Homicide and Murder

The courts tended towards leniency also in cases of homicide. In late medieval England, acquittal was the norm. Conviction rates for homicide ranged between 12.5 per cent and 21 per cent.^{^[646]} On the continent, the figures were much higher.

For example, fourteenth-century Milan boasted an 80 per cent conviction rate.^{^[647]} Despite the broad disparity in rates, the actual numbers of those punished remained roughly the same. The distinction lay in the law's approach to flight. The vast majority of murderers in the Middle Ages fled the scene immediately after the crime and were never heard from again.^{^[648]} The English reacted to flight by outlawing the accused. That is, rather than trying him in his absence, after a series of four unanswered summonses the accused was ousted from the protections of the law. Because of this process, English conviction rates do not include outlaws. Roman law, on the other hand, treated flight as a confession of guilt and proceeded to trial and conviction in the perpetrator's absence, inflating continental conviction rates.

The predominance of flight speaks to the nature of medieval law enforcement. Across Europe, law enforcement was typically communal and unpaid: only some of the Italian city-states enjoyed genuine police forces with salaried officers. For most of those who fled, evading the legal consequences for one's actions entailed moving outside one's home community, either permanently or until tempers cooled and memories faded. Further, a whole host of ‘loopholes' existed to escape the death penalty. Throwing oneself on the mercy of the church, a confessed felon might claim sanctuary and then abjure the realm. Affluent felons might also pay their way out of trouble by applying for a pardon or letter of remission; while such an endeavour was costly, it resulted in royal protection from further prosecution.

Compensation to the family of the victim, while formally abolished in most places after the thirteenth century, still existed informally and was tolerated by the courts across Europe. Indeed, in Siena, the offender could secure an instrument of peace (instrumentum pacis), a notarised document signed by the injured person and his heirs, in which they promise not to seek revenge. A felon might also convince the court that he was a member of a religious order by shaving a tonsure or reading a passage of the Bible. This permitted him to claim privilegiumfori (in England, benefit of clergy), that is, the right to have his case transferred before an ecclesiastical tribunal where capital punishment was not an option. In England, a confessed felon might also turn approver, negotiating a lesser plea by abandoning his former accomplices. What is relevant here is the simple fact that most homicides in medieval Europe went unpunished. Presumably having murderers wandering freely about in medieval society did little to diminish rates of violence.

For those who stood trial, there was still a good chance of acquittal. In general, medieval men and women did not often see death as a fitting punishment for homicide. Far too many homicides resulted from a ‘fair fight'. Such a death was better punished through indictment and time spent in prison awaiting trial than through the death penalty. Moreover, the legal definitions of ‘self-defence' would have transformed most reasonable men into cowards; thus the popular imagination supported an expanded version. Conviction was significantly more likely to be the outcome when the crime was premeditated, marked in England by the use of the term ‘murder' as opposed to ‘homicide'. Homicide convictions in fourteenth-century Venice nicely document this trend: 49 per cent of homicides of passion ended in conviction, while 85 per cent of premeditated murders did.^{^[649]}

Most medieval killings were a product ofhot blood and close living conditions.

However, bloodfeud or vendetta also played a key role, especially in Scandinavian and Mediterranean cultures. The cycle of violence prompted by the obligation to defend one's family honour led to stringent regulation of vendetta by regional law codes. In Iceland, the law permitted licit revenge up until the time of the next Althing (the parliament). However, the law restricted the targets of revenge to those who actually carried out the offence. If an individual avenged a homicide within the family, he needed the evidence to prove in court that his actions were lawful; otherwise, the avenger would be charged with homicide.^{^[650]} The overall impact of rigorous legal control of bloodfeud was meaningful. Despite the ‘social legitimacy of violence' in Iceland, the ultraviolence of the saga literature does not seem to have been reflected in society.^{^[651]} Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Italian citystates struggled with a variety of legislation in an effort to contain violence to the offender and the victim. A common approach was to pass laws penalising secondary vendetta, that is, the taking of revenge against anyone other than the original aggressor. For example, in Florence, those who engaged in secondary vendetta, targeting the aggressor's brother or an unde, found themselves sentenced to decapitation, their property forfeited to the family of the victim.^{^[652]} As Trevor Dean explains, penalties against secondary vendetta do not imply that primary vendetta was ‘tolerated and sanctioned'. Statutes of Camerino and Spoleto, for example, make it clear that revenge killing of the principal aggressor was punished according to the ordinary penalty for the crime.^{^[653]}

In this climate, serial killings were an aberration. Yet, the exploits of Gilles de Rais, a Breton nobleman famed for being one of Joan of Arc's early companions, reminds us that sociopaths are not exclusively a product of the modern world.

His 1440 trial at Nantes revealed years of depraved criminal activity, in which he kidnapped and sexually abused over one hundred boys between the ages of 8 and 16, then ruthlessly murdered them, dismembered their corpses, and ordered his servants to bury the remains surreptitiously. Lia Ross has compared Gilles's perverse behaviour to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, one of twentieth-century America's most notorious serial killers, who raped, murdered and dismembered sixteen boys and men between 1987 and 1991. In a detailed psychological analysis of Gilles, she explains that ‘[f]or both killers the victim was a dehumanized, aesthetic object to be collected'.^{^[654]} At his trial, Gilles blamed his nature on his upbringing, warning fathers ‘to bring children up strictly, not too delicately dressed or accustomed to idleness'.³³ The various historians who have endeavoured to make sense of Gilles's actions have pointed to the medieval world's rigid social hierarchy that both facilitated dehumanisation and led to abuses of power, particularly among the medieval knightly society where violence was a way of life.³⁴ Nevertheless, it seems clear that Gilles was in no way typical of medieval criminals.

Of all violent acts, self-killing was the most reprehensible. Stirred by biblical interpretations of Judas's hanging, medieval Christianity identified suicide as an act of despair, in itself a form of apostasy. As a result, the church denied church burial to those individuals who took their own lives. Traditional burial rites for suicides include the punishment and exorcism of the body, indicating that popular ideals linked self-killing to diabolical intervention. In thirteenth-century Lille, the law dictated the body of a female suicide should be burned, while the body of a male suicide was dragged to the gallows and hanged. In Zurich, the law punished the body according to the nature of the suicide's death. Those who died by stabbing had a wooden wedge driven into their skulls; those who drowned were buried in the sand 5 feet from the water's edge; those who leapt to their deaths were buried under a heap of stones with big stones on their head, stomach and feet.³⁵ In England, not law but custom encouraged the burial of a suicide at the crossroads, with a stake driven through the chest pinning the corpse to the ground.

The intention behind this bizarre rite was to prevent the spirit of the dead from reentering society and wreaking further havoc. If the stake did not imprison the spirit, the crossroads might encourage it to choose the wrong road and thus harass the inhabitants of some other town. While the justification for doing so varied, the property of the dead was typically confiscated into the king's treasury, depriving a suicide's family of future support. In Normandy, and perhaps also England, authorities took it a step further by destroying the property altogether: burning fields, cutting and uprooting vines, felling woods.³⁶ Normally reserved for treasonous acts, the destruction of the land ensured the utter devastation of the suicide's reputation, and also his family's.

the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Mental-Historical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Response (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 359-402, at 377.

33 Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, p. 21.

34 For a discussion of knightly violence, see Chapter 21 in this volume.

35 Georges Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

36 Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, vol ii, The Curse of Self-Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 57.

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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

Homicide and Murder

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