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Global Lynching And Collective Violence Volume 2 The
Americas And Europe Michael J. Pfeifer Digital Instant
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Author(s): Michael J. Pfeifer
ISBN(s): 9780252041389, 0252041380
Edition: Hardcover
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Year: 2017
Language: english
GLOBAL
LYNCHI
NG
AND
COLLECTI
VE
VIOLENCE
V
OLU
M 2
E
THE
AMERICAS
E
DIT
EDB
Y
AND
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CHAELJ
.PFEI
FER EUROPE
Global Lynching and Collective Violence
volume 2
Global Lynching and
Collective Violence
The Americas and Europe
Volume 2
Edited by Michael J. Pfeifer

© 2017 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pfeifer, Michael J. (Michael James), 1968– editor.
Title: Global lynching and collective violence: volume 2: the Americas
and Europe / edited by Michael J. Pfeifer.
Description: Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois
Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016031719 (print) | lccn 2017000754 (ebook) | isbn
9780252041389 (hardback) | isbn 9780252082900 (paper) | isbn
9780252099984 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Lynching. | Race discrimination. | bisac: social
science / Violence in Society. | social science / Discrimination
& Race Relations. | history / World.
Classification: lcc hv6455 .g56 2017 (print) | lcc hv6455 (ebook) |
ddc 364.1/34—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031719
Cover illustration: ©iStock.com / pixelliebe

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Michael J. Pfeifer
1 Collective Violence and Popular Justice
in the Later Middle Ages 12
Hannah Skoda
2 Unofficial Justice and Community
in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 34
Stephen P. Frank
3 “A lei de Lynch”: Reconsidering the View from Brazil
of Lynching in the United States, 1880s–1920s 68
Amy Chazkel
4 Lynching, Religion, and Politics
in Twentieth-Century Puebla 85
Gema Santamaría
5 “Canadians Are Not Proficient in the Art of Lynching”:
Mob Violence, Social Regulation, and National Identity 115
Brent M. S. Campney
6 “Negro and White Unite”: The Communist Party’s Campaign
against Lynching in Indiana and Maryland, 1930–1933 146
Dean J. Kotlowski
7 Bonded in Hate: The Violent Development
of American Skinhead Culture 186
Ryan Shaffer
Contributors 209
Index 213
Acknowledgments
Numerous people helped to make this book possible. Laurie Matheson once
again was a model editor, offering exemplary encouragement and support to
the project. James G. Engelhardt took over the project as editor at a late stage
and lent helpful aid. Amanda Wicks, Brigette M. Brown, Julie R. Laut, and
Jennifer Clark also provided splendid editorial assistance. Nancy Albright was
once again a superlative copy editor. Others supported the research, writing,
and editing in a variety of ways, including Hyunhee Park, Fumihiko Kobayashi,
Sara McDougall, Jürgen Martschukat, David Enos, Ginger and Matti Vehaskari,
George Dansker, Jack Belsom, and Daniel Golebiewski. Margaret Vandiver
and an anonymous reader improved the manuscript with their close reading
and helpful comments. I am also grateful to the University of California Press
for permission to reprint Stephen Frank’s chapter on popular justice and the
Russian peasantry. Frank, Stephen P., “Unofficial Justice in the Village: Defining
Popular Justice, Charivaris, Samosud and Property Crime, Sorcery” in Crime,
Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 © 1999 by the Regents
of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.
Global Lynching and Collective Violence
volume 2
Introduction
Michael J. Pfeifer
The word lynching is most likely American in origin but the practice of lynch-
ing, defined by scholars as extralegal group assault and/or murder motivated
by social control concerns,1 can be found in many global cultures and eras.
This collection of essays looks at lynching and related varieties of collective
violence such as vigilantism and rioting across world cultures. Analyzing
lynching and collective violence in Europe and the Americas, the chapters
highlight both the presence of mob violence in a number of cultures and eras
and the crucial role of transnational relationships in shaping the particular
contexts for, and understandings of, extralegal violence.
Scholars have argued that lynching against individuals often deemed so-
cially distant typically occurs in conditions of social flux, for example: in
transitions from homogeneous tribal societies to plural, heterogeneous social
orders; in locales where patterns of racial or ethnic dominance have been
challenged or collapsed; in settings shifting rapidly from rural to urban social
arrangements; in polities where authority has effectively lost legitimacy or
where multiple, contradictory legal regimes contend for popular support;
amid perceptions of a crisis of legal order brought on by rampant criminality;
and in contested or fragile states as opposed to settings where the state is able
to, in Weberian terms, successfully claim a monopoly of violence. But while
lynching violence may occur in many global cultures and eras, it is hardly a
universal phenomenon and it does not occur in other temporal and social
landscapes. To perhaps state the obvious, lynching does not occur where
the conditions stated above are not present, that is, where social, legal, and
political arrangements are by comparison fairly stable and where, at least
in recent times, the state enjoys a monopoly over the use of force and the
2 michael j. pfeifer
respect of the populace at large.2 By contrast, a number of the essays in this

volume examine the conditions in which extralegal collective violence has
in fact occurred in an array of settings in Europe and the Americas. Some
of the essays offer ideas for how such acts of summary group violence may
be interpreted in their particular cultural contexts; several of the essays also
address how such practices of summary group punishment can be viewed
in a comparative, cross-cultural fashion or were strongly mediated by trans-
national connections, including the role of discussion of U.S. lynching in
shaping discourses surrounding extralegal violence in other nations.3
I have argued at length elsewhere that the origins of American lynch-
ing can best be understood as a national, indeed a transnational, process
of cultural and legal formation. Diverging significantly from England and
western Europe, the United States’ transition to a capitalist economy was
not accompanied by the emergence of a strong, centralized national state
that claimed and enforced an exclusive monopoly over violence and the ad-
ministration of criminal justice to secure the rule of law. Rather, American
criminal justice developed along a distinctive path that emphasized local
authority and opinion, self-help and ad hoc law enforcement practices, and
the toleration of extralegal violence. Lynching was an important aspect of this
distinctive American trajectory from the late eighteenth through the early
twentieth centuries, evolving from traditions of popular violence with roots
in the early modern British Isles but registering many Americans’ rejection
of due process and the exclusive claims of state authority in criminal law.
The formation of American criminal justice was a highly contested process,
as lawyers, judges, and middle-class reformers fought for due process and
the rule of law against rural elites and working-class people who sought to
retain “rough justice,” that is, criminal justice grounded in local prerogatives
of race, ethnicity, class, honor, gender, and crime control. Because of fac-
tors of demography, economics, and historical development that included
slavery, westward migration, urbanization, and industrialization, the due
process forces were at their strongest in the Northeast but weakest in the
South, with the West and Midwest lying in between. American mobs acting
out the punitive rough justice vision would lynch thousands of persons over
the long nineteenth century, including several thousand African Americans,
as well as hundreds of Mexicans, Native Americans, and whites, and dozens
of Chinese and Sicilians.4
The conflict between rough justice and due process sentiments persisted
for decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction in the American regions
beyond the Alleghenies. Vividly recalling the emancipation of the slaves
and Reconstruction in the 1860s and ’70s as an era in which they had lost
control of the social order, criminal courts, and political offices, many white
Introduction 3
southerners turned again to collective murder outside the law amid racial
and political conflict shaped by the depressed cotton economy of the 1890s.
In a contagion of collective murder that was less overtly political and less
systematically organized but even more racial than the collective violence
of Reconstruction, lynching became a prime means of punishing black re-
sistance and criminality for white southerners skeptical of the efficacy of
law and legal processes in the perpetuation of white supremacy in the New
South. Southern urbanization and industrialization at the turn of the twenti-
eth century catalyzed anxieties over racial mixing and in some cases evoked
large-scale spectacle lynchings, but eventually a southern white middle class
coalesced against mob violence. Embarrassed by the increasing spotlight
African American activists and a nationalizing culture shone upon lynching
and fearing the loss of investment that might promote economic growth and
prosperity in the region, middle-class white southerners in the early twentieth
century pressed instead for “legal lynchings,” expedited trials and executions
that merged legal forms with the popular clamor for rough justice. As the
frequency of lynchings in the American South plummeted in the middle
decades of the twentieth century, the practice went underground as lynchers
no longer acted in large public mobs but instead in small, secretive groups
that murdered in an expression of racial intimidation, which—by the late
twentieth century—was more often called a “hate crime” than a “lynching.”5
The American Midwest and the American West were not as directly bur-
dened by the legacy of antebellum racial slavery, and the trajectory of rough
justice and lynching took different forms in those regions. North and west
of Dixie, lynching also persisted into the middle decades of the twentieth
century, surfacing after allegations of particularly heinous crimes and un-
der the influence of events such as African American in-migration and the
heightened racism of the Jim Crow era, the Mexican Revolution (precipitating
the lynching of persons of Mexican descent), World War I (the migrations
and racial leveling of the war inspired the lynching of African Americans in
northern locales, while nativist and antiradical sentiment informed acts of
collective murder in the West and the Midwest), and the social tensions of
the Great Depression. In the Midwest and West, as in the South, legislators
reshaped the death penalty in the early twentieth century to make capital
punishment more efficient and more racial, achieving a compromise between
the observation of legal forms long emphasized by due process advocates and
the lethal, ritualized retribution long sought by rough justice supporters.6
Group assault and killing across global cultures has sometimes, like
American lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, re-
flected ambivalence about alterations in law and social values and rejection
of seemingly ineffectual legal regimes that ostensibly do not offer sufficient
protections for the property or security of communities. Collective assault

and killing across global cultures in recent centuries has often flowed from
local dynamics contesting the anxieties and ambiguities of legal change and
authority in the context of decentralized, weak, fragmented, or transitional
states. The emergence of informal group assault and killing in situations of
legal ambiguity, contestation of state legitimacy, or even communal support
and legitimation of imperiled authority, can be seen in the cases of late me-
dieval Europe, late imperial Russia, Mexico, and the Great Depression–era
United States analyzed in this volume. The particular pattern of group vio-
lence, however, invariably reflects the local culture from which it stems, while
understandings of lynching and collective violence are retranslated for new
audiences as they cross national boundaries. In her essay, for example, Amy
Chazkel shows that Brazilians crafted their own meanings for U.S. lynching
in relation to Brazilian notions of race, violence, the state, law, and society.
Brent M. S. Campney similarly argues in his chapter that Canadian mobs in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually tempered their use of
violence to keep it in accord with their notions of British law and order in
marked contrast with what they viewed as anarchical American lynching.
The book begins with an analysis of cultures of popular justice, that is,
collective extralegal violence, in late Medieval Europe, a transitional period
during which notions of state authority, the law, and the legitimacy and il-
legitimacy of popular violence were highly fluid and contested. In her essay,
Hannah Skoda examines three instances of summary collective violence: the
use of vigilante violence by the nuns of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains in Troyes,
France, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the English Peasants’ revolt
of 1381, and the collective murder of Nicholas Radford in Devon, England,
in 1455. In an analysis that intriguingly anticipates in some respects what
scholars have found when looking at lynchers, vigilantes, and rioters in later
eras who often acted out their particular understandings of law even as they
defied legal institutions, Skoda carefully examines the relationship between
late Medieval law and popular justice in the French and English contexts and
argues that her three late Medieval European case studies demonstrate “the
contingency of the logics underpinning the use of popular justice.” Skoda
argues that “institutions, like that of the abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains,
used violent self-help when they felt that official legal channels had failed
to afford them the necessary protection and redress.” The perpetrators of
collective violence in the later Middle Ages, she asserts, “often drew upon a
repertory of judicial motifs in order to project a particular set of meanings
to spectators.” “In the case of popular justice undertaken by a community,”
she argues, “this message was often one of claiming to restore the true rule
Introduction 5
of law, unadulterated by corruption and misgovernance.” In contrast, Skoda

holds, “private gangs subverted and parodied judicial motifs in order to pur-
sue their own private interests, apparently compromised and undermined
by the force of law.”
In his chapter, Stephen Frank explores community justice in Eastern Eu-
rope in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the
peasantry in the Russian Empire in the postemancipation period, Frank
charts vozhdenie, nonlethal rituals through which peasants humiliated and
reconciled village deviants such as petty thieves and transgressors of sexual
norms. Frank also analyzes samosud, sometimes lethal practices of extralegal
retribution through which peasants punished more serious criminals that
included outsiders such as horse thieves and sorcerers. Practices of unofficial
justice in rural Russia in this period flowed from the postemancipation peas-
antry’s effective exclusion from formal legal institutions and the peasantry’s
tradition of communal governance, even as such practices repulsed educated
Russians who, Frank argues, “saw these acts not only as violations of the
criminal code but as proof of the low level of civilization in which the rural
population was mired.” Elite Russians transliterated the American English
word linch to describe rural folk’s resort to samosud in the late imperial
period. Indeed, the Russian peasantry’s collective, illegal murder of horse
thieves in a rural context in which equine transportation was valuable and
vital and targeted by organized criminality and formal criminal justice and
courts were viewed as unreliable, bears a certain resemblance to the lynching
of horse thieves and other property transgressors on the midwestern and
western frontiers of the United States in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.7
On a broader level, Frank’s essay suggests that unofficial justice and lynch-
ing emerges cross-culturally in contexts where state authority is uneven or
incomplete and when legal reform pushes beyond the popular understand-
ing of criminal justice; practices of community coercion, which may imitate
official practices, can fill the void.
The book shifts next to the understanding and practice of popular justice in
the form of lynching in Latin America. In her essay, Amy Chazkel examines
Brazilian understandings of lynchings in the United States. Late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century Brazilian juridical texts and daily newspapers
contain numerous references to American lynching incidents. As Brazil dealt
with the abolition of slavery (1888) and political instability in the wake of
the fall of the monarchy and the beginning of the First Republic (1889), the
intelligentsia grappled with questions of political inclusion, representation,
and equal justice in a country where so many among the Afro-descended
majority had been, for centuries, deemed juridically as nonpersons. Reports
of U.S. vigilante racial violence provided a language with which Brazilians

