Books by Sara M Butler
Cambridge University Press, 2022
In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to p... more In medieval England, a defendant who refused to plead to a criminal indictment was sentenced to pressing with weights as a coercive measure. Using peine forte et dure ('strong and hard punishment') as a lens through which to analyse the law and its relationship with Christianity, Butler asks: where do we draw the line between punishment and penance? And, how can pain function as a vehicle for redemption within the common law? Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this book embraces both law and literature. When Christ is on trial before Herod, he refused to plead, his silence signalling denial of the court's authority. England's discontented subjects, from hungry peasant to even King Charles I himself, stood mute before the courts in protest. Bringing together penance, pain and protest, Butler breaks down the mythology surrounding peine forte et dure and examines how it functioned within the medieval criminal justice system.
The twelve essays in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britai... more The twelve essays in Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain examine marches and margins as jurisdictional, legal, and social expressions of power, building upon the scholarship of Professor Cynthia J. Neville.
Available for $25 through Brill MyBook.
England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death... more England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.
Available in paperback for $44.95.
Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages offers fresh insight into the intersection between these ... more Medicine and the Law in the Middle Ages offers fresh insight into the intersection between these two distinct disciplines. A dozen authors address this intersection within three themes: medical matters in law and administration of law, professionalization and regulation of medicine, and medicine and law in hagiography. The articles include subjects such as medical expertise at law on assault, pregnancy, rape, homicide, and mental health; legal regulation of medicine; roles physicians and surgeons played in the process of professionalization; canon law regulations governing physical health and ecclesiastical leaders; and connections between saints’ judgments and the bodies of the penitent. Drawing on primary sources from England, France, Frisia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, the volume offers a truly international perspective.
Contributors are Sara M. Butler, Joanna Carraway Vitiello, Jean Dangler, Carmel Ferragud, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Maire Johnson, Hiram Kümper, Iona McCleery, Han Nijdam, Kira Robison, Donna Trembinski, Wendy J. Turner, and Katherine D. Watson.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
Divorce in Medieval England is intended to reorient scholarly perceptions concerning divorce in t... more Divorce in Medieval England is intended to reorient scholarly perceptions concerning divorce in the medieval period. Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the many and varied uses of divorce in the medieval period and highlighting the fact that couples regularly divorced on the grounds of spousal incompatibility. Because the medieval church was determined to uphold the sacrament of marriage whenever possible, divorce in the medieval period was a much more complicated process than it is today. Thus, this book steps readers through the process of divorce, including: grounds for divorce, the fundamentals of the process, the risks involved, financial implications for wives who were legally disabled thanks to the rules of coverture, the custody and support of children, and finally, what happens after a divorce. Readers will gain a much greater appreciation of marriage and women’s position in later medieval England.
Available in paperback for $42.
The Language of Abuse provides the first comprehensive examination of marital violence in later ... more The Language of Abuse provides the first comprehensive examination of marital violence in later medieval England. Drawing from a wide variety of legal and literary sources, this book develops a nuanced perspective of the acceptability of marital violence at a time when social expectations of gender and marriage were in transition. As such, Butler’s work contributes to current debates concerning the role of the jury, levels of violence in late medieval England, the power relationship within marriage, and the position of women in medieval society.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
Journal Articles by Sara M Butler
Gender & History, 2024
Reflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering ... more Reflecting the carceral turn in scholarship, this introduction to a special issue on engendering carcerality explores the difference that gender makes in the history of the carceral in its various forms over time and space. It considers the multiple meanings and spaces of imprisonment, surveillance, and confinement; incarceration of mothers; confinement of sex workers; imprisoning of political prisoners, and reforming of youths, taking account of intersectional identities, sexuality and resistance. It looks forward by looking back, engaging in a dialogue with abolitionist movements and current global struggles to encourage critical gendered histories of incarceration and resistance. We have entered a carceral turn in scholarship, reflective of the rise of mass imprisonment and expansion of policing and surveillance in many areas of the world. Not until the 1990s was the term 'carcerality' in much use, but the concept became ubiquitous following the 1998 Critical Resistance Conference. 