A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages

Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment

Irina Metzler

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136778230
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called "disabled." Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes.

This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.

1 Law

This chapter investigates medieval laws and the effects of judicial actions.¹ Notions and perceptions of physically impaired people as presented in legal texts can inform us about the status, social position and rights (or restrictions) impaired people may have had. Similarly, the ‘evaluation’ of impairments in legal discourse can illuminate societal attitudes. Laws imposed restrictions on disabled people, but also protection in some cases, while injury, especially during the earlier Middle Ages, was often dealt with through compensation law. These topics have been discussed specifically in relation to permanent injuries, leading to physical impairments.² Conversely, through judicial mutilation in punishment, the law was actually causing impairment. The quantitative statistics surrounding judicial maiming, i.e. the question of how frequently people were physically impaired through punishments and judicial torture, are deliberately disregarded, since there is some controversy as to the extent of these practices which cannot be answered in an overview such as here. The questions of how prevalent physical mutilation really was, in which regions and in which epochs, and where more so than others, also to which extent the practical, ‘real’ application of written, ‘theoretical’ law codes was actually carried out, one cannot endeavour to answer with certainty.

The following may serve as illustration of the problem to which extent, at what times, under which circumstances or with what authority such penalties were enacted. In the laws of Cnut (compiled 1020–1023) there seemed to be a reluctance to execute criminals outright; instead there was a sliding scale of judicial mutilation. This followed a principle similar to the modern notion of ‘three strikes and you’re out’. An accused man, who could be accused of any criminal act although the majority mainly related to theft, had three chances of conviction, with a harsher penalty in each instance: the first conviction could still be resolved by a compensation payment and through wergild, but the second and third instances required corporal punishments:

[30.4.] And on the second occasion there is to be no other compensation, if he is convicted, but that his hands, or feet, or both, in proportion to the deed, are to be cut off. [30.5] And if, however, he has committed still further crimes, his eyes are to be put out and his nose and ears and upper lip cut off, or his scalp removed, whichever of these is then decreed by those with whom the decision rests; thus one can punish and at the same time preserve the soul.³

Note that in hierarchical terms of impairments, the second level of punishment caused the convicted criminal to have an orthopaedic impairment, while the third level inflicted sensory impairments. Note also the clause denying legal responsibility, in that although it was likely that the third-degree punishments would lead to the death of the convicted man, his death would not have been directly caused by capital punishment, which the laws of Cnut expressly tried to avoid for the sake of “preserv[ing] the soul”. In late tenth-century and eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England, the use of physical punishment was a means to reveal both the crime and its recompense on the body, so that the body was the ‘text’ for both crime and punishment.⁴

During the Carolingian period mutilation as a form of punishment had been on the increase, but in conjunction with crimes such as arson and theft, which used to carry the death penalty; hence by contemporaries mutilation was regarded as a more lenient approach.⁵ Conversely, some crimes were treated more harshly, such as perjury or fraud, which prior to the Carolingian period had been compensated by monetary fines.⁶ Throughout the medieval period, mutilating punishments were on the rise, the argument goes. While in twelfth-century Germany hacking off the hand was still the only mutilating punishment, by the thirteenth century a variety of mutilations such as blinding,⁷ cutting off ears and so on were now being used.⁸ Nevertheless, compensation payment as an alternative to mutilation continued to remain an option,⁹ one which was of course more readily available to the wealthy than to the poor. Thus in German historiography, the late Middle Ages were seen as the period when physical punishments, from the amputation of hands to cutting off ears, became an integral part of the judicial process.¹⁰

It is certainly the case that during the later Middle Ages corporal punishments were coming to be favoured over other punitive measures, such as monetary fines or imprisonment. For instance, around 1500, within a two-week-stretch alone in Nuremberg two men were hung, a charcoal burner was beheaded, an eighty-year-old peasant had both eyes gouged out and a maid who had “stolen much” (vil gestoln) had her ears cut off.¹¹ Judicial practices perhaps echoed or reflected wider social mentalities, so that:

one of the defining features of this Christianized, late medieval ‘paradigm’ of punitive justice, namely, a distinctive mode of judicial spectatorship, fretted with the visual habits and devotional attitudes unique to this period.¹²

Hints are occasionally provided by the documentary record that mutilating punishments were not necessarily carried out but instead commuted to fines.¹³ From a study of the archives of Bruges in the fifteenth century, Malcolm Letts had drawn the conclusion that:

a large number of offences, which we might expect to be punished by loss of liberty or by mutilation, were dealt with at Bruges by fines only. Fines were imposed for larceny, housebreaking and burglary, threats to murder, wounding, violent and aggravated assaults, adultery, forcible entry, common theft, for wapeldrink, a curious ducking offence which was regarded very seriously in Flanders at this time, and for various offences against the peace, which would seem in any age to have merited more serious treatment.¹⁴

More recently, according to Robert Mills, it seems, too, that “judicial violence was exercised selectively and acquittals and reduction of sentences were often the order of the day”¹⁵ across late medieval Europe. Social historian John Bellamy had put forward the argument that physical punishments, such as judicial mutilation or branding, were relatively rare in England in the high Middle Ages, as compared with either the first century after the Norman conquest or with the fifteenth century and following.¹⁶ Miri Rubin in turn, however, commented that the study of maiming through judicial punishment and torture was hindered by the paucity of medieval sources.¹⁷ The ‘classic’ portrait of the later Middle Ages as especially ‘barbaric’ and full of violence (judicial and otherwise) is derived from the opening chapter—“The Violent Tenor of Life”—of an influential volume originally published in 1919, Huizinga’s The Autumn [Waning] of the Middle Ages.¹⁸

