayez, after explaining how his damages (estimated at c. 2,000 guilders) jeopardised his capacity ‘to provide bread to his wife and 3 children by which he is burdened’, requested a begging license ‘in order to be able to recover from his losses’.³⁸ Such formulations of the purpose of recovery resonated in attestations by local authorities, as when the village authorities of Forest supported François Godart’s request for a begging licence ‘so that by the charity of good people he can raise his family and subsequently restore (his situation)’,³⁹ and often additionally stressed the good standing and reputation of applicants.

Detailed analysis of spatial selectivity would require a systematic identification and GIS-processing of all the localities mentioned in the petitions and/or local attestations. A partial analysis based on all 136 place names mentioned in one box (1286/A) indicates that applications from the nearby County of Hainaut (45%) and Duchy of Brabant (33%) far outweigh other principalities,⁴⁰ while some villages appear more than once over the 10 years covered in the sources. The question of geographic selectivity ties in with broader questions on the availability and accessibility of administrative knowledge: how did victims of natural disasters find their way to the Privy Council offices? Were royal Lettres de Quête a common and well-known recourse in times of mishap, or was knowledge about their existence and the procedure to obtain them limited to certain areas and/or certain circles?

We find many instances where only a handful of days had passed between the occurrence of the disaster and the filing of a request, as when Jean Maison dit Bernissart from Bois Lessines in Hainaut received a Lettre de Quête on 4 April 1774 after his house had burnt down on 15 March.⁴¹ Here, clearly, either the victim himself, the local authorities, or some other source of information knew well enough how and where to apply for such a begging licence. However, there are also many instances where several months elapsed between the mishap and the application for a Lettre de Quête. Sometimes the applicants discussed this in their request, detailing how they had first tried other means before turning to the monarch. Remarkably, several of them had often used lesser types of ‘begging letters’ first, i.e. licences granted by local or regional authorities to appeal for charity in a smaller, designated area. We see this reflected in the fact that the attestations drawn up by local authorities and joined to their requests, in these cases often were worded as a begging licence themselves, while marginal notations of ‘visas’ by local police officers confirm that they had indeed been used as such.⁴²

So we find the case of Petrus Boschmans from Bekkevoort in Brabant, who had lost his house, possessions and two children in a fire on 23 March of 1776. On 1 April his village aldermen wrote a declaration carrying the local seal, which acted both as a statement of his loss and an endorsement for his begging, in which they ‘recommend him to the generosity of all, by alms to cure him of his poverty’.⁴³ Later visas added to this document show that Petrus Boschmans used this certificate on begging rounds in the vicinity in the course of May.⁴⁴ Only 2 months later did he submit this local declaration together with a petition for a royal Lettre de Quête, which was granted on 11 July 1776.⁴⁵ Likewise, Jean Lievens from Schaarbeek (near Alost), who had his house destroyed by fire on 17 May 1775, explained how the regional authority of his castellany, ‘touched by his misfortune, had allowed him to do a collection in the villages of the castellany’. Since this had unfortunately not sufficed for the restauration of his home, he in October later that year successfully requested a royal Lettre de Quête as he ‘had been advised to turn to the graces and goodness of his majesty’.⁴⁶ Unfortunately, he does not specify by whom he was advised to do so.

Some, however, did not even await the proceeds of such local begging letters. After a fire had destroyed his house on 5 August in 1774, Barthelemi Vandernoot from Bousval (Brabant) had likewise been provided with a begging letter by his local village council dated 12 August ‘in order to move humanity to give help to rebuild his house’,⁴⁷ but he himself appears to have taken the initiative immediately (and successfully) to appeal to the central authorities for a Lettre de Quête ‘because he desired to be procured with more authentic certificates and to be allowed to beg in the whole of the Duchy of Brabant’.⁴⁸

Some applied for begging letters after inadvertently ending up in a situation where they had been required to present one. So we find the example of widow Marie France Delire, who came to Brussels to request alms in the winter of 1781 after she had suffered severe burns, but then found out that she was supposed to have a permission to do so.⁴⁹ Likewise, Bersil van Compernolle carried a ‘begging certificate’ from his hometown of Ronse (Flanders) after losing his house to fire on 10 February 1773, which was dutifully signed with a visa by the Brussels relief authorities to allow a local begging round on 18 February. Clearly, things were not as they should have been, since he subsequently filed for an official Lettre de Quête, while the Privy Council warned the Brussels relief authorities no longer to grant begging rounds to persons without royal Lettres de Quête.⁵⁰ Several requests more generically stated that they wished to appeal for charity and knew this was only allowed with a royal begging permit.⁵¹

Almost all petitions for a Lettre de Quête conserved in the Privy Council archives were granted.⁵² It seems that applications were approved in a relatively routine manner as long as they were accompanied by the necessary documents, irrespective of the length and discourse of the petition. Yet, we also find instances of requests that were destined to fail. A recurring issue here pertained to the geographical limits of the begging letter requested. Several applicants explicitly asked for a begging letter for wider or other areas than their province of residence. In such cases, the Duchy of Brabant was often a popular intended destination for begging rounds, especially for those originating from relatively poor and peripheral regions, such as the Duchy of Luxemburg. So we find Joseph Gamby from the small village of Attrival in Luxembourg filing a very badly spelled request for a begging letter for the Duchy of Brabant, ‘since this Government well knows that the land of the Ardennes is very poor and that there are many villages that have houses destroyed by fire, and that it would be impossible for him to gather something there to allow him to recover his terrible losses’.⁵³ Although several requests to such purpose exist, none of them were ever granted: Lettres de Quête were always limited to the principality where the applicant resided, and this was even formally corroborated by an administrative note dated 6 November 1771 that stated ‘we only ever accord Lettres de Quête for the province where the mishap occurred, and this for a term of three months’.⁵⁴