1 There, at the University of California, Berkeley, abolitionist feminists, mostly women of colour, joined with people who were incarcerated and other dissenters from the prison-industrial complex to envision a world without prisons and the end of structures of inequality that led to incarceration as a mechanism of social control and labour extraction. The conference underscored the connections between violence in the home and the streets, especially for minoritised and poor communities, and the violence inside the prison and related institutions that maintained the racialised gendered order. 2 Nonetheless, power is not absolute even when it is the most lethal. As robust discussions over prison abolitionism exemplify, despite the increased numbers of women, transgender men and others locked up, disproportionately Black and Brown in the United States, carceral regimes have generated pushback. Everyday resistance, hunger strikes, break-outs, insider/outside solidarities, labour organising and legal challenges disrupt the workings of systems in the present time even as abolitionist imaginings prefigure another world to be possible. This special issue asks: What difference does gender make in the history of the carceral? What are the continuities and differences across time and political economies, gender systems and social formations? What kinds of women's and feminist movements have made or unmade the carceral? Imprisonment, confinement and detention have histories, but so does resistance inside and outside of jails, reformatories, asylums and other spaces of restriction. Two scholars of gender, one a historian of This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Journal of Legal History, 2023
Historians have long argued that arbitration was the preferred means of resolution for most dispu... more Historians have long argued that arbitration was the preferred means of resolution for most disputes in later medieval England; but does this apply also to the settlement of homicides? Despite the strenuous efforts of the English legal system after the Norman Conquest to force homicides through the royal courts, historians have argued that homicide continued to be settled out-of-court throughout the medieval period. This study examines six cases of arbitration centred on homicide from the fifteenth century to demonstrate that arbitration was rarely implemented as a means to resolve homicides. When it was, it was a relatively small, interrelated group of gentry who exploited the provision because they were well placed to manipulate the law and because their behaviour was supervised by the kingdom's magnates only once problems had arisen. Accordingly, arbitration for homicide was unusual and the practice was anything but inclusive. KEYWORDS Homicide arbitration gentry compensation out-of-court settlements Many thanks to the King George III Professorship in British History at The Ohio State University for funding this research project. When Henry V ascended the throne, he was determined to put his youthful transgressions behind him, to '[forsake] al wyldnes', to take up 'good gouernaunce, and [keep] streytly his lawys with ryghtwisnes & Iustise'. Within the first year of his reign, so the Brut chronicler tells us, he found his dedication to good and just governance tested by two knights who were constantly 'at gret debate'. Although we are not given their names, we are told their political affiliations: one was a
Law and History Review, 2019
Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted ... more Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. Despite the significance of their role, little is known about medieval matrons and what qualified them to sit on a jury. Were they mothers? Honorable wives? Midwives? The goal of this paper is to argue that matrons had training in obstetrics. This was particularly important for medieval matrons because the quickening (that is ensoulment, signaled by the first fetal movements) did not become the focal point of the matrons' assessment until at least 1348. Before this, the diagnosis was much more medically challenging as matrons had to determine whether a felon had conceived. Overall, the medieval records demonstrate great confidence in medieval matrons and their obstetrical expertise.
Historical Reflections, 2018
Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged ... more Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged in democide and civilians lived in terror, is not supported by the evidence. By analyzing Pinker’s sources for the medieval period and providing a clearer understanding of the difficulties involved in extracting statistical data from medieval England’s criminal justice system, this article hopes to demonstrate that Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing process is not tenable. While the medieval world was violent, we cannot definitively say just how violent it actually was, and whether it was any more or less violent than we are today.
Canadian Journal of History, 2012
Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as ... more Conflicts between parish clergy and parishioners in late medieval England have been described as acts of both anticlericalism and proclericalism (that is, an attempt to compel clergy into living up to the parishioners’ increasingly high expectations of them). This paper hopes to expand our knowledge of parish conflict by turning to an oft-neglected source. In his 2002 book Selling the Church, Robert Palmer contended that we must turn to the king’s courts to better understand conflicts with the church, because both the clergy and the laity frequently preferred the king’s justice to the church’s. This paper also turns to the king’s courts, this time to the courts of equity. Examining a sampling of cases involving parish violence this paper hopes to offer a greater appreciation for the variety of sentiment existing in England prior to the Reformation.
Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 2011
Florilegium , 2011
Fears of being accused of malpractice have plagued the field of medicine since its inception. Des... more Fears of being accused of malpractice have plagued the field of medicine since its inception. Despite the longevity of the concerns, English law was slow to catch up and only did so eventually because of the pressure exerted from below by users of medicine rather than the practitioners themselves. Much of the hostility between medical practitioners and their dissatisfied patients is reflected in disputes over payment in an economy that functioned exclusively on supply and demand: patients refused to pay for anything less than a cure, and they withheld fees when they believed that the quality of the service was less than exemplary.
Journal of Women’s History, Special Issue: Domestic Violence in History, 2007
Since Barbara Kellum’s pioneering work on child murder in medieval England, published in 1973, me... more Since Barbara Kellum’s pioneering work on child murder in medieval England, published in 1973, medieval historians have argued that the courts adopted an approach to child murder that highlighted “the casual nature and mild consequences of infanticide in late medieval England.” Kellum concluded that royal officials rarely bothered to prosecute either infanticide or filicide, and justices and jurors treated those cases that did appear in the courts with lenience: specifically, Kellum argues that the courts viewed child murdering mothers as mentally incompetent and thus awarded them pardons. Further compounding the argument, Barbara Hanawalt has noted that a mother was not even guilty of homicide in the killing of her infant until the mid-sixteenth century under statute law, thus medieval “jurors may have been unclear whether or not indictment was appropriate.” The goal of this paper is to test these commonly held assumptions about child murder, employing a sampling of 131 instances of child murder (comprising 144 victims) from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in England. In particular, this paper will argue that infanticide was a felony in the Middle Ages and that neither jurors nor royal officials treated child murder with indifference. In fact, there is no reason to believe that the English royal courts treated the murder of infants or older children as anything less than homicide. This paper will ask a number of pertinent questions in order to uncover the nature of medieval child murder and its treatment in the courts of medieval England. How did royal officials and jurors react to cases of child murder? Was this a woman’s crime (in particular, was this a singlewoman’s crime)? Were the victims usually female? Finally, what happened to child murderers? For the purposes of this paper, child murder as a category is restricted to cases of infanticide by a parent (homicide of an infant, from newborns up to the age of one), and filicide (homicide of young children, that is under the age of seven).
Journal of Social History, 2006
Most scholars of the medieval family would agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an eas... more Most scholars of the medieval family would agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Lawrence Stone has depicted married life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating.” Judith Bennett also contends that wife-beating was “a normal part of marriage.” What is more, the rules of coverture rigidly enforced by the common law courts of England left a wife economically vulnerable. Because all real and movable property were thought to belong to the husband as head of the household, a wife who fell out of favour with her husband might well find herself expelled from the family home, without any resources to fall back on. At a time when families, not individuals, were generally responsible for spousal selection, it is not hard to imagine that many medieval wives found their fates difficult to accept. In general, historians have assumed that wives passively accepted this position – and yet, ecclesiastical and secular records for the English courts both abound with evidence of wives who deserted their husbands, refusing to adhere to unhappy or unsatisfying marriages. The goal of this paper is to examine this evidence, focusing on bishops’ registers, ecclesiastical actbooks, manorial courts, chancery records, and even assize rolls, to discern better the frequency and common features of wife desertion, as well as contemporary attitudes held by both wives and society in general.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 2006
Alexander Murray has written that, in the Middle Ages, women were more frequently excused of suic... more Alexander Murray has written that, in the Middle Ages, women were more frequently excused of suicide because “female suicide was just too horrible to think about.” Murray’s perspective builds on a heritage of ideas about chivalry and modesty. Christian hagiography, replete with stories about the deaths of virgin martyrs, women who killed themselves rather than jeopardise their vows of chastity, in particular, would seem to pardon female suicides. More generally, historians have had difficulty imagining that medieval society imposed the full weight of the law on self-killers. At a time when a suicide was refused proper burial in consecrated ground, interred at a crossroads with a stake through its heart, and all its goods and property were confiscated by the king, merciful declarations of non compos mentis would seem most fitting. An examination of 718 cases of suicide from coroners and eyre rolls, however, suggests that this was not the case. Medieval juries usually declared a suicide felonious. This rule holds true also for medieval women, who played a significant role in the crime. In fact, medieval Englishwomen were far more likely to participate in suicide than in any other felony. The treatment of female suicides by juries certainly demonstrates a degree of compassion; and yet, more often than not, their verdicts show signs of malice and resentment. An investigation of cases of female suicide in these documents opens a window into the minds of medieval jurors to reveal their attitudes towards female suicide in a wide variety of situations; at the same time, these cases offer evidence to explain why medieval women sometimes resorted to suicide.
