No crime or offence preoccupied the maréchaussée so much as theft: in no less than 416 of the 976 affairs before the Périgueux prévôté between 1720 and 1790. And no crime or offence was less tolerated by the population as a whole. While a physical assault could be settled out of court, and while the vast majority of beggars and vagabonds were allowed to go on their way, no mercy was shown to the vagabonds suspected of theft. Not content with handing them over to the police – and practically all vagabonds convicted of theft had been arrested by private citizens – the public exacted its own immediate retribution. When caught in his second burglary, Alexis Faye was stoned and beaten with clubs; Georges Petit, caught running out of a house with piles of linen under his arms, was ‘seized by several people who struck him numerous blows with sticks and bellows’. Grelety stole a ploughshare and went to sell it at market in Le Bugue, but the owner turned up, tore it from his hands and used it to beat him. Even the presence of a brigade of maréchaussée could not protect the thief caught in flagrante delicto. Pierre Geneste, arrested by the Mussidan brigade at their local market when a métayer caught him picking his pocket, subsequently had the greatest difficulty walking to the prévôtal court in Périgueux, ‘as he was set upon by the crowd of peasants’.