could engage in public debates about not just race but also violence and
informal justice in their own society. Many Brazilians looked to the United
States for a comparative foil against which to define their own society, es-
pecially with respect to social inequality and its often-violent results. In the
context of recent historiography on the transnational connections between
Brazil and the United States with respect to their shared, but contrasting,
history of slavery and racial conflict, Chazkel’s essay considers the way in
which news of vigilante racial violence in the United States traveled to and
around Brazil as a way to deepen our understanding of race and the law in
postabolition Brazil. This chapter suggests that studying the way lynching
incidents in the United States were discussed during this tumultuous period
in Brazilian history explicitly connects the question of racial oppression to
acute anxieties about the rule of law.
In her essay, Gema Santamaría analyzes the role of religiosity and politics
in lynchings in Puebla state, Mexico, in the twentieth century. On September
14, 1968, in the town of San Miguel Canoa in Puebla, hundreds of members of
the community (official records refer to 800) attacked five university workers
from the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Two of the five university work-
ers died after being burned and lethally injured with machetes. According to
official accounts, the lynching was triggered by the belief that these workers
were actually communist students whose ideology represented a direct threat
to the religious well-being of the community. Because of its alleged connec-
tion to the student movement and to anticommunist ideology, academic
accounts have interpreted the lynching in San Miguel Canoa as an expres-
sion of the social and political violence driven by anticommunism in 1960s
Mexico. Based on an analysis of archival material and a revision of extant
secondary sources, Santamaría argues that the political and religious drivers
of this and numerous other cases of lynching in Puebla before and after the
1960s need to be understood in light of the shifting relationship between
the Catholic Church and the political elites at the local level. Evidence from
Puebla and elsewhere in Mexico suggests that this relationship is pivotal for
understanding how lynching was legitimated against people identified as
criminals or enemies of the community at different points of time.
Moving northward, Brent M. S. Campney examines the history of racist
and mob violence in Canada from the 1830s to World War II. Focusing on
three types of violence, including tarring and feathering, rioting, and lynch-
ing, he uses these episodes to illuminate the ways in which English Cana-
dians enforced informal social control and crafted their national identity.
Campney’s work explores how Canadians used rough and humiliating, but
Introduction 7
rarely lethal, mob violence to punish those suspected of immoral behavior or

those deemed undesirable for some other reason; how white Canadians used
racist violence to enforce dominance over black and Asian Canadians; and
how many Canadians associated racism and mob violence with an American
Other while viewing themselves as antiracist, orderly, and distinctly “British”
in character. Finally, Campney uses his findings as a means for assessing the
historiography of lynching and the recent shift toward a focus on a global
context.
The book’s concluding essays examine the role of transnational relation-
ships in lynching and collective violence in the United States. In his es-
say, Dean J. Kotlowski examines a transnational dimension of American
lynching in the early 1930s through an analysis of the Communist Party of
the United States of America (CPUSA)’s campaign against mob violence.
Lynching persisted in the United States during the Great Depression, despite
growing attention from the national and international press and mounting
criticism from movements with a global reach, such as the Communist Party.
The murders of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana, in 1930; of
Matthew Williams in Salisbury, Maryland, in 1931; and of George Armwood
in Princess Anne, Maryland, in 1933—along with the threatened lynching
and ultimate execution in 1933 of Euel Lee, also in Maryland—are cases in
point. The CPUSA fought to expose, and even to exploit, the racial violence
in Indiana and Maryland. Inspired by the Moscow-based Communist In-
ternational, the CPUSA attacked the lynchings in Indiana and Maryland in
its newspaper, the Daily Worker; offered legal assistance to accused African
Americans through its auxiliary, the International Labor Defense (ILD); and
organized demonstrations against racial violence. Even though few blacks
joined the CPUSA, the Communist campaign, in both the press and the
streets, inspired many African Americans and roused such mainstream rights
organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) to refocus their attention on antilynching efforts. In so do-
ing, Kotlowski argues, the CPUSA unintentionally strengthened the NAACP,
and its integrationist ideals, three decades before the 1960s.
In the book’s final chapter, Ryan Shaffer explores the significant role of
transnational connections in shaping the subculture and extralegal violence
of American skinheads, the perpetrators of racially motivated hate crimes,
in the late twentieth century. Focusing particularly on Milwaukee, Shaffer
explores how a skinhead subculture was imported from Britain and how
one of the earliest violent skinhead organizations was formed in the United
States. Based on rare publications and interviews with key skinheads, the
chapter shows how the neo-Nazi skinhead culture developed and flourished
in the 1980s as well as the Milwaukee skinheads’ connections to a translocal

community. Fueled by lyrics about lynching and assaulting “nonwhites,” the
skinheads committed acts of violence against minorities and opponents.
As pioneers in the movement, Shaffer argues, the skinheads in Wisconsin
emerged as central members in national skinhead organizations. Rooted
in racial violence, the Skinhead Army of Milwaukee (SHAM) bonded over
alcohol, hate, and assaulting minorities and perceived opponents. The loca-
tion of Milwaukee proved important as it was a prime location for racists
from Canada, Chicago, and Detroit to gather and disseminate racial hatred
internationally. Due to the notoriety of SHAM’s violence it became a feared
force that other skinheads sought to emulate with the foundation of the Ham-
merskins, a loose umbrella organization that united skinheads around the
country. At the same time, the skinheads adopted a strange religion called the
World Church of the Creator, which preached that its congregations should
murder minorities. SHAM became important leaders in the religion after
the church’s religious founder died and the religion’s global headquarters
moved to Wisconsin. Although SHAM is now defunct, the violence per-
petrated by the group continues to impact the community, notably when a
Hammerskin killed six people in a Wisconsin Sikh temple in August 2012.
Though the reasons for the rampage are unknown, Shaffer argues, skinhead
culture in Wisconsin was rooted in collective violence that targeted minori-
ties, which was replicated throughout the United States. While his chapter
shares a transnational frame with Dean Kotlowski’s treatment of the Com-
munist Party of the United States of America and lynching in the 1930s,
Shaffer’s chapter indicates important shifts in American collective violence
by the late twentieth century. By the 1980s and ’90s, extralegal racial violence
had moved from the mainstream to the margins, and the American state had
shifted to protection of racial minorities rather than collusion with those who
perpetrated collective violence against them (with the important exception
of police violence directed against African Americans and Latinos).8
In sum, the volume’s essays demonstrate that lynching and collective vio-
lence cannot be dismissed as a phenomenon peripheral to global history. To
the contrary, summary group violence matters to scholars of various nations
and regions as a key index of contested state formation, as a brutal, culturally
powerful collective expression of social values such as communal identity,
religiosity, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, political and legal legiti-
macy, and understandings of criminal justice in opposition to or in tension
with evolving structures of state authority. Moreover, transnational move-
ments have both combated and fostered extralegal group violence. We cannot
understand the history of state formation, social values, criminal justice, and
Introduction 9
developing notions of “rights” in the United States and other societies (mob
violence invariably abridges the procedural, due process rights of its victims)
without understanding how lynching and collective violence—and the varied
responses of those communities that have been targeted by perpetrators of
group violence—has been shaped by transnational relationships even as it
has punctuated the uneven pathway of the development of the state, notions
of criminal justice, and concepts of civil rights in particular nations.
Notes
1. For the history of the term lynching and the rhetoric surrounding it in the United
States, see Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and
Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Christopher Waldrep,
ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press,
2006). For the spread of the word lynching around the world, see William D. Carrigan
and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 1–9.
2. For efforts at understanding lynching and other forms of collective violence in struc-
tural and theoretical terms across world cultures and eras, see Roberta Senechal de la
Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological: Forum 11, no. 1 (March 1996),
97–128; Senechal de la Roche, “Why Is Collective Violence Collective?” Sociological Theory
19, no. 2 (July 2001), 126–144; Senechal de la Roche, “Toward a Scientific Theory of Terror-
ism,” Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (March 2004), 1–4; Donald Black, “Violent Structures,”
in Margaret A. Zahn, Henry H. Brownstein, and Shelly L. Jackson, eds. Violence: From
Theory to Research (Newark: Lexis-Nexis/Anderson Publishing, 2004), 145–158; Mark
Cooney, Is Killing Wrong? A Study of Pure Sociology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2009); Bradley Campbell, “Genocide as Social Control,” Sociological Theory 27, no.
2 (June 2009), 150–172; Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Pratten and Atreye Sen, eds., “Global Vigilan-
tes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence,” and Ray Abrahams, “Some Thoughts on the
Comparative Study of Vigilantism,” in Pratten and Sen, eds., Global Vigilantes (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 1–19, 419–442. Senechal de la Roche’s work is especially
useful for distinguishing among categories of collective violence such as lynching, riot-
ing, vigilantism, and terrorism. For a cogent discussion of the issues involved in studying
lynching and collective extralegal punishment from a global perspective, including a useful
problematization of the role of state authority and Max Weber’s conception of the state
monopoly upon violence, see Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, “Introduction: Lynching
from an International Perspective,” in Berg and Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–18, esp. 6–9, 13–15; Max Weber, “Politics as a
Vocation” (1919), reprinted in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed., Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1970), 77–128. For an interesting effort at a comparative
analysis of lynching across global cultures, albeit one that unnecessarily and erroneously
downplays the significance of race in lynching in the American South, see Robert W.
Thurston, Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate,
2011), and Thurston, “Lynching and Legitimacy: Toward a Global Description of Mob
Murder,” in Berg and Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History, 69–86. For collective
violence prior to modern eras, see Scott Morschauer, “‘Vengeance Is Mine’: Lynching
in the Ancient Near East,” and Brian P. Levack, “Witch Lynching Past and Present,” in
Carrigan and Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath, 15–49, 49–67; Sara Forsdyke, “Street Theater
and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece: Shaming, Stoning, and Starving Offenders inside
and outside the Courts,” Past & Present no. 201 (November 2008), 3–50; David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities during the Middle Ages (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). For extralegal punishments, including collective
murder, in early modern France, see William Beik, “The Violence of the French Crowd
from Charivari to Revolution,” Past & Present no. 197 (November 2007), 75–110. For lin-
chamientos, that is, lynchings, in contemporary Latin America, see Angelina Snodgrass
Godoy, “When ‘Justice’ Is Criminal: Lynchings in Contemporary Latin America,” Theory
and Society 33, no. 6 (December 2004), 621–651; Daniel M. Goldstein, The Spectacular
City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);
Christopher Krupa, “Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador,” American
Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (February 2009), 20–39; Jim Handy, “Chicken Thieves, Witches, and
Judges: Vigilante Justice and Customary Law in Guatemala,” Journal of Latin American
Studies 36, no. 3 (August 2004), 533–561. For nonstate violence in recent decades across
the varied regions of sub-Saharan Africa, see Bruce Baker, Taking the Law into Their Own
Hands: Lawless Law Enforcers in Africa (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 2002); Tilo
Grätz, “Vigilantism in Africa: Benin and Beyond,” in Berg and Wendt, eds., Globalizing
Lynching History, 207–223.
3. For analyses of transnational discourses surrounding U.S. lynching in, respectively,
the Slovak-American press in the early twentieth century, fin de siècle Britain, Japan
in the Second World War, and the Soviet Union, see Robert Zecker, “‘Let Each Reader
Judge’: Lynching, Race, and Immigrant Newspapers,” Sarah L. Silkey, “British Public
Debates and the ‘Americanization’ of Lynching,” Fumiko Sakashita, “Lynching across the
Pacific: Japanese Views and African American Responses in the Wartime AntiLynching
Campaign,” and Meredith L. Roman, “U.S. Lynch Law and the Fate of the Soviet Union:
the Soviet Uses of American Racial Violence,” in Carrigan and Waldrep, eds., Swift to
Wrath, 137–159, 160–180, 181–214, and 215–236. For a comparison of histories of extralegal
violence and race in the United States and Australia, see Gregory D. Smithers, “Frontier
Justice: Lynching and Racial Violence in the United States and Australia,” in Berg and
Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History, 101–118.
4. For extended treatment of these matters, see Michael J. Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough
Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011) and
Pfeifer, “Extralegal Violence and Law in the Early Modern British Isles and the Origins
of American Lynching,” in Berg and Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History, 19–34.
See also Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (reprint edi-
tion; Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb,
Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the
American South, 1886–1910,” American Nineteenth Century History 3, no. 1 (Spring 2002),
45–76.
5. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana:
Introduction 11
University of Illinois Press, 2004), 15, 22–24, 68–86, 139–147. For discussions of the evolu-
tion of the legal and rhetorical context for the racially motivated extralegal violence that
came to be known as “hate crime” in the 1980s, see Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch,
185–191; Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resis-
tance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2008), 113–127.
6. For treatment of these developments, see Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 122–147.
7. For the emergence of lynching for property transgressions, including horse theft, on
the midwestern and western frontiers of nineteenth-century United States, see Pfeifer,
Roots of Rough Justice, 21–31.
8. For connections between American police violence and the legacy of lynching, see
Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 153.
1 Collective Violence and Popular Justice
in the Later Middle Ages
Hannah Skoda
Introduction
Something akin to lynching was built into medieval law in the form of out-
lawry. Most legal frameworks throughout the period relied upon a system
of banishment or outlawry for dealing with undesirables, who forfeited the
protection of the law: brutal punishment could then be carried out by angry
communities rather than by legal agents.1 Legal mechanisms were implicitly
built on the idea that communities should, and needed to, be involved in
the pursuit of justice: this was not just a top-down or hegemonic process.2
Nevertheless, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often described as a
pivotal moment in European legal history.3 The later Middle Ages are com-
monly represented as the point at which the state seemed to assume an ever
more prominent role in the prosecution of interpersonal violence, to take
upon itself the punishment and resolution of disputes, and to regulate these
matters according to a set of increasingly codified norms.4 The narrative of
the rise of the state, the centralization of legal systems and the monopoliza-
tion of violent punishment, is a deeply problematic one: however, its broad
outlines do shape the late Middle Ages, and certainly appeared to do so to
contemporaries.
Reality was much more fluid. While difficult to enumerate in statistical
terms, high levels of interpersonal violence continued to be perpetrated. 5
More importantly, this was a transitional period in which the law and defini-
tions of legitimate and illegitimate violence were still being hotly contested.
In many ways, it was this very fluidity and the contestations over the right to
carry out and to define violence, which lay at the heart of much of its perpe-
tration: while we find a variety of causes of violence in the period, popular
Collective Violence and Popular Justice in the Later Middle Ages 13
justice was a common trope. Much popular violence arose because of the
overlap between violence and the law; at this liminal phase in European legal
history, the same logic seemed to underpin much of the “legitimate” violence
of the law and “illegitimate” violence of “the people.”6 Both seemed to oper-
ate according to a logic of vendetta, righting wrongs, and negotiating social
relationships. This is encapsulated in Claude Gauvard’s observation that the
trope of the condemned man publicly forgiving his executioner before death
reveals that legal actions were still read as interpersonal messages that could
provoke vengeance.7 And vice versa, many acts of interpersonal violence
continued to be widely acknowledged as a form of popular justice.
If the role of the law is to establish boundaries, categories, and frame-
works of logic, this process was far from complete. It is from the fluidity of
the boundaries between “the law” and interpersonal violence, that popular
justice arises; these were actions that essentially contested the definitions
of violence and justice. But these contestations took very different forms:
contemporaries might object that law was not being properly applied or
that it was inconsistently and abusively carried out; but equally, they might
claim that there was too much law and that it encroached on their personal
freedom; in other cases, it was felt that the law as a set of formalized processes
was simply inadequate to offer the protection and redress required.
Three case studies have been selected here in order to illustrate, for the
later Middle Ages, three distinct forms of popular justice, with distinct log-
ics. They are evidence-rich examples, permitting a kind of “thick descrip-
tion.” Although they are dramatic, even melodramatic, they are not atypical
and comparative evidence will be offered where possible. My focus is upon
northern France and England for two main reasons: the material is readily
accessible; these were areas where the developments of law in relation to the
state were particularly noteworthy (and, indeed, commented upon by con-
temporaries). Common law dominated the picture in England, which became
precociously centralized and included a sophisticated apparatus of profes-
sional lawyers.8 England stood apart from the rest of Europe in this respect.
In France, the ius commune, arising from Roman law, was in the ascendant
by the later Middle Ages, permitting a more centralized state-based approach
to the process of law; however, customary law continued to be of paramount
importance in dealing with and resolving local disputes, to the extent that
Frederic Cheyette has described the system as one of “amoeboid formless-
ness.”9 The interplay between customary and royal law in France is striking
precisely because developments in statecraft lent it a particular dynamic. A
very different picture emerges in Italy, for example, where a multiplicity of
smaller polities were obliged to embed the practices of powerful and violent
local agents in legal developments.10 Legislative growth of statecraft in what
14 hannah skoda
is now Germany was also dependent upon embedding the expectations of

