by Sean McGlynn
The above details are all variations of a theme, the common thread being a visual demonstration of ritual killing demanded by a majority of the population. Even so, the similarities are more striking than the dissimilarities: Charles V’s code has much in common with the fourteenth-century coutumiers of France, which in their own turn build on thirteenth-century traditions, such as found in the Coutumes de Beauvaisis. Everything went to serve a policy of deterrence, even after death. Long after sentence had been carried out, the bodies of criminals were left on public display to inhibit other potential wrongdoers; whether corpses left on the gallows, or heads on pikes, or quartered parts prominently exhibited in different parts of a kingdom or city, the price of crime was shown as a high one and one continually advertised to the public at large.
No general observations are universal, and so it is possible to encounter exceptions that prove the rule. Depending on the nature of the crime and on whether the convicted man was having a ‘good’ death, sympathy could be evoked from the assembled spectators. As mentioned earlier, last-minute rescue attempts were not unheard of, one efficacious resort being the reprieve that came with an offer of matrimony. Executions that were motivated to further a political faction were sometimes publicly opposed, as no offence had been perpetrated against the people. In 1315 in the western Italian city of Siena, the authorities attempted to amputate a foot from each of six men from an opposing party who had entered the city in violation of a biased law, but the city (at least partisan elements of it) rose in riot against this measure. Leniency, however, was only rarely tolerated, and was especially resented by ordinary people when it was granted to the nobility: in Siena in 1374 a threat to riot ensured that clemency granted to a noble family of brigands was rescinded. As the case of the unfortunate Thomas of Eldersfield demonstrates, the crowds gathered for an execution were not squeamish. The corpses of executed criminals often became playthings, notably for youths, who dragged them around, kicked and beat them, and severed body parts. Many of these youths would go on to become soldiers.
Despite the pervasive brutality of this period, there is evidence to suggest that the number of death sentences was declining by the fifteenth century. One possible explanation for this might have been the reluctance to assist what nature and war had done to population levels; plague, famine and endless military conflicts had depleted workers in the field and manpower for the army, the latter recruiting increasing proportions of criminals. Alternatively, there may simply have been a drop in the crime rate. A further reason was the development of an ever more legalistic and literate society that spawned theories on which crimes deserved what punishment, allowing more detailed delving into a case and greater complexity in judicial procedure. Claude Gauvard’s study of the death penalty and the late medieval parlement, France’s highest court, shows that between 1387 and 1400, of nearly two hundred criminal cases heard at the court, only four men were condemned to death. The family of one of these men, to avoid the shame of a public hanging, saw to it that the guilty party was instead secretly drowned one night. That this was a noble court helps to account for the few death sentences passed. In the majority of cases, privately negotiated agreements meant that there was a decreasing recourse to the hangman. In this way, the court offered a conciliatory process to honour avengers without initiating a blood feud between the victim’s family and that of the accused.
The court adapted the premise of an eye for an eye into its workings, but ‘the death penalty was used more frequently as part of an argument than it was in reality’.18 Lesser jurisdictions – dealing with ‘lesser’ people – did not lean so heavily this way. The influence of Roman law remained strong, Seneca’s assertion that the more severe a punishment the greater its effect on people informed the thinking in most courts. Medieval jurists made juridical and philosophical arguments for the deterrent effect and didactic moral message of capital punishment and its efficacy in preserving social order. The population at large wished to participate in the dissemination of this message and effect, and did so through attendance and participation at public executions.
In discussing violence in the medieval world, a brief foray into the domestic environment is merited. Here the violence is generally perceived as more directed against the individual than against society, but not always. The nature of medieval record-keeping and the illiteracy of most people require us to examine this field through court cases. While this permits us to discover official views on domestic violence (and the official view can be expected to at least partly mirror the popular view), it affords our only opportunity to consider violence within the household. Perceptions are far more ambiguous here, given that most domestic violence was meted out to women, and a woman’s legal standing left her at a great disadvantage (although not to the degree that is commonly supposed). As Philippa Maddern has written of females and violence in the Middle Ages: ‘Their place in the moral hierarchy of violence was low; men who beat their wives, according to fifteenth-century views, merely affirmed natural and normal order, whereas wives who attacked their husbands were seen as unnatural traitors against their lords.’19
This notion is reinforced by the Statute of Treason of 1352 in England which declared that a woman killing her husband was guilty of a treasonous act. So even in this sphere of violence there was concern for the stability of the social order. For this crime, as with many others, a woman would be burned alive; this sentence was last carried out in England as late as 1789. (The unfortunate woman was Catherine Murphy, burned at Newgate on 18 March for coining, which was considered high treason. By this time, women could normally expect to be strangled before the burning.)
