Murder & the law in medieval England

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Medieval England had only one punishment for murder: death. In fact, death was a kind of one-size-fits-not-all-but-a-lot punishment. It was just the right size for poaching, theft, heresy, and petty treason. 

Petty treason? That was when, say, a servant killed their master or mistress, a wife her husband, or a priest his superior. If you owed a person “faith and obedience,” killing them was (of course) treason.  

Big-league treason? The penalty for that was a much more painful death. Long-term imprisonment wasn’t a prominent item on the punishment menu. 

But I’ve derailed us. Let’s stick with murder. Death being the only possible penalty doesn’t give us the full picture; most murderers, or alleged murderers, were never convicted.

Very nearly semi-relevant photo: Foxglove. It can be poisonous, so if you’re looking to kill someone . . .

A note 

I’ll be leaning heavily on the wonderful Medieval Murder Maps here. It’s a treasure trove and not limited to information about murders. If you’re interested in the medieval period, go rummage around. It’ll be worth your time, I promise.

 

How common was murder? 

In the 1340s, Oxford had an estimated (emphasis on estimated) murder rate of around 110 per 100,000 people. In fourteenth-century London, that was between 36 and 52 per 100,000. In 2020 Britain, it was 1 per 100,000. 

A BBC article explains the high rates by saying that the king’s justice would’ve been seen as too slow, too corrupt, or too both to count on, so arguments easily escalated into fights, and sharp instruments were always close to hand. If no other weapon was handy–and everyday tools could be lethal–just about everyone carried a small knife to eat with, to work with, to defend themselves with, to look cool on the street with. If that’s not enough, the population that skewed heavily to the young and (presumably) hot-headed and the culture that placed a high value on honor, which is a fragile beast that wants constant defending.

Figure in also that wounds which wouldn’t be fatal today would’ve been then. 

 

Prosecution

So okay, let’s say you murdered someone. Oops. You were now officially in deep shit–unless of course you were rich and powerful, in which case the shit wouldn’t be anywhere near as deep.

You could be brought to trial in two different ways: in the first, a jury indicted you and the coroner ordered the sheriff to arrest you and keep you in jail until you could be tried. Or until you died of the miserable conditions in prison, whichever came first. 

The second way was if someone launched what was called an appeal–a sort of private effort to bring a person to justice. A relative of the crime’s victim could do this, or an accomplice who’d turned king’s or queen’s evidence. (Sorry, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either but it’s all I know about it.) 

An appeal could be launched against the main accused or against accessories. 

Women could only launch an appeal if they’d been raped or if their husbands had been killed.  

Yes, it was a lovely time to live. 

 

But . . .

. . . most people who were accused of murder weren’t put to death for it, so let’s talk about what happened to them.

One group we can peel away either fled or sought sanctuary and abjured the realm.

Fleeing is clear enough. You turned, you ran, you tried never to be seen in the neighborhood again. As far as the coroner was concerned (and I admit I’m guessing here), that made you somebody else’s problem. In an era before CCTV, before anyone carried identification, it might not have been hard to disappear, although it was probably hard to eat and put a roof over your head once you’d cut yourself loose from the social structure. But if you weren’t fussy about eating, or if you had ready cash and connections, you might manage. Still, I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems of disappearing if your flight took you through villages and hamlets where a stranger stood out like a fluorescent zebra. People did travel–what else were all those pilgrimages about?–but you’d hardly be invisible. 

Or you could forget all that, embrace your fluorescent zebrahood, and become an outlaw. 

So that’s fleeing. Seeking sanctuary and abjuring the realm, though, needs translation. By the fifteenth century, sanctuary held a recognized place in English common law, and it came in two flavors: taking time-limited sanctuary in a parish church (that was also called taking church) followed by abjuration of the realm and time-unlimited refuge in a chartered sanctuary.

