The disreputable or romantic figure of the wanderer of roads has occupied the world's narratives from the earliest times. For de Certeau, ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’, but the story of the wanderer perhaps carries a specific resonance of dangerous liaisons with space. Since premodern communities were often policed by mutual watching, to be on the road at this time was, as Cresswell says, ‘to exist on the margins … outside the web of obligations and duties that marked feudalism’ and it was for this reason that wanderers were distrusted. The effect of the enclosures of common lands and other imminent bringers of instant poverty engendered a very particular kind of fear. The fear of the settled for the wandering stranger was firstly a straightforward fear of the unknown other, but more so it reveals a deep-seated fear that one might become the other. Lewis Mumford puts it viscerally: that during the Middle Ages the ‘unattached individual … was one condemned either to excommunication or to exile’, that is to say they were in a sense perennially ‘close to death’. For the wanderer, this situation was to some extent self-perpetuating, as in the case of European Jews whose wandering as a result of pogroms and forced evictions led to the horrendous irony of them being suspected across Europe because of this very mobility, as Cresswell notes. By the sixteenth century in Europe, numbers of placeless or temporarily transient people were soaring and these included not only the newly landless but also increasingly those travelling as merchants.