Women as perpetrators of violent crime and murder appear in court records many times fewer than men, proportionately forming an average of ten per cent of cases in Europe. The one violent crime for which there is an inversion is infanticide. Of all the many social, economic, cultural and moral pressures that drove a mother to kill her child, perhaps the most telling was the preference for boys in medieval society. In fourteenth-century Catalonia, eighty per cent of infanticide victims were girls: ‘Girls were a cost and a liability, so were extinguished; boys were an asset and a benefit, so were preserved.’20 Thus, even from birth, females were more vulnerable to violence than males. We have already noted Charles V’s legal code’s penalty for infanticide, but punishment varied, especially according to whether the case was heard before a secular or ecclesiastical court, the latter emphasizing repentance over punishment. Thus in Italy, where infanticide came under secular jurisdiction, we hear of a case from Bologna in 1344 in which a guilty mother was beheaded, while a mother in late medieval England was sentenced by a Church court to penitential processions. England also seems to have entertained mitigating circumstances more readily: in 1342 one Alice was incarcerated to await the King’s grace, judged to having been in a state of insanity when she killed her young son. For all of their disadvantages in law, women were less likely to receive corporal or capital punishment for certain offences, and far more likely to receive pardons.
Married women were vulnerable to violence, but not to the extent that modern perceptions hold. Intra-familial murders were very low indeed, especially when compared to modern society; as Barbara Hanawalt explains, ‘With the family as the basic unit of peasant economy, one would no more consider killing one’s wife than one’s ox.’21 (The ‘rule of thumb’ precept – husbands could beat their wives if the stick was no thicker than a thumb – does not come from the Middle Ages as some commonly suppose.) James Brundage has shown how canon (Church) law attempted sensitive adaptations of biblical patriarchal authority, addressing areas such as St Paul’s command that wives should subject themselves to their husbands in all things and that while husbands should love their wives, wives should fear their husbands. In a form of corporal trickle-down effect from the king, superiors had the right to chastise inferiors whether they were women, servants or children. At the degree ceremony for Master of Grammar in medieval u
niversities, the newly qualified master was given a rod with which to beat a boy as part of the ceremony; the Rule of Benedictine monasteries permitted abbots to whip monks.
However, wife-beating was frowned upon and discouraged, although clerical wives could be more harshly treated, the mid-twelfth-century Summa Parisiensis authorizing severe, but not lethal, beating for wives of the clergy. Wives could obtain legal separation from their spouses on grounds of cruelty: in late fourteenth-century Paris, Guioche Grivoul received a court warning to cease assaulting his wife with clubs and knives, on pain of excommunication, a fine, a separation and the wife laying claim to her share of their property. Appeals on such grounds were almost unheard of (as low as 0.02 per cent of divorce cases in England). Economic difficulties were often cited as the basis for matrimonial violence. In the western French city of Angers in 1367 a man who had lost half his property in pursuit of a litigation case was, as a result, driven temporarily irrational; he beat his wife and attempted to defenestrate his children. For this he was manacled at home for six months. That there was a degree of equality in judicial punishment is borne out by Hanawalt’s various studies. These demonstrate that in late medieval England husband killers and wife killers were equally likely to be found guilty (twenty-nine per cent each in all cases); fifty-two per cent of men convicted of killing a relative were hung, while fifty per cent of women were.
One area in which there was great injustice for women was rape. The writings of misogynistic monks portraying women as stereotypical temptresses and latter-day Eves twisted some opinions into expressing the view that some women deserved to be raped, and the accused frequently resorted to the effective defence of besmirching the moral character of his victim. Rape, as an offence against the king’s peace, was a serious crime, but one with an extraordinarily high acquittal rate. Questions of proof of consent, the lack of witnesses, and the reluctance of an all-male jury to pass a death sentence (which was applied to rape in England only in 1285) all conspired to mitigate punitive legislation. A number of studies highlight this glaring injustice. In the English Midlands between 1400 and 1430, of 280 rape cases, not one led to a conviction. For the country as a whole in the first three-quarters of the thirteenth century, of 142 prosecutions only one resulted in so much as a fine (two others, as clerics, were dealt with – how we do not know – by the more lenient Church courts). It was a similar story for Europe as a whole: in Brescia between 1414 and 1417 of over 400 criminal sentences only four were for rape; in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Cerisy, of 344 violent crimes appearing in the courts, only eight were rape cases; and fourteenth-century Nuremberg records only eight rapes in over 700 crimes. No wonder, then, that in medieval Europe, ‘Of the crimes perpetrated against women, rape stands out for the apparent ineffectiveness of the law.’22 Given these attitudes, it is only to be expected that the number of rapes increased many times over in war zones when the disincentives to rape were so feeble in peacetime.
The victim of rape had little recourse to justice and so might look to her own protection. The violence of a woman against a man was abhorrent to received ideas of the social order, but exceptions could be made for self-defence: a trial in England from 1438 acquitted Joan Chapelyn, who had killed the rapist assaulting her (the fact that the rapist was a Frenchman undoubtedly helped her case). But even suicide was condemned as a means of escaping rape. Sometimes justice was dealt out by the victim’s outraged family, but authorities were persistently stamping down on private feuds. What little help there was available came from spiritual intervention, if we are to believe the sources. In 1345 a widowed noblewoman fell pregnant after a rape assault; she turned to the Franciscan friar Gerard Cagnoli for assistance and miraculously all signs of her pregnancy disappeared.