If you took sanctuary in a parish church, you’d need to count the days. In most cases, you had forty before your claim of sanctuary ran out. After that you either surrendered or abjured–translation: renounced–the realm, which meant you confessed and gave up whatever protection the king’s peace offered, along with your rights as a citizen. Then you’d negotiate with the sheriff and coroner over what port you’d leave from and how long it would take you to get there. If you detoured off the highway, you could be killed, and once you got to the port you had to take the first available ship. 

Which assumed you could pay for your passage–or I guess convince a captain that you were worth hiring. 

Then you went into exile. Forever. Or until you were pardoned or came back without a pardon, hoping to be (a) forgiven or (b) not noticed. Or mistaken for a fluorescent zebra.

Chartered sanctuaries first came into being around 1400: a limited number of religious houses were granted the right to shelter felons from secular justice and debtors from the creditors who were trying to have them imprisoned. The felons, at least, had to confess their crimes, often in detail, and swear to keep the peace, follow the rules, and play nice. 

After that, they couldn’t set foot outside the chartered sanctuary’s precincts without risking arrest, and they had to find someplace to live within them–not to mention a way to support themselves, and since sanctuaries weren’t marketplaces or red-hot centers of business, ways to make money were scarce. So this was either for felons who could pay their way or for the ones who only planned on staying a few days and then disappearing into the night. 

By the time Henry VIII dissolved England’s monasteries, the number of people claiming sanctuary in either form had narrowed down to almost no one. Sorry, but I’m not sure why.

 

Prison

If you were accused of murder–or anything else while we’re at it–you’d have had good reason to flee: people died in medieval prisons while they were waiting to be tried. In Newgate Prison, the coroner recorded some prisoners as having died of starvation. Others died a ”rightful death and not of any felony.” That would’ve meant typhus (called jail fever), malaria, cold, or infected wounds.

To point out the screamingly obvious, if they died of neglect, starvation, and poor conditions, no one was at fault.   

If you’re inclined to think harsh punishment leads to less crime, do consider the middle ages.

Prisons were divided by class and by cash. The keepers could and did demand fees for admission (yes, seriously; otherwise no doubt that have been mobbed by people wanting to get in) and for release. They charged for food, bedding, and heating. In London, prisoners who could pay enough were kept on the Master’s side and the upper floors. Below them were the Common’s side, below ground level. The poorest prisoners (I’ll go out on a limb and guess those were the people who couldn’t pay for their admission) went into a common chamber. Anyone the keepers thought might escape was fettered.

 

Numbers

But we haven’t accounted for everyone who was accused of murder and not put to death, and to figure out what happened to the ones who didn’t flee or seek sanctuary, the makers of the Murder Maps combed through the “records of gaol delivery.” 

Gaol? That’s British for jail. And delivery? Starting in 1330, jails had to be “delivered,” which meant all the prisoners tried and the jail emptied, three (or possibly two; do you really care?) times a year. 

Of the people tried for murder, 90% to 95% were (a) acquitted, (b) transferred to an ecclesiastical prison, or (3) pardoned by the monarch, leaving 5 – 10% who were actually hanged. 

If you’re in that 5 – 10%, that’s not much comfort, but it does soften our image of the era.

 

Acquittals, priests and pardons

I couldn’t find any numbers that would let me take even a wild and irresponsible guess at how many people were acquitted. I’ve always assumed not many were, but that’s based on no information whatsoever. Don’t mistake it for a fact-related guess. 

Once we set that group aside, we’re left with two final groups to peel away; priests and people who were pardoned. 

If you were a priest, you could be convicted in the king’s court but only the church had the power to punish you, and the church didn’t have capital punishment, so you’d want to move your holy hind end into the church system. 

All well and good, but how was a court to decide, in the absence of centralized records, who was a priest and who was just pretending to be? Why, by asking them to do something priestlike: after 1351 (or from the 15th through 18th centuries, according to another source), anyone claiming benefit of clergy was asked to read psalm 51 in Latin.  If he could read it, he was a priest. Who else could read Latin, after all? It became known as the neck verse: it saved your neck. Some criminals were said to have memorized it, because you could never tell when it would come in handy. 

