[alexpotato]

Several years ago I read the book Fingerprints by Colin Beavan [0] and it was really eye opening how different life was before we had modern forms of identification.

Example 1: In countries that had little formal legal structures and rudimentary identification (e.g. India in the early 1800s), it was incredibly easy to be a criminal and just move from town to town while acquiring new identities. In other words, there was a huge upside to becoming a career criminal since it was both difficult to catch you (no forensic evidence) and even if you were caught, you could just reboot your life.

Example 2: He mentions a case where a gentleman was charged TWICE for crimes that were later found to have been committed by someone else who had only a passing resemblance.

I read this book before Twitter/Facebook became ubiquitous and every like, share, comment was public knowledge but even at the time, it was mind boggling how different "identity" was back then.

0 - https://amzn.to/3kDqEgj

[eatingCake]

The flipside of this would be that anyone from out-of-town would be shunned under the assumption that they had left their previous town for negative reasons.

[eru]

That's probably part of the reason the branding of the hand worked reasonably well in practice in Britain.

If you plead the 'benefit of the clergy', you were branded, so you didn't do it again.