So I'm making a Dark Souls "lore" video of sorts and it's about... (Patreon)

Vagrants. I recently finished recording and editing my vocal audio and started the video today. It should be a pretty quick ~14 minute video, so I'm expecting to have this ready by next weekend at the latest.

They really don't have any concrete lore whatsoever, so this is a sort of funny topic to broach. But nonetheless I've thought of two primary questions about them that I'll try my best to answer:

1) What was the most likely design inspiration for the developers?
2) Is there any kind of in-universe explanation that we can even begin to speculate on?

Of course, all I can do is speculate, but I'm looking forward to spilling the beans on my personal Vagrant headcanon that slowly coalesced over time.