Edexcel GCSE History

The nature of crime

Medieval England recognised three broad kinds of crime. Crimes against the person included murder, manslaughter and assault. Crimes against property included theft, burglary and arson. Crimes against authority were offences against the king or the state, the most serious being treason, and rebellion against the king's rule.

Some offences were treated differently by the people who committed them than by the law. Poaching, hunting animals such as deer or rabbits on land owned by the king or a lord, is the usual example of a social crime: an act the law punished but that many communities did not regard as wrong. A peasant who took a rabbit was feeding a family, and the animals could not easily be said to belong to anyone, so a villager who poached was rarely shunned by neighbours.

Changing definitions after the Norman Conquest

The Norman Conquest of 1066 changed what counted as a crime. William I set aside large areas as royal forests, and the Forest Laws governed them. Hunting the king's deer, cutting down trees or clearing land in the forest became offences, even where villagers had used that land for generations. Penalties were severe and could include mutilation and, for the worst offences, death. Poaching therefore changed from a minor wrong into a serious crime, which shows how a new ruler's interests could redefine criminal activity.

The Normans also introduced the murdrum fine, a payment demanded from a local community when a Norman was found killed and the killer was not produced. It was a response to Norman fears of attack by the conquered population.

Law enforcement

Policing in the Middle Ages depended on communities, not on a paid force. Everyone was expected to take part in keeping the peace, and the community as a whole was held responsible for its members.

• Under the Anglo-Saxons, people were grouped into tithings of about ten households. Each member of a tithing was responsible for the good behaviour of the others, and if one of them committed a crime the others had to bring him to court or pay a fine. The Normans kept the system, which became known as frankpledge.
• The hue and cry was the duty to raise a shout when a crime was witnessed and for everyone who heard it to join in chasing the criminal. A village that failed to respond could be fined.
• The parish constable, an unpaid local man chosen for a year, became the main officer of the law in villages and towns by the thirteenth century. He arrested suspects and brought them before the courts.
• The sheriff represented the king in each county, and manor courts, hundred courts and royal judges heard cases at different levels.

Because enforcement was local, it depended heavily on whether a community trusted its neighbours and on how far the nobles and the king could impose their will. A stranger or a person with no ties to a village could expect little sympathy.

Punishment

The aim of medieval punishment was deterrence and retribution. The authorities wanted to frighten other people out of committing the same crime, and to make the offender pay for it. Prison was used mainly to hold people awaiting trial, not as a punishment in its own right.

Fines were the most usual penalty for minor offences. Corporal punishments, which inflict pain on the body, included whipping and the stocks and pillory, where offenders were held in public to be mocked and pelted. Mutilation, such as cutting off a hand, was used for some thefts and forest offences. Capital punishment, usually hanging, was used for serious crimes including murder, and for felonies such as theft of goods above a certain value. Traitors suffered a worse death, with the aim of terrifying others.

Wergild

In Anglo-Saxon England the wergild was a payment owed to the family of a person who had been killed or injured. The amount depended on the status of the victim, so a nobleman's life was worth far more than a peasant's. It let a feud end with compensation instead of further killing. After the Conquest the Normans moved towards punishing the offender through the king's courts, with fines paid to the crown and more use of corporal and capital punishment, and the wergild ended.

The Church and the law in the early thirteenth century

The Church had great influence on crime and punishment, and the best-known examples come from the early thirteenth century.

Sanctuary

A person who had committed a crime could run to a church and claim sanctuary. They could not be arrested while they stayed there, and after forty days they had to either surrender to the law or confess and leave the country by an assigned route, swearing never to return. Sanctuary reflected the Church's authority and its belief in mercy, and in practice it saved some people from execution while also letting some criminals escape.

Benefit of Clergy

Churchmen could be tried in Church courts, which gave lighter punishments than the king's courts and could not order death. This was called Benefit of Clergy. A man could claim it by showing he could read, because the ability to read was taken as the sign of a clergyman, and since few people outside the Church could read this protected many who were not priests.

Trial by ordeal

Where guilt was uncertain, a suspect might be tested by trial by ordeal, which relied on a belief that God would reveal the truth. In the ordeal of hot iron, the accused carried a heated iron a set distance and the hand was bandaged; if the wound was healing cleanly after a few days, they were innocent. In the ordeal of cold water, the accused was lowered into a pool, and floating was taken as a sign of guilt, because the water was thought to reject the guilty. Priests blessed and supervised the ordeals.

Trial by ordeal ended in 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council, a great meeting of the Church, forbade priests to take part in it. Without a priest to bless the test, it could not work as a judgement of God. England replaced it with trial by jury, in which a group of local men decided on guilt, and the Church's decision shows how far the Church could shape the law. There was also a growing doubt about whether the ordeals really found the truth.