Unhappy villagers who decide to leave take with them everything they are carrying. Those goods belong to the community, and they should have to face attacks from anyone they run up against on their way out. At the very least, make it so that I can select other villagers or soldiers and right click on the deserter to set them loose and try and regain that stolen loot.
The latter I’d agree with but maybe with a chance of a happiness hit to the bailiff in question (“What, I’ve got to kill Bundar?”) but I’m not sure I’d really want the former: Kallis the Soldier is leaving town so 13 townsfolk try to stop him on the way out… carnage.
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You’d kill a man for his shirt, shoes, and a few meat loaves?
I’ve sent them out to “live and die” among the wolves for a lot less… 
It’s a game, not reality.
The men who desert most are the soldiers, especially after a raider hit. They like to run off with all that expensive armor and weapons I bought/built. If they would leave the professional items behind and just take their clothes and some food rations, I’d be fine with that. I want to take back the high value gear though.
Much as I hate to lose stuff I’ve gone to great trouble to manufacture and equip the little digital varmints with, I think having them scamper with whatever they can carry is more realistic. Soldiers are going to desert with their armor and weapons, if for no other reason than to protect themselves against all them wolves, bears, rabid deer - and any other townsfolk who try to stop them. Civilians will take anything valuable if they think about it for even a minute, so they have something to sell to get a start somewhere Else.
You avoid the problem of people leaving with valuable stuff by giving them lots of reasons not to leave in the first place. At least, that’s my take on the game and my understanding of the reality from long before Medieval times right up to the present day - troops deserting from Putin’s Folly show up with their personal gear , clothings and weapons, and sometimes with major equipment like tanks, vehicles and man-portable missiles. That’s just the way it is.
Ah, but they managed to evade capture or got out undetected. We are given notice of a deserter and a spyglass to focus on him. We should be able to do something about it. Otherwise, perhaps the more logical thing to do is to let him slip unnoticed unless we happen to click on him ourselves to see what he’s up to, and then once a month a muster of population would reveal that somebody had deserted long after they got away.
We also magically have complete information on every shirt, shoe, and turnip stored anywhere in our village, which would make me wonder what kind of Orwellian Inspectorate the village is running if it were not a game. It is very rare that any game gives you only that gap-filled information you would really have, because, frankly, most gamers would regard it is highly unfair to keep hitting them with Surprise problems that they never saw coming.
As an ex-military Intelligence NCO, I have presented scenarios and games (miniatures and RPG) that gave people only the information they could legitimately expect to have IRL, and have never failed to have just about as many unhappy gamers as intrigued/satisfied ones.
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