‘To Help Him Recover from His Losses’: Royal Begging Licences in the Austrian Netherlands, 1760s-1780s Vrije Universiteit Brussel
This article explores a collection of circa 400 applications for ‘begging letters’ conserved in the archives of the Privy Council of the Austrian Netherlands from the late 1760s to the early 1780s. Such Lettres de Quête were issued in the name of the Habsburg monarch to subjects who had lost their possessions to fire or other natural disasters, and allowed their bearers to travel around begging. By means of a qualitative reading of the ...