These examples provide evidence that there was a multi-layered landscape of begging letters, of which those issued by the monarch represented only the tip of the iceberg. Why and when some victims of disasters appealed to the monarch, while others may have been content with local equivalents is not entirely clear. The cases encountered thus provide a mixed image as to the administrative skill of applicants in navigating this multi-layered system. Sometimes, they appear to have been aware of the relative merits of the various systems, as when Barthelemi Vandernoot desired ‘more authentic certificates’, yet at other times they appeared foolhardy in formulating requests that were never granted.

Begging letters as disaster relief? Value and proceeds

Were begging letters, whether local or royal, useful or valuable in relation to their stated intent, i.e. to recover the losses incurred by fire or other disasters? Some early students referred to Kings’ Briefs or Letters Patent in England as primitive forms of insurance, although later ones were quick to acknowledge that their discretionary nature and unknown revenue were antithetic to the logic of insurance.⁵⁵ Yet, there is some interesting affinity between the practice of these Lettres de Quête and more formalised forms of disaster relief that evolved in the following century. One interesting institution in this respect was the provincial disaster fund, which saw the light only some 25 years after the period studied here and existed throughout the nineteenth century.⁵⁶ The calamities dealt with by this provincial fund corresponded to those addressed by the eighteenth-century Lettres de Quête: natural disasters, mainly fires, which could not be attributed to any negligence or otherwise on the part of the victim. The discourse in applications for help from the provincial fund bears many similarities to the requests for Lettres de Quête, stressing exterior causes of misfortune, sudden poverty, family responsibilities, good standing and reputation, and the failure of alternative support strategies. Even the actual procedure was similar, as local authorities were required to provide applicants with official attestations of their claims and losses.⁵⁷ Possibly, the radical makeover of the social landscape in the revolutionary era, had in the early nineteenth century created a responsibility for authorities to provide alternative procedures to deal with this specific type of misfortune.⁵⁸ To be sure, the possible lineage between begging letters in the late eighteenth century and provincial disaster funds in the early nineteenth century needs further exploration and verification, yet it is useful here to give some indication of the possible value victims could expect to recover. On condition of providing sufficient proof, applicants to the provincial fund would be awarded one-tenth of the total value of the losses claimed. To the extent that the provincial fund was a functional successor to the Lettres de Quête, this 10% benchmark might be considered an approximate or minimal expected return.

Unfortunately, we find very few explicit references to the benefits of begging rounds supported by Lettres de Quête. Most indications were gleaned from requests for renewal, which imply that they pertain to situations where the begging letters had not yielded the returns hoped for. Throughout the documents, we do find oblique references to conditions that could make begging rounds more successful than others. One of them was indeed the location where they took place, and here it is clear that begging rounds in the densely populated province of Brabant were considered more lucrative than those in more remote and sparsely populated provinces such as Luxemburg – as indicated above. Another issue was the time of year. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the harvest season is mentioned as a bad time for begging, as Ambroise François Castiau for instance argued for a renewal because ‘he had not been able to reap great benefit (from the Lettre de Quête for Hainaut obtained early July) because of the harvest; as the villagers were all on their fields, and the nobility was on their rural properties’.⁵⁹ Laurent Coltart similarly argued that by the time he had recovered sufficiently from an illness, ‘it was the time of the harvest, which gave peasants no fixed abode, so that he had not been able to reap the same advantage as in another season’.⁶⁰

How begging and collection rounds took place in practice is difficult to reconstruct. Again, some indications can be gained from the original Lettres de Quête handed in together with requests for renewal. By recording the visas of the police officers from the places they had visited to beg, they show the area of the begging rounds that had been undertaken. The visas on Jean Detienne’s Lettre de Quête, for instance, recorded eight stops, of which four abbeys and two castles, on a begging round of 83 km in Brabant in little more than a fortnight following its issuance on 5 September 1772, before he fell ill.⁶¹ François Joseph Tonneau collected more than 21 visas from various cities and villages in western Hainaut between mid-April and late May 1774 before succumbing to illness.⁶²

While these local visas allow us to reconstruct the travels undertaken, they leave open the question of how begging took place once the permission of a local officer had been obtained. In some cases, bearers might simply have ventured from door to door with their begging letter, or to have positioned themselves at busy places. Yet, in some cases at least, we find that they received institutional support for their begging. In the city of Mons, for instance, we learn that visiting bearers of Lettres de Quête were accompanied by a local constable (Sergent de ville) during the 3 days during which they were typically allowed to beg in the city.⁶³ Likewise, some visas indicate that church services could be used to propagate their cause. Nicolas Dufour, for instance, had submitted his Lettre de Quête to the archbishop of Cambrai, who with his visa urged all parish priests in the County of Hainaut to ‘recommend in their parochial services this man to the charity of their parishioners’.⁶⁴ The integration of church collections and of collection rounds assisted by local officers in the begging practices of bearers of Lettres de Quête indicate that they at times used the same ecclesiastical and worldly infrastructure as regular collections in the context of poor relief: local relief officials likewise relied on church collections and door-to-door collections as a source of income for regular relief disbursements.⁶⁵ That cities and churches were deemed particularly valuable places to present a case for charity, is indicated by the fact that Pierre Joseph Paquet substantiated his claim for a renewal in 1774 by the complaint that he had been denied permissions by the city of Mons and the archbishopric of Cambrai when he had presented his Lettre de Quête.⁶⁶ When Jacques François Maini similarly complained about the lack of collaboration from the Mons authorities in 1780,⁶⁷ this would lead to a formal reprimand and an interesting debate, which I return to below.