violent warring nobles within it.11
The essay begins with a consideration of collective violence by an institu-
tion, namely the convent of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains in Troyes in north-
ern France. Perhaps the most obvious motivation for popular justice in the
Middle Ages was the perceived inadequacy of the law as well as its hijacking
by powerful figures. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries,
these nuns, led by their feisty abbess, marched out of their abbey in order to
demolish the collegiate Church of St. Urbain and to break the boundaries
of the Dominican enclave in the town. They explicitly characterized their
violence as positive action needed in order to defend their rights, pointing to
the inadequacy of legal mechanisms to which they had frequently appealed in
order to defend their prerogatives (both territorial and jurisdictional). Here,
then, the action of “taking law into their own hands” was a pragmatically
driven move: it was a move designed to point to the inadequacy of the law
and to contest its unique claims over the legitimate use of violence. These
nuns “took the law into their own hands” in order to critique and correct
the perceived failure of the law.
If the nuns resorted to violent self-help because of the inadequacy of law,
a similar logic underpins the object of my second case study: the notorious
popular rebellions that characterized the later Middle Ages in particular.
A wave of rebellions famously swept across swathes of Europe, notably the
urbanized centers of Italy and northern Europe, in the socioeconomic and
demographic aftershocks of epidemic disease. These were preceded by waves
of revolts in the 1310s and 1320s and succeeded by sociopolitical turmoil in
the fifteenth century.12 Many of these popular rebellions were explicit com-
mentaries on law, justice, and jurisdiction, and many used violence not to
undermine the law but to demand more of it. However, whereas the inad-
equacies perceived by institutions like the convent at Troyes were bounded
and practical and evoked equally pragmatic responses, popular rebellions
operated on a much broader discursive canvas. They were commenting on
nothing less than the political order and law’s place within it; in many ways,
they were more rooted in a particular historical moment, provoked by the
upheaval of social structures concomitant with rapidly growing statecraft.
Their responses were, perhaps as a consequence, more richly textured with
symbolism and laden with meaning. The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
involved lynchings and symbolic violence. The Peasants’ Revolt seems to
have been provoked, at least in the short term, by the imposition of a poll
tax by Richard II and his extremely unpopular counselors. Structurally, the
socioeconomic makeup of England was changing dramatically following
the demographic upheaval of repeated outbreaks of catastrophic epidemic
disease, and relations between different social groups were potentially ex-
plosive. But the actions and gestures of the rebels themselves tell a slightly
different story and draw attention to the specifically legal dimension of their
complaints. Chronicle accounts of the revolt, while predictably hostile to
the rebels themselves, when read against the grain, reveal the logic of rebel
violence: rebels focused on the destruction of legal documents, upon the
freeing of prisoners, and the exaction of popular justice upon those who
had abused their positions of legal or governmental authority. Of course, the
rebels claimed their loyalty to the King, famously presenting their demands
to him at Mile End (only to be subjected to terrifying reprisals afterward), but
their point was one about the nature of governance or law broadly speaking.
According to the rebels, the law was the prerogative of the community of the
realm as a whole, in place to protect and empower the common good. When
the corruption of legal officials prevented its just application, they took the
law into their own hands as a community. The rhetoric here, both in gestures
and in words, was about law and the common good.
However, this growing emphasis on the common good could generate an
entirely contrasting logic for popular justice: one generated by a backlash
against both royal power and emphasis on the common good. Powerful
aristocrats could feel marginalized by legal developments: their freedom of
action was deliberately constrained. This kind of popular justice, undertaken
by individuals or private gangs, tended to parody legal developments. There
is little sense of the “common good” here, and the use of popular justice is
not intended to “correct” the law but rather to overturn it entirely because
it is perceived to be detrimental to private interests. The case of the murder
of Nicholas Radford and mock trial of his corpse in 1455 will be considered.
Nicholas Radford was a justice of the peace under Henry VI, during the
stormy period of the early factionalism, which would escalate into the Wars
of the Roses. One night, his godson’s brother, Thomas Courtenay, came to the
gates of his house, demanded that he open them in order to have a discus-
sion, and then broke trust by brutally murdering Radford; his brother, Henry
Courtenay, Radford’s godson, later subjected the corpse to a grotesque mock
trial. There can be no question of community or common good here—this
was the enactment of a private vendetta, but it was carried out in mock
legal terms because the freedom of action of Thomas Courtenay was being
constrained by the perceived expansion of royal justice.
These examples draw on different economies of scale: the private, the in-
termediate or institutional, and the public. These different scales generated
different logics of popular justice. In a period in which the reach of the law
was expanding, these instances of popular justice were an important way of
responding to these shifts.
16 hannah skoda
Popular Justice and Institutions:

The Case of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains in Troyes
We begin, then, with intermediate groups or institutions. In many ways,
these middling collectivities lay at the heart of medieval society, despite the
historiographical temptation to focus on “great” individuals or the rise of
states.13 In such settings, we find collective violence used in order neither to
correct and restore, nor to subvert the law, but rather to indicate its inad-
equacies. “Taking the law into their own hand” was often a straightforward
pragmatic response to the inadequacy of legal mechanisms to protect insti-
tutional interests.
A dramatic case in point is provided by the nuns of Notre-Dame-des-
Nonnains in Troyes. The origins of this abbey of nuns are fairly unclear, but
by the late twelfth century, the institution was clearly sufficiently flourishing
to have a rather magnificent building catastrophically burned to the ground
in 1188.14 In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, these nuns
turned to violence on several occasions in order to defend their interests: it
is a pleasing example because it counterbalances gender stereotypes. This is
particularly striking, since the dominant historiographical view of nuns in
the later Middle Ages is that they were increasingly rendered voiceless and
submissive, particularly following the papal decree Periculoso of 1298 (Boni-
face VIII), which systematically ordered the enclosure of nuns throughout
Europe.15 The nuns of Troyes clearly bucked the trend: they were neither
submissive nor silent. And they were certainly not enclosed. However, their
use of violence does not seem so unusual when we turn to male monastic
houses and find monks regularly willing to resort to violence in order to de-
fend the interests of their institutions. For example, Alan de Baston, a canon
of Sempringham Priory, may well have been involved with the violent gang of
the Folvilles; one might also cite the fight between the monks of Saint-Denis
and the canons of Notre Dame over precedence at French royal funerals.16
By the later thirteenth century, the nuns quite justifiably had a sense that
the law, both local secular law and the legal authority of the papacy, had
failed to protect them sufficiently from the encroachments of other institu-
tions that they felt threatened and undermined their position. It was most
particularly their position as major landowners and the jurisdictional rights
that this entailed that regularly came under threat. In 1223, they had appealed
to Pope Honorius III against the abbot of St. Peter de Celle of Troyes who
had apparently been encroaching on their territory;17 in April 1249, they
received a letter of papal protection against aggravations by local knights;18
in 1249, Innocent IV wrote to forbid any other orders to build oratories in

the parishes dependent upon the abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains;19 on
April 30, 1252, Innocent IV was again writing against predators on the goods
of the abbey;20 in 1262, Urban IV issued yet another bull to the same effect.
To compound the inadequacy of these letters (which patently didn’t work,
given their repetitive nature), the nuns felt themselves to be betrayed by
Urban IV, when he decided to build a collegiate church in Troyes (he was a
native of the city) in honor of his namesake St. Urbain, and, in order to do so,
compulsorily purchased land from the abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains.21
The nuns felt threatened by this collegiate church, which encroached on
their own rights, both jurisdictional and religious, and land; more impor-
tantly, it was a symbolic move demonstrating their impotence in the face of
papal authority. Given papal involvement, their chances of legal redress were
clearly minimal since the authority to whom they would normally appeal was
their opponent in this case. Accordingly, led by their abbess, they took up
arms and marched out to destroy the half-built Church “quoddam stipium
ferreum, cum lapidibus et collumpnis” (with an iron stick, with stones and
rocks).22 Unsurprisingly, for this they were excommunicated by a bull of
Urban’s successor, Clement IV.23 They compounded their crime then by force
of arms, preventing the benediction of the churchyard “cum pluribus armatis
hominibus” (with many armed men) and “excessus excessibus cumulantes”
(piling misdeed onto misdeed).24 These women were extremely determined,
and took up arms to defend their legal rights, precisely because they felt that
the legal system itself had failed to do so. The nature of their violence clearly
involved help from local knights: the participants were heavily armed and
the events carefully planned, effectively drawing up battle lines between war-
ring parties. Their violence resonates with the high levels of private warfare,
which continued to characterize later medieval France. Contrary to previous
historiographical assumptions that the rise of French statecraft had curbed
this practice, Justine Firnhaber-Baker has shown that centralized forms of
justice were often complicit with the kinds of violent negotiation going on
between these warring nobles by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In many ways, violent conflict between powerful groups was embedded in
society to the extent that it was not necessarily seen as antagonistic to the
legal process. On the other hand, the kind of violent self-help undertaken
by the nuns was consciously filling in gaps left by law.
It was not just the inadequacy of legal mechanisms but a sense that those
mechanisms were undermined by conflicts of interest, which motivated the
nuns. Clearly, they were not going to receive any other form of protection
18 hannah skoda
when the pope himself was behind the new building. When prosecuted for
their misdoings, they protested that the archdeacon of Besançon, who was
to conduct the trial, was unlikely to give them a fair hearing since he was a
kinsman of the cardinal patron of the canons of Saint Urbain.25 These women
felt, again and again, that the mechanisms of law were too intimately invested
in, and connected with, local conflicts to represent any form of neutral third
party. This was a common complaint: for example, a series of complaints
from Arras in 1296 drew attention to the conflicts of interest disingenuously
engaged in by the comital official, Jehan de Beauquesne.26 Popular justice was
an effective means of responding to the widely held knowledge that legal of-
ficials could rarely stand apart from the cases in which they were supposed
to intervene.
Interestingly, although their behavior was, for obvious reasons, widely
condemned and they were excommunicated, the excommunication was
lifted in 1274, a move most pressing since they needed reintegration into the
Church in order to elect a new abbess.27 The readiness with which Gregory
X ordered the lifting of the excommunication (applying absolution to all but
the most violent of the nuns) suggests a degree of acceptance of the logic of
their actions: there was not a total disjunction between the self-help of these
women and the protecting function of the law, and even the pope was obliged
to acknowledge this. A similar ambivalence characterizes legal reactions to
other examples of institutional self-help. Medieval students are a notorious
case in point. The students of Paris, or Oxford, for example, engaged in bru-
tal and existential violence against townsmen in 1200 and 1355, respectively,
ostensibly in order to defend their threatened privileges.28 In both cases, the
students were effectively rewarded with the confirmation of their privileges
by papal and royal authorities, respectively. On the other hand, when other
institutional groups engaged in apparently defensive violence against the
corporation of students, they were almost invariably punished. So, in 1278,
the monks of St. Germain, seeing what they deemed to be their land at the
Pré-aux-clercs, routinely used and abused by students, took matters into
their own hands by massacring and mutilating the students en masse. The
monks were punished and their abbey continued to pay reparations for years
to come.29 They had acted violently because they saw that the law itself was
not going to defend their collective interest: any potential legal ambivalence
regarding self-help was, in this case, tempered by a stronger prerogative to
protect the interests of the students deemed essential to the well-being of
the kingdom.
In 1307, violence erupted once again in Troyes, this time against the Do-
minicans, whose influence in the town was much resented by the nuns.
The women’s actions were described as “excess[us], violenti[es], et armorum

