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.

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