Although in most cases it appears that the beneficiary of the Lettre was also the person doing the collection, it was possible to have a stand-in, as the Lettre itself extended the permission to beg to the named victim or his substitute. In some rare cases, we find a request for renewal motivated by the illness of the person who had been supposed to represent the case on a begging round. In most cases such substitutes were close family members, and their appointment was likely motivated by the beneficiary’s infirmity or old age. Yet, in some instances, we find language compatible with the possibility that making use of a replacement beggar was sometimes a pecuniary transaction, as when the – previously wealthy – Jean de Waeghemaker complained that ‘because of the distress in which he found himself (…) almost no-one was prepared to go begging in his name’.⁶⁸

How much the begging rounds yielded was rarely if ever communicated. Most references found in the sources are formulations lamenting the trifling nature of proceeds, typically attributed to adverse circumstances that were to motivate a renewal. We find Jean Fostier complaining in 1775 that his begging rounds in Luxemburg had yielded ‘so little, that it had barely sufficed to provide means to survive quite miserably during his travels’.⁶⁹ Due to illness, Charles de Mol complained that he had been able to beg only 4 days, and ‘the little he had retrieved from this collection had not sufficed to pay for the medication he had used during illness’.⁷⁰

The only exception to the absence of indications on the actual value of begging rounds is an exceptional case of a collective disaster, after a fire destroyed more than 15 houses in the hamlet of Muizen near Malines in 1781. The case is exceptional in that it was a collective procedure, on behalf of 15 households, mediated by the Malines city authorities. This is also the only instance we found where the area of the Lettre de Quêtes granted transcended the province of residence – as they were valid both in the Duchy of Brabant and County of Flanders – and also exceeded the traditional duration of 3 months – as they were valid for 6 months.⁷¹ We also find a detailed tabulation of the yields of the Lettres de Quête after this period of 6 months, namely 1,701 guilders, 10 stivers and 2 liards. As overall losses were estimated to have been over 11,000 guilders, this implied that the begging round had yielded the equivalent of circa 15% of the overall damages.⁷² Interestingly, this was deemed small by the Privy Council, and the victims were eventually awarded an additional royal donation of 840 guilders, bringing the total amount of relief to circa 2,500 guilders, or an average of 167 guilders per household: the value of a small house or a generous yearly wage of a male rural labourer.⁷³

Although the case of Muizen was exceptional in many respects and therefore does not allow easy generalisation, it is worth remarking that a return worth 15% of the damages was unequivocally considered a small return by state and local officials and topped up to 23%. Conversely, at least in this case, the collection activities yielded each household a value equal to that of the small house which Joseph Quinart, whom we encountered earlier, had lost to fire in the same year. Although speculative at best, these observations do suggest that the value of collection rounds with begging letters could be considerable and no doubt far outweighed ‘illegitimate’ forms of begging without such recommendation. Also, the observation that (previously) wealthy victims of disasters, such as Jean De Waeghemaeker, applied for a Lettre de Quête, suggests that expected returns were more than trifling. A last, oblique, indication of the value attached to these documents, are the various attempts by which their bearers had attempted to reinforce and better preserve fragile begging letters by stitching or gluing them onto other pieces of paper, cloth, or parchment.⁷⁴

Conflicts over begging letters

I discussed earlier how the custom of officially sanctioned itinerant begging itself appears at odds with authorities’ attempts to repress begging and vagrancy in the second half of the eighteenth century. The evidence retrieved so far, however, suggests that the use of begging letters, whether issued by royal or subordinate authorities, was relatively well established, possibly even for centuries previous, and somehow fitted in with existing policies and infrastructure related both to policing and charitable giving. Yet, I would like to end the analysis by revisiting this apparent policy contradiction by zooming in on the different tensions that begging letters could give rise to, between various authorities with sometimes divergent aims. One such field of tension is that between church and state, i.e. between ecclesiastical and secular power structures, which had a long history of repeated clashes and incursions in the Southern Netherlands.⁷⁵ Royal ordinances in the eighteenth century repeatedly reminded church authorities that they were not allowed to issue begging letters on their own authority, which apparently happened frequently in the Duchy of Luxemburg.⁷⁶ The President of the Privy Council, Patrice-François de Nény, somewhere in the late 1770s or early 1780s explicitly observed in this respect that ‘the right to allow public collections is attributed to the sovereign (…) as is attested in the most ancient protocols of the Privy Council’, and that even the right of mendicant friars to beg existed only by virtue of the sovereign’s permission.⁷⁷

Not only ecclesiastical and secular authorities at times diverged in their views as to how and to whom begging permits should be granted. Conflicts also arose between central and subordinate authorities. In some cases, this was because local authorities were deemed to have acted too leniently. We find several instances where city representatives were reprimanded because they had granted begging rounds to bearers of Lettres de Quête of which the scope did not include the city in question or to someone who had previously been denied a Lettre de Quête by the Privy Council.⁷⁸ Yet sometimes, the conflict arose from the fact that city authorities had unduly declined collection rounds to bearers of royal Lettres de Quête, as in the example of the city of Mons.