portation[es]” (excessive, violent, bearing arms) in the letter from the King of
France ordering an investigation by the bailli of Troyes.30 The involvement of
the king shows the level of interest in the case but equally indicates the com-
plexity of legal redress in an era of multiple competing jurisdictions. Led by
their abbess, and with the help of her knightly brother, Guy de Saint-Phal, the
women had apparently attacked the house of the Dominicans with swords,
axes, knives, and spades; smashed down its door; and destroyed the walls.
The involvement of the brother reveals just how closely these religious houses
were connected with nearby noble families and local interests. Townspeople
came to watch, and the nuns peremptorily threw them in the ditch according
to the investigation ordered by Philip IV: in many ways, this was a piece of
theater.31
What the nuns were trying to achieve was utterly explicit. This was about
showing the Dominicans that they were not welcome and that they had en-
croached on the space of the nuns. The spatial connotations of these events
are particularly striking. No form of legal redress or protection had been
forthcoming, and these nuns, with their rather violent history, seized on
the only viable alternative to defend their rights: violence. The reaction was
obviously one of shock and hostility from both king and Pope, both of whose
jurisdictional authority as the sole executors of legitimate violence was threat-
ened and shown to be inadequate. However, once again, it is striking that
during the mediation that followed in August—undertaken by the council-
lors of the king, Guillelmus de Marcilliaco and Bernardus de Meso—the
Dominicans were unequivocally informed by the royal authority that they
had no right to extend their property in various enumerated directions and
the nuns were obliged to rebuild one of the walls that they had destroyed.
Really, this mediation then constitutes an implicit admission that the violent
actions of the nuns had the force of justice behind them; that these women
were doing what the law had not yet managed to do in order to defend their
rights; and that the authority of the law would now attempt to ensure what
they had affirmed through force.32
All this is not to suggest that the actions of these nuns were not deemed
deeply aberrant. As women of God, they were expected to behave in a very
different way, and the feistiness of their reaction is out of line with the gen-
eral trend of increasing submission and silencing of nuns in this period. The
abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains seems to have established for itself a
reputation of violence, where it became the fairly ready resort when other
means apparently failed, and it was castigated accordingly: no other female
institution seems to have such a spectacularly forceful history. However, the
20 hannah skoda
idea that an institution might react violently in order to compensate for the
inadequacies of law and to take matters into its own hands, is not so very
unusual in this period. One might compare this incident with numerous
incidents of male religious resorting to violent self-help in order to defend
the jurisdictional integrity of their institution; we might cite the thirteenth-
century canons of Laon violently defending their interests.33 This was violent
self-help on a pragmatic scale: it was functional. Medieval collectivities often
found themselves unprotected by law and mobilized themselves violently to
remedy that.
Communities and Popular Justice:

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
If the nuns’ violence was essentially doing the work left undone by the law,
much of the popular justice in later medieval revolts and rebellions was
equally driven by a sense that law was not doing enough. Conceptually,
though, there are important distinctions. The violent self-help of intermedi-
ate institutions, or collectivities, tended to be practical and goal-oriented.
Revolts and rebellions provoke historiographical debate precisely because
they operated on such a broad canvas. When they engaged in the execution
of popular justice, their actions constituted a political critique. The questions
they posed, through their violence, were more fundamental. What is law for?
Who is law for? These are questions of a political order, and they tackle the
nature of government and of the body politic. Violence was accordingly as
shaped by a desire to communicate political messages as it was designed to
achieve concrete goals.
The historiographical debates continue to rage concerning the origins
and meanings of the English Peasants’ Revolt—whether it arose out of the
changing expectations caused by structural social and demographic change
following the massive mortality of the Black Death (1348);34 whether taxa-
tion and, in particular, the introduction of the poll tax, lay at the heart of it;35
whether political discontent was the key spark and objections to particular
figures of authority characterized as “evil counsellors”;36 or whether this was
specifically about the corruption of legal practices.37 In reality, these different
elements must all have played a role in mounting tensions, and what they all
have in common is a rootedness in the legal sphere. Structural social change
was embedded in the legal structures of serfdom and property rights. The
chronicle of Thomas Walsingham states explicitly that the rebels wished “to
acquire their liberty, concert further action, and change the evil customs for
and of the kingdom”:38 these men articulated their demands in terms not only
of socioeconomic liberties but in terms of what was increasingly perceived as
the tyrannical and often arbitrary nature of legal authority. The question of
taxation was, of course, a legal one, since it relied on the power of law both for
its justification and its enactment. The notion of political discontent and evil
counselors was dwelt on: for example, the chronicler Froissart commented
that the rebels wished to show “how the realm of England hath not been well
governed a great space for the honour of the realm nor for the common profit
by his [Richard II’s] uncles and by the clergy.”39 In this redaction of the rebels’
motivations, the notion of poor governance is foregrounded, an intrinsically
legal issue, and it is blamed on the privileging of personal interest over the
common good.
These “legalistic” concerns played out in the popular justice of the revolt
and have been noticed by several historians, notably Stephen Justice who
has argued specifically that rebels sought to empower themselves through
legal writing and documents.40 These rebels were keen to define themselves
as acting for the common good of the realm, and, in appropriating legal
forms, to claim that they were the true protectors of the community. They
were not attempting to subvert the law, but to remove those who had, to their
minds, subverted it. This was about community, conceived in a more socially
expansive sense than had been previously conceived of. The rebels were con-
testing the fact that a few men had taken it upon themselves to redefine law
and the community of the realm in narrow and self-serving terms. Although
the rebels were not highly educated men, it is surely relevant that this was a
period during which political theory regarding the common good was being
articulated in more sophisticated and more strident terms.41 Unlike, perhaps,
their Italian counterparts, the English rebels were not in a position to draw
upon complex Dominican thinking on the subject of the precise nature and
goal of the political community, but they were able to draw upon a common
discourse that claimed that the law was there for the good of the many and
that this was the true end of good governance.42
And what constituted the law in this period? This was the era of the com-
mon law, matured over the course of the thirteenth century,43 and the point
of the common law, or at least its rhetoric, was that this was a set of legal
practices designed to reinforce central authority precisely by representing
the interests and the customs of the community of the realm.
All the chronicles concur in describing the numerous attacks on property
by the rebels. But they also all concur in noting that the rebels rarely plun-
dered and stole—they just destroyed and confiscated. This was about account-
22 hannah skoda
ability in an overtly legal sense, as presented by the chronicler Froissart, who

writes: “They that were at Canterbury entered into Saint Thomas’s Church
and did much damage there: they robbed and broke up the [arch]bishop’s
chamber, and in robbing and bearing out their pillage they said: ‘Ah, this
chancellor [Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury] of England has had
a good market to get together all these riches: he shall give us now account of
the revenues of England and of the great profits that he has gathered since the
king’s coronation.’”44 The chancellor was one of those most obviously associ-
ated in the rebels’ eyes with corruption; this was not only about extortionate
taxation but also about its dubious legal foundations given the misdirection of
revenues. Interestingly, the rebels also carefully policed themselves to ensure
that this logic was unmolested: “While they were seeking, gathering and col-
lecting these most precious objects, the rustics did not dare to steal anything
of value secretly; because if anyone had been caught in the act of stealing
some object he would have been dragged off to death by execution without
trial or judgment.”45 It is striking that even hostile chroniclers were willing
to dwell upon this aspect of the rebels’ actions and implies that these legal
critiques and the quasi-legality of the rebellious gestures were particularly
striking. Similar observations have been made regarding the rebels in Paris in
1306; rebels in Siena in 1355; members of the radical movement known as the
Jacquerie in northern France in 1358; or Ciompi, Florentine rebels of 1378.46
In all these cases, rebels plundered but did not use. They violently policed
this distinction: their political critique depended upon showing themselves
to be operating within a quasi-legal framework.
Famously, much of the violence against objects was focused on docu-
ments, specifically legal documents. For example, at Lambeth palace the
rebels “destroyed a great number of the archbishop’s goods and burnt all the
register books and chancery remembrancers’ rolls they found there”;47 in
Canterbury, they “took and feloniously burnt the rolls touching the Crown
of our Lord the King, and the rolls of the office of Receiver of Green Wax for
the county of Kent.”48 They burned Temple Bar and the House of St. John’s
Hospital, where “there were many muniments which the lawyers were keep-
ing in custody [that] were consumed by fire.”49 The focus on these actions
by the chroniclers demonstrates contemporary readings of rebel violence as
indicative of their dissatisfaction with the way in which legal mechanisms
were being applied. The rebels also focused on the kinds of legal documents
that bore witness to their serfdom, such as manorial court records, which
notoriously were attacked and burned.50
The rebels took this a stage further with the opening up of many prisons:
“In Fleet Street, the said commons of Kent broke open the Fleet prison,
removed all the prisoners and let them go where they would”;51 “they broke
open Newgate prison, and released all the prisoners”;52 “they opened up
prisons, releasing the prisoners, and then offering the iron chains of Newgate
in the church of the Friars Minor as well as breaking open the Marshalsea.”53
The breaking of prisons was a fairly typical gesture in late medieval revolts;
we find similar incidents, for example, in a revolt in 1307 in Abbeville in
northern France, or a revolt of 1311 in Saint Quentin, or again in Italy with the
Ciompi in 1278 or the rebels in Siena in 1355.54 It was clearly a powerful way of
contesting current structures of authority, since it visualized critiques of legal
corruption in spatial terms:55 the injustice of constraints and boundaries ap-
plied through law could be overturned. The rebels of 1381 went a stage further.
They not only contested the imprisonment of those who were victims of the
law, but equally focused their attentions on those on whom the law had been
unjustly lenient: justice and injustice could clearly cut both ways. Prisoners
whom they felt had been unfairly pardoned were lynched: “They dragged
Richard Lyons, a notable burgess, out of his house and executed him in the
street. Lyons had been convicted in one of Edward III’s Parliaments for seri-
ous fraud towards the king and queen as well as other lords and ladies of the
kingdom in his dealings with precious stones and other jewels. Accordingly
Parliament had sentenced him to perpetual imprisonment . . . afterwards
he was freed by favour but now he was killed.”56 The rebels were making
unambiguous statements of their dissatisfaction not with the law itself, but
with the way in which it had been too “flexibly” or corruptly administered.
Taking the law into their own hands, they sought to remind those in power
that, as they believed, its function was to protect the realm as a whole, and
its prerogative was everyone.
Most notoriously, the rebels took upon themselves the violence of the
law and lynched several notable figures. Even the most hostile chroniclers
are clear that they “never killed anyone except by beheading him”57—these
were clearly, in the minds of both the rebels and the observers, quasi-judicial
killings of those deemed to have transgressed and to deserve punishment.
The crime, according to the rebels, was treachery. Those they beheaded,
they accused of treachery, and, in some cases, mini-trials were conducted.
Sir Robert Bealknap, chief justice of the Common Bench, was told by the
commons that he was a traitor and they forced him to swear on the Bible
that he would never again hold such sessions nor act as a justice in such in-
quests. They “proposed to kill all the lawyers, jurors and royal servants they
could find.”58 Again, the targeting of lawyers did not spring from antipathy
to the law as such, but was rather explicitly articulated as defense of the
rightful order and the upholding of the law itself. Lawyers were deemed to
24 hannah skoda
represent legalism for its own sake, pettifogging, and the corrupt and greedy
extraction of money. Such figures were lampooned in popular literature with
growing frequency: Chaucer’s “man of law” is a case in point.59 As Hyams
has pointed out with respect to the Magna Carta of 1215, the great document
presented to their king by his dissatisfied barons at Runnymede, these rebels
sought the opportunity to speak to the king and to critique his policies and
his counselors, because they wanted more law, not less.60 And, whereas the
rhetoric of the common good was still fairly nascent in 1215, by 1381, more
law could explicitly be conceptualized as law exercised justly, systematically,
in the interests of the realm as a whole.
In Canterbury, the rebels apparently “summoned the mayor, bailiffs and
commons of the town and examined them as to whether they would swear
in good will to be faithful and loyal to King Richard and the loyal commons
of England or not.”61 Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, was their highest
target, and although the chronicles do not quite concur on the sequence
of events and on the degree of violence (most being keen to demonize the
rebels as far as possible), the chronicle of Henry Knighton tells us that they
drew him out of the Tower of London, “without the use of any aggression or
force, sword or arrow but only by means of threatening words and disorderly
shouts.”62 Sudbury was then brutally murdered. In the eyes of the rebels,
this was an execution; in the eyes of government, it was clearly murder, a
crime for which the rebels paid later with their lives. Knighton is keen to
portray Sudbury and his colleagues as martyrs but cannot resist describing
the judicial appearance of proceedings: “they went freely to their deaths as if
they were murderers or thieves and deserved this fate.”63 There was nothing
secretive about these acts: the rebels informed the king that “they wanted
to kill traitors and his evil counsellors”:64 they were keen not just to dem-
onstrate their loyalty to the king (with whom they still sought an audience)
but to illustrate their credentials as the upholders of justice and law. This
use of quasi-judicial violence, and the explicit use of judicial motifs in order
to claim legitimacy for their actions and to emphasize their claims about
the nature of the law, again may be found in numerous other late medieval
revolts. During a revolt in Laon in northern France in 1295, the victims of
the rebels were stoned.65 This was not a contemporary judicial practice by
any means, but these were certainly gestures with judicial overtones, which
served rhetorically to visualize the rebels’ claims that they represented the
common good of the urban community in opposition to the corrupt local
mayor and his local aristocratic henchmen. Quasi-judicial executions were
integral to political conflict in early-fifteenth-century Tournai and served a
triple purpose: to dispose of enemies, and to symbolize both the inadequacy
of existing judicial structures and the claimed legitimacy of revolutionary

