Violence in Medieval Europe

Warren C. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138425408
• eBook ISBN: 9781317866206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The European Middle Ages have long attracted popular interest as an era characterised by violence, whether a reflection of societal brutality and lawlessness or part of a romantic vision of chivalry. Violence in Medieval Europe engages with current scholarly debate about the degree to which medieval European society was in fact shaped by such forces.

Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, Warren Brown examines the norms governing violence within medieval societies from the sixth to the fourteenth century, over an area covering the Romance and the Germanic-speaking regions of the continent as well as England. Scholars have often told the story of violence and power in the Middle Ages as one in which 'private' violence threatened and sometimes destroyed 'public' order. Yet academics are now asking to what degree violence that we might call private, in contrast to the violence wielded by a central authority, might have been an effective social tool. Here, Brown looks at how private individuals exercised violence in defence of their rights or in vengeance for wrongs within a set of clearly understood social rules, and how over the course of this period, kings began to claim the exclusive right to regulate the violence of their subjects as part of their duty to uphold God's order on earth.

Violence in Medieval Europe provides both an original take on the subject and an illuminating synthesis of recent and classic scholarship. It will be invaluable to students and scholars of history, medieval studies and related areas, for the light it casts not just on violence, but on the evolution of the medieval political order.

chapter one
Violence and the Medieval Historian

The English knight hit Sir Regnault de Roye very hard near the top of his helm, but did no other damage to him; Sir Regnault hit him on the shield with such a firm, powerful thrust, delivered with so strong an arm – for he was one of the strongest and toughest jousters in France at that time and also he was truly in love with a gay and beautiful young lady, and this contributed greatly to his success in all his undertakings – that his lance pierced the left-hand side of the English knight’s shield and went straight into his arm. As it did so, the lance broke, the longer part falling to the ground and the shorter part remaining in the shield with the steel point in the arm.

Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1410), Chronicles, IV, on the tournament held at Saint-Inglevert in 1390.¹

Medieval violence seems to exercise a certain fascination for a great many people, as witnessed by the violent tenor of movies or books set in the Middle Ages and of the ever more popular fantasy role-playing games set in medieval-like worlds. The appeal perhaps lies in the fact that violence in the Middle Ages was personal, direct, and visceral; it involved not guns or bombs but swords, knives, and lances, wooden staffs, clubs, and fists. According to the texts that describe it, it was often motivated by equally visceral feelings: anger, shame, and the craving for revenge, but also love, pride, and the desire for justice and glory. Medieval texts make no effort to hide the effects of violence. They tell us quite openly of torn or burnt flesh, spurting blood, the noise of metal striking metal, and the suffering of victims. It is possibly because of these qualities that medieval violence can be compellingly interesting, particularly to undergraduate students; the courses I have taught on violence in the Middle Ages, or on its purveyors such as knights, have consistently been the most well-attended of my offerings.

I too am drawn to medieval violence, not simply because it fascinates me as it does my students, but also because it opens up a route into the medieval worldview. From a modern perspective, medieval accounts of violence can seem contradictory. They can present violence as lawless and anarchic, as a force for evil that disrupts the right order of the world. They can also present it as a tool of right and justice, as a weapon for the protection of the poor and helpless, and even as God’s way of aiding his faithful. Violence lays waste to villages and towns; it offers its disciples glory, power, and lasting fame. Violence desecrates churches and monasteries; it is also the means by which God and his followers protect the faithful and their interests and avenge wrong. One gets the sense in fact that violence was not considered intrinsically bad. It could rather be good or bad depending on who was using it against whom and for what purpose. More puzzling to modern western sensibilities, it seems that anyone could wield violence. Though bearers of constituted authority, such as counts or kings, did use violence against wrongdoers or those that harmed their interests, so did many other people, often with the applause of their fellows.