This only worked if you were male–at least until 1629, when it was extended to women, although women still couldn’t be priests. The only way to understand that is to accept that the law and religion follow a logic we mere mortals can’t always make sense of.

And according to one source, it worked only once: that first use earned you a brand on the thumb.   

Pardons came from the monarch, who had the power to pardon a person for any reason or for none. If you were wealthy enough, you could buy a one. If you were well connected (which pretty much implies wealthy, but let’s not quibble), you or your supporters could plead for one–say because you fought in one of the king’s wars. Or you could also be pardoned for agreeing to serve in a current one.

If you were pregnant, you could have your execution postponed, or sometimes reduced to a fine. Note: this did not work well if you were male. You’d have an easier time learning Latin.

Finally, you could give evidence against other people and if they were convicted you got to go into exile. That was called turning king’s approval. The bargain-basement option for people who couldn’t get pregnant and didn’t have the money or connections to wangle a pardon.

*

Unconnected to that: it’s deeply weird to be writing about medieval England while the US–my native country–sinks ever deeper into autocracy and (I don’t use the word lightly) fascism under the most bizarre leader elected in my (or anyone else’s) lifetime; as federal employees snatch immigrants and people who kind of look like they might be immigrants off the street and deport them to wherever without warrant or trial; as the people of Gaza starve; as–oh, hell, I could go on for pages but you know what’s happening out there. We all do. The world dances on the edge of disaster and those of us who can, go on leading our lives. Writing about this stuff is part of my life. 

Forgive me, though, if I take a moment to acknowledge what’s happening out in the real world. Because none of us can afford to look away, thinking our safety is guaranteed. We can’t afford to be silent. Our voices are small but we can’t know in advance what will make a difference. 

Be noisy, my friends. No effort is wasted.

In fear, in grief, in love,

Ellen

38 thoughts on “Murder & the law in medieval England”

  1. Always an enjoyable education with you Ellen. Another option in English law came from the Welsh laws of Hywel Dda (Howell the Good) which allowed the murder victim’s family to claim a price for the death from the murderer thus allowing the crime to be absolved. Hugs

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      • On the subject of English/Welsh law, the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters cover some of it. I don’t know how much author’s licence she may have used and sadly she’s no longer with us, but I recall that she showed Welsh law as being rather gentler in its ways than English, less resort to capital punishment, for instance. The setting is Shropshire, during the war between Mathilda and Stephen, so turbulent times. The books might interest anyone with a liking for well-written historical mysteries.
        Jeannie

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        • Thanks. I can testify that they’re well written but as a fiction writer myself I leery about trusting fiction writers on factual issues. I know some historical novelists and they’re passionate about the period they write in, and I love the work of creating a lost time and allowing us to live in it. But hey, we’re fiction writers. I don’t write historical fiction, but I do know that when I depart from fact for some reason, either deliberately or because I think I already know something and I’m wrong, I don’t leave a footnote to warn people.

          Having said all of that, they’re good reading. And she could well be right about the Welsh law.

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          • Ellis Peters under her real name wrote a quartet of books about the brothers of Gwynedd. They are pretty factual and my favourite historical read as they include my hero Llewelyn, prince of wales, at a time when the border barons used Welsh or English law to suit themselves. Hugs

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          • Last one I promise.
            Laws of Hywel Dda
            Posted on September 1, 201313 Comments

            Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) ruled Wales in the early 900s, one of the few Welsh kings to control the entire country. He maintained peace with Wessex, to the point of minting coins in the English city of Chester. His laws were codifications and a consolidation of the common law in Wales at the time (meaning he didn’t create them out of whole cloth), and provided the foundation for Welsh law until the Norman conquest, when many were abrogated by Edward I. A surviving manuscript (from the thirteenth century) is in the National Library of Wales. It was a ‘pocket’ book, designed for lawyers to carry around in their scrip, rather than left on a library shelf.