government.66
What points were the English rebels making? They were claiming that
the government of the land was embodied in its law, and this was law that
affected them in tangible and painful ways, both as victims of injustice and
corrupt practices at a local level, and as economic victims of taxation that
could be levied only through legal channels. Indeed, it was taxation that
brought serfs and freemen together out of common interest in the revolt. If
their critique was essentially of law, corrupt practices, and injustices, they
were demonstrating that violence was not clearly demarcated from the law
and that both operated according to a similar logic. And they were enacting
their desire to contest the nature of that governance through contestation of
legal power. Taking the law into their own hands was a powerful statement
of their belief that law should be enacted on behalf of the community. Unlike
the popular justice of intermediate institutions, the violence of the rebels
aimed not just to correct an immediate wrong but to change the political
order through a critique of the ways in which law was being applied.
Popular Justice and Private Interests:

The Case of the Murder of Nicholas Radford, 1455
We turn now to consider the very different kind of popular justice carried
out by private gangs in the later Middle Ages, lest we should assume that
popular justice attempted only to supplement the law. In the latter stages of
the Middle Ages, quite the opposite was also true. The growth of royal law
in England, or more hegemonic legal mechanisms in continental Europe,
naturally produced losers and constrained the unruly behavior of those who,
while not enjoying any straightforward governmental power, had previously
been able to exploit their social position. Such figures used popular justice
to deny, undermine, and subvert the law that they deemed to encroach on
their prerogatives. Their attitude to the law was negative, and their violence
was knowingly destructive: to put it bluntly, they wanted less law, not more.
Much later, medieval popular justice is associated with criminal gangs
and bandits, or, in more resonant terms, the outlaws of late medieval leg-
end. The outlaw stories of Robin Hood became popular in precisely this
period67 and tended to evoke the common trope of popular justice. In most
of the fifteenth-century ballads, the outlaws’ form of justice resonates with
an ultimate respect for the law and a desire to free it from the corrupting
influences of those currently administering it, in much the same way that,
ultimately, the popular justice of the peasant rebels of 1381 was not anti-law
26 hannah skoda
per se.68 Some have been therefore tempted to read these ballads in Marxist
terms and as politically subversive polemics; this is problematic, but it is clear
that the poems aim to sustain and correct law. In stark contrast, many of the
real-life bandits resist such romanticization and inspired, instead, widespread
terror. The popularity of the Robin Hood and outlaw literature sprang not
from realism, or from admiration for real outlaws, but rather from its social
commentary on law. Real bandits seem to have had distinctly less elevated
aims and rather to be pursuing private interests in stark contrast to the rebels’
recurrent emphasis on the common good.
Accordingly, the use they made of judicial motifs was very different, in-
volving not just violent appropriation of these motifs, but a kind of topsy-
turvydom in their parodic use. These men (there is, to my knowledge, no
evidence of female bandits) were not using popular justice to sustain or
even restore the system, but rather to subvert it altogether for private, as
opposed to public, interest. The later Middle Ages in England are replete
with examples: famous gangs such as the Folvilles or the Coterels terrorized
local populations.69 They were particularly notorious in England, where the
combination of precociously centralized royal law, and a fragmenting polity,
proved a dangerous mixture.
For our case study, we turn now to the murder of a local Devon lawyer
named Nicholas Radford in 1455 by the men of the eldest son of the Earl of
Devon, Thomas Courtenay. Radford was a local lawyer of distinction and, by
all accounts, great wealth, who lived alone with his invalid wife. At the time
of his death, he was serving as justice of the peace and recorder of the city of
Exeter. He was also a member of Parliament in 1421 and 1435, and served in
what might be described as “central” law courts over the course of his career.
He stands then as a powerful symbol of the law. There are three surviving
accounts of his murder: a petition to Parliament by his cousin and executor,
the indictment of his murderers at sessions held at Exeter, and a letter to
John Paston written by another lawyer expressing his shock at the news.70
The remaining sources are clearly deeply prejudiced against the murderous
gang, but there are a sufficient variety of voices, from legal commentary to
the reaction of a family member, that we can be fairly sure of the details. Sir
Thomas Courtenay was an extremely violent man, already aligning himself
in the very early stages of the so-called Wars of the Roses. He had formed
a large private army, besieged Powderdam Castle and taken over the city of
Exeter.71 He had been involved in the battle of St. Albans in May 1455 on the
defeated Lancastrian side; the ensuing chaos, as the local historian G. H.
Radford put it, provided “an excellent opportunity for gratifying his private
enmities.”72 Oddly, Nicholas Radford was his brother’s godfather, so the mur-
der amounted, in medieval eyes at least, to something close to a truly heinous

parricide. And clearly Radford thought himself relatively safe, because we
learn that he willingly opened the gates of his home (which would otherwise
have been defensible) to Courtenay and his men. Why did Courtenay attack
so viciously? The answer probably lies in the fact that Radford was both a
representative of the law, which Courtenay detested as limiting his private
interests, and the legal advisor of Sir William Bonville. Radford had suc-
cessfully represented Bonville against the Courtenays in recent litigation.73
Bonville was Courtenay’s mortal enemy in a dispute originating in rival claims
to the stewardship of the duchy of Cornwall and in effect dating back to the
reign of Richard II (1377–1399).74
What happened? Courtenay came late one night to Radford’s manor house
at Upcott Barton and begged admittance to speak to Radford; he was granted
it and then had his men rob Radford’s house, throw his invalid wife out of
her bed and “feloniously rob . . . the said Nicholas Radford of £300 and more
in cash lying in his trussing coffers, and other goods and jewels, bedding,
gowns, furs, books, and ornaments of his chapel, to the value of 1000 marks
and more, and the goods they trussed together and, with the said Nicho-
las Radford’s own horse, carried them away.”75 Courtenay proceeded to tell
Radford that he was to come with him to his father, and the aged Radford
begged to be allowed to ride there; Courtenay chillingly replied, “Do not
worry, Radford, you shall ride well enough soon, and therefore come with
me.” Shortly afterward, Radford was stabbed and mutilated by Courtenay’s
men. This was explicitly excessive violence, involving multiple wounds to the
face, heart, and throat and is described in gruesome detail in the surviving
accounts; the aim was, of course, to express the full horror of events. What
followed is bizarre and telling. The body was placed in the chapel of Radford’s
house and, a week later, Thomas Courtenay’s brother rode over with his
men: this was Radford’s godson, Henry Courtenay. They “took upon them
the office of coroner without authority, and made one of them sit down, and
called before him an inquest of the persons who murdered the said Nicholas
Radford, by such strange names as no man might know them by, nor never
men heard tell of such dwelling in that country. These misdoers, scornfully
appearing by such names as they were called, made such a presentment as
pleased them, and such as is reported that they should indict the said Nicho-
las Radford of his own death, in great contempt and derision of your laws.”
They then rolled the body out of the coffin, and threw it, naked, into a pit,
and then hurled stones on top. The episode was premeditated and carefully
planned. It effectively dehumanized the victim and resonated symbolically
with all who heard about it. In a culture in which news still spread rapidly
28 hannah skoda
through oral means, such gruesome incidents assured widespread publicity;

