Thieves and Beggars

Beggars can be excellent spies. Their presence anywhere outside of the higher-class areas of cities and towns will go unmentioned, if they are seen at all. Beggars ply their trade everywhere, and some of them may just be sleeping off the effects of drink. If one is hunched up against packing boxes by a warehouse, so what? Anyway, no one wants to get too close to beggars. They have an unpleasant range of startlingly contagious diseases, and approaching them is an open invitation to lice to infest your person—just for starters. And, of course, beggars are harmless (in the sense that they are too feeble, dim-witted, drunk, etc., to cause anyone any harm). For all these reasons, well-trained beggars are a real boon to the enterprising thief. They can get into places where other people would look suspicious, they often go unnoticed, and they don't have a lot to do apart from keep their eyes peeled. Just the people to have hanging around the places a thief intends to rob. After the job, the grateful beggars can be given a little percentage of the take.

Beggary can even be semi-professional, in large cities in particular. Dominant beggars control lucrative patches of territory, where they know that pickings are richest. Fit and able-bodied people, their senses undulled by illness or drink, can pose as beggars for a better living (in a rich city) than they can make by honest means (e.g., as farm laborers). Such people would make excellent spies. A Guild of Beggars is by no means unlikely in many city settings. And, since children make very appealing beggars as they look soulfully up from their sad little eyes and beg for a penny for a poor orphan, such a guild will find and train such rapscallions. The more talented (dexterous and/or intelligent) ones may well be sold on to the thieves' guild, for a consideration, to become apprentice thieves.

Table of Contents