The Bandit, the Holy Man, and the Slave in the Early Medieval West.

This paper examines the relationship of banditry with slavery and constructions of sanctity in the early medieval West. Eric Hobsbawm suggested that, across preindustrial societies, bandits were admired and supported as dispensers of justice. Yet this role seems more obviously fulfilled in Late Antiquity by saints. Where we do have bandits who appear to have been championed by the poor, they sometimes appear as failed holy men amid contests over religious authority. Indeed, the conceptual overlap between modern interpretations of the bandit and the holy man echoes their shared association with the wilderness in contemporary hagiography. But this shared association leads to bandits usually appearing as the antithesis of saints rather than their allies in justice. In this light, the holy man emerges as the "anti-bandit": a crucial aspect of the significance of saints at a time when brigandage threatened the activities of pilgrims and churchmen. Furthermore, that both slavers and fugitive slaves were characterized as brig-ands raises interesting questions about the supposed marginality of bandits. Overall, the early medieval evidence shows that banditry was a more heterogeneous phenomenon than Hobsbawm theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]