There were many reasons why Wallace never resorted to thievery in small villages. The towns were too small, the people too close knit. All it took for one to become suspicious in these kinds of places was to be known, since everyone in town could immediately spot a stranger and strangers were the first people looked to when things started to go missing. Additionally, your average peasant had somewhere between "nothing" and "less than nothing" worth stealing. Unless Wallace had a pressing need for a broken piece of farm equipment or a dozen-patched tunic, the benefit of walking away with anything was emphatically not worth the attendant troubles. More than all of that, however, it was just too easy. Doors without locks, windows that were little more than wooden flaps over a hole in the wall, residents that slept the sleep of people who actually worked for a living... had there been anything in those homes worth stealing, Wallace would have considered doing so beneath him. He might as well have stolen coin out of the paws of addled elders or small babes.
This is why it was so darkly amusing that, as he was preparing to slip out of the manor in the middle of the night, he realized that being naked made all of those problems so much better.
Being recognized around town did not mean much when you had spent the last couple of days hiding in an abandoned manor and you had no intention of letting any villager see you. The ratty tunics suddenly seemed like more valuable prizes, all of a sudden. And as for the difficulty, what could be more difficult than getting in and out of a town without anyone getting an eyeful of your naked body? He could smooth over any sort of casual spotting. Worst case scenario, he could talk his way out of things and then make himself scarce. It would be so much more difficult to do that when the first thing people saw was your plum and prods, in the cold night air.
It was perfect. As he slipped underneath a window on an out-of-the-way cottage and tested the flap for creaks, he wondered to himself why he had never thought of this before.
His pawpads touched the floor on the other side of the window, soundlessly. That was the one part of this excursion he was confident in, the one part of his work that was not affected by a lack of clothes. He always went without shoes, whenever he needed to move silently. That way, he could feel every suspect bend of the floorboards, every anomaly in elevation that might otherwise have tripped him up. He moved gingerly, eperimintally. His eyes had not adjusted to the sudden darkness he was thrust in, so instead he navigated by ear. Forward and to his right. There, he could hear an old married couple, snoring in two seperate keys that emphatically did not sound better together. Along the way, he had to pause when his footpaws brushed against a carpet, a chair-leg, a spinning wheel on the verge of collapsing from overuse. Like many peasant families, these had scarce possessions, and even scarcer space to put it. Even so, it was a fair sight better than some of the boarding houses he had holed up in, in the cities.
By the time he had slunk into the bedroom, he had mostly adjusted to the light. Now, in the blue-grey shafts of moonlight peeking through the window covers, he could see the lump of blankets peacefully snoring away. He could also see his quarry. Slowly, carefully, one ear cocked towards the bed, he pulled the bottom drawer of the nearby dresser. It fought him, as he did so, but fortunately it was a difficulty he could solve by carefully jiggling the thing instead of having to use potentially noisy force. Snaking a paw inside, he pulled out the first clothing-like thing it fell on. In the dark, he tried to get a measure of what he had. Was that a neck hole he felt, or a waistband? Were those sleeves? No... no, leggings. He smirked to himself. Trousers. Perfect. He immediately closed the drawer behind him and made his escape.
That was the plan for what the rest of his night would look like. He would only ever steal one thing from each house. With any luck, they would just be considered mislaid, and nobody would think to ask about it until he was well and truly away from the village. After three houses, his bag was now filled with just about enough clothing for two. In the fourth, he instead decided to sneak a few hunks of cheese from the sliced wheel that had been left in the pantry. He ate his prize at the family table, listening to the sound of the owners sleeping and enjoying the perverse sense of peacefulness that surrounded him. However, he would not be able to try his luck a fifth time. Approaching the house, he had managed to get his paw on one of the windows when a noise from inside forced him to scutter away. It was only when he was hunched over around the corner, peeking around it like a feral creature, that he realized what he was hearing was the fitful squalling of a babe, awake and determined to make it everyone's problem. A second babe joined in, shortly thereafter, and then Wallace heard the belabored, incoherent mumbling of a mother coming to fix whatever ailed them. Aware that the neighbors might wake up soon, from this racket, he put himself behind some hedges and made his escape.
By that point the sky was beginning to lighten. Just beginning. Dawn was still a ways off; he might have had the time and the will to pull one more thing. Still, it was just as well. Wallace always had the time and the will to pull one more thing. He considered it one of his greatest strengths of character. The town watch usually begged to differ, but they were poor judges of character. No matter. Providence had seen its way clear to give him what he needed, and intervened before he could suffer the consequences for it. He would offer his thanks to no god in particular, as he scaled the fence and landed back in the courtyard.
He was halfway to the front door when it opened. Beckett must have been waiting for him at the window. Wallace had insisted that the dormouse get his beauty sleep, that he did not need to stay up on his account. Of course, Wallace might also have phrased his night's activities as "going forth to bring back deliverance" from their "horribly unclothed" state. In retrospect, Beckett might have been a little bit too excited to hear that. He was especially eager to get some cloth between him and the world outside, for reasons that had long since dried onto the floorboards.