The conflict between Mons, the capital city of the County of Hainaut, and the Privy Council over begging letters in 1780 is very illuminating, as their extensive correspondence, conserved in the boxes with the Lettres de Quête, brings to light underlying conceptions. The Mons Magistracy defended its right to deny begging rounds to those carrying royal Lettres de Quête when they came from the ‘wrong part of the province’. Within Hainaut, so the city authorities argued, there was a longstanding custom that subjects visited by natural disaster such as fire were issued with local begging letters with which they could collect alms within the remit of their châtellenie – an administrative subdivision of the County. If ‘inhabitants from one end of the province, were to go around begging at the other end, for unknown calamities’, this would erode charitable intentions, they argued: ‘inhabitants would by and by refuse their charity not only to those beggars from far away, but also those from their own châtellenie when they are in a similar situation’.⁷⁹ Only residents from the châtellenie of Mons were therefore allowed to beg in the city when carrying a begging letter. The Mons authorities endorsed their position by referring to generic royal legislation on the poor, which indeed stipulated that paupers were to remain in their parish of residence and were not allowed to venture elsewhere to appeal for charity.⁸⁰ The Privy Council retorted that ‘the usages and regulations invoked by the Mons council, pertain to the poor and beggars in general, who are to be supported in the places and cantons where they belong, but this may not prohibit nor in any way hinder, the effect and working of the Lettres de Quête which His Majesty chooses to bestow in the particular case of fire, or other similar disaster’. Even more explicitly, the Council asserted that ‘these Lettres de Quête form a manifest exception to the general rules with regard to the ordinary poor, and their effect has nothing in common with the workings of the permanent support of the poor’. The protests of the Mons city council were therefore dismissed, and the right was upheld to beg with a Lettre de Quête.⁸¹

However, one last revealing indication of policy contradictions bubbling to the surface, is that from late 1780 onwards the formulation of begging letters changed in a telling respect: the right to beg within the given province was henceforth accompanied by the additional clause, ‘except for the cities where begging has been abolished’.⁸² Following from the example of the city of Ath (1772), the Privy Council had by then persuaded several more major cities to enact a complete prohibition on begging, and more were to follow.⁸³ In this climate, the action radius of begging letters was curtailed accordingly. Although in the first instance begging letters, on the one hand, and policy reform on begging and vagrancy, on the other hand, appear to have operated in separate spheres in the second half of the eighteenth century, by 1780 these spheres could no longer remain completely separated. As more and more urban authorities renewed begging bans – at the instigation of the central authorities – the custom of Lettres de Quête eventually failed to remain unscathed by the contemporary tendency to criminalise begging in all forms.

Conclusions

This first analysis of the Lettres de Quête from the Conseil Privé archives shows that the use of royal begging letters was customary policy practice in the late-eighteenth-century Austrian Netherlands, by which time it had likely existed for many years or even centuries. At a rate of about 50 Lettres issued per year, the Privy Council awarded them in a routine procedure in response to petitions by subjects who had lost their property to fire or other natural disaster, if accompanied by local certificates that validated the applicants’ standing and the losses incurred. In social terms, applicants included both men and women of various ages, and ranged from relatively humble backgrounds to the unambiguously wealthy, but were spatially biased towards relatively nearby regions, especially the countryside of the Duchy of Brabant and County of Hainaut. Although there is little hard evidence on the eventual value of the collections made, some indications suggest that these could be substantial and yield up to 10–25% of the losses incurred, which would have made the letters a valuable attribute when competing for compassion and charity.

The documents in the files signal the presence of a broader landscape of begging letters, emanating also from ecclesiastical as well as local and regional authorities, in which those issued by the Privy Council in the name of the monarch were only the – probably most prestigious – tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, bearers of royal begging letters appear to have enjoyed regular access to clerical and lay infrastructure for charitable collections, including church collections or assisted door-to-door rounds, which would have further increased the legitimacy of their appeal and hence the value of such letters. From the perspective of the Privy Council, moreover, the bearers of Lettres de Quête were no ‘ordinary poor’, and hence they were exempt from generic legislation on paupers and begging. Indeed, these Lettres de Quête operated in a sphere other than that of poor relief. Their stated aim was not to provide a means to survival but to restore a lost property status. If there is any parallel in the realm of poor relief, it is the elusive one of the ‘shamefaced poor’, and if there is any functional successor, it is that of the provincial disaster fund in the nineteenth century.

Many questions and opportunities for further research remain. The rich empirical materials provide a wealth of possibilities for follow-up research into various aspects surrounding this fascinating practice, such as the discourse of claims-making, scales of risk, loss, and recovery, overlapping spheres of local and royal begging letters, infrastructure and trajectories of collection rounds, social and spatial selectivity of applicants, the role of intermediaries and gatekeepers in providing access to administrative procedures, opportunities for fraud and deception, conflicts of interests between different policy actors, and comparisons with practices attested but little studied in neighbouring countries.

