If definitions of ‘violence' are slippery, the concepts of crime and law offer some purchase.

Law is not just about controlling or repressing violence (indeed, sometimes quite the opposite), but about circumscribing and defin­ing it. The term ‘crime' entered Middle English, via Old French, from the Latin ‘cernere', meaning to discern or to determine.^[303] In itself, it presents many problems, but its chief conceptual purchase lies in the sense that this is an offence to be dealt with through public law.

A fairly standard narrative argues that as polities coalesced and became more powerful over the course of the Middle Ages, so the law and legal mechanisms which underpinned political structures of power became more efficient and effective. This is a story both of legislation and of jurisdiction. Growing states shored up their power through expanded legislative effort and, so it is often assumed, the distribution of jurisdiction reflected these shifts towards central power. However, recent historiography has tended fruitfully to complicate such narratives. The idea that law is straightforwardly intertwined with the growth of states has been disrupted, both by showing political developments to have been complex and multidirectional, and by demonstrating that law can work for many different parties - it is not always the tool of those in power, and nor was it always perceived as such.

It is nevertheless striking that there is a dramatic shift in tone between the historiography of the early Middle Ages and that of the later Middle Ages. Work on crime and law for the early medieval period has often been particularly receptive to anthropological perspectives, and taken a processual approach to dispute resolution.^[304] Work on crime and law for the later medieval period, by contrast, continues to ask questions about institutional developments, and to focus more explicitly on the formal legalism of cases of crime and violence.^[305]

An account now of the relationship between law and violence must do both these things: it should be processual, acknowledging the negotiating function of law and conflict resolution as socially embedded; and it should acknowledge its relationship with power and the coercive function of law.

This chapter is about the ways in which law, violence and power were intertwined. It examines the ways in which those relationships became, if anything, more complex over the course of the Middle Ages. Although it rejects straightforward chronologies, it is nevertheless organised around the rediscovery of Justinian's Digest of Roman law in late eleventh-century Italy and the subsequent emphasis on Roman law in medieval Europe: by any measure, this was a pivotal moment.