By the early thirteenth century the Church was becoming more concerned about its clergy being involved in the shedding of blood (i.e. through warfare, practising surgery or by being present at judicial ordeals). Not for nothing were heretics handed over to the secular arm for punishment. The insistence at the council of 1215 that clerics should have no blood on their hands occurred at a time when secular justice was becoming increasingly bloody. Religious and secular legal codes came to differ quite sharply. Canon law had developed gradually from late antiquity through the early Middle Ages, but was substantially collected and systematised around 1140 in Gratian’s Decretum. By the middle of the thirteenth century this collection had been added to by various papal decrees, coming to be known as Corpus iuris canonici. In terms of antecedents, canon law emerged from the old Roman law tradition as well as the early medieval penitentials, the penances in which were almost always non-mutilating (mainly prayer, fasting, etc.). The laws of Cnut did indeed make a claim for spiritual efficacy, but one ought to bear in mind these predated the emergence of formalised canon law by some half century. So once canon law emerged in fully developed form (and in the very early thirteenth century the former lawyer turned pope Innocent III embodied the apogee of this development), the distinction between bloodless canon law and blood-shedding secular law became more apparent.

As execution and mutilation grew in importance, edging out earlier systems based on compensation, the priest and the clerk found that the rules of their order and the practices of the secular courts were increasingly discordant.¹⁹

Whereas the older legal systems, both secular and clerical, had tried to avoid bloodshed and mutilation, by the thirteenth century secular legal proceedings began to deviate more strongly from such sentiments which canon law nevertheless still entailed. Interestingly, the re-emergence of Roman law appears to have driven the increased use of judicial mutilation, if the argument presented by Patrick Geary is anything to go by; Roman law had liberally employed “torture, mutilation, and execution … both for the interrogation of unfree witnesses and as punishment for a wide range of offenses.”²⁰ An alternative argument made by a number of historians is that with the abolition in 1215 of trial by ordeal, other methods of establishing the ‘truth’ in a criminal case had to be found, so that interrogation and confession of a suspect became the primary tools of the judiciary.²¹ One important question for further research therefore might surround the apparent increase in judicial corporal punishments during the later Middle Ages.

‘Judicial’ can be interpreted in a very wide sense: the victors assailing the vanquished undoubtedly thought they were acting judiciously and within the moral and legal codes of the day. Thus while injury of combatants in direct battle will be covered in the next chapter, as part of the occupational hazards and disabilities concerning soldiers, here the disabling of non-combatants or of defeated and/or captive soldiers is treated as part of judicial mutilation. According to the thinking of medieval military commanders, the physical mutilation of enemies, and even downright massacre, was considered part of useful, if not always acceptable, military strategy.²² Despite—or possibly because—many victims did not survive mutilations such as having their eyes gouged out, these tortures were used to demoralise the enemy. Since most victims of such actions tended to be non-combatants, it is more appropriate to consider their fate under ‘judicial’ mutilation than under occupational disabilities, even if that is stretching the definition of ‘judicial’ somewhat for modern sensibilities. Having said that, once soldiers ceased to be combatants, in that they were defeated and taken prisoner, they could suffer a similar fate to civilians. “Vanquished warriors but also defenceless peasants needed to reckon with the loss of eyes, noses, hands and feet.”²³ This is exactly what happened in 1067 or 1068 at Exeter, when, according to Orderic Vitalis, William the Conqueror had one of his hostages blinded at the gates, that is, within sight of the inhabitants, of the town.²⁴ Mutilation of the vanquished happened again in 1098 during squabbles between the Armenians and crusaders under Baldwin I in Edessa, when Baldwin ordered that some of the participants in an attempted uprising were to be blinded and others were to have their noses, hands and feet cut off before being banished²⁵—hence the assumption, at least on Baldwin’s part, that some of the latter might in fact survive these mutilations²⁶; otherwise there appears little point in using banishment as an additional sanction.

During the conflict between Bulgarians and Byzantines in the early ninth century, one Bulgarian ruler slit the noses of his Byzantine prisoners before sending them home. Not to be outdone, the Byzantine emperor retaliated “by blinding the great majority of his Bulgarian captives; leaving a handful of one-eyed men to lead the victims back Bulgaria.”²⁷ Byzantine rulers seemed to have a predilection for this kind of mutilation, since in 1014, according to the chronicler Michael Glycas, after another battle against the Bulgarians, the emperor Basileios II Bulgaroktónos (Bulgar-slayer, 976–1025) ordered all the Bulgarian prisoners to be blinded, allowing just one man in every hundred to keep one single eye, so that he could lead his companions home.²⁸ The first incidence of this form of mutilation was mentioned in Byzantine chronicles with regard to the blinding of Kallinikos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in 705 on orders of the emperor Justinian II.²⁹ Other examples include the blinding of general Symbatios, who had led a revolt against Emperor Basil I (867–886).³⁰ Byzantine sources described three types of blinding: the removal or complete destruction of the eye(s) by mechanical means such as with a dagger or other sharp tool; the destruction of the eye(s) by heat such as with a red-hot iron, or more rarely by boiling oil or vinegar; and a combination of these two methods.³¹ The death of the victim was often a “characteristic” result of this form of mutilation, most likely due “to hardship and the possible infection of his wounds”.³² Where the victim survived this orde...