Medieval Europe boasts a long-standing reputation for brutality and disorder.

Nurtured by formative scholars such as Henry Charles Lea and Johan Huizinga, this vision of endemic violence and lawlessness is deeply entrenched in scholarly perceptions of the Middle Ages.

Why medieval Europe was so violent is still a contentious subject. Appropriating theories from psychology, anthropology and sociology, his­torians have crafted a miscellany of incongruous answers to this question. At one end of the spectrum, we have those who see medieval man as having been stunted in his intellectual growth, lacking basic emotional controls. For example, Marc Bloch described violence as the inexorable outcome of med­ieval human nature. Medieval man was an unstable creature whose decisions were irrational and impulsive, and ‘emotionally insensitive to the spectacle of pain'. Homicide resulted from spontaneous heated exchanges in dense living conditions with no forethought or remorse.^[627] J.

At the other end of the spectrum, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish provides a more thoughtful yet narrowly political framework for the ideol­ogy that ‘might makes right'. He sees violence as an integral part of the process of medieval state building. The growth of monarchy was predicated on a monopoly of violence, intended to subdue destabilising violence with the coercive violence of a centralised state. To this end, the state engaged in a policy of terror, sponsoring public spectacles of violence in which punish­ment was stamped on the bodies of those who affronted the state in order to foster loyalty and ultimately deter resistance. Even if built on somewhat faulty underpinnings, Foucault's theory continues to garner strong support among historians.^[630] Only recently have historians begun chipping away at the foundations of Foucault's compelling proposition. Where Foucault imagined a murderous, tyrannical state whose authority feeds on its subjects' fear, study of extant records reveal instead a state heavily reliant on the voluntary cooperation of a broad base of energetic subjects, which favoured concilia­tion over compulsion, where violence was most likely to be enacted on purses rather than bodies. Before the fifteenth century, executions were rare and distinctly unspectacular, and subjects were more bloodthirsty than were their kings, complaining loudly when the crown failed to command the violence justice seemingly demanded.

This vision of a callous and savage era is undermined further by the jarring realisation that the medieval records preclude us from accurately measuring rates of violence.

Third, medieval states did not have the same objectives in mind when creating legal records as do modern authorities; often they do not contain sufficient data to provide appropriate comparisons. For example, medieval case records frequently omit sentencing. Can we comfortably compare medieval indictments with modern sentences? This is especially pertinent when we take into account the cavernous gulf between the theory and the practice of the law. While it was not the state's intention in devising the law, medieval communities regarded indictment as punishment: public pronouncement of one's crimes and time spent in prison awaiting trial was humiliating and financially debilitating, punish­ment enough for most crimes. Conviction was reserved for repeat offenders whose crimes were deemed egregious and highly antisocial. This distinctly medieval attitude led to a low number of actual convic­tions. Criminologists today would consider this a sign of systemic fail­ure. In the Middle Ages, few convictions signalled a system functioning according to the needs of the people.

Finally, adding the final straw to our precarious heap, the works of Philippa Maddern and Claude Gauvard (among others) remind us that the legal records upon which these studies are founded cannot be read straightfor­wardly. Shrewd litigants regularly employed legal fictions, injecting force and arms (vi et armis) into indictments to bring a case into the king's jurisdiction, or inflating the number of violent acts to justify a death sentence. More confusing still, the terminology of crime has changed dramatically over time, so that ‘rape' in the Middle Ages might better be termed ‘elopement' today. Once again, changes of this magnitude make it difficult to compare like entities. The unavoidable conclusion is that no meaningful statistics about overall levels of violence can be drawn from such dissimilar sources.