While each of these themes provide valuable and fascinating avenues for further research, this first exploration endeavoured primarily to elucidate the paradoxical existence of these Lettres de Quête in a policy context of increasing criminalisation of begging. In this respect, I would like to conclude by stressing how their existence serves as a powerful reminder of the continued cultural and social ambiguities towards begging and almsgiving throughout the early modern period and of the qualified tolerance that could exist of specific varieties of begging, not only by the broader public but also by policymakers. Even in a time and region where the criminalisation of begging and vagrancy dominated the social policy agenda, authorities allowed and encouraged itinerant begging by means of special licences. By confirming a status distinct from ‘ordinary poor’, such licences exempted their bearers from the criminal connotations of begging, and in this they likely represented well-established early modern custom. Yet, as reinvigorated begging bans started chipping away at their action radius by 1780, the study showed that the increasingly hostile social climate at the close of the ancien régime eventually did end up eroding the Lettres’ long-standing advantages, foreshadowing the eventual demise of the institution by the turn of the century.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ward Leloup for his assistance in the archives, and the participants of the Eighteenth-Century Seminar at the University of Cambridge, the SHOC-research seminar at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the NW Posthumus Conference 2023, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Winter

Anne Winter is Professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and part of the Social History of Capitalism (SHOC) research group. Her research deals with the social and economic history of the Low Countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from an internationally comparative perspective, with a focus on the interactions between migration, social policy, urbanisation, and labour relations.

Notes

1. For general discussions of long-term evolutions of social policy in early modern Europe, see Lis and Soly, Poverty and Capitalism; Jütte, Poverty and Deviance. For the urban Netherlands in particular: Nederveen Meerkerk and Vermeesch, ‘Reforming Outdoor Relief’.

2. On the importance of belonging to a locality in relief policies, see King and Winter, Migration. On pauper badges in particular, see Hindle, ‘Dependency’. Pauper badging was familiar policy practice in the eighteenth-century Low Countries. The imperial ordinances of 12.01.1734, re-issued on 14.12.1765, restricted begging to the local invalid poor, recognisable by a pauper certificate or badge, and outlawed all other forms of begging: Receuil des Ordonnances de Pays Bas Autrichiens, vol. 8, pp. 243–245: Ordonnance de l’Impératrice Reine touchant la mendicité (14.12.1765). For regional and local examples see: City Archives Veurne, Kasselrij Veurne, Politieke ordonnanties, nr. 343: 25.06.1716 (f. 2), 29.11.1724 (f. 71), 16.06.1736 (f. 146); nr. 345: 25.06.1763 (f. 11); City Archives Antwerp, Vierschaar, V1584: Distributieboek bedeltekens, c. 1766.

3. Lucassen, “Eternal Vagrants”.

4. Hitchcock, “Begging”.

5. Winter, “Vagrancy”.

6. On the many re-publications of prohibitions of begging, see e.g. Stadsarchief Veurne, Kasselrij Veurne, Politieke ordonnanties, nr. 343, f. 170: 11.12.1738, 05.05.1742; nr. 344, f. 159: 05.12.1759, 18.12.1762, 13.12.1766, 02.12.1769, 01.12.1770, 28.12.1771, 28.11.1772; nr. 345, f. 11: 25.06.1763, f. 242 v: 11.12.1771; nr. 346, f. 38: 27.11.1773, f. 66 v: 02.12.1775, f. 92: 15.12.1778, f. 116: 11.12.1779, f. 126: 04.11.1780, f. 136: 15.12.1781, f. 151: 30.11.1782, f. 161: 17.12.1784, f. 282: 28.11.1788, f. 332 v: 15.12.1790, f. 367 v: 03.12.1791, often accompanied by complaints of non-observance. On non-observance, see also Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme, 110–16. On the continued pervasiveness and qualified tolerance towards begging in late eighteenth-century France, see also Hufton, The Poor, chap. 4.

7. On the elusive treatment of pauvres honteux, see Vermeesch, ‘Miserabele personen’.

8. Beier, Masterless Men.

9. Commercial insurance in the early modern Southern Low Countries was well developed, yet insurance of houses against fire remained very limited in the early modern period and took off only in the nineteenth century. Even then, it long catered only to the bourgeoisie: Hannes, ‘Verzekeringen’, 266; Brion and Moreau, Van AG tot Fortis, 13–29, 209–34; Heirbaut, ‘Non-Marine Insurance’, 106–8.

10. National Archives of Belgium (NAB), Conseil Privé – Période Autrichienne (CPA), Cartons, 1286/A-1287/B. As the collection is in some disarray and scattered over various boxes, an exhaustive quantitative analysis falls beyond the scope of an individual research endeavour. The bulk of the documentation in these four boxes dates between 1767 and 1782, which is also the focus of this article, yet some earlier documents, sometimes dating back to the 1750s, pop up from time to time.

11. For the political structure of the Austrian Netherlands, see the general overview by Lenders, ‘Vienne et Bruxelles’.

12. For a detailed account of the various aspects of social policy reform in this period, see: Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme. For a synthesis, see: Lis and Soly, Poverty and Capitalism, 202–7. From the 1780s onwards, Joseph II would attempt more direct interventions in social policy domains next to other institutional and ecclesiastical reorganizations, yet these would elicit more resistance than actual realization, and are situated beyond the chronological scope of this paper.

13. Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme, pp. 110–25, 408–13; Winter and Lambrecht, ‘Migration’.

14. Lambrecht and Winter, “An Old Poor Law”.

15. Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme, pp. 249–307; Lis and Soly, ‘Total Institutions’; Lis and Soly, Disordered Lives.

16. The introduction of a begging ban in the city of Ath in 1772 inspired the Privy Council to successfully persuade other major cities to likewise enact begging bans and relief reforms in the following years, such as Kortrijk (1774), Bruges (1776), Ghent (1777), Tournai (1777) and Antwerp (1779). Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme, 320–90. See also Lis, Soly and Van Damme, Op vrije voeten? ; Nederveen Meerkerk and Vermeesch, ‘Reforming Outdoor Relief’.