violence was not so common in this culture (contrary to our stereotypes of
the brutal Middle Ages) that people were not shocked and horrified by such
incidents. In so doing, the perpetrators were apparently enacting the due
punishment for the verdict that their mock court had decided upon, namely
suicide, a mortal sin and most serious crime in the Middle Ages; implicitly,
the cruel suggestion was that he had brought his plight upon himself.76 The
act of crushing and mutilating the body also ensured that no “proper” inquest
could ever be conducted into the true manner of death, so they were, in a
sense, responding to the strictures of law. The petition to Parliament claims
that they had “no more compassion nor pity than as if it had been a Jew or
a Saracen; one of the most heinous examples that has been seen or heard
in this your realm before now.” While the comment indicates the troubling
nature of deeply ingrained medieval prejudice, it also acknowledges a sort
of displaced moral or legal framework for the violence that had taken place.
The mock inquest was just that: a mockery. There is a form of gruesome
humor here in the parody of judicial forms, not least because this victim was
already dead by the time that these legal forms were invoked. Such humor
cannot be found in revolts or in popular justice by intermediate institutions.
The Courtenays were enacting personal interests, namely their rivalry with
Bonville, and the law, embodied by figures like Radford, had got in the way;
indeed, the Courtenays were responsible for a series of attacks on clients,
retainers, and supporters of the Bonville family in the 1450s. Strikingly, in
the commissions of June to September 1455 issued from Westminster for
the investigation of trespasses and offenses in the West Country, Bonville’s
name appears, but Courtenay’s does not: Courtenay had presumably been
excluded from this exercise in law and order because the previous year his
sons had disrupted a meeting of these commissioners with a riot in Exeter
in pursuance of private gain. Added to this sense that the Courtenays felt
their private interests were threatened by centrally imposed law, Bonville
would eventually proclaim himself to be in open Yorkist rebellion to the
king (in other words, one of the Lancastrian Courtenays’ enemies) by 1460,
so there was a factional dimension also. The Courtenays’ use of violence
claimed superiority to, and exemption from, the law: quite simply, their
use of force was superior. In “indicting” Radford for suicide, they turned
the law upside down by reaching a verdict that was the mirror image of
reality, while perhaps also mockingly suggesting that Radford had somehow
brought his death upon himself. Most of all, however, the parody really
evacuates meaning from law, in favor of private interests, gruesome vio-
lence, and extreme cruelty. The theatricality of the legal process—both of
the trial and of the punishment—is evoked and so greatly magnified that
its rationale is undermined and the reasonableness of law itself is thrown
into question.77
If these men chose to invoke legal motifs and to carry out a form of popular
justice, the point they were making was one essentially antipathetic to the
implementation and administration of law, namely that they wanted less of
it (when it suited them), and deemed centrally orchestrated law and order
detrimental to their private interests. This kind of popular “justice” responded
to a particular historical moment: it was precipitated both by growing legal-
ism of a centralized and royal nature and fatally compromised by a crown
unable to enforce even its own monopoly on power.
Conclusion
These three case studies have been chosen in order to demonstrate the contin-
gency of the logics underpinning the use of popular justice. The perpetrators
of collective violence in the later Middle Ages often drew upon a repertory of
judicial motifs in order to project a particular set of meanings to spectators.
In the case of popular justice undertaken by a community, this message was
often one of claiming to restore the true rule of law, unadulterated by corrup-
tion and misgovernance. In contrast, private gangs subverted and parodied
judicial motifs in order to pursue their own private interests, apparently
compromised and undermined by the force of royal law. And institutions,
like that of the abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains, used violent self-help
where they felt that official legal channels had failed to afford them the nec-
essary protection and redress.
These various forms of popular justice were given particular potency and
resonance by the transitional and fluid nature of law and violence in this
period. The boundaries between the two were still being contested, and own-
ership of their definitions was a matter of conflict and antagonism.
Notes
1. See, for example, Paul Dresch, “Outlawry, Exile, and Banishment: Reflections on
Community and Justice,” in Legalism: Community and Justice, eds. Fernanda Pirie and
Judith Scheele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97–124; Mark Ormrod, “Law
in the Landscape: Crime, Outlawry, and Regional Identity in Late Medieval England,”
in Anthony Musson, ed. Boundaries of the Law: Geography, Gender and Jurisdiction in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005), 7–20.
2. See, for example, A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Con-
sciousness from Magna Carta to The Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2001).
30 hannah skoda
3. See, for example, on France, Frederic Cheyette, “Suum cuique tribuere,” French His-
torical Studies 6 (1969), 287–299; Joseph Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1ff.; Claude Gauvard, De Grace Especial: Crime,
état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991);
Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice. Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden:
Brill, 1993). On England, see Musson, Medieval Law in Context; Paul Brand, The Making
of the Common Law (London: Hambledon Press, 1992); Mark Ormrod and Anthony
Musson, The Evolution of English Justice: Law Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century
(New York: Palgrave, 1998). On Italy, see Andrea Zorzi, “Giustizia criminale e criminalità
nell’Italia del tardo medioevo: studi e prospettive di ricerca,” Società e storia 11 (1989),
923–965.
4. More generally, see Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (Harlow:
Longman, 2001).
5. For example, Claude Gauvard, Violence et ordre public au Moyen Age (Paris: Picard,
2005), 1ff.; Hannah Skoda, Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, c.
1270–1330 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrea Zorzi and William Connell,
Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000); Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe.
6. This is one of the main arguments in my book, Medieval Violence (particularly
20–49). For an exploration of the intertwining of increasingly centralized law and com-
munity-based customary approaches, see Cohen, Crossroads of Justice, 15–26.
7. Gauvard, Violence et ordre public, 68–69.
8. Brand, Making of the Common Law, particularly 1–20.
9. Cheyette, “Suum cuique tribuere,” 288.
10. Zorzi, “Giustizia criminale,” 923–965.
11. Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53–97. The seminal text is Otto Brunner, Land
und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutschlands im
Mittelalter (Baden-bei-Wien: Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Geschichtsforschung
und Archivwissenschaft in Wien, 1939). Brunner argued that what he labeled “self-help”
by nobles engaging in private war and feuding was quasi-legitimate: there was room
for it within legal frameworks. He distinguished this “Selbsthilfe” from brigandage and
illegitimate coercion. His own political views sit uncomfortably with a historiographical
willingness to take his conclusions very seriously.
12. See Patrick Lantschner, The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities: Italy and
the Southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Samuel
Cohn Jr., Lust for Liberty: the Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
13. This point is made eloquently in Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle
Ages: Guilds in England 1250–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2–36.
14. A short history of the institution can be found in Patrick Geary, “Saint Helen of
Athyra and the Cathedral of Troyes in the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance History (1977), 149–175; Penelope Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 65–66, 77, 86–88.
15. Elizabeth Malinowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Com-
mentators, 1298–1545 (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 1–24.
16. Anthony Musson with Edward Powell, Crime, Law and Society in the Later Middle
Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 3:2, 77. The nuns at Troyes were
unusual, but not unique: the most famous episode occurred in 589–590 at Poitiers and
is recorded by Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London:
Penguin, 1974), bk. 10: see M. Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the
Sixth Century (2001), esp. 72–75. Many thanks to Dr. Katharine Sykes and Dr. Malcolm
Vale for suggesting these examples.
17. The principal sources for the history of the Abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Nonnains
were collated in Abbé Charles Lalore, Documents sur l’abbaye de Notre-Dame aux non-
nains de Troyes (Aube: Vol. 38 of Mémoires de la Société Académique de l’Aube, 1874). The
documents are gathered from the Archives Départementales de l’Aube, and from a copy
of the relevant document made by the Benedictines and bound in MS Lat 11926 in the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The appeal to the pope is edited on pp. 94–95.
18. Ibid., 107.
19. Ibid., 108–109.
20. Ibid., 110.
21. Ibid., 113–114. I use the English spelling for the Pope’s name but resort to French
spelling when referring to the place and the saint: this is for the sake of comparability
with other scholarship.
22. Ibid., 120.
23. Ibid., 120–121.
24. Ibid., 123–124.
25. Ibid., 122.
26. Skoda, Medieval Violence, 46.
27. Lalore, Documents, 129.
28. On the 1200 incident in Paris, and the resulting papal statute of 1215, see Stephen
Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1985), 4; G. Jehel and P. Racinet, Education et cultures dans
l’Occident chrétien du XIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Editions du temps, 1998), 281. On the
St. Scholastica’s Day massacre in Oxford in 1355, see, for example, Pearl Kibre, Scholarly
Privileges in the Middle Ages: The Rights, Privileges and Immunities of Scholars and Uni-
versities at Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of
America, 1962), 304–308; Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries: An Institutional and Intellectual History (New York: Wiley, 1968),
90–92; Alan Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 262–263.
29. Antoine Destemberg, “Morts violentes et lieux de mémoire: les réparations faites
à l’université de Paris à la fin du Moyen Age,” Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte, Revue
d’histoire 2 (2008), 37–48.
30. Lalore, Documents, 139.
31. This document is published in full in A. Vallet de Viriville, Les Archives Historiques
du Département de l’Aube et de l’ancien diocèse de Troyes (Troyes: Bourquin, 1841), 404.
32 hannah skoda
32. Charles LaLore, ed., Cartulaire de Montier-la-Celle, Collection des principaux car-
tulaires du diocèse de Troyes 6 (Paris: Thorin, 1882), 319.
33. We might cite the canons of Laon as discussed in Hélène Millet, Les chanoines du
chapitre cathédral de Laon: 1272–1412 (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1982), 60–63.
34. For example, Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements
and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Routledge, 1973), 152–154.
35. For example, Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 150.
36. R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 23.
37. Mark Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England 1300–1450 (Houndmills: Macmillan,
1995), 116–118.
38. The chronicle accounts referred to here can all be accessed in Dobson, Peasants’
Revolt. After providing the reference to the published edition of each individual chronicle,
I also include the page number in Dobson’s selections. Here, Thomas Walsingham, Histo-
ria Anglicana, edited by H. T. Riley, 2 vols (Rolls Series, 1863–1864), I, 285–288; Dobson,
Peasants’ Revolt, 132.
39. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, trans. Lord Berners, ed. G. C. Macaulay (London: Mac-
millan, 1895), 254; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 141–142.
40. Stephen Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 1–12.
41. See Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1ff.; Matthew Kempshall, The Common Good in Late
Medieval Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 13–14.
42. On northern Italian revolts in the fifteenth century, see Lantschner, Logic of Political
Conflict, 1–17.
43. See Brand, Making of the Common Law, 79–102.
44. Froissart, Chroniques, 254; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 140.
45. C. Babington and J. Lumby, eds., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, 9 vols (Rolls Series,
1865–1886), IX, 2; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 200.
46. Skoda, Medieval Violence, 186; Samuel Kline Cohn, Popular Protest in Late Medieval
Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 114, 152, 217.
47. V. H. Galbraith, ed., Anonimalle Chronicle (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1927), 140; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 155.
48. “Jurors Presentments,” in Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 47.
49. Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest, ed.
James G. Clark (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2005); Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 171.
50. Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 227.
51. Galbraith, Anonimalle, 141; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 156.
53. F. S. Haydon, ed., Eulogium Historiarum sive Temporis, 3 vols. (Rolls Series, 1858–
1863), III, 352; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 206.
54. See Skoda, Medieval Violence, 159–192; Cohn, Popular Protest, 209, 114.
55. Guy Geltner has demonstrated that prisons were far more visible and centrally lo-
cated in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2014), 1–27.
56. Henry Knighton, Chronicon, ed. J. R. Lumby, 2 vols (Rolls Series, 1889–1895), II,
133; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 183.
57. Knighton, Chronicon, II, 134; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 185.
59. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, ll., ed. Larry Benson
(The Riverside Chaucer) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition 2008), 321–322.
60. Paul Hyams, “Orality and Literacy in the Age of the Angevin Law Reforms,” in
Richard Kaeuper, ed., Law, Government and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitu-
tionalism (Brill: Leiden, 2013), 27–72, 68.
62. Knighton, Chronicon, II, 133; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 183.
63. Ibid.
64. Haydon, Eulogium, III, 352; Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, 207.
65. See Skoda, Medieval Violence, 169–170.
66. See Lantschner, Logic of Political Conflict, 59.
67. Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1961), 1–8.
68. Some useful reflections on the nature of these ballads may be found in Anthony
Musson with Edward Powell, trans. and ed., Crime, Law and Society in the Later Middle
Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 50, 62, 262.
69. See, for example, J. G. Bellamy, “The Coterel Gang: An Anatomy of a Band of
Fourteenth-Century Criminals,” English Historical Review 79 (1964): 698–717; Barbara
Hanawalt, “Fur-Collar Crime: The Pattern of Crime among the Fourteenth-Century
English Nobility,” Journal of Social History 8/4 (1975), 1–17; S. K. Walker, “Lordship and
Lawlessness in the Palatinate of Lancaster, 1370–1400,” Journal of British Studies 28/4
(1989), 325–348.
70. The petition is in The National Archives (henceforth TNA) SC 8/138/6864; the
indictment of his murderers is in TNA KB 9/16; the letter to John Paston is included in
N. Davis, ed., Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1971–1976), vol. 1, no. 257; these documents are listed in Musson with Powell,
Crime, 86. The incident is detailed in G. H. Radford, “Nicholas Radford, c. 1385–1455,”
Transactions of the Devonshire Association 35 (1903), 251–278, and “The Fight at Clyst in
1455,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 44 (1912), 252–265. This is also cited in
Musson with Powell, Crime, 86.
71. Radford, “The Fight,” 253.
72. Ibid., 257.
73. Ibid., 253–260.
74. The case is particularly striking, since Radford had previously been a loyal servant
of the Courtenays and had stewarded their estates and represented them at law.
75. TNA SC 8/138/6864: translations are from Musson with Powell, Crime, 87–90.
76. See Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages. Volume I: The Violent against
Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 120–125.
77. For interesting comparative material on the spectacular nature of medieval legalism
and the rhetoric underlying this from a literary perspective, see Jodie Enders, The Medieval
Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998),
1ff. Incidentally, despite the pardons for the Radford murders in the 1450s, they were later
executed by the Yorkists (Thomas in 1461 and Henry in 1469).
2 Unofficial Justice and Community
in Rural Russia, 1856–1914
Stephen P. Frank
Almost daily the telegraph brings news about cases of vigilante
justice against thieves, robbers, hooligans, and other criminal
elements. . . . One might think that Russia has been brought
temporarily to the American prairie and that Lynch law has been
granted citizenship by us.
—The Jurist, August 7, 1905
Yaroslavl, Central Russia. An angry mob of gardeners stripped

a woman accused of stealing potatoes, tied her to a tree near a
railway track, and flogged her, Itar-Tass reported. A shocked
railway engineer saw the half-naked woman as he was driving his
train through the Yaroslavl region and alerted police, the news
agency said. The forty-nine-year-old woman . . . had been seized by
landowners furious that she had pilfered their small plots. Police
said the woman was lucky. Last year, a potato thief in the same
region was beaten to death by angry farmers.
—The Moscow Times, July 26, 1995
Agrafena Ignat’eva was known as a sorceress in her native village of Vrachevo,

located in the Tikhvinsk district of Novgorod province. Ever since, her youth
residents had believed she possessed an ability to cast harmful spells (porchi)
and greatly feared this power. To the villagers’ relief, Agrafena moved to St.
Petersburg following her marriage, but after her husband’s death in 1877 she
returned to Vrachevo an impoverished, fifty-year-old widow, often forced
to beg for her daily subsistence. Her return soon gave rise to rumors that
harmful spells would once again occur, rumors no doubt fed by recent out-
breaks of mass hysteria (klikushestvo) in this same district.1 Village women
sought to appease Ignat’eva by doing various chores when she fell ill, giving
her bread, cleaning her at the bathhouse, washing her linen, and scrubbing
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KULKURIN LAULUJA
Kirj.
LARIN-KYÖSTI [Kyösti Larsson]
Porvoossa, Werner Söderström, 1899.

