Before I try to develop the essay about Conan and what that literature tells us about outlawry and civilization, I'd like to say some general things as addenda to
AVI's post. This is addenda; it's meant to be read after his post.
I. Outlawry is a part of civilization
AVI starts with a very good point: the word outlaw has meant different things in different times and places. I think the Danelaw versus the Saxon law example he gives is a good one, but there were also different laws in place in the region we would now call Scotland (which really came to be Scotland around this same period of time). The Danelaw was ruled by Danes, and it pressed well into the north until Scottish geography posed sufficiently defensible barriers as to allow them to stop it. Thus Cnut the Mighty did not conquer Scotland, but instead accepted the submission of the Scottish king Malcolm II but did not actually attempt to impose any sort of rulership or law. Malcolm appears to have ignored Cnut even more effectively than Western North Carolina ignores its governor. Or, as Frans Bengtsson put it in The Long Ships:
Meanwhile in the Isles to Scotland's west and north, a Norse rather than Danish population of Vikings had brought their own laws and customs, as they had to Ireland (from whence they raided even the Danelaw, and captured even York). They made different but similar relations with the Scottish kings, allegedly promising fealty but in fact running things their own way.
And in Iceland, men went forth who were tired of all of these systems but who wanted the freedom of a frontier. They, too, ended up making their own laws once there were too many not to have agreements of some sort between them; and they also handled the idea of outlawry differently. Some of our best material comes from Iceland's stories of its outlaws.
When we are going to talk about pirates, well, we already are: most of those early Vikings were in fact pirates, and not kings in their own land. We will return to how little a distinction there is between piracy and "legitimate government" in a while, but the concept was not new even then: no less than St. Augustine relates a story about a pirate captured by
Alexander the Great, who asked the pirate how he dared molest peaceful shipping. The pirate asked him, "How dare you molest the whole world?"
It is a much fairer point than people admit. If we look at our own American notions of legitimacy in government, the pirates look far more legitimate than the kings: they made compacts to which the people who joined those compacts actually gave their consent. Iceland's government looks like the only one that we would find legitimate on anything like the American model; even Scotland's doesn't have the legitimacy of the Declaration of Arbroath until 1320, much later.
The point of this section is that outlawry turns out to be a reflection of the civilization that produces it. You cannot, as an American, be an Icelandic Saga outlaw because there is simply no way to escape the laws. You can't opt out of them, and you can't be thrust outside them. You can live in defiance of them, but even should you fly the country the government will do its best to pursue you, arrest you, or have you arrested and extradited to face the judgments of its courts.
In Iraq, meanwhile, a system very similar to the system of
wergild existed in the wake of the failure of the central state (which was never just, but was tyrannically effective at suppressing feuds). The outlaw laws of Iceland had been a kind of pressure-relief valve for its own system: as we see in the
Saga of Burnt Njal, Gunnar kills many people (as do others) and the matter is resolved with blood price payments. But when that becomes evidently ineffective, and Gunnar kills multiple times within one family, outlawry basically makes him no longer capable of resolving the matter through lawsuits or payments. It exposes him to being handled however his enemies wish, and they will not be held responsible under the law for whatever they do. He trusts to his own right arm and it avails him for a while, though eventually -- well, we read that story together
at length some thirteen years ago.
The urge to escape tyrannical government is universal, but it exists in tension with the government and the civilization. Those who make the laws determine the shape of outlawry.
II. Other forms of separateness sometimes enabled by civilization
This is also true of other forms, and in fact it is the mark of a decent government to support them. (Perhaps it is only the mark of a weak government; but if you believe, as I do, that power exercised over others is a corrupting force, it might be reasoned that weak governments are generally also more decent even if only accidentally so.) Contrast allowed forms of separation with, say, Mussolini's vision: 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.' Totalitarian forms cannot abide the idea of this sort of separateness.
One of the clearest early example is the
hermit. The hermit (somewhat like Edward Abbey, recently discussed) goes to the
desert to find the transcendent divine. We picture the actual desert, but the root is Latin and simply means a wilderness. Monasteries and churches came to offer an additional separation, originally a taking-on of additional laws not applicable to everyone else, but coming to offer a sacred alternative to the positive law. An order of Templars might claim the right to live only under their own laws, for example.
Consider the tradition of church
sanctuary for criminals, which was honored in English law from the fourth to the seventeenth century. It offered via the Church an opportunity to choose to outlaw one's self:
[Sanctuary] seekers then had forty days to decide whether to surrender to secular authorities and stand trial for their alleged crimes, or to confess their guilt, abjure the realm, and go into exile by the shortest route and never return without the king's permission. Those who did return faced execution under the law or excommunication from the Church.