            You can view it here: http://www.llgc.org.uk/?id=lawsofhyweldda

            The laws are divisible into several categories:

            Laws of the Court
            These laws set down the rights of the king and rulers of Wales, their order of precedence, ranks, titles, and obligations. It introduces the concepts of insults and fines, according to whom an offence was given. The law used payment as a form of punishment, rather than death, dismemberment, etc., which the Normans instituted in England in 1066. In that respect, Welsh law was similar to Anglo-Saxon law and it is the system of Saxon and Welsh lawyers, infighting, and suing one another that provided the precedence for the modern English/American system, rather than the feudal Norman one.

            Laws of the Country

            This category was further divided into laws of women, land law, and surety and contracts. Women had more rights and were of higher status than in many European groups (e.g. Norman). For example, a woman was entitled to compensation if her husband beat her for anything other than: “giving away something which she was not entitled to give away, for being found with another man, or for wishing a blemish on her husband’s beard.” (the final article indicates cultural differences between then and now) She also had the right to divorce him under certain circumstances, including if he was unfaithful to her. http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/laws_hywel_dda.html

            Hywel Dda laws
            Marriage was considered an agreement, not a holy sacrament.
            Divorce was permitted by common consent.
            There was no punishment for theft – if the sole purpose was to stay alive.
            Illegitimate children received the same rights as legitimate sons and daughters.
            You were allowed to pick up three things if you found them in the road – a horseshoe, a nail and a penny. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-18784782
            Further laws include the consequences for homicide, theft, and fire (usually involving payments to the victim) and setting the ‘value’ of animals, both wild and tame, and for trees, equipment and parts of the human body. “The value of a part of the body was fixed, thus a person causing the king to lose an eye would pay the same as if he had caused a villein to lose an eye.” He would also have to pay sarhad, however, meaning “the payment that was due to a person in the event of an insult or injury, and this varied according to the status of the person concerned, for example the queen or the edling’s sarhad was one third that of the king.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyfraith_Hywel

            Welsh law was far more humane than Norman law, which was undoubtedly the reason the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, told Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Prince of Wales, that the laws were inspired by the devil. He was referring, in particular, to the Welsh law that allowed illegimitate sons to inherit land from their father, provided he acknowledged them.

            TagsArchbishop of Canterbury, dark ages, Hywel Dda, laws, middle ages, Saxons

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      • ‘The Laws of Hywel Dda’ is a long-established descriptive term for native Welsh legal texts which were traditionally regarded as having been codified in the 10th century by King Hywel ‘the Good’ of Deheubarth, effectively ruler of all Wales under the overlordship of Athelstan of England. Copies of the laws survive in some 30 medieval manuscripts, written both in Welsh and Latin, nearly all of which display unique textual features, and most of which are kept at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

        This small parchment volume, known at the ‘Boston manuscript’, is written in Middle Welsh and was the oldest Welsh manuscript offered in a public sale since the Hendregadredd Manuscript was sold to the National Library of Wales, again at Sotheby’s, in 1923. The Boston Manuscript was sold by the Massachusetts Historical Society, and appears to have been donated to that Society by Welsh emigrants early in the 19th century.

        The main part of the manuscript shows signs of having been written by three scribes in south-west Wales, possibly in Ceredigion, in the mid-14th century. Further texts and gatherings were added to the original work during the remainder of that century, possibly by an itinerant lawyer or judge in the Welsh Marches, where the Welsh laws were still cited in civil cases following the Conquest of 1282.

        Native Welsh law became obsolete following the 1535 and 1542 Acts of Union, with legal texts then becoming the objects of antiquarian interest. This manuscript re-appeared at the town of Brecon at the end of the 17th century, when it received the scholarly attention of the Oxford-based antiquary and polymath Edward Lhuyd. Its next re-appearance was in the records of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1831, where it was regarded as being ‘very valuable’, although ‘of no importance in an historical view’! Few readers of Welsh were able to access this manuscript during subsequent years.