SISÄLLYS:
I.
Lähtö.
Ulos maailmaan!
Kulkurin kannel.
Itkisit joskus illoin.
Mustalaistaikoja.
Suvisia suruja.
Keinulaulu.
Kulkijaneito.
Synnyinmaja.
Pilviä kaitsemassa.
Mustalaislaulu.
Elon kulku.
Keväisiä sointuja.
Ne pitkän matkan kulkijat.
Arpasilla.
Hän kulkee niinkuin kuningas.
Juomalaulu.
Maantiellä.
Maailman turulla.
Sua etsin.
Maailman-Matti.
Laivat ne seilaa.
Pahajärven pitäjäss.
Lemmen oksalla.
Majan ma tahtoisin rakentaa.
Voi, tahdotko rannalle tulla.
Villivarsat.
Houreissa.
Kirkon varjossa.
Ota se kaunis kannel taas.
Pois on mennyt laulajaneito.
Epätoivo.
Jouten.
Soitan pillillä.
Jääpylväät.
Eksyksissä.
Pakosalla.
Ristitiessä.
II.
Koskelle tulo.
Myllärin neito.
Limokujassa.
Häitä kuokkimassa.
Huumeessa.
Myllärin rengin laulu.
Hääpolska.
Unelmissa.
Pöytälaulu.
Hän riisti piiristä morsiamen.
Häistä palaaja.
III.
Silkkisiteissä.
Naamiosalissa.
Silmästä silmään.
Sinä olet kuin kiiltävä perhonen.
Voi, muistatko.
Itke ihana!
Ma tahdon heittää sen naamarin.
Aiheen haltija.
Kuin nuoren ruovon sun notkistan.
Keskellä karkeloa.
Sua suojaisin.
Narrin kannel.
Narrin lauluja.
Viuhkain liehuessa.
Voi, olisiko surua silmissäs.
Kuvastimen edessä.
Sinä aiot mun hyljätä.
Miksi viivyn?
IV.
Hyypiö.
Laululaaksossa.
Hämärän ääniä.
Paistaa se päivä kiville.
Pensas varjossa.
Satu.
Näky.
Ilokivellä.
Unen liepeillä.
Kuutamossa.
Kulkurin lankeemus.
Kulkurin virsi.
Äiti.
Unen unhola.
Tuutulaulu.
Astui tietä vanha vaari.
Kun maa pyörii.
Onnen tupa.
Kullan kahleissa.
Manan majoilta.
Maineen siivillä.
Oravan jäljillä.
Vieraalla maalla.
Tähtien lentäessä.
Kotimatkalla.
Tulo kotikylään.
Onnen ovella.
Rakkauden ha'ussa.
Kotona.
I.
Lähtö.
Äiti.
Minne menet, kunne kulet tutun turvan kynnykseltä oman

pellon pientareelta, näiltä armailta ahoilta? Kotitakan liekit ne
lempeästi liehuu, maaliman nuotioilta pahat tulet riehuu,
miksi jätät kotitulet, poikani poloinen?
Kulkuripoika.
Tääll' on pellon sato saita, köyhä olo, yksinäinen tunnit on

tuhannen vuotta näillä pienillä pihoilla. Yhtä samaa, yhtä
samaa kotikäki kukkuu, puhtehella hämäressä ajatuskin
hukkuu, kaipaan noita mairemaita, kantaja kaunoinen!
Äiti.
Päivä paistaa pilvien alta, loistaa neidot, naurun lapset,

odottavat onneansa, ota parvesta parahin! Kuule
paimenhuilua ja metson kotkotusta poven tulta tunne ja
huulen huvitusta, suloinen on neidon valta, poikani poloinen!
Kulkuripoika.
Suurten vuorten tuolla puolla siell' on immet ihanammat,

täällä täyteiset säveät, siellä rakkahat, rajummat. Sylissä ma
neitojen joutomielin sousin, siellä taidon rakastella miekoin ja
jousin, en ma tahdo tänne kuolla, kantaja kaunoinen!
Äiti.
Mieronteille moni meni, joka joutui loitommalle oman ahon

aitausta matkoillansa maalimoilla. Älä sinä oudosta onnesta
huoli, täällä sun taatasi vaon viereen kuoli, aurinkoni,
ainoiseni, poikani poloinen!
Poika.
Älä itke äitikulta, vaikka vaivun laulun maille ohi oman

taatan haudan näiltä rakkailta rajoilta. Minna nyt astun, kun
lähden taatan koista, palatessa poluiltani kunniassa toistan,
siunaustas pyydän sulta, kantaja kaunoinen.
Äiti.
Hyvästi jää ja astu aamun teitä, älä Luojalta, älä muilta

tekojas yöhön peitä, keijut keveät sua hellästi pitäköön, hyvät
taimet ne sinussa itäköön!
Poika.
Hyvästi jää nyt emo hyvä, hellä, kannan kuvasi, hyvät

sanasi, syvällä sydämmellä, anna anteeksi… mun täytyvi
lähteä, taivas selittäköön iltasi tähteä!
Äiti.
Hyvästi poikani!
Poika.
Hyvästi äitini!
Ulos maailmaan!
Ma katselin kauvan taaksepäin, kotiseutuni hämärään

häipyvän näin, jäi portaille äiti rukka. — En äidille murheen
murua sois, mut elämän leikkiin haluan pois vaikka perisi mun
huuman hukka!
Kotirantoja rauhaton harhailin, söin, join sekä jouten

kyläilin, oli pieni se aatospiiri, yhä samaa haalean vanhaa
näin, ei, pois, pois uusia retkiä päin, mihin viittaa maaliman
viiri!
Ei auta, auta, en itkeä saa, kun eessäni suuri on suunnaton

maa, joka aatosta nostaa ja kiintää. Ulos, ulos kun elämä
hymyilee ja voitonseppeltä tarjoilee ja toivorunsaana siintää!
Kulkurin kannel.
Minä se olen kulkuripoika ja mulla on laulun ääni,

soittokiistoihin kiiruhdan ja elämä huumaa pääni.
Ei ole rikkaus painamassa,

ei kultia kukkarossa,
sauva ja kontti on korujani
ja rikkaus kantelossa.
Kannel se mulle on kumppani
ja tunteeni tuoksun tuoja,
kuusest' on pohja ja koivusta kansi
ja kaijun on antanut Luoja.
Hyräillen veisti sen paimenukko,

kun kuhersi teiri tieltä;
siinä on suvista suhinaa
ja siinä on viisi kieltä.
Kaksi kieltä on kimeää,

ne päivän säteissä loistaa,
kaksi on ruosteista kumeaa
ja ne hämärän huolia toistaa.
Laulan sydämmeni tarpeesta

kuin tapa on kulkureilla,
kuljen kylihin soitellen
ja suurilla taipaleilla.
Muilla on kannel kauniimpi

ja säveä laulun laatu,
viittä kieltä ma helkytän vaan
ja maantieltä soitto on saatu.
Laulu on lehdon katveesta,

missä lempi on kiivas ja rohkee,
laulu on kuilujen partaalta,
jota astuen louhikot lohkee.
Soittelen kulkurikanneltain ja pelokas ilo mun täyttää,

kunnian kukkulat silmiini siintää ja maalima suurelta näyttää.
Itkisit joskus illoin.
Yrttitarhassa yksin kuljet, siniset silmäsi nauraa, katselen

sinua lehvien läpi ja unhotan elämän hauraan.
Katselen sinua kyynelsilmin,

katselen yksin ja kauvan,
kauvas lähden maaliman teille,
ma veistin jo matkasauvan.
Voi jos kysyisit äidiltäin: että palaako poikasi milloin?

Muiston kukkia poimisit ja itkisit joskus illoin.
Mustalaistaikoja.
Tuli mua vastahan mustalainen, pouvasi minulle polulla,

katseli illan loimuja, katseli käteni poimuja, sanoi: "poikani
kulkevainen, olet väärällä tolulla!
Nään sinun jättävän kotikunnaat, kannat kaihoa povella,

kyselet maaliman turulla laulajaneitoas surulla, maksat
onnesta kalliit lunnaat kuljet monella ovella.
Ihanasti se päivä paistaa, kun käyt suurihin kylihin, siellä

saleissa isoissa kuljet neitosten kisoissa, vaan et löydä sitä
naista, jota kaipaisit sylihin!"
En sua usko musta nainen, viekkaat, liukkaat on lukusi,

mairitat maille sulille, viekoitat virvatulille, jotta olisin
kulkevainen niinkuin omakin sukusi!
Suvisia suruja.
Maantien vartta ma vaeltelen ja kaunis on luomakunta,

töllin töyräillä yrtit tuoksuu ja satavi kukkaislunta.
Viheriän, viileän oksan alta

nään sinisen taivaan kaistan,
lähteen silmässä jalkani kylven
ja polulta marjoja maistan.
Hyttyset, hetken heiluvat lapset

ne alkavat purpuriansa,
päivänpaisteessa hyörii ja häärää
ahkera muurahaiskansa.
Käki se korvenrannasta kukkuu

kuten kukkuvi helluntaina
sinisellä oksalla sinisessä salossa,
kun ei sitä huolet paina.
Keltavarpunen aidalla hyppii

ja eelläni näyttää tietä:
no, etkös, tili, lili, etkös, tuli, luli,
mittumaaria vietä!
Kylän ohi tullessa tuttuja löydän

ja heitän ne huolet liiat,
saakos kulkuri kurkistaa,
miten pitkät täällä on piiat!
Huomisen huoli nyt sydäntä painaa kuin viimesyksyinen

lehti, suuressa saatossa suviset keijut jo sydämmeni tarhaan
ehti.
Keinulaulu..
Heilu keinuni korkealle, linnut ne viettävät häitä, minä olen

nuori kuin päivänkukka, en muistele suruja näitä!
Heilu keinuni korkealle,

nythän on juhannusilta,
mesimarja paistaa ja pihlaja tuoksuu
ja kirkas on taivahan silta!
Heilu keinuni korkealle, onneni riemuja laulan, kedon helyt

kullalle kuiskaen poimin ja solmin sen vihreän paulan!
Kulkijaneito.
Ken olet sinä outo neitonen, sinä neito tumma, tuima, sun
silmäsi kaiho kaunis on ja kulkusi on niin huima?
Sun silmäsi aina arastaa,

sinä piilet pimeän huolta,
tien toista puolta sa kaartelet,
minä kuljen toista puolta.
Oot oikun armas arvoitus

ja povesi syitä peittää,
vai oletko kupla, lastu vaan,
jota onnen pyörä heittää?
Me molemmat olemme kulkijat,

me yhdymme ylämäissä,
siis anna kätesi yli tien,
niin menemme käsikäissä!
Käy marjapoluille leikkimään, jossa kukaan ei huomaa

meitä, kun metsä on suuri ja hämärä ja täynnä sinisiä teitä!
Synnyinmaja.
Vihreän virran reunalla synnyin majassa matalassa, linnut

ne havahti pesäpuiltaan aamussa alkavassa.
Äidin kyynel se ilosta loisti

päivän kasvoja vastaan,
taata se varoen vaalitteli,
kauvan katseli lastaan.
Ristiäisiä kuistilla juotiin

iltapäivähän asti,
kummit ne pyhästi kumarsi
ja vallaton pappi kasti.
Silloin selkeni sunnuntai
ja lintuset venytti virttä,
ilmeinen ilo kaijutti silloin
kotoista kurkihirttä.
— Synnyinmajani ohi ma kuljin

kasteessa aamunsuussa,
vieraan väen kengät ne narskui
kotini kynnyspuussa.
Kuistin räystäältä pilpatti peippo, kumahti kumpuinen

puisto, majasta kuului kehtolaulu kuin lapsuuden kirkas
muisto.
Pilviä kaitsemassa..
"Pimpula pampula paimen parka, heitä jo mättäille marjas,

missä on tuohinen torvesi, poika, ja missä on ruskea karjas?
Karjasi kulkee sutten polkuja,

sataa jo karjankynteen,
taivaan tulla tuijotat vaan
ja kuljet haaveissa syntein!"
En ole tän kylän paimenparka,

mut katsohan pilven harjaa,
tuuli se mulle torven antoi,
kaitselen pilvien karjaa.
Pilvet on valkeita lampaita, ne ajan minä taivaan tarhaan,
kultaportista hopeasillalle pyhissä haaveissa harhaan.
Mustalaislaulu..
Mit dschai, mit dschai, hyvä sun on olla romanesgepojan

nuotiolla, mustalla varsalla mustalaispoika kylästä kylään ajaa
vaan, ei ole majaa, ei ole maata, eikä hän majaa
kaipaakkaan! Mit dschai, mit dschai, hai, dusja me daari
djimnasge aah' 'a![1]
[1] Tyttöni, tyttöni, hei kumppaniksesi aina ma jään!
Maantien tähteni, mieroni kukka, hiiluva silmä, tumma

tulta, sulle ma annan kultaisen renkaan valkoisen hevosen
arvoisen, mit dschai, mit dschai, sorea Taafa, älä sitä hukuta
tulehen! Mit dschai — — —
Lammaslauman sulle ma ostan, satulaan minä Taafan

nostan; sammuvan nuotion hiilokselta mustalaispoika se
ratsastaa mit dschai, mit dschai, kaukaa katsoo kuinka se
Taafa nyt paimentaa! Mit dschai — — —
Elon kulku.
Elon kulku on niinkuin purren, joka lastuna laskettaa,

aavaan suuntaa ja rannat jättää, merten sointuja halajaa.
Keulan kuohuissa riemu soittaa,
toivo purjeita pullistaa,
ruori rytkyy ja nuorat juoksee,
pursi kahtaalle kuljettaa.
Teuhaa tummuvan pilven alla,

suistaa loistossa auringon
yli synkkien syvänteiden,
ohi siintävän suvannon.
Karit kiiltää ja viimat viiltää,

pursi loitolle lennättää,
kultakankaita kohden puskee,
yhtä loitolle sentään jää.
Antaa mennä kun mennä tahtoo, antaa laulaa kun laulaa

saa, tämä kulku on vaarallista, tämä kulku on ihanaa!
Keväisiä sointuja.
1.
Ma hengitän tuoksuja tuoreen maan ja ma pingotan rintani

paulaa, joka oksalla lintuset visertää ja ne uusista toiveista
laulaa.
Maan alta jo myyräkin kurkistaa,

