Conclusion
The study of violent crime often tempts statistical analyses, and here again the source material is fraught with challenges.[365] A period can look particularly violent from the records simply because legal mechanisms were more highly developed or because political imperatives were stimulating a crackdown on crime as a demonstration of power.[366] An instructive debate arose between Esther Cohen and Claude Gauvard in this respect.
Cohen used the Parisian Chatelet records of 1389-92 to argue that the disruption of the Hundred Years War led to a surge in crimes against property, with a comparative diminution of crimes of violence against persons.[367] Gauvard critiqued the conclusions by pointing out the problems inherent when only a single register survives. Furthermore, the registers were compiled by a judicial system in the midst of reforming itself and keen to demonstrate that it could be tough on crime particularly against property, a subject about which people were particularly fearful in the context of the Hundred Years War.[368] The registers were to be examples of the types of punishment meted out, rather than systematically to transcribe prosecutions. They tell us more about the judicial system and the shifts within it.If one turns to what one might broadly term ‘legislative' evidence, or the normative evidence of law-making rather than the application of law, any conclusions must be tempered by the aspirational nature of these sources. They represent ideals and hopes, rather more than practice. Likewise, they often present a falsely static picture in a world in which legal mechanisms and frameworks were in fact changing far more rapidly than the surviving documentation indicates.[369]
Understanding law is integral to understanding violence. It accounts for the bulk of our sources (at least for the late medieval period); and it provides a critical way of thinking about violence, both for medieval contemporaries, and for historians. Law was not simply a hegemonic process, attempting to limit and replace violence with something more formalised and state-centric. Rather, it was a process of negotiation, mediation and compromise. And in this sense, it was much like interpersonal violence itself. As so often, the boundaries are blurred.