Inquiring into Adultery and Other Wicked Deeds: Episcopal Justice in Tenth- and Early Eleventh-Century Italy
This article suggests that Italian bishops often had recourse to spiritual penalties to exercise their coercive authority over serious offences during the tenth and early eleventh centuries.
Murder, Mayhem and a very small Penis
On a Friday evening in the spring of 1375, William Cantilupe, a knight of the relatively young age of thirty and the great-great-nephew of St Thomas of Hereford, was murdered by members of his household.
Cheapside: commerce and commemoration
The broad street of Cheapside, Vanessa Harding shows, was a central location in the lives and minds of early modern Londoners. In a crowded city it was a significant open space where public events could be staged and important issues communicated to a wide audience. The everyday reality of shop and market trading — where qualities and values were scrutinized and false dealing punished – enhanced its association with truth and patency. Normally dominated by the authorities, it was on occasion captured by oppositional groups, though their activities tended to reinforce Cheapside’s identity as a place of publicity and validation.
Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law
In order to understand these issues properly we must first consider our own ideas about ‘crime’, a deeply problematic term for the period before the late twelfth century.
Danish Penal Law in the Middle Ages: Cases of Homicide and Woundings
In the provincial laws, a killing was not simply a killing. The penalty imposed on the killer depended on the conditions under which the killing had taken place.
Was the White Ship disaster mass murder?
It was perhaps the worst maritime disaster of the Middle Ages, not just because it cost 300 lives, but because one of them was the heir to the Anglo-Norman Empire. One scholar has a theory that the sinking of the White Ship on the night of November 25, 1120 was not a tragic accident, rather a case of mass murder.
Expenses Related to Corporal Punishment in France
How much did the hangman get paid to carry out his deed?
Going Mad in French: Royal Notaries and Charles V’s Translation Project
This was another interesting paper from the Mental Health in Non-medical Terms session at KZOO on notaries, and how crimes committed under “mental duress” were processed.
Student Violence at the University of Oxford
My first foray of KZOO 2013 couldn’t have been off to a better start with, “I just don’t want to die without a few scars”: Medieval Fight Clubs, Masculine Identity, and Public (Dis)order. There were only two papers in this session and both were riveting. I felt like I couldn’t type fast enough to get it all in! The first paper was given by Professor Andrew Larsen of Marquette University. Professor Larsen published a book on high and late medieval student violence and the Saint Scholastica’s Day Riot at Oxford university.
The Interrogation of of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth Century London
Despite the general rule that sexual offenses were matters for the church courts, in some cases the city of London took charge of these offenses. Prostitution and procuring, for example, involved public order; the temporal courts dealt with them for that reason, so that the same people might be prosecuted in both jusrisdictions for the same offense.
Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society
At some point early in 1355, the laborer Pons Gasin of Marseilles killed a woman named Alazais Borgona. The peace act that arose from this killing does not tell us why. What it does tell us is that the killing marked the birth of a great hatred between Alazais’s kinfolk and Pons.
BOOK REVIEW: “Death Before Compline”
BOOK REVIEW: Death Before Compline Bagwyn Books (2012) Sharan Newman This short book, DEATH BEFORE COMPLINE is a great collection of murder-mystery stories…
Animals on Trial
The history of animals in the legal system sketched by Evans is rich and resonant; it provokes profound questions about the evolution of jurisprudential procedure, social and religious organization and notions of culpability and punishment, and funda-mental philosophical questions regarding the place of man within the natural order.
Under the Greenwood Tree: Outlaws in Medieval England and modern medievalist crime novels
A recurring theme in several medievalist crime novels is the subject of outlaws. They are used to create ambience, they can be the adversary and main threat to the protagonists, they can be cast in somewhat more heroic roles, and they are sometimes essential to the plot.
Perkin Warbeck: Whether my hero was or was not an impostor, he was believed to be the true man by his contemporaries
So what about the famous confession? By historians in the Tudor tradition this is usually seen as absolute proof that he was an impostor, arguing that “there is nothing in [his] confession which should make us doubt his truthfulness”. Somehow they cannot have looked at it too closely.
The Curious Career and Uncertain Past of Perkin Warbeck
Was Warbeck just another in a long line of pretenders to the throne of England, or did his appearance in Ireland in 1491 prove the innocence
of Richard III, whom most historians accuse of murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower?
Spectacularizing Justice in Late Medieval England
I use the word ritual because in cases of treachery use of a general ‘script’ as ordered by these two accounts emerges with surprising frequency in England in the late 13th and early 14th century.
European Written Sources on the Counterfeiting of Coins in the Middle Ages
Counterfeiting of coins is mentioned in a multitude of medieval written sources, manuscripts and books, starting with the Laws of the Visigoths in the mid 7th century, through the Visitation of the Chapter of Esztergom in 1397, to the Inferno, first part of Dante Alighieri’s most important work, the Divina Comedia.
An 11th-Century Scandal
Complaints from Damian about the church’s unwillingness to confront the sexual behavior of the clergy, however, met with inaction. In 1049 Damian wrote to Pope Leo IX (1048-54) about the cancer of sexual abuse that was spreading through the church: boys and adolescents were being forced and seduced into performing acts of sodomy by priests and bishops; there were problems with sexual harassment among higher clergy; and many members of the clergy were keeping concubines.
Thirteenth-century knight was a murder victim, researchers believe
The remains of a thirteenth-century skeleton discovered buried at Norton Priory in western England were likely of a knight who was murdered by a sword cut to his upper back.
Social Deviancy: A Medieval Approach
Why bother with the weakest members of society by allocating substantial resources for keeping them alive and well in designated spaces?
Nomadic Violence in the First Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Military Orders
That the threat posed by bands of marauders was taken seriously by the early crusader settlers can be seen by some of the barons’ brutal reactions to it.
The King’s Mercy. An Attribute of Later Medieval English Monarchy
Modern assumptions about medieval justice still tend to see this process of amelioration as merely occasional and exceptional: mercy needed to be applied only where special circumstances made it inappropriate to apply the full rigours of the law. This, however, is seriously to misunderstand both the purpose and the pervasiveness of mercy in the operation of medieval justice.
A Medieval Murder – Interview with Frederik Pedersen
Frederik Pedersen, Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, talks with Medievalists.net about the murder of William Cantilupe on March 23, 1375.