kalasuomut ne välkkyy veessä
ja sammakot letossa kurnuttaa
ja ne kutevat päivän eessä.
Sisilisko se kivihin luikeroi
ja suolta se kurki jo koikkuu,
jänö uudessa turkissa teutaroi
ja sen hännässä tappurat roikkuu.
Näin elämä ilonsa ilmaisee,

minä näen niin kevyttä unta,
salon vihreissä saleissa vilisee
koko luonnon soittajakunta.
Kedon nurmelle korvani kallistan,

maanaliset salapurot solskaa,
ilon salvat ma laulaen vapautan,
veri tanssii keväistä polskaa.
Voi, nyt minä tahtoisin armastaa, koko maaliman sylihini

painaa ja elämälle kannelta kaijuttaa, joka mullekin säveleen
lainaa!
2.
Kuin huumeessa leivoset leikkiä lyö ja kiitosvirsiä raikaa,

suli soiluen hangen kireä vyö, jään laine jo söi ja jo valkeni
yö, taas lempeen ja toivoon on aikaa.
Ja rinnankin lämpö se murtavi jään, joka tuuditti

tunteemme hallaa ja se voittoa vaativi poutaisen sään,
elononnea laulaa se enteissään, ruman aatteen alleen se
tallaa.
Nyt tunnen kuin sieluni siivet sais ja ma leivona nousta

voisin ja tahtoni talvesta ponnahtais ja mun riemun oikean
kaijun sais ja ma oikea laulaja oisin!
Ne pitkän matkan kulkijat.
Ne pitkän matkan kulkijat ne yhtyvät ja ne eroovat, kuka

kysyisi nimeä heiltä!
Ne etsijät ne ehtivät,
ne salasanojen hyräilijät
ne tulevat kaikilta teiltä.
Ja niill' on merkit mentävät,

tiepuissa piirut on heleät,
jotka siskoissieluja ohjaa.
Ja niill' on pitkä määrän pää,

se vetten takaa kimmeltää
vasten hopeansinistä pohjaa.
Ne kysyskö mistä leivän saa,

kun vaan on kaunis jumalanmaa
ja kaunis on itäinen rusko!
Ne kulkemahan Luoja loi ja korpit niille leivän toi, sillä niillä

on ihana usko.
Arpasilla.
Istu helkanurmelle ja nojaa sammalseinään, tuoss' on
kortta kymmenen ja sido nyt arpaheinää!
Katso heinän helyjä,

ne siintää silkkiloimin,
sinilatvan, sasminan
ma seppeleekses poimin!
Anna yksi kihara vaan,

sull' on niin monta noita,
armostasi arvotaan
ja tehdään solmukoita!
Kuusikossa hiljaa hiipii

sinipiika rukka,
siskoisliittoja solmitaan,
sinä sinikellokukka!
Kuule haavan sohinaa, kun sinikellot soittaa, anna arvat

Luojalle, ma sydämmes tahdon voittaa!
Hän kulkee niinkuin kuningas.
Hän kulkee niinkuin kuningas, joka näkee suurta unta, ja

hänellä on haavelinnoja ja suuri valtakunta.
Ja aatoksista koottu on
sen nuori, suora kansa
ja päivä paistaa yllänsä
ja kultaa kiharansa.
Hän käy kuin käy vaan kuningas, ei huomaa arkilasta, voi,
köyhän narrikaapua, voi, köyhää kuningasta!
Juomalaulu.
Ja tässä me ystävät istutaan ja tahdomme maljoja maistaa,

kun lehdossa rastahat raksuttaa ja jumalanpäivä paistaa.
Ei aikaa nyt ole suremaan,

näin ihana elämä on sentään,
näin hetken siivillä leijutaan
ja aatos lintuna lentää.
Ja tulkaat veikeät veitoset,

kun silmä nuorena säikkyy,
kun rinta taulusta lämpenee
ja viini maljassa läikkyy.
Kas tässä on isäntä iloinen,

jota sanotaan Remuseksi,
jok' on viinamäkien tarhuri
ja hellän humalan keksi.
Hän tekohurskahan kauhu on

hän naurun kannelta soittaa,
hän tulevi tuttuna tupahan
ja surevan sydämmen voittaa.
— Hei, juokse, viinuri, kellariis, eropikarit vielä juodaan, jos

loppuu, niin kylästä lainataan ja Saksasta uutta tuodaan!
Maantiellä.
Poika.
Minä tulen täältä ja sinä tulet sieltä metisen metsän

ahtaalta tieltä ja katselet latvoja aina. Polkusi on niin kiero ja
kaita, varo sinä ettes sa jalkaas taita ja ettei ne oksat paina!
Tyttö.
Voi, sua poika, et pyhää vietä, aina sa kuljet leveätä tietä ja

laulelet kisamielin, sulla on hurjat maantieveljet, sulla on
mielessä ehtoiset eljet ja kuihutat linnunkielin!
Poika.
Älä sinä, neitoni, kisoja kiellä, käärmeell' on pesänsä

pensaassa siellä ja valkoista jalkaas se pistää! Tule, tule
hilpeän laulajan seuraan, sua minä hain kuin metsän peuraa,
mut en sua löytänyt mistään!
Tyttö.
Piti, piti veijari, kiivas ja kirkas, paljonko maksaa se

veijarivirkas, kai käärme on povessa sulla! Vaan jos heität sen
myrkkyisen hampaan, hiljaa hiivit ja mieles on lampaan, niin
ystäväks' saat sinä tulla?
Maaliman turulla.
Kadunkulmassa rumpali rummuttaa: "minä kuulutan kaikille
julki, mies — veitikka Iloksi kutsutaan —, on karannut
vankilatornistaan, johon pyöveli eilen sen sulki, se mies on
valkea-otsainen ja kiertää pitkin maita ja silmä sillä on sininen
ja punanen on sen paita!"
— Ja holjakka pyörii ja kansaa käy, nyt on turhuuden

markkina-aatto, ja vallat ne vaunuissa keinuilee ja käädyt ja
sormukset kiiltelee ja jälessä on matkijasaatto, ne tuhlaa
joukolle almujaan ja lokaan kultansa hukkuu ja riitaa niillä on
arvostaan ja ne kunnian patjoille nukkuu.
Ja tuolla ne silmänkääntäjät käy, jotka elävät köyhien

työstä, ja sitte viisahat kirjoineen ja onnenonkijat
koukkuineen, ne kuiluun voi veljensä syöstä; kas tuolla pappi
on yksinään, joka kuivasti nauraa koittaa, ja tuolla se suutari
lestillään surumessuja kujassa soittaa.
Kamasaksoilta kojuissa ostetaan, mitä oikukas tapa matkii,

ja siellä on kirjavat keikarit sekä elämän mairivat kuokkurit,
jotka toisten pöydiltä latkii, ja siellä on itserakkahat, jotka
lemmen luotansa syytää, ja siellä on matalat mankujat, jotka
kaikilta ropoa pyytää.
Siell' liittoja sokeita solmitaan ja ne elämä kahtia jakaa,

koronkiskuri vannoen sanansa syö, tekohurskas laihaa
rintaansa lyö ja ojavierissä makaa. Kuin kuumeessa, humussa
huudetaan, kuka tuntisi toinen toistaan, mitä toinen on
ahertanut varjossaan, sillä toinen valossa loistaa.
Siell' laulajat kunnian ahnehet omantuntonsa joukolle

tyrkkää, salajuorujat sopissa supsuttaa ja itsepilkkaajat
huoahtaa, ne kulkevat polkua jyrkkää. Ja tyhjän tympeä
nauru soi, täm' on nahkasielujen juhlaa, ja hauturi lopuksi
koota voi, mitä elämä liikaa tuhlaa.
Ja hoijakan kellot ne helisee, näin joukot turulla teuhaa, ne

etsivät iloa itsestään ja ne kulkevat lainahelyissään ja ne
keppiratsuilla reuhaa. — Mies valkea-otsainen yksin käy ja
etsii elämän juomaa, mut seurassa sen ei ketään näy, eikä
kukaan Iloa huomaa.
Sua etsin.
Sua etsin, etsin ma kautta maan, voi, missä on matkani

määrä, sun unten kuvissa näin minä vaan ja onko se uneni
väärä?
Ma tahtoisin kerrankin armastaa,

sanat salatut valloille päästää,
ma tahtoisin paljon unhoittaa,
en iäti laulaa ja säästää,
Ma tahtoisin päivän paisteeseen

sekä aarteita tuhlaten antaa
ja kunniaan sekä maineeseen
sun sylissäni tahtoisin kantaa.
Minä laulaisin, mitä taitaisin,

käsin tarttuisin elämään kiini,
ja kivet minä tieltäsi kiskoisin,
sinä oisit elämäni viini.
Ja sinuun sieluni kasvaa sais ja elämä elämää oisi, me

kesästä kesään kuljettais ja koivuissa kantelot soisi.
Maaliman-Matti.
Tomu pelmui päivän paisteessa ja jalkaa poltteli santa,

puun taulalle pihkaa tippuili, oli helteä metsän ranta.
Mäen notkosta kuului töminää

ja ahteelle valahti varjo
ja siin oli Maaliman-Matti taas,
jok ei tulijalle kättään tarjo.
Hän oli niin vanha ja vaappuva

kuin laho tieviitan risti,
hän säikähti äänen kuullessaan
ja sormensa poveen pisti.
Hän liikkuu tuulessa, tuiskussa,

ei jyrkintä polkua karta
ja ruskean paljaalla rinnallaan
hajan huljuu takkuinen parta.
Kuka tietää, mistä hän milloinkin käy,

kasaveikot ne silmiään herjää,
hänen sanotaan koonneen aarteita,
muka pirulle hän kolehtia kerjää.
Hän höpisee hämäriä sanojaan
kuin koirille vihansa hän heittäis,
hän tutkii salassa käsiään,
kuin rikosta suurta hän peittäis.
— Me ahteella seistihin vastakkain, oli katseensa

surevaisen, näin punasista silmäreijistä sen vaeltavan
juutalaisen.
Laivat ne seilaa.
Laivat ne seilaa sinisellä sillalla, taivaan ranta se kellertää,

tuuli se kauvas soudattaa, rakkaille rannoille joudattaa.
Punanen on purje ja karikivet kiiltää,

laivuri ruoria kouristaa,
kuultavat tähdet ne ilmoittaa,
minnekä aaltoset kuljettaa.
Vihreät on aallot ja valkeat on harjat,

syvyyttä synkkää ne syleilee,
pimeässä huutaen huoliaan
vihreät vaahdot valuu vaan.
Sinne ma tahtoisin koivun alta

punasen purren kannelle,
etelän maille ma laskisin
ja aalloilla aina ma laulaisin.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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respect of the populace at large.2 By contrast, a number of the essays in this

protections for the property or security of communities. Collective assault

of law, unadulterated by corruption and misgovernance.” In contrast, Skoda

of U.S. vigilante racial violence provided a language with which Brazilians

rarely lethal, mob violence to punish those suspected of immoral behavior or

in the 1980s as well as the Milwaukee skinheads’ connections to a translocal

is now Germany was also dependent upon embedding the expectations of

Popular Justice and Institutions:

in 1249, Innocent IV wrote to forbid any other orders to build oratories in

The women’s actions were described as “excess[us], violenti[es], et armorum

Communities and Popular Justice:

ability in an overtly legal sense, as presented by the chronicler Froissart, who

of existing judicial structures and the claimed legitimacy of revolutionary

Popular Justice and Private Interests:

der amounted, in medieval eyes at least, to something close to a truly heinous

through oral means, such gruesome incidents assured widespread publicity;

Yaroslavl, Central Russia. An angry mob of gardeners stripped

Agrafena Ignat’eva was known as a sorceress in her native village of Vrachevo,

Title: Kulkurin lauluja

Release date: December 12, 2019 [eBook #60909]

Credits: Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KULKURIN

LARIN-KYÖSTI [Kyösti Larsson]

Porvoossa, Werner Söderström, 1899.

Minne menet, kunne kulet tutun turvan kynnykseltä oman

Tääll' on pellon sato saita, köyhä olo, yksinäinen tunnit on

Päivä paistaa pilvien alta, loistaa neidot, naurun lapset,

Suurten vuorten tuolla puolla siell' on immet ihanammat,

Mieronteille moni meni, joka joutui loitommalle oman ahon

Älä itke äitikulta, vaikka vaivun laulun maille ohi oman

Hyvästi jää ja astu aamun teitä, älä Luojalta, älä muilta

Hyvästi jää nyt emo hyvä, hellä, kannan kuvasi, hyvät

Ma katselin kauvan taaksepäin, kotiseutuni hämärään

Kotirantoja rauhaton harhailin, söin, join sekä jouten

Ei auta, auta, en itkeä saa, kun eessäni suuri on suunnaton

Minä se olen kulkuripoika ja mulla on laulun ääni,

Ei ole rikkaus painamassa,

Hyräillen veisti sen paimenukko,

Kaksi kieltä on kimeää,

Laulan sydämmeni tarpeesta

Muilla on kannel kauniimpi

Laulu on lehdon katveesta,

Soittelen kulkurikanneltain ja pelokas ilo mun täyttää,

Yrttitarhassa yksin kuljet, siniset silmäsi nauraa, katselen

Katselen sinua kyynelsilmin,

Voi jos kysyisit äidiltäin: että palaako poikasi milloin?