How Criminal Were the Middle Ages, Really?
Ask how violent medieval England was, and you’ll get an answer that it was much less violent than our present-day equivalents. The murder rate in fourteenth-century East Anglia has been calculated equivalent to present-day New York; indeed, the English homicide rate overall was far higher than that of today’s US cities. In 1202, the city of Lincoln with a population of approximately 5,000 had 114 separate murder trials in one year. Much of this violence was not dramatic, but a neighbor dispute about land or cattle or even minor debts could quickly turn into a deadly confrontation, as a 1312 Norfolk murder trial demonstrates: two brothers argued over a plot of land, and one killed the other with a cart shaft. Historians who study similar pre-modern peasant societies note that this kind of peasant-on-peasant killing was not considered nearly as serious a threat to the social order as violence against people outside the same social circle; indeed, while the killing of another peasant was a crime of sorts, it was not seen as a challenge to how society was structured.
Crime rates were also fluctuating: they often peaked at identifiable times, such as after soldiers returned from campaigns in France (Justices of the Peace were empowered to force soldiers to take up jobs in order to prevent them from turning to crime), or in times of genuine economic distress, when there is a close statistical correlation between poor harvests and women stealing food and clothing. Anything stolen that was worth more than twelve pence would result in a death sentence: which is why juries so often deliberately underrated stolen goods just under twelve pence, a small, humane act of jury discretion built directly into an otherwise brutally unforgiving system.
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