Outlawry: When Being an Outlaw Meant Anyone Could Kill You on Sight

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Today the word outlaw suggests a rebel on a motorcycle or a gunslinger at a saloon door. For most of history it was a legal sentence, and one of the harshest a society could impose short of execution. An outlaw was placed outside the protection of the law, which is different from being a fugitive. The Hungarian bandit Sandor Rozsa ran from the police but still got a trial when caught. William John Bankes, a former member of Parliament outlawed in 1841, lived openly in Venice until his death in 1855, stripped of his English estates.

This episode follows the idea from Rome's interdiction of water and fire, through Germanic tribes that had no prisons, to English common law, which declared an outlaw caput lupinum, a wolf's head. Killing such a person was no crime, feeding one was, and simply missing a court date on a felony charge could trigger the sentence. The conversation also covers civil outlawry for debtors, the bandit gangs that peasants came to cheer, and the colonial Australian laws that revived the practice against bushrangers.

• Anyone who killed an outlaw had to announce it publicly. Failing to do so let the dead man's family seek wergild through oath-swearing.
• Women could not technically be outlawed. They were declared waived, with exactly the same loss of rights and protection.
• Henry Danvers was outlawed for murder in 1597, fled to France, joined the French army, and was later pardoned by Queen Elizabeth I.
• A three-year sentence of lesser outlawry from Iceland's Althing drove Erik the Red west to Greenland.
• The Felons Apprehension Act of 1865 in New South Wales let any citizen take a declared outlaw alive or dead. Ned Kelly was outlawed in Victoria in 1878, and the New South Wales law stayed on the books until 1976.