Conclusion

While actual rates of violence in the Middle Ages are difficult to calculate, it is clear that fear of violence escalated over the course of the period. The reasons for this are manifold, including among others the entrenchment of a crusading mentality, the development of R.

I. Moore's ‘a persecuting society', the implementation of the Inquisition by the church and the fear mongering over heresy that accompanied it, as well as a sense of crisis heightened by the Black Death, environmental change, and an almost constant state of war. All of these factors led to a distinct sense that violence was on the rise. As K. B. MacFarlane has observed, in England escalating panic is registered in the ‘preambles to statutes, the denunciations of moralists and reformers, and the ex parte statements of those engaged in litigation', painting an image of the Middle Ages as one of ‘bloodshed and injustice'.^{^[655]} The benefits of widespread fear were not lost on late medieval government. Municipalities across Europe grasped the opportunity to expand their powers into the realm of social control, by criminalising a wide variety of social misbehaviours, such as gambling, eavesdropping, scolding and vagrancy, as well as a variety of sexual and moral offences. Monarchies, too, expanded their armoury of weapons to preserve the social order. In France, Claude Gauvard sees late medieval fear as an essential tool employed by ambitious monarchs to justify paternalistic and oppressive legislation, paving the way for the crisis in order of the early modern era.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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