History Compass, 2006
When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of ... more When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon's goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on the verdicts put forward by members of the jury during the various stages of the legal process. While these elements form the base of jury verdicts relating to self-killings, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that medieval juries did not respond uniformly to cases of suicide. Rather, jurors at various stages of the process differed widely in their familiarity with the dead and this familiarity had an impact on their judgments. Members of the coroners’ inquest juries were often neighbors of the dead, and thus their verdicts reflected a more local resolution to the death of a community member than the verdicts of presentment or trial juries.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2006
**Winner of the Sutherland Prize, awarded by the American Society for Legal History for the Best ... more **Winner of the Sutherland Prize, awarded by the American Society for Legal History for the Best Article in English Legal History.
Journal of Women’s History , 2005
Throughout Western history, abortion has been a contentious issue; nevertheless, ethically and le... more Throughout Western history, abortion has been a contentious issue; nevertheless, ethically and legally, society has drawn a line between voluntary and involuntary abortion. Women who bring an abortion on themselves by enlisting the services of a medical practitioner or by imbibing venomous draughts have rarely managed to draw sympathy from the communities in which they live. On the other hand, pregnant women who become the victims of brutal assault and miscarry as a result, have been treated in a different manner entirely. According to medieval common law, if the foetus had already been endowed with a soul (roughly around the third month), such an attack was indeed homicide. It has been argued, however, that in practice, English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as such. Cyril C. Means, Jr. maintains that not only was an abortion not felonious in medieval England, it was not even criminal. More recently, John M. Riddle reminds us that we “must distinguish between legal principles as known by jurists and the principles of fact on which juries were willing to find people guilty.” While medieval common law probably viewed abortion by assault as a crime, English jurors did not. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, like rape, male jurors are loath to impose the death penalty. Both Means and Riddle base their conclusions on a mere handful of cases. A greater number of cases presents a much different view. While conviction rates for assault on pregnant women are very low (not unusual given the general reticence of jurors to convict for any felony), the responses of those involved demonstrate that Englishmen and women certainly believed it was a crime of felonious proportions. Moreover, the role played by husbands as plaintiffs makes it clear that this was not merely a women’s issue. As the recent work of Becky R. Lee and Fiona Harris Stoertz indicate, the birth of a child was a moment of great pride and celebration for medieval men; they not only cared for the welfare of their unborn children, but also the future health and fertility of their wives. Abortion by assault was never an easy judgment for jurors to deliver; but there is very little reason to believe it was not a criminal matter, taken seriously by plaintiffs, jurors and defendants.
Uploads
Books by Sara M Butler
Available for $25 through Brill MyBook.
Available in paperback for $44.95.
Contributors are Sara M. Butler, Joanna Carraway Vitiello, Jean Dangler, Carmel Ferragud, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Maire Johnson, Hiram Kümper, Iona McCleery, Han Nijdam, Kira Robison, Donna Trembinski, Wendy J. Turner, and Katherine D. Watson.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
Available in paperback for $42.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
Journal Articles by Sara M Butler
Available for $25 through Brill MyBook.
