The Game, the Muskets, and the Law
When Hiasl’s men crossed the threshold of the bailiff of Täfertingen, they sought no back door. Five of them entered the house while their leader and the rest of the troop held the approaches. Money was demanded; silver plate, watches, and firearms were likewise seized. The bailiff’s wife attempted to snatch back a vessel filled with coin, but a raised musket and sabre checked her hand. The robbers withdrew, only to return demanding more, deeming the first harvest insufficient.
It is not thus that ballads are wont to inaugurate the career of a benefactor of the poor. Yet it is in these terms that the sentence published at Dillingen in 1771 recounts one of the raids of Matthias Klostermayr, the “Bavarian Hiasl.” The document tallies the very florins lost by the bailiff Johann Baptist Heß. It is thick with indignation, vituperation, and an intent to make an example; yet behind the insults heaped upon the condemned man, it brings into view flesh-and-blood persons, homes, and wounds. Posterity chose to remember a lone man defied by princes; the judicial inquiry had also to confront those who stood directly between that man and those princes.
Klostermayr hailed from Kissing, near Friedberg. A shepherd in his boyhood, then a farmhand and huntsman’s boy, he had learned the forest paths and the habits of the game long before his name began to be cried to the patrols. In those rustic parts, the poacher often enjoyed a fairer repute than the officer who hunted him. The game reserved for the great lords ravaged the crops; he who felled it rendered to certain peasants a service that the law strictly punished. Hiasl was quick to turn this contradiction to his advantage. It won him sympathies, hideouts, and intelligence; yet it conferred upon him no right over the lives of those who wore a different livery.
The Disarming of the Keepers
A sentence of nine months in the house of correction, served at Munich in 1765, did nothing to curb his enterprises. Soon, it was no longer a mere matter of hunting in defiance of the ordinances. An armed band gathered about him, ready to confront the officers charged with dispersing them. The keeper’s musket became a trophy; the blows rained upon his shoulders were meant to teach him never to return. With every fresh encounter, the preceding violence supplied the pretext for the next.
The judicial record dates to 1766 the assault upon Franz Joseph Baur, the son of a huntsman from Tussenhausen. Set upon in the woods, threatened, and roughly handled, he was forced to surrender his weapon and hunting accoutrements. The ensuing years present identical scenes with different names: a ranger intercepted in the forest, a servant beaten, an officer stripped on the highway. The captain’s great dog recurs throughout the depositions as a dreaded auxiliary, loosed upon those whom the men had already surrounded.
This hostility soon spilled beyond mere skirmishes with patrols. In December 1768, Franz Joseph Laner was at work threshing grain when an armed party arrived to fetch him. He was suspected of having slain a poacher. According to the court’s judgment, the suspicion was utterly unfounded; the farmer was nonetheless beaten with such savagery that he was left permanently crippled. The justice Hiasl arrogated to himself required neither tribunal nor conclusive proof. Intelligence arrived, the troop moved, and retribution fell before any defence could be mounted.
He understood full well the value of good intelligence. The magistrates noted that he overawed the country folk by announcing, as though by divination, movements that informants had secretly relayed to him. He was credited with invulnerability; his marksmanship was held in awe. In villages that lived in terror of the lord’s bailiffs, such a reputation might easily pass for protection. In those where he had left a maimed man behind, it bore a vastly different meaning. The selfsame rumour passed from farmstead to farmstead, altering its nature according to the ear that received it.
The War of the Taverns
Taverns served as waystations, meeting places, and occasionally as battlefields. A gamekeeper compelled to enter found himself isolated in the midst of armed men. An innkeeper cowering in his cellar heard his common room being torn to pieces overhead. At Buchloe, the gang provoked the watch and opened fire upon the magistrate’s residence. In these close-knit communities where every man knew his neighbour’s allegiance, wearing a uniform or exercising an office was enough to mark a man out.
At Kellmünz, according to the facts established at his trial, Hiasl awaited a patrol whose approach had been signalled to him, rather than taking flight. The encounter cost soldiers their lives. Later, at Oberelchingen, the military attempted to surprise the men assembled at the Crown Inn. The opening volley killed one soldier and wounded several others, three of whom subsequently succumbed to their wounds. The survivors of the band made good their escape. On the morrow, their road brought them to a fresh victim: a huntsman from Holzschwang, who was stripped in his turn.
The authorities thus saw their attempts at capture multiply the dead without yielding the fugitive. Prohibitions and warrants were redoubled; yet confederates continued to warn the band. Terror served their purpose quite as effectively as sympathy. He who refused the requested shelter might expect menaces; he who spoke risked seeing the return of the very men whose passage he had denounced.
Three days after the raid at Täfertingen, an officer from Agawang, Franz Schleißheimer, was dragged from an inn and brutally beaten on the village road. Several inhabitants intervened to rescue him from their blows. Hiasl then turned his fury upon them and upon the parish priest; the parsonage was peppered with shot and damaged. This scene confounds any facile distribution of roles: the villagers were no longer shielding the outlaw from authority; they were shielding his victim from him. The virtue of succour had not altered; it had merely found a different recipient.
Osterzell, the Last Stand
On the 14th of January 1771, a detachment of soldiers and huntsmen succeeded in cornering Hiasl and his companions inside the inn at Osterzell. This time, intelligence, the concentration of force, and the chosen moment did not favour the fugitives. The resistance lasted several hours. Blood was shed among both the besiegers and the outlaws. When the smoke cleared, Klostermayr was taken alive and led into the judicial machinery whose agents he had so long held at bay.
At Dillingen, his roaming career was reduced to a dossier. One parish followed another in the interrogations; depositions were collated with confessions. The printed account published by the court professed to rest upon his own declarations and upon sworn testimony. At the same time, it reproached him with seeking to diminish his guilt: the prisoner’s explanations survive chiefly in the form of the disdain with which his judges cast them aside. We know far more of what they held against him than of the precise words with which he attempted to answer.
The final reckoning set forth twelve robberies with violence, eight breaches of the public peace, and nine homicides. This total did not imply that his own hand had struck every blow: the leader’s accountability, collective violence, and participation in armed frays were closely intertwined in the indictment. But the bench at Dillingen was trying something far graver than a clandestine deer-stalker. Disarmed keepers, terrified burghers, and fallen soldiers weighed heavier now than tales of game distributed among the peasantry.
The sentence was carried out on the 6th of September 1771. It decreed the wheel, followed by the exposure of the condemned man’s quarters along the public highways. Authority intended to pursue beyond the grave the man who had eluded it in life: to every traveller who had known his name, it would exhibit the spectacle of his ruin. Such a conclusion was designed to close the record; yet it served only to nourish another narrative—that of a rebel crushed by an unyielding power.
The popular ballads remembered only the daring marksman. Chapbooks furnished him with ever new adventures. Between the admirable champion craved by a segment of the public and the unmitigated monster depicted in the judicial sentence, the ordinary victims were in danger of vanishing a second time. One need only return to that parlour in Täfertingen to find them: a woman reaches out toward the stolen coin, and the weapons swing toward her. At that precise moment, all the future glory of the brigand brings her not the slightest aid.