If the suspects chose to confess their guilt and abjure, they did so in a public ceremony, usually at the church gates. They would surrender their possessions to the church, and any landed property to the crown. The coroner, a medieval official, would then choose a port city from which the fugitive should leave England (though the fugitive sometimes had this privilege). The fugitive would set out barefooted and bareheaded, carrying a wooden cross-staff as a symbol of protection under the church. Theoretically they would stay to the main highway, reach the port and take the first ship out of England. In practice, however, the fugitive could get a safe distance away, abandon the cross-staff and take off and start a new life. However, one can safely assume the friends and relatives of the victim knew of this ploy and would do everything in their power to make sure this did not happen; or indeed that the fugitives never reached their intended port of call, becoming victims of vigilante justice under the pretense of a fugitive who wandered too far off the main highway while trying to "escape".
This use of exile is currently forbidden by international law, but consider it in terms of the recent discussions of prison alternatives. Would it really be worse for the United States to allow criminals to deport themselves rather than pay to feed and house and care for and guard them for five or ten years? It might be worse for whichever country they were going to, but assuming that a country was willing to admit fugitives, what's wrong with the practice?
There are other examples like the heroic orders such as the
Fianna or the
Jomsvikings, which were similar to the military orders of knighthood but not inherently religious in nature. In the United States, we long had privateers and private militias co-existing with the US Navy, Army, and Marine Corps; and actual pirates, too, such as
Lafitte who assisted in the Battle of New Orleans.
III. Lack of distinction between 'legitimate' governments and pirate/outlaw ones
Since the Declaration of Independence we have a recognized standard for legitimacy in government; the older standard depended on the Divine Right of Kings, which was itself an evolution of a corporatist model of society that the Catholic Church developed in company with various royal and noble families. The American project is much more like the pirate project than it is like the royalist one. AVI writes:
The old language of "masterless men," and the importance of having a flag to sail under or a protector over you will be part of [the later post on outlaws, linked above -Grim]. For our purposes here, it is important to note that becoming a pirate placed one in a position of almost certain execution if caught. The exception was Africans and ex-slaves, who would be sold back into slavery. For blacks and New World natives, on board pirate ships were a place of near-equality with whites, and in many instances entire equality. There was democratic election to the various roles on the ship, and this likely had influence on the countries on Atlantic coasts, especially in the New World. It can be overstated - they did force captives to join them, especially if they had a needed skill, and that's hardly freedom-loving. They also made their livings by taking what was not theirs and doing so with extreme violence.
On the other hand, the legitimate governments of Europe impressed sailors and regularly took each other's stuff on the sea via violence. So not a lot of difference. Piracy was a more extreme version of what everyone else was doing, perhaps.
I noted in the comments that the distinction wasn't even as great as that, because the 'legitimate' kings were happy to employ pirates as "privateers" in their wars.
Sir Henry Morgan, the Welsh adventurer who surpassed all other buccaneers in his accomplishments, was rewarded with knighthood for his successful plunder -- using quite hideous tortures to force Spaniards to reveal hidden wealth -- of several Spanish cities in the Americas, including when done during a period of a peace treaty. (Whether or not he used priests and nuns as human shields in his conquest of Porto Bello was the subject of a libel suit that Morgan won; you can read about that in the linked article.)
American privateers carried the Revolutionary War's naval victories for the nascent republic, the Navy being a bare consideration at that time. More than two thousand American privateers ravaged British shipping, showing the King that free men governing themselves by consent were just as capable of fighting against him as they had been of fighting for him. They were better behaved, though: Congress required bonds of up to thousands of pounds as assurance that they would not harm innocents, neither persons nor the shipping of neutral nations.
IV. Importance of joining a pact (frith)
AVI mentions in passing the importance of 'having a flag to sail under,' whether national or piratical. There is a whole section of links on this concept on the sidebar, under 'frith and freedom.' A lot of these point to the importance of pulling together to make each other free, and thereby being able to stave off the terrors of the world -- to include tyrants, as well as other harms. In passing I would like to note that if you follow the link regarding church sanctuary, above, you will see that word employed: they note that some of the churches required a sanctuary seeker to reach and sit down upon a "frith stool" in order to obtain the peace and sanctuary offered.
Now in the post I wanted to write, which this is a preface to as much as an addenda to AVI's, I will be able to look at how Conan -- AVI mentions him by name -- used such bonds and friendships, laws and codes, to move through a series of relationships. In the end he became king by his own hand, having previously become captain of a series of pirates, bands of kozak ('Cossack') raiders, mercenaries, and so forth; and whether there was really all that much difference between the latter and the former is as much a live issue for us as it was for Alexander the Great.