17. In some instances, local poor were still allowed to beg locally under specific conditions, but many local reforms combined a centralization of relief provisions with prohibition of begging. See also Winter, ‘Caught’.

18. See for instance Rousseaux, ‘L’incrimination du vagabondage’; Winter, ‘Vagrancy’.

19. ‘Comme nous avons permis et permettons à (…) de pouvoir (…) faire une Quête d’Aumônes (…) et demander l’assistance des Gens charitable pour l’aider et l’assister à se remettre de la perte qu’il a faite’. See for example NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A, Lettre de Quête for François Joseph Tonneau, 17.03.1774. Identical wording in other letters.

20. There is a growing literature on the history of identification. For long-term and comparative perspectives, see for instance Breckenridge and Szreter, Registration and Recognition; Greefs and Winter, Migration Policies.

21. Walford, ‘Kings’ Briefs’; Field, “Charitable Giving”; McIntosh, Poor Relief, pp. 45–52, 148–64, 275.

22. Harris, ‘Inky Blots’; Houston, ‘Church Briefs’.

23. Hufton, The Poor, 83–85; Harris, ‘Inky Blots’, 99; Langenhuyzen, ‘Zekerheid en brand’, 215.

24. The earliest, somewhat lost, document in this collection is a Lettre de Quête from 1758. The messy state of conservation – with documents pertaining to the same case scattered over various boxes without chronological order – precludes any precise figures in this stage of research. Yet, a basic tally of all documents pertaining to applications from 1773–1776, the ‘densest’ period of conservation, yields a total of 157 for these four years.

25. Some of the arguments that support the idea of a century-long history of Lettres de Quête are: the observation of the President of the Privy Council referring to ‘the oldest protocols of the Privy Council’ (see below, note 61), the presence of a varied and well-established landscape of begging letters also at local and regional level (see below) and the attested presence of similar practices from the late Middle Ages onwards for England (see above, note 17). That these letters were granted by the monarch also corresponds to an underlying expectation that s/he is expected to ‘care’ for his/her subjects, a theme present in political treatises from at least the late Middle Ages onwards, see for instance: Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia, 836–47.

26. See, for instance, requests drawn up by agent Mertens: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A, Request by Jean Lievens, 12.10.1775; Request by Charles Bausoit, 16.11.1774; or by agent Germain: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A, Request by Martin Vasanne, 26.04.1775; Request by Louis Turpin, 21.12.1776. On the explicit use of these agents as middlemen, see NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Procuration to agent Mertens by Matthieu Blondeau, 06.04.1774.

27. On the role of these agents, see : Vermeesch, ‘Professional Lobbying’.

28. See for instance NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Marie Antoinette Henan, 03.02.1774; Request by Alexis Heijnen, 13.03.1775; Request by Joseph Bridoux, 02.11.1776, for examples of applicants’ signatures in a hand different from that of the request. For examples of requests ‘signed’ with a cross by illiterate applicants, see: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Ambroise Castiau, 30.06.1774; Request by Joris Raevens, 31.05.1775. Many more requests carried neither signature nor equivalent cross.

29. That many requests had little folding traces further strengthens the impression that they were often drawn up in situ. Some, however, had traces of delivery by envelope, such as NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Marie Antoinette Henan, 03.02.1774; Request by Gilles Praille, 05.1776 (which was drafted in his name by a notary).

30. Two rare examples of requests in very bad spelling – yet not untrained writing – are NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Marie Antoinette Henan, 03.02.1774; Request by Joseph Gamby, 17.05.1774. In both cases, the applicant was not the author, as Gamby signed off with a cross and Henan’s signature was in very different, less trained, writing. Conversely, one request in a trained hand could well have been autographic, as both signature and request are in the same hand: NAB, CPA, 1286/A: Request by Gillis Henderickx, 14.04.1774.

31. See, for example, NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A, Request by Gilles Hendrickx, 13.05.1774; Request by Hélène Vigoureux, 20.08.1774; Request by Pierre de Wilguan, 18.07.1774.

32. ‘les villes (…) ou l’habitant ne court pas tant de danger d’être incendié, qu’à la Campagne’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B: Rapport à SAR par conseiller De Gryspeer, 27.04.1780. Such disproportionately smaller risk in cities may have been the result of stricter, fire-sensitive building regulations (Deneweth, 'Building Regulations'), the presence of urban fire brigades (Boumans, Het Antwerps stadsbestuur, 161–62.), and the possible urban availability of insurance (see note 11).

33. Of all 135 applications in Carton 1286/A, 105 (78%) were by a man and 13 (10%) by a woman, another 7 by married couples (5%), and the others by multiple, non-married applicants, most of whom were male, yet also containing, for instance, two sisters.

34. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A: Request by Joseph Quinart, 18.12.1782. Scholliers, ‘Prijzen en lonen’, 989, records 12 stivers as the standard summer wage and 10 stivers as the standard winter wage for a male rural labourer on the countryside around Antwerp at this time (20 stivers make a guilder). A year income of 150 guilders represents an upper limit of 250 working days at summer wage. Working 100 days at a standard winter wage and 100 days at a standard summer wage, a more plausible estimate, would yield 110 guilders.

35. SAB, CP, Carton 1287/A: Attestation by local council of Landreghem on Jean De Waeghemaeker, 30.03.1781.

36. The literature in that field is rich and growing. Early works include Sokoll, Essex Pauper Letters; Voss, Petitions; King, ‘Friendship’.