Available in paperback for $44.95.
Contributors are Sara M. Butler, Joanna Carraway Vitiello, Jean Dangler, Carmel Ferragud, Fiona Harris-Stoertz, Maire Johnson, Hiram Kümper, Iona McCleery, Han Nijdam, Kira Robison, Donna Trembinski, Wendy J. Turner, and Katherine D. Watson.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
Available in paperback for $42.
Available for $25, through Brill Mybook.
This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that parents might cross the line between influence and force, and consequently permitted annulments on these grounds. What happened when it was not the parents, but an overly zealous suitor who coerced a marriage? Very few Englishwomen brought suits of force and fear against their husbands. Those few documented cases of coerced marriage that have survived from the York cause papers of the later Middle Ages reveal how the victims perceived their own situations, and the ways litigants used the church courts to address these concerns.
knew her carnally and beat her several times with blows and beatings, “as if she was his wife.” He also got her pregnant. In the end, it was the pregnancy that prompted her to come forward: she requested thirty marks in compensation so that she might raise and educate the child.
Nurtured by formative scholars such as Henry Charles Lea and Johan
Huizinga, this vision of endemic violence and lawlessness is deeply
entrenched in scholarly perceptions of the Middle Ages. In this narrative,
violence was a normal part of everyday life in medieval Europe. The scope of
that violence is illustrated by two now infamous anecdotes. Fulminating on
the pervasive and unrestrained violence of medieval urban life, Barbara
Hanawalt explained that a person had a better chance of being murdered in
medieval Oxford or London than of dying in an accident.1 James Given
delivered an even more dire warning about life in medieval Europe, remarking
that every person, ‘if he did not personally witness a murder, knew or
knew of someone who had been killed’.2 This long heritage of hyperbole
prompted Marcus Bull to observe that ‘[v]iolence was everywhere [in the
Middle Ages], impinging on many aspects of daily life’;3 while Peter
Hoppenbrouwers more recently coined the phrase a ‘culture of violence’.4
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-world-history-of-violence/A66C0C42F41D137B4D221B6C375D645B
In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 52 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. The volumes describe the role of marriage, its contributions to society, and how it engages with matters of religion, law, society and love.
Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.
The six volumes cover: 1. – Antiquity (500 BCE - 500 CE); 2. – Medieval Age (500 - 1450); 3. – Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1400 - 1650) ; 4. – Age of Enlightenment (1650 - 1800); 5. – Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. – Modern Age (1920 – 2000+).
Themes (and chapter titles) are: Courtship and Rite; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.
The page extent is approximately 1,728pp with c. 240 illustrations. Each volume opens with a series preface and an introduction, and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, List of Contributors and an Index.
In Ohio, Governor DeWine’s landmark 8 December 2020 press conference has left the future of felony execution in the state up in the air. The indefinite delay in capital punishment announced back in 2018 has turned into what DeWine is referring to as a “de facto moratorium,” as he instructs lawmakers to find some method of execution other than lethal injection. Since 2015, Ohio, like twenty-eight other American states where the death penalty remains on the books, has been struggling to find an American pharmaceutical company willing to supply sodium thiopental. A nation-wide shortage of the drug springs from the reluctance of drug companies to be openly associated with the death penalty. Past boycotts of their products across Europe have demonstrated that it is bad for business. ...
On Saturday, June 15, 1287, an inquest was held at the king’s prison of Carlisle (Cumbria) into accusations against William le Macegrene of Langrigg, arrested and imprisoned for the homicide of Richard de la Ferete, for which he stood indicted. The inquest had been assembled to establish whether the indictment had been procured legitimately or maliciously, as the defendant claimed. The defendant’s objective was to be released from prison on bail. The next general eyre was five years away. Five years in prison was a dangerous and expensive proposition at a time when prisoners regularly died from “gaol fever,” malnutrition, or just outright starvation. Thus, while it was English policy to detain all defendants accused of homicide without bail, exceptions might be made if the accusation was found to have sprung from hate and spite (de odio et atya) and the suspected felon was willing to foot the bill for the inquest.
Towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Hemyng, a chaplain associated with Hereford cathedral, experienced a harrowing ordeal. Richard Rollesden, undersheriff to Thomas Parker, the county sheriff, stole 21 marks of goods and chattels from a local gentleman, then pinned the crime on Hemyng, whom he arrested and indicted by means of a jury fraudulently empaneled with jurors he had bribed. Hemyng's time in prison was truly horrific. He tells us that they sette a pon hym a peyre of grete gyves and boltys of iron to importable to bere and bolted his armes the space of a yerde frome other and then leyde hym yn a peyre of stockys in a depe pytte and with all this peyn ther hongyd hym frome the grounde and kepte hym frome mete and drynke and frome his frendys (set upon him a pair of great fetters and bolts of iron too heavy to bear and bolted his arms the space of a yard from each other, and then laid him in a pair of stocks in a deep pit and with all this pain there hanged him from the ground and kept him from meat and drink and from his friends) until he promised to pay a fine of £10, 6 shillings, and 8 pence in order to be delivered from prison. He, and the friends who stood surety for the funds, were then bound over in an obligation to the sheriff for a sum of 100 marks, promising that they would never implead, vex nor trouble the sheriff and his men for any matter relating to the above treatment. To make certain Hemyng saw the merit in silence, the undersheriffs threatened to beat him and any of his acquaintances if they spoke out. Hemyng's experience brings to life all the worst aspects of medieval prison from our popular imaginations. In the middle ages we see regularly on the big screen, prisoners are cast into damp, dark dungeons, replete with shackles, gruel, and rats for company. Food and rodents are the only essentials missing from Hemyng's narrative. Admittedly, what we don't tend to imagine is that very same prisoner later presenting himself as a humble petitioner before the Lord Chancellor of England in his court at Westminster, to complain of this "grevous wrong and hurt." Nor do we imagine him seeking writs of subpoena to be served to all those responsible for his torment, to have them appear before the chancellor in his court in order to be examined regarding these circumstances, with the goal of having them punished, and the petitioner's money restored, all of which the petitioner asks the chancellor to
This is intended to be a list of primary sources in print for students who are writing history papers, for professors who are trying to find sources for their students, and for those who are simply interested in reading some original documents.
The goal of this page is accessibility: therefore, almost all of these texts are ones that have been translated into English.
A recent article in the Journal of Legal History by Gwen Seabourne addresses one of the more unusual requirements of medieval law. If a widower hoped to remain on the land brought into marriage by his dead wife, his claim rested on having fathered a live and legitimate child by her. Even if the child immediately died, its short life was sufficient to grant a widower an interest in his wife’s land for the remainder of his life. What is most remarkable, though, is the nature of the evidence required for proof of life: a crying test. A Year Book from the late thirteenth century spells out the condition: “[I]n order that the husband may hold the inheritance of his wife by the curtesy of England by reason of issue between them, it is necessary that the issue be heard to cry or squall within the four [walls].”[1] Certainly, to most readers, I suspect that a crying test sounds like a roundabout route of proving life: what about testimony from the midwife? Or a physician? Yet as Prof. Seabourne explains, “it fits in with the general importance of sound in medieval common law, with its oral tradition, its hue and cry, its cries and proclamations to announce statutes, legal processes and judicial sessions.”[2]
Since reading this article, my mind keeps circling back to the role of sound in medieval law....
About six months ago, I stumbled across an intriguing 2011 article by Stephen Alsford on the subject of medieval serfdom and the myth that “town air makes free” – that is, escape to a town for the period of a year and a day earned a fugitive serf his freedom in medieval England.[1] The subject aside, what surprised me most about the article is the fact that it appeared in the journal Slavery & Abolition. Equating serfs with slaves is a bold move, and something that we emphatically do not do in medieval historical circles. The medieval unfree were undoubtedly the descendants of the Roman Empire’s chattel slaves; but, as the medieval history textbooks pronounce, their status was wholly different. Admittedly, after that strong stance the explanation in the textbooks tends to get a bit hazy, and for good reason. There are wide gaps in our knowledge. When chattel slavery died out is hotly debated. Some argue it withered away during the Roman era;[2] others see the Norman Conquest as the key moment for the abolition of English slavery.[3] How slavery transitioned into serfdom is an equally elusive subject; but most importantly the distinction between the two states — how the daily experience of serfdom differed from that of slavery — is something we know little about. Admittedly, the records don’t make this easy: the fact that the standard vocabulary for slavery (servus, mancipium, ancilla) was simply repurposed for medieval serfs makes it difficult to detect any transition in status. In the classroom, most of us just hope that in rapidly glossing over such a major shift no student will stop to ask exactly how this happened.
