Yet
outlawry's use need not facilitate the unbridled expansion
Famine, warfare, and
outlawry were the products of a policy designed to reduce the land to a state fit for household settlement.
"
Outlawry" among early Germanic tribes "implied the ousting of the offender from the community and the deprivation of all rights," such that he "lost all his possessions," "anybody could kill him with impunity," and his "children were considered as orphans, and his wife a widow." (135) Early Rome also used this device, (136) as did Iceland at its founding.
(64) Timothy Scott Jones,
Outlawry in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25-28, 106; Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge, 1961); Melissa Sartore,
Outlawry, Governance, and Lau> in Medieval England (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 10-40; and the essays in Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c.
(248) As early as 1897, the Supreme Court explained that "the ancient common law doctrine of '
outlawry,' and that of the continental systems as to 'civil death,' ...
This is a living death; such that reminds and equates with the punishment of
outlawry in feudal England.
There is one chapter devoted solely to lawmen and another to the citizens who courageously fought back against
outlawry. In a chapter on women, Smith notes that the famed Belle Starr was far more legend than outlaw and that, indeed, "surprisingly few" female bandits "lived up to their billing" (125).
Outlawry, Governance, and Law in Medieval England, by Melissa Sartore.
I have no problem with emphasizing the social responsibility of governments and organizations that have become increasingly self-aggressive and ethically indolent in today's digital economy but I want to emphasize the structural violence of capitalist inequality and the necessity of creating a socialist alternative to capitalism's impending form of
outlawry in our increasingly disjointed and dissolute world.
The idea of
outlawry was, of course, a highly important concept of legal and social control in the early Medieval societies in Europe as well as elsewhere, and especially so in the early Germanic societies of England and Scandinavia.
He argues further that Rastas linked militancy to Black Nationalism and Rudies combined black consciousness with social
outlawry. This consciousness rested in a view "in the eyes of the alienated young, [that] the cause of the downtrodden had to be affirmed by a racially informed indiscipline against a discriminatory society and its values."(ibid:88) They developed what he calls exilic responses and inverted civility, they moved from restraint to indiscipline and a retreat from civility's authority.(ibid:118)
The notions of crime and justice, as well as law and
outlawry are presented as relative in social terms, inviting a sociological reading of the story.
"Blood Meridian" is the engaging and violent story tracing decent into
outlawry that ultimately finds the kids confronted by a hard and heartless Judge Holden.
On the following logic, it is: Lawrence's elimination of homosexuality's
outlawry is driven by a message of inclusion and integration into the larger community of constitutional persons entitled to, for now, at least, some basic constitutional rights.