Medieval violence presents us, therefore, with attitudes towards violence and its legitimate use, but more fundamentally towards right, wrong, power, and the proper ordering of human society, which differ profoundly from those that dominate modern western societies. We live at the dawn of the twenty-first century in a world in which the dominant idea of order claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence for the state. At the same time, our world is riven by violence, much of which is very difficult to understand when seen through the lens of western ideas about order. Societies that appear to be more violent than our own, or acts of violence that seem particularly incomprehensible – i.e., cruel, unjustified, wanton, irrational, or driven by religious beliefs – are often called “medieval”.² Those who do so apparently see the Middle Ages as having been similarly violent and/or disordered.

Yet the societies of the modern West are direct heirs to those of medieval Europe. Studying medieval violence thus gives us an opportunity to explore attitudes towards violence and order that are at once foreign and yet ancestors to our own. If we try to understand how medieval people thought about such things as justice and injustice, power and responsibility, and political order, we might get a sense for how some of our own attitudes towards violence evolved. We come away from the effort being able to see – without necessarily validating – violence in our own world that we do not understand not inevitably as irrational but rather driven possibly by worldviews and ideas of order that are different from our own.

So violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1921).³

Were medieval societies more violent than those of the modern West? Much of the past scholarship on the Middle Ages certainly thought so.⁴ Two decades after the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published his famous work on the end of the Middle Ages, the French medievalist Marc Bloch in his Feudal Society (1939–40) declared that “violence was … deep-rooted in the social structure and in the mentality of the age”.⁵ Bloch’s countryman Georges Duby connected violence particularly with knights; “the brutality of these men,” he commented in The History of French Civilization (1958), “accustomed as they are to fighting wild animals, and incapable of checking their anger. The battlefields described in the chansons de geste are strewn with severed heads and scattered brains.”⁶

Statements such as this reflect the impression created by all kinds of medieval sources, ranging from histories and literary works to hagiography and charters.⁷ These sources were, however, as interested in recording the spectacular, the dramatic, the entertaining, the shocking, the legally important, or the polemically useful as are the stories, journalism, records, and blogs of our own day. It is hard to say for certain, therefore, how well they represent the experience of most medieval people.

One might look for safety in statistics. Though the difficulties are profound, efforts have indeed been made to quantify levels of violence in parts of medieval Europe and to compare them to those in modern societies. One of the best remains James B. Given’s 1977 discussion of homicide rates in thirteenth-century England.⁸ Given chose homicide as a relatively clear and measurable index of violence (though more on this below), and looked for incidents recorded in royal circuit court, or eyre court, records from individual English counties, or shires. He chose as his measure one that is still in use, namely the number of homicides per 100,000 of population per year. Using his own estimates of the population in his target counties, Given found the highest homicide rate in Warwickshire in 1232, namely 64 homicides per 100,000 per year. The lowest was in the county of Bristol in 1227 and again in 1248, at 4/100,000/year. Over time, Given found that the homicide rate remained highest in Warwickshire, at c. 47/100,000/year over 25 years, while the lowest was in the county of Norfolk, at c. 9/100,000/year over 23 years.

Population estimates for medieval Europe, however, come with a very large margin of error; even the relatively dense documentation of thirteenth-century England permits at best only an educated guess about the number of people living in a given area. So Given redid his calculations using two other population estimates, one done by J.C. Russell for England in 1377 and one produced for the British parliament in 1801.⁹ The first of these calculations produced a high of 30/100,000/year (likewise Warwickshire in 1232) and a low of 11/100,000/year (county of Norfolk, 1250); the second produced a high of 18.9/100,000/year (Bedfordshire, 1276) and a low of 6.8/100,000/year (Kent, 1227).