        The repatriation of this Welsh national treasure was made possible by a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the help of the Friends of the National Libraries.

        Item Provenance
        Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 2012, lot 23.

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  4. Hywel DdHywel Ddaa called a great assembly of lawyers and leaders from all over his kingdom to draw up a unified legal code for Wales in Whitland.

    These laws were based on compassion rather than punishment and used a lot of common sense. They differed greatly from the laws in other countries, especially regarding the rights of women.

    The laws depended on the social status of the person concerned, and divided Welsh society into five classes:
    * rulers – including the king over his kingdom and the lords over their
    lands;
    * the free Welsh – including both the aristocracy and the yeomen;
    * Welsh serfs;
    * foreigners resident in Wales;
    * slaves.

    Status

    Women

    Women were treated far more fairly under Welsh law than elsewhere. For example, if a couple separated before the end of seven years of marriage then the wife would get an amount of the property owned by the couple in line with her status by birth. If the marriage broke up after that time then the woman was entitled to half of it.

    Crime

    Murder was regarded as an offence against the family rather than against society or the state. It was normally dealt with by a payment to the family of the deceased, with the amount dependent on the social status of the victim.
    Assault was dealt with in a similar fashion but it only applied to the upper classes – any serf who struck a free man was liable to have the offending limb removed.

    A high value was placed on compensation for any breach of the law, and it was particularly detailed for the loss of a limb.
    The body of a free man was valued at 3780 pennies – or 63 cows. Each hand, eye, foot, lip, and nose was worth 480 pennies, but the value of other limbs depended on various factors.

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    • Thanks. I’ve read about similar cost-based sets of laws, although not the Welsh one, and the idea of balancing the death of or injury to a person against money has always struck me as bizarre, and all the more so when they start writing the menu: offence against and social standing of the injured party in one column, price on the other. In doing that, the law reinforces the society’s class divisions, but what did I expect? So does ours in its less obvious way.

      At about that point I have to remind myself that the system does actually make sense. This is about the family or individual carrying on after the loss of a member or a limb. The guilty party pays in a currency that’s actually useful to them, something our system hasn’t found a way to do. But I’m a product of my time and place and I can’t entirely get past the strangeness of it.

      Again, thanks.

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  5. Dear Ellen,
    I confess I’m at a loss to understand what’s going on. Yes, I can accept that we are all different, that some people enjoy power, money and the gratification of having and wielding them but I can’t identify with such people, nor can I understand how others are taken in by them. History shows us, over again, that despots cannot be trusted, that revolution is a transfer of power, not a gift of liberation for the oppressed. Martin Niemöller’s words in “First they came”, have applied throughout history, and many a red hot believer has learned to regret following a leader for their promises of joyful liberation, in the French and Russian revolutions to name only two. And Hitler was democratically elected…
    I’m not American, so can only partly understand the country and its people and, in any case, have to rely on the media for information which is, of course, partial, in both senses. Perhaps people are too trusting of politicians because they can’t quite imagine the depth of dishonesty of which some of them are capable, or maybe it’s wishful thinking? The Brexit campaign and vote comes to mind here. The naïveté of the few people I know who voted “Leave” makes me despair of humanity.
    If I still had children or grandchildren to consider, I suspect I’d be encouraging them to political activism. Efforts at recycling and lowering my consumption are useless in the face of the activities of the rich and powerful, whether individuals or corporations. I confess, I don’t understand their inability to see what they are doing to the planet and their apparent belief that they and their progeny can avoid the consequences. Maybe they don’t care.
    I don’t know whether to post this reply. Is it too pessimistic? Ignore me if you like, I have days when I can’t see through the dark. I hope things can improve for all our sakes.
    Jeannie

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    • One person I’m sort of kind of related to seems to take an outsized pleasure from not just being on the winning side but seeing someone else be on the losing side. I expect medieval warriors were a lot like that. That’s as close as I can come to explaining anything, and it’s not very close. The fact that we’ve got people who are willing to move their own planet closer to destruction–or at least to a state that could destroy their species’ ability to live on it–is mind boggling. But here we are. I’m afraid you’re right about revolutions having a pretty sketchy history, but if one could edge us back from the brink it might be a good gamble, for all its dangers.

