Medieval Crime & Violence | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"How then might we explain this decline in levels of violence? So scholars have come at this question from a range of angles, and I'll briefly introduce three particularly powerful ones. So the first is Warren Brown, who's written this brilliant overview of violence in medieval Europe. And here he discusses the relationship between violence and political power. As states became more powerful, they were keen to control societies and able to legislate more forcefully against violence. The famous sociologist Max Weber talked about the monopolisation of violence by the state. This was the idea that violence was now a matter for the state to deal with via violent punishment, rather than for individuals in ways that could kind of wreak havoc with social harmony. But even as medieval states developed, they tended, in fact, to adopt really very ambivalent attitudes towards violence.
Another angle on the question, was explored by Norbert Elias. So he was a German sociologist writing in the first half of the 20th century. And he didn't really make much impact until much later in the 20th century, when his work was translated. And it's since become absolutely seminal, this is the thing that everybody's referring to all the time. Elias argues that it's not so much the development of law, but the development of a so called court society, which made all the difference, and which limited violence. So Elias is interested in the growth of things like etiquette, and social taboos. And he argues that as these became more powerful, increasingly it's, it just wasn't the done thing to beat up your neighbor because they irritated you, for whatever reason. There's a lot that's really convincing about this approach. But it also relies on a sense that medieval people just beat each other up on a whim without really thinking about it. And as we'll see, over the course of the talk, this really isn't true…
A third approach is provided by Steven Pinker, whose book The Better Angels of Our Nature uses a historical-psychological approach to paint a really optimistic picture of human progress. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this book was endorsed by Bill Gates. It credits the role of the liberal, of liberal democracy, of commerce, of globalism, as reasons for the apparent overcoming of what he calls our demons by our better angels. So, there's some truth to all these claims. But none of them, perhaps with the exception of Warren Brown, do quite justice to the complexity and the sophistication of medieval attitudes towards crime and violence.
So what might we add? Clearly, this is largely a story of criminalization. Levels of interpersonal violence do tend to decrease when they are legislated against and when they're policed. Though this isn't a straightforward relationship. What was criminalized and punished in the Middle Ages is actually really specific. So, famously, in the Anglo Saxon period, theft, was punished far more severely than murder. In the later Middle Ages, there was no clear distinction between murder and manslaughter in law. But in legal practice, we do tend to find this distinction. In other words, in England, at least, medieval juries tended to adjust their findings so that they distinguish between intentional and unintentional homicide, even if that distinction wasn't there in law. So the point is that there are a great deal more nuances in this story of criminalization...
Stocks are really the classic example of the involvement of communities in prosecuting crime. The state might announce that certain behaviors were to be criminalized, but the actual punishment, in this case, was carried out by the community itself. This kind of public shaming of community policing was a really effective way of keeping people in line. Little mattered more to people in the Middle Ages than reputation and public humiliation was really hard to recover from. In fact, it's struck me that medieval punishment was surprisingly non violent. The letter of the law prescribed extreme brutality. Though note, they were really ambivalent about the, the kind of the usefulness and the justifiability of torture.
But in practice, corporal punishment was actually most often avoided. They used fines instead, or communal shaming, and that tended to be enough. So a second set of explanations regarding the high homicide rate in the Middle Ages might lie in medical practice. If you got beaten up in a tavern brawl, you're much more likely to die from your injuries. I don't think this alone is sufficient to explain the dramatic drop that we saw in the graph. But it is important nonetheless. A fight could turn fatal very easily indeed. Add to that, the ready availability of weapons and you have a really toxic mix.
But don't fall into the trap of thinking that all medieval physicians were total idiots. They really weren't. Medieval thinking, medieval medical thinking was surprisingly sophisticated. And the skill of surgeons could be rather impressive. So in the slide here, you've got an image of the extractor used by John Bradmore to extract an arrowhead from the future Henry the’s Fifth cheek after the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. And this was a wound from which Henry would almost certainly have died, had Bradmore not acted so skillfully and decisively. The most convincing explanations though, lie in the cultures of violence. That is to say, these were cultural contexts in which violence was seen as an understandable response to certain offenses or insults...
The story of The Patient Griselda gives us some useful insights [on women]. So this was a story which was really popular throughout the late Middle Ages, and it was immortalized in the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer. So the story is of a wealthy knight called Gualtieri, and who has finally persuaded to marry. He chooses a very virtuous and impossibly beautiful peasant girl. And once married, he decides to test her obedience and virtue. So first he just abuses her regularly. And she responds always patiently and uncomplainingly. Then he has her daughter takeaway, taken away and causes her to believe that the child has been killed. Still, she doesn't complain. He then takes away her son. Still, she doesn't complain. Finally, he rejects her all together and tells her that he's going to marry someone of noble blood instead, and he orders Griselda to prepare the wedding feast for the new wife. At which point, finally convinced of her utter submissiveness, he reveals that her children are still alive and that he loves her after all. So happily ever after....
Part of the medieval fascination with this story came from the fact that it didn't simply affirm a marital hierarchy, wherein husband could abuse his wife as much as he liked. Even the characters in the story remark on Gualtieri’s excessively cruel behavior. He's crossed a line from discipline to abuse. In legal terms and in religious terms, medieval thinkers agonized about where to draw the line between discipline and abuse. There's a 14th century preachers’ manual called The Fascisculus Torum [sp?], which is very telling, that says a wife wrongly treated by her husband should suffer patiently lest her husband lose face by censure. And if to his shame, by chance, a lesion appears on her from beatings, she should carefully pretend otherwise, claiming she’d occur, sorry, incur some other misfortune.
So the implication is that beating one's wife was fairly normal, but also that it's potentially really shameful. Though, of course, the onus was on the woman to disguise it. In trying to distinguish between discipline and abuse, they referred again and again to the notion of reason or moderation. But this is, of course, a matter of perspective. And this kind of ambivalence shows up in the ways in which domestic violence was prosecuted, and usually pardoned. So for example, in 1327, it was the friends of the convicted Massey de Milon, one of the kings’ cooks in Paris, who appealed on his behalf. So he'd been condemned for a murderous assault on his wife. But his friends claimed in this appeal for his pardon, that it was justifiable discipline. She just was so annoying that she'd had it coming sort of thing.
And one of the most effective ways of expressing the very problematic nature of domestic discipline or domestic violence was to poke fun, fun at it, and to turn it on its head. So hence the very popular motif of the husband-beating wife, which you can see here on a seat carving from St. Mary's Church in Fairford. Medieval culture loved images of the world upside down. And they're enigmatic to say the least. But the whole idea of a wife who beat her husband was deemed inherently comic, and a way of complicating any straightforward reactions to ideas of domestic violence. These were cultures which encouraged the violent disciplining of a disrespectful wife, but they were also cultures which recognized the problems: moral, practical, and indeed social, which this produced.
So to some extent, medieval anxiety about violence was about channeling and containing it. It was about distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable use of physical force. So this is a third kind of violence I'd like to discuss today. Chivalric violence. The violence of knights, chivalry, those who fought on horseback, and those who enjoyed the cachet and the honour, which came with this"