The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville (Leics.) played a key role in persuading me to devote my life to researching crime in medieval England. As an undergraduate, reading Edward Stones’ 1957 study of the infamous crime family opened my eyes to the medieval common law’s broad potential for manipulation and creative application of the laws.[1] For those of you unfamiliar with the family, their story comes across as a medieval rendering of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, with a little bit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thrown in for good measure. John de Folville, lord of Ashby-Folville, fathered seven sons. Only one of the seven, John the younger, led the typical life of the medieval gentry, obtaining appointments as commissioner of array and keeper of the peace at various stages in his career. The other six were professional criminals, with a string of robberies, rapes, and murders on their respective rap sheets. One of the brothers, Richard Folville, strangely enough was also a member of the clergy...
When reading over an anonymous reviewer’s comments on a manuscript I was writing on the subject of women’s legal disability in medieval England, I was genuinely surprised by one of the recommendations. He (or she) asked me to insert a reminder to my audience that, when it comes to the law, not all married women experienced the strictures of coverture. The legal designation of femme sole (“woman alone”) made some women an exception to the rule.
and the Cistercians of the thirteenth-century Low Countries, women like Lutgard of Aywières and Ida of Nivelles. The sanctity of these women derived from the healing miracles for which they were best known. Studying these “communities of care” (p. 31), and the unconventional means of healing they endorsed, offers us the best means to understand how health care, in the broadest sense of the term, was practiced on a daily basis in late medieval Europe.
“parallel forms of discourse, each with its own conventions and traditions,”
although their interaction is understood as being chiefly unidirectional:
literature provides an opportunity to critique changes in law or present
a view of law in action.1 Thomas’s book, however, proposes a new dimension altogether to this relationship. He sees William Langland using (primarily) the C-text of his Piers Plowman as a vehicle to participate in contemporary debates about canon law and the practice of pastoral care. As Thomas explains in his introduction, Langland’s intervention should not be seen as remarkable. Canon law was never an accumulation of statutes, as we often imagine law to be. Rather, canon law was a constantly evolving system, reliant on the debates and treatises of great canonists and theologians that produced much conflicting work. As a result, it was never a “closed corpus” (12). Nor was it definitive: rather, the judge in an ecclesiastical court ruled in accordance with those works he found most compelling. Drawing in part on the fact that Piers Plowman was typically read alongside treatises of canon law, Thomas asks us to imagine Piers Plowman as part of this process.He provides a cogent and compelling case for the poem’s participation in the glossing and production of canon law.
Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at the International Medieval
Congress in Leeds discussing the question of whether it was time to ditch
the term “agency” because overuse in the scholarship had stripped it of
its original meaning. Thus, imagine my surprise when I read Epurescu-Pascovici’s dismissive statement that the “social history of the individual
agent in the later Middle Ages remains largely to be written” (1). Clearly,
we were not on the same page. One might even argue that we were not
even reading the same book. Of course, Epurescu-Pascovici’s work is
plainly not intended for a group of social historians; nor is he reading their
work. Rather, this book is designed specifically for an audience of historical sociologists and anthropologists conversant in action theory who will appreciate the author’s efforts to flesh out the medieval roots of modernity. This book is not looking to reanimate the twentieth-century debate on the birth of the individual; yet it very much picks up where that debate left off by asking, if medieval people did have a strong sense of self-awareness, did they also appreciate their capacity to effect change?