      Sorry, that’s not a programmatic suggestion, but me casting a line from a place entirely to close to despair to some other place that I hope might offer hope.

      Thanks for writing.

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    • Thanks. I also do not understand the supporters of these wannabe monarchs. I say that as a native Californian. I am sad and terrified. These supporters live right next to me. Evidence, reason, kindness, even empathy doesn’t make a dent in their support. I now consider myself a citizen of the Republic of California and, with that, mostly only the western half. As Ellen recommends, I am as noisy as an 80-yr old can be with petitions, emails to Congress, local marches and chunks of my slim retirement dollars. For relief I go to London and wander around places where I detect few Americans. I know people who’ve been fired and one scientist in limbo, waiting for the axe to fall and ruin his ability to pay his bills and support his family. He has worked 10-12 hour days for less pay than he could get in the private sector, perhaps promoting some ridiculously expensive drug advertised on TV. These power mongers want to take us back to something like life in the Middle Ages. I am deeply angry but I’ll stop now as this is definitely too dark for Ellen’s fun, informative emails. Oh, I also don’t listen to podcasts. Books are so much better!

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    • Imagine, Jeannie, if even 25 heavy computer users called Microsoft’s bluff this October: if MS stops supporting computers that use Windows 10 or 7, we stop supporting MS, get Linux or use public-access computers only. I *think* it might make a difference.

      Pris cilla King

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      • You may well be right, Priscilla, I have too little knowledge of computers really to understand what you mean, (wrong generation) and rely heavily on my son in law for guidance.
        I try to look past my pessimism. Rationally, I see that we can survive as a species, one way or another, and there would have to be unimaginable disaster for every one of us to disappear. It’s partly age and partly experience of the random cruelty of nature that makes me so negative. People like you encourage me, so thanks!

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  8. Yes, the POOH (Pres Of Our Hearts) of Trumpistan, what a guy, don’t cha lahv big daddy D ?
    He is doing the things he needs to do, to stay in business, constant ballyhoo, absolute contempt for anything remotely callable “ethic”.
    Meanwhile unmarked & masked “agents” swipe the unwanted from the streets or from where ever they hide ; Himmler would like it, I am sure. The rest of POOH’s politics too.
    The major part of the society does not bother.

    I think the true danger for Trumpistan is the economics. Over the last sixty years “the markets” gently looked into another direction when the US was again & again standing banquerotte, and did what any “Third World Shit Hole” (courtesy of POOH, thank you Sir !) would do, start the printing press, throw out gouvernement bonds.
    Bonds only work on trust. Anybody, who trusts the POOH of Trumpistan, has difficulties to find one’s arse in their own trousers.
    Something is changing. The POOH is demented enough to mint the one trillion coin, what would not necessarily solve the underlying problem of trust. I really fear that this “union” will implode like the “Soviet” Union imploded.

    So, yes, it is good when citizens step out and protest. I really wonder if the Marines would attack protesters. If they are worth a shot, they refuse such an order, their General marches over to the White House and arrests the bastard for insurrection. Didn’t the POOH say he wanted to have Generals like Hitler had ? Yeah, they tried to kill him, fashionably late on the party, but at least they tried.
    If the Marines shoot (and massacre citizens, after all they are soldiers, not policemen), then … Given the average Trumpistani’s lust for violence, and arsenal of guns, there goes the King’s peace.

    The only viable way to get rid of POOH before the end of this term would be an insurrection inside “da movement”. People like Vance, Miller could try to bring together enough votes for an impeachment, but this would be a real gamble – I doubt they could pull that of. And seriously : DO you want to say “Hail Vance ” ?

    All I know for sure is that the circle of hell is not trotten out yet.

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    • Himmler would indeed have approved. I’m not sure what the breaking point for the regime will be. Your comment about economics is interesting, as is the question about the marines, or the army, or the National Guard. At this point, I think they’d still follow orders, whatever their reservations, but they’re not the only place to look for armed enforcers. The gun nuts who follow Trump are fairly easy to call out and then deny responsibility for. One just assassinated one Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, along with her husband and their dog, and shot and wounded another, along with their spouse. (I’m not sure in the second couple who was the legislator, so I’m dodging pronouns.)

      Will his own movement turn against him? No impossible but some of them are just plain nuts and others are held in place by either careerism or fear. The question you raise of whether it would be an improvement if they did dump him (no president has ever presented more grounds for impeachment) is a very real one.

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      • I doubt that the legally elected gouvernement of Trumpistan will reach a “breaking point” – with one possible exception, that is when the POOH drops dead while still in office.
        Otherwise there is no “breaking point” in sight. There is no legal opposition, just a geriatric convention called “Democrats”.
        What happens out side on the streets – the POOH made clear that these “Unamerican” “commiethugs” will be met with brutal force ; and all those “policemen” in their military gear, are – in true German fashion – “just following orders”.
        The re-modelling of the society is in full swing, successfully : education (needs nobody !), science, arts – as Hunter S. Thompson once remarked, the scum is always rising.
        All this started well, and will go on for the next three-and-half years in full force – very likely longer, because elections are for the weak, strong men grab power you know where : If the POOH is still alive in four years, he will not leave his office, “da people” will demand that he stays, and who is he to refuse the calling ?
        And there’s always Eric.

        I repeat meself, sorry, but the only real danger for this administration is economy. The indeptedness of the federal state is breathtaking. A private company would have been closed for years and the managers thrown into jail for fraud (“Konkursverschleppung”).
        But notably the “Republicans” give a shit for a balanced account, and throw out money apres nous le deluge. This new “bill” of the POOH will rocket the dept into stellar regions, so that there is no real chance of balancing.
        Again : All this is based on trust. People must trust in that ugly green dollar paper ; if they do not anymore, one can burn that crap in the mantle.
        I mean, it is just a coincidence that European states are moving their gold reserves from Ford Knox back to Europe.

        A real crisis with inflation, unemployment, hunger etc. can likely mark the end of the federal state. GOd alone may know what will happen then, but I fear God’s not interested.
        And the rest of the world has very clearly understood what kind of “man” the POOH is.

        Sorry for the long suada.

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        • It’s not a pretty picture that you paint and I wish I could argue with it. The only part I will argue with is that people demonstrating make no difference. They do. Not always in visible ways, and certainly not because they change Trump’s mind, but they become part of the national conversation, and that matters.

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  9. These are dark times and sometimes they feel bleak but I remain energized by being involved in activism and doing what I can with the privilege I possess. We all hit a wall sometimes with that energy and need to take a break to recharge, however, and reading about Medieval law is just the kind of distraction from contemporary life that I welcome. Thank you for your writing and thank you for being you.

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    • And thank you for what you’re doing. It’s an odd, odd feeling, living in abroad as my home country spirals into chaos and people are arrested and deported without warrant or trail. I’m grateful for my safety and feel even more helpless than I would if I were in the US, where I’d also feel helpless but at least be in a position to do a bit more. I remember from the Vietnam War how helpless we felt after demonstrations grew huge but the war grew ever larger. Most of us, I think, having grown up with the existence of Instant Rice, expected a result from our efforts. Looking back, though, we did make a difference.

      Warmly, Ellen

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