37. Two examples of fires in which young children perished are SAB, CP, Carton 1286/A: Request by Gillis Henderickx, 14.04.1776; Request by Petrus Boschmans, 01.04.1776. In both cases, this loss is mentioned after the enumeration of material losses, but not elaborated on emotionally.

38. SAB, CP, Carton 1286/A: Request by Jean Abraham Menayez, 12.06.1773. Original quotes: ‘pour donner du pain à sa femme et 3 enfans dont il est chargé’; ‘afin de pouvoir se remettre de ses pertes’.

39. ‘a fin que par la charité des bonnes gens il puise ellevez sa famille, et par consequent se pouvoir retablir’: SAB, CP, Carton 1286/A: Attestion by the village authority of Forêt (Ath) for François Godard, 20.05.1773.

40. In 1813, the populations of these two erstwhile principalities together amounted to 15% (Province of Hainaut) and 23% (Provinces of Brabant and Antwerp) respectively of the total population of later Belgium – which was more or less the territorial equivalent to the Austrian Netherlands. See Deprez and Vandenbroeke, ‘Population Growth’, 230.

41. SAB, CP, Carton 1286/A: Request by Jean Maison dit Bernissart, s.d. (between 15.03 and 05.04.1774).

42. e.g. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Local Attestations for Barthelemy Vandernoot, 12.08.1774; Nicolas Lejeune, 05.02.1776; Petrus Boschmans, 01.04.1776.

43. ‘waaromme wij den selven onsen inghesetenen aen een ider syn recommanderende, om medt eene milde aelmoesse van sijne behoeftighijdt te connen genesen’: NAB, CPA, 1286/A: Local Attestation for Petrus Boschmans, 01.04.1776.

44. Visas added for Diest (May 2nd), Scherpenheuvel (May 4th), Kasteel van Zichem (May 19th), Aarschot (May 20th).

45. NAB, CPA, 1286/A: Request by Petrus Boschmans, s.d. (07.1776).

46. ‘le chef college de cette chatellenie touché de son infortune lui aiant permit de faire une quete dans les villages de son ressort (…) Et comme elles ne sont pas suffisantes (…) il est conseillé de recourir vers les graces et bontés de Votre Majesté’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Jean Lievens, 12.10.1775.

47. ‘lui ont donné le certificat … pour emouvoir l’humanité à lui donner du secours pour rebatir sa maison’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Barthelemi Vandernoot, sd (08.1774). The attached declaration by the Bousval aldermen dd. 12.08.1774 was indeed formulated as a begging license: ‘prions (…) les personnes aumonieuses de le regarder d’un oeil de compassion et de vouloir l’assister dans la misere extreme ou il se trouve’.

48. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Barthelemi Vandernoot, s.d. (08.1774): ‘comme le remontrant desirait d’etre muni d’actes plus authentiques que ce certificat et de pouvoir faire la quette dans tout l’étendue du Duché de Brabant’.

49. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A: Request by Marie France Delire, Veuve Mahaut, s.d. (07.1781): ‘Elle s’est rendue à Bruxelles dans l’espoir d’y trouver quelques secours auprès des personnes charitables; mais ne pouvant les demander sans une permission suprême’.

50. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Local Attestation for Bersil Van Compenolle, 10.02.1773.

51. See for example NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Jean Michel Allard, s.d. (11.1773): ‘qu’il ne reste l’unique moien d’aller demander son pain parmi les villes et villages ce qu’il ne lui est cependant pas permit dans le Brabant a ce qu’il croit sans la permission expresse de V:A:R’.; Carton 1286/B: Request by Marie Magdeleine Fortain, s.d.: ‘La supliante désiroit qu’il lui fut limité tems et lieu de recourir avec assurence aux bonnes œuvres publiques’.

52. Apart from non-granted requests for deviations from the standard spatial and temporal remit (see below), the only examples of outright rejection were applications unaccompanied by official attestations, and one exceptional case concerning a foreign subject. Of course, it is possible but not necessarily plausible that chances of preservation were greater for accepted than for rejected applications.

53. ‘comme il et connu a cette Gouvernement que le paye de l’ardein et povere et quiel ny a plusieur vilage quiel ny a de maison reduy paer lin cendu et quiel luy sere impossible de ramasser qualque choge pour ses pouvoir remetre de sa penible perte’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Joseph Gamby (17.05.1774).

54. ‘On n’accorde jamais des lettres de quete que pour la Province ou le malheur est arrivé, et pour le terme de trois mois’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Administrative note, 06.11.1771.

55. Walford, ‘Kings’ Briefs’, 2; Houston, ‘Church Briefs’, 3, 12.

56. It was established in the early nineteenth century under French rule, became formalized during the Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815–1830) and was elaborated in the early decades of the Kingdom of Belgium after 1830. The archives of this departmental, later provincial, fund are kept at State Archives Antwerp, Archief van de Provincie Antwerpen, Blok J, Bijstand aan personen – hulp bij rampen, J 005/006, 1798–1863, and were the subject of a study by Karen Arijs, who studied 355 applications conserved for the years 1819, 1839 and 1859: Arijs, ‘Rampen en rampenbescherming’.

57. Arijs, passim.

58. Interestingly, in 11 out of the 355 applications studied by Arijs, some form of collections (still) appeared as part of ‘disaster management’ by the provincial authorities, but the lion’s share was awarded monetary compensation by the provincial fund: Arijs, 76.

59. ‘comme il n’a pu faire grand fruit de ladite Grace lui accordée par votre Majesté, à Cause de la Moisson; les villageois etant presque tous aux Champs, et la Noblesse a leurs Biens de campagne’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Ambroise François Castiau, 29.10.1774.

60. ‘c’etoit le tems de la moisson lequel en ne donnant plus aucune habitation fixe au païsans, a fait qu’il n’a pu recueillir le même avantage que dans une autre saison’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Request by Laurent Coltart.

61. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Lettre de Quête for Jean Detienne, 05.09.1772.

62. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Lettre de Quête for François Joseph Tonneau, 17.03.1774.

63. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B: Rapport à SAR par conseiller De Gryspeer, 27.04.1780.

64. ‘que nous avons permis et par ces présentes nous permettons aux Curés de notre Diocese dans l’hainaut autrichien de recommender au prône de leurs messes paroissiales à la charité des fideles le nommé nicolas Dufour’: visa by the secretary of the archbishop of Cambrai, 04.04.1781, noted on Lettre de Quête for Nicolas Dufour, 29.03.1781 in NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A. Here, the archbishop’s approbal

65. Haemers, ‘Goede gevers’; Teeuwen, Financing Poor Relief.

66. NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Pierre Joseph Paquet, s.d. (09.1774).

67. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B: Kladbrief by SAR to Mons Magistrate, 09.03.1780.

68. ‘a cause de la detresse ou il se trouvoit, il n’a pu faire que peu d’usage parce que presque personne n’étoit disposé à aller quetter en son nom’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A: Request by Jean De Waeghemaeker, 14.09.1781.

69. ‘les charités qu’il ij a reçu ont été de si peu de chose, qu’à peine ont elles suffit pour lui procurer de quoi subsister bien miserablement dans ses voiages’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/A: Request by Jean Fostier, 16.03.1775.

70. ‘le peu qu’il a retiré de cette quête ne lui aiant pas prouvé de quoi a paier les drogues qu’il a usées pendant sa malade’: NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Request by Charles de Mol (s.d.).

71. The fact that the Lettre was valid in two provinces in this case may also have had something to do with the special status of Malines, which was situated within the Duchy of Brabant and near the County of Flanders, but as a special Heerlijkheid and seat of the Upper Court enjoyed an autonomous status and did not form part of any of the provinces.

72. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B: Letter of the Malines Magistrate to SAR, 02.04.1782.

73. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A: Rapport du Conseil des Finances, 12.06.1782. On wage equivalents, see note 24.

74. For examples, see: NAB, CPA, 1286/A: Local attestation for Mathias Bruinimet, 06.04.1774; 1287/A: Local attestations for Jacques Delier, 09.04.1780; Joseph Dejehet, 19.01.1781; Henderick Doeckens, 20.09.1781.

75. See for example: Hasquin, ‘Le joséphisme et ses racines’.

76. See for instance Recueil des Ordonannances des Pays Bas Autrichiens, vol. III, p. 105: Ordonnance du Conseil de Luxembourg portant défense à tous réligieux étrangers de faire des quêtes dans cette province (28/04/1718); vol. IX, p. 501: Ordonnance du Conseil de Luxembourg sur les quêtes (13/04/1769).

77. ‘Le droit de permettre de faire des quêtes publiques est un attribut de la Puissance Souverain (…) On trouve le formulaire des Lettres de Quêtes, c’est-à-dire de la permission de quêter dans les plus anciens Protocols du Conseil Privé’. SAB, Archive of Patrice De Nény, 246: Notitie over het recht om toelating te verlenen tot bedelen, sd (late 1770s-early 1780s). I am grateful to Thijs Lambrecht for signalling this reference.

78. See NAB, CPA, Carton 1286/B: Request by Bersil Van Compernolle, s.d. (02.1773).

79. ‘et (si) les habitans d’une extremité de la Province, iroient demander à l’autre extremité, pour des évenemens inconnus, des secours qui devroient etre réservés à ceux de ce Canton (…) leurs habitants peu à peu ne réfuseront pas seulement leurs charités à ces Quêteurs d’un canton éloigné, mais aussi à ceux de leur Prevoté ou propre Chatellenie, lorsqu’ils seront dans le même cas’ (underlining in original). NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B, Rapport de Conseiller de Grysperre, 27.04.1780.

80. NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B, Letter by Magistrate of Mons, 18.03.1780.

81. ‘que l’usage et les Dispositions, que ceux du Magistrat de Mons réclament, concernent les Pauvres et les Mendians en général, qui doivent être nourris et secourus dans les endroits et cantons auxquels ils appartiennent, mais que cela ne peut empêcher, ni réstreindre en rien, l’effet et l’operation des Lettres de Quête que S.M. trouve bon d’accorder dans le cas particulier d’incendie, ou autre désastre semblable ;(…) lesquelles Lettres de Quête forment une exception manifeste au Régles généralement établies, à l’égard des Pauvres ordinaires, et leur effet n’a rien de commun, avec la marche de l’alimentation permanente des indigens’. (my underlining): NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B, Rapport de Conseiller de Grysperre, 27.04.1780.

82. A draft memo by the Secretary of the Privy Council, P. Maria, notes that the Council had decided on April 22nd 1780 ‘que dans les Lettres de quête à expedier on insereroit à l’avenir la clause sauf dans les villes ou la mendicité est abolie’ (underlining in original): NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/B, Note by P. Maria, s.d. (c. 1780). Lettres de Quêtes issued after this date, indeed contain this clause. See, for instance, NAB, CPA, Carton 1287/A, Lettre de Quête for Nicolas Dufour, 29.03.1781.

83. Bonenfant, Le problème du pauperisme, pp. 320–90.