billeting
The accommodation of soldiers in civilian lodgings or public houses. Until the advent of purpose-built barracks, billeting was the normal method of housing troops in peacetime in European armies. It was also widely practised on campaign, when a quartermaster would normally travel ahead of his unit to arrange accommodation with the (often less than enthusiastic) civic authorities. Billets were then ‘chalked up’, with the names of numbers of soldiers designated for particular houses being written on the front door. Civilians who had soldiers billeted on them were required to feed them, and, at least in theory, received a set rate of repayment, sometimes in cash but, especially in wartime, in vouchers which might prove difficult to convert. ‘Free quarter’ was the practice, common in the 17th century, of requiring the inhabitants of hostile territory, foreign or domestic, to house troops without recompense. Sometimes it reflected shortage of funds, but was often intended to be punitive. After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes Louis XIV sought to covert his Huguenot subjects by billeting troops, often dragoons, on them. Even when billeting was not deliberately punitive, it was often bitterly resented. The Quartering Act, passed by the Westminster parliament in 1765, required the American colonies to supply food and accommodation to British troops. Once the apparent need for these troops had diminished with the end of the French and Indian war, this arrangement became one of the leading colonial grievances in the run-up to the American independence war.
Billeting was unsatisfactory for soldiers and civilians alike. It was difficult to preserve discipline and cohesion in a unit that might be billeted over a wide area, and in wartime a billeted unit might be surprised—a practice called ‘beating up quarters’ in the 17th century—by an attacker who killed or captured men as they stumbled out of their billets in the small hours. Civic fathers, fearing for the virtue of their daughters and the sobriety of their sons, lamented the corrupting presence of the ‘drunken and licentious soldiery’. However, as the novels of Jane Austen testify, billeted officers might be far from unwelcome.
Even soldiers who sought to behave well in billets were not immune from gaffes. At Saalfeld, in the Jena/Auerstadt campaign of 1806, the French Quartermaster-Sergeant Guindey killed Prince Louis Ferdinand, the Prussian commander, in an encounter in which he himself was wounded. He was comfortably billeted with a German noblewoman, but his reception changed when news of the encounter leaked out. Riding off in search of more welcoming accom-modation, he discovered that his orderly had been indiscreet when one of the servants taunted him. ‘I told him straight, ’ confessed the hussar, ‘that if his prince had wounded you in the face, he would not be wounding anybody else because you had run him through with your sabre.’
— Andrew Haughton/Richard Holmes
