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

Abstract

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.