With this last example we encounter another aspect of medieval attitudes towards violence and justice. The population looked to the authorities to administer violent retribution as a deterrence to wider, criminal violence; we have also encountered guilty parties meeting with divine punishment; but sometimes the feeling of people was that judicial chastisement was not only too severe but represented a miscarriage of justice. As a remedy to this, they occasionally took the law into their own hands, aiding prisoners to escape or calling on the hangman to spare the offender; where it was particularly vocal, the authorities at times did heed this barometer of public opinion and granted the condemned person his life, lest public disorder break out. But the supplication of divine help and subsequent miraculous intervention formed an equally powerful influence on society’s need for an equitable system of justice. The sources are replete with examples of this, undoubtedly promoted by the clerical writers, who encouraged belief in the efficacy of prayers and the more material offerings to the saints and the Church. The emphasis on forgiveness meant that even the guilty could hope for grace.
Examples exist from all of medieval Europe; they range from events that can be explained in practical ways to the completely inexplicable (not to mention improbable). In England in the late 1170s, a defendant soundly beat his accuser in a trial by battle, his success being attributed to his having invoked the aid of St Thomas Becket the Martyr; but the defendant had also undergone a three-day crash course in combat immediately prior to the trial. From Norwich in East Anglia in 1285 we have the case of Walter Eghe, who was hung for theft. When he was cut down from the gallows and taken to be buried, it was soon apparent that he was not dead. He took sanctuary in a church and received a royal pardon, his wondrous recovery being taken as a divine sign of his innocence. (Walter was more fortunate than a thief hung in Oxfordshire in 1335: not fully despatched by the hangman, he was buried alive.) In 1291 William Crak was hanged for multiple homicide (thirteen murders) in Swansea in south Wales. He invoked the aid of Thomas Cantiloupe before a heavy rope with a slip knot was placed around his neck and the ladder was quickly removed ‘so that he would die at once’23 (by the breaking of his neck). When strung up, William fouled himself, as victims usually did, and went limp. He was carried to church on the ladder used to hang him. His face was black and swollen; his eyes protruded; his neck, throat, nose and mouth were bloody; and his tongue was livid and thick, having been lacerated by his teeth. Yet St Thomas Cantiloupe brought him back to life. This St Thomas was bishop of Hereford until his death in 1252. He was the nearest thing to a medieval liberal, and takes the credit for saving a number of guilty offenders on the gallows. Another of his successful interventions took place in Lincoln in 1291, responding once again to a gallows appeal.
Prison walls were no guarantee against saintly assistance to incarcerated parties. In early twelfth-century England, the Bishop of Ely wrote of one Bricstan, wrongly imprisoned (or so he believed) for financial crimes. Five months after his arrest, in a well-organized and carefully co-ordinated gaolbreak, Saints Benedict, Ethelreda and Sexburga sprang Bricstan from his prison cell. In Angevin times, a shoemaker by the name of Robert the Putrid escaped purgation of ordeal by water when, having prayed to St Edmund, he offered the saint (i.e. the Church) his best ox as a quid pro quo; consequently, his name miraculously failed to materialize on the prepared trial list. In 1170, to settle a case of debt and violence, one Ailward was made to undergo ordeal by water. He failed and was mutilated: his eyes were put out and he was castrated. ‘Fortunately for Ailward, his devotion to St Thomas at length restored him to wholeness, although his new testicles were small and one of his eyes no longer multi-coloured but black.’24 God’s mercy could go against public order. One Oxford pickpocket was sentenced to death to general applause. However, the intervention of some monks, praying to the relics of St Ecgwin, successfully entreated the saint’s help to save the thief from hanging.
In times of calamity and desperation, people looked to the heavens for help. Unsurprisingly, then, the turbulent fourteenth century saw an explosion of thaumuturgical interventions, providing sufficient material for a book-length study of this phenomenon, Michael Goodich’s fascinating Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Cen
tury (1995). The author notes how ‘in times of great fear and distress, the innocent suppliant appeals for divine aid against the exigencies of a violent and unjust world’.25 Charged with murder in 1323, the innocent Bernardo Nuctii made a vow to renounce all sin to Nicholas of Tolentino; he made good his escape past seven guards. At Die in 1390, the execution ladder broke causing the horses to flee in panic; the condemned man was offered a second trial and was freed. In 1384 a crowd of three hundred spectators watched a forger make a sacred vow before being hung from the bridge at Lansberg; he fell into the water and despite being bound hand and foot managed to reach safety. A similar story is told from Châteauneuf in 1395, where a bound child killer was sentenced to drowning in a river; however, she resurfaced on a sandbank with her hands miraculously freed. More often than not, though, it was the innocent who were saved by divine involvement.
Occasionally, heavenly aid did not go quite far enough. In 1369 in the north-western French city of Le Mans, Guillaume le Breton survived several attempts to hang him. At each attempt the halter broke and Guillaume made a lengthy drop to the ground. This was taken as a sign of celestial aid, so Guillaume was spared the gallows and transported back to prison on a carriage. During the return journey the carriage was involved in a serious accident in which Guillaume was critically hurt; as a result of this, he died soon after in his cell. The physician attending him put cause of death down to injuries sustained in the falls from the gibbet and in the carriage crash.