Given then noted that the United Kingdom as a whole from 1930 onwards had a more or less stable homicide rate of c. 0.4/100,000/year; the United States in 1974 had a homicide rate of 9.7/100,000/year. Within the United States, figures for major cities in the mid-twentieth century ranged from 5.7/100,000/year for Philadelphia to 15.1/100,000/year for Miami. Since Given wrote, various national and international agencies have continued to compile homicide statistics. The UK Home Office, for example, has issued a set of international comparisons of homicide rates for the years 1999–2001.¹⁰ The lowest rates were found in the European Union as a whole, which boasted a homicide rate of 1.6/100,000/year for the period. The highest individual rates within the EU were in Finland at 2.9, Northern Ireland at 2.7, and Scotland at 2.2/100,000/year. The Home Office report found higher rates of homicide outside the EU. Lithuania and Estonia, for example, each had 10.6/100,000/year, while Russia had an eye-catching homicide rate of 22.1/100,000/year. The United States in the same period had a rate of 5.6/100,000/year,¹¹ but interesting peaks and valleys appear in the numbers for individual cities. The report found 8.1/100,000/year in San Francisco and 8.7/100,000/year in New York City, as compared to a modest 2.6/100,000/year in London (for which the 1244 eyre court session had produced a figure of 8, and the 1276 session a figure of 15/100,000/year). Washington DC was, however, in a different league, at 42.9/100,000/year.

When stacked up against Given’s for thirteenth-century England, these figures would seem to indicate clearly that life in high medieval England was more violent than life in the modern developed world. Modern homicide rates are for the most part lower, even much lower than Given’s, the range of Given’s population estimates notwithstanding. And yet, it is hard to make this claim absolutely. Given’s estimate for Bristol in 1227, 4/100,000/year, while higher than the 1999–2001 EU numbers produced by the UK Home Office, is lower than the US average. The picture gets more difficult to assess when we break apart the Home Office’s aggregate figures. With Estonia and Lithuania we start to approach the low end of Given’s range for Warwick (11/100,000/year); with Russia we enter into it. With Washington DC we are comfortably above the middle.

To make matters worse, homicide itself as a measure can be misleading. As Given himself points out, thirteenth-century England did not possess the level of weapons technology available to modern killers. In 1970, he notes, guns were estimated in Chicago to be five times as likely to kill as knives.¹² Medieval homicide rates may not, therefore, include the number of times someone tried to kill someone else but failed. By the same token, the modern west possesses medical technology vastly superior to that of medieval England. An assault that would in the latter have resulted in death may well be survivable today and thus not show up in the records as a homicide.¹³

It is possible, therefore – counterintuitive as it might seem – that thirteenth-century England as a whole was not significantly more violent than the US or EU around the turn of the twenty-first century. Warwick may have been thirteenth-century England’s Washington DC, while Bristol suffered homicide rates only slightly higher than many places in the modern EU. All of this is to say that while much of the US or EU experiences far less violence than much of thirteenth-century England, some city dwellers in the United States and some inhabitants of Russia endure about the same level. And some parts of thirteenth-century England experienced levels of violence little different from those found in much of the west today.

What is certain, however, is that medieval societies were differently violent. As I noted above, violence played a different and in many cases more central role in many medieval societies than it does in modern western ones; it shows up in medieval sources in contexts that are often unimaginable today. This feature of medieval violence, in fact, may well be responsible for the Middle Ages’ reputation as a violent epoch; a different range of people used violence in situations, in ways, and according to norms different from those we have been conditioned by our own experience to expect.

In recent years, a number of scholars have investigated medieval violence from this perspective; that is, they have asked not how violent were the Middle Ages but rather: how were the Middle Ages violent? They have approached this vast subject either by focusing on a particular part of the Middle Ages,¹⁴ a particular place,¹⁵ on a particular class of sources (such as literature or charters),¹⁶ on particular social groups within medieval society (such as knights or peasants),¹⁷ on a particular kind of violence (such as vengeance killings),¹⁸ or on particular methodological approaches to violence (such as those informed by anthropology or literary theory).¹⁹

With the help of some of these studies, I would like to explore the variety of ways that medieval people used violence and understood its use, and the range of norms according to which they legitimated or criticized it. I will offer a series of case studies covering the full range of the Middle Ages in time, and much of medieval Europe in space. These case studies will foc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFACE AND AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• chapter one VIOLENCE AND THE MEDIEVAL HISTORIAN
• PART ONE COMPETING ORDERS
• PART TWO LOCAL AND ROYAL POWER IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
• PART THREE TWELFTH-CENTURY TRANSFORMATIONS
• PART FOUR A MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE?
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX