by Sean McGlynn
The geographical focus of this book is on England and France – but not exclusively so – and to well-attested events that allow for confident and detailed use of the contemporary sources of evidence. As the book’s objective is explication rather than condemnation, I am largely spared the burden of deploying evidence to apportion explicitly moral guilt; if even the repulsive defendants at the Nuremberg trials could offer some form of defence, how much harder it would be to offer a full trial for war criminals in the medieval period with its limited documentation. (Disputes arising from military situations did gradually come to be settled in developing Courts of Chivalry as the Middle Ages progressed in time.) Even in the twenty-first century, the manifest culpability of Milosevic would not have guaranteed his conviction on all counts and to everyone’s satisfaction. As it was, like so many war criminals, the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’ escaped judicial judgment and sentencing by dying a natural death in 2006.
To illustrate this point about culpability, we can delve back exactly one thousand years from the Milosevic trial to the infamous St Brice’s Day Massacre in Anglo-Saxon England. Against the background of Anglo-Danish warfare and tribute payments to the Vikings, in November 1002 King Ethelred II (the ‘Unready’) of England gave orders, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘for all the Danish people who were in England to be slain … because the king had been told that they wished to deprive him of his life by treachery, and all his councillors after him, and then seize his kingdom’.2 Henry of Huntingdon, writing a century later, confirms the massacre from eyewitness oral tradition: ‘Concerning this crime, in my childhood I heard very old men say that the king had sent secret letters to every city, according to which the English either maimed all the unsuspecting Danes on the same day and hour with their swords, or, suddenly, at the same moment, captured them and destroyed them by fire.’3
The massacre takes on the characteristics of a major act of genocide, yet historians are uncertain as to just how extensive this pogrom really was. For a start, over one-third of England was under Danish control, including the cities of York and Lincoln, so Ethelred’s mandate did not run there. In fact, hard evidence for the massacre comes only from Oxford, where Danes had taken refuge in vain in St Frideswide’s Church. For the most part, it appears that the main casualties were new merchants and mercenaries. Only two victims’ names are recorded, by tradition the married couple of Pallig and Gunnhild, prompting some historians to consider the massacre as little more than a political execution. Pallig, a Danish naval captain, had broken his pledge of loyalty to England and raided the southern coast; Gunnhild, sister to King Swein of Denmark, was living in England as a diplomatic hostage. But as these were high-ranking personages, it is to be expected that their names should be noted; medieval chroniclers were not concerned with the (unknown) names of the lower orders. One of Ethelred’s later charters refers to the slaying of the Danes. Swein, possibly in partial revenge for his sister’s death, made deep incursions into England in the following year. Clearly, fatal violence was inflicted upon some Danes in southern England in 1002, but whether it constituted a political crime of mass murder, a pre-emptive strike against a potential fifth column, a legal execution of a traitor and a small number of hostages or a local manifestation of millenarianism and ethnic hatred exacerbated by economic factors is not certain. It is likely that all these elements were present to some extent; but the most significant underlying factor is the King’s role in unleashing the violence against a targeted group. The atrocities examined in this book are much clearer in their magnitude and certainty, but equally diverse in motivation.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Medieval society was violent; and it was a society organized for war. Some historians have wondered not so much at its violence but at its periods of peace. Relatively quiescent phases did occasionally occur. In relative terms, the thirteenth century in England, from c. 1220 onwards, equates in many ways to the nineteenth century. Both periods experienced a mid-century dip into war – the Baronial War and the Crimean War – but otherwise full-scale military conflicts did not encroach too deeply upon people’s preoccupations. However, in both cases, the following centuries seemed to make up for lost time, as the Hundred Years War and the World Wars more than negated the earlier peace. Thirteenth-century England might have been peaceful; thirteenth-century Britain most certainly was not. The border wars on the Celtic fringe were escalating with ever more brutalities. In 1230 alone, the chronicles tell us of: an ambush in which twenty thousand Irish soldiers were slaughtered (the figure is obviously inflated); Welsh prisoners being decapitated and their heads sent to the English king; and, in revenge for this deed, Prince Llewelyn embarking upon a series of savage raids across the border into England, during which he was accused of sparing no one, even burning alive women and girls who had taken sanctuary in churches. So even in this ‘quiet’ century, war and violent death were not banished. Even in periods of relative peace, war was forever in the forefront of a monarch’s thoughts.
Not all society was militarized, but military matters touched upon all aspects of society. In England, for example, all men (and boys over twelve) were subject to call-up to the national levy in times of danger for the country. Anyone physically capable of bearing arms was expected to answer the call when given; those who failed to respond could expect a life of servitude and culvertage (degradation of a vassal to the position of a serf). Local and municipal militias were also organized, such as those to guard London or watch the coast for invasion. These militias were reorganized by Henry II’s Assize of Arms in 1181, making no distinction between feudal and non-feudal elements. In the thirteenth century, archery practice at the butts became compulsory in England, the statutes of Winchester (1285) and Cambridge (1388) being but two attempts by the Crown to compel men and youths to train with bows and arrows. These reforms were emulated on the continent, especially during the exigencies of the Hundred Years War, when rulers ushered in laws to direct subjects away from games towards more martial pursuits: Charles V of France prohibited pastimes that did not involve military training; James I and II of Scotland banned football and golf.
In the shadow of the castles, those formidable fortresses that dominated the landscape as symbols of power and authority, peasants worked in the fields with agricultural implements that could easily serve as weapons; these were ever at hand should an argument turn violent, and so the murder rate was a high one. Recourse to violence was easier in an age without a local police force pounding the beat and when courts could be prohibitively expensive.
Perhaps the greatest influence on modern perceptions of violence in the Middle Ages has been Jan Huizinga’s famous The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), the first chapter of which is entitled ‘The Violent Tenor of Life’. Huizinga paints a colourful but bloody picture of life in the late Middle Ages: his is a Europe of lepers and deformed beggars, processions of self-flagellants and, most of all, public executions announced by ceremony and fanfare. These executions were ‘spectacular displays with a moral. For horrible crimes the law invented atrocious punishments.’ An appropriate punishment to fit the crime was uppermost in the eyes of the law: thus arsonists might expect to be burned to death. But harshness could be tempered by human emotion. Final speeches of condemned men could prompt tears from the crowd assembled for the carrying out of the court’s sentence. One of the victims of the 1411 Burgundian terror in Paris begged the hangman to embrace him, a request witnessed by ‘a great multitude of people, who nearly all wept hot tears’. Huizinga explains how crime was ‘a menace to order and society, as well as an insult to divine majesty. Thus it was natural that the late Middle Ages should become the special period of judicial cruelty’, a reference to the harsh and deliberately terrifying and inventive punishments meted out to malefactors.4 The people’s investment in social order encouraged their exultation and enthusiasm at ending any perceived threat to it; medieval accounts tell of brigands being bought for money so their quartering and execution c
ould be witnessed in front of an ecstatic home crowd, a form of transfer market for executions. At a hanging in Paris in 1427, the victim is harangued by a high official who not only prevents a last confession to a priest, but who also, working himself up into a frenzied state of self-righteousness, physically attacks not only the condemned man but the hangman as well (for granting spiritual reconciliation). The executioner, unnerved by events, botches the hanging; the rope snaps and the condemned man falls to the ground, fracturing some ribs and a leg. He is then forced to drag himself back up to the scaffold for completion of sentence.
Huizinga relates how late medieval society deteriorated from previous ideals held in a golden age of chivalry, where concerns for justice and mercy loomed higher in medieval man’s conscience. While correct in ascribing a ‘violent tenor’ to medieval life, Huizinga is wrong to consider it a phenomenon of the late medieval period. There was never a golden age of chivalry, as accounts in this book will demonstrate. Nor was earlier medieval society much less brutal in character. Spanning the entire Middle Ages, in different times and in different places, we can see both waxing and waning in the prevalence of violence, but nothing that amounts to a golden age or anything like it. In a notorious case from the late sixth century, Gregory of Tours imparts the story of Sichar and Austregisel. During a night of drinking a retainer of a priest was killed. As the priest was Sichar’s friend, Sichar and his followers took up arms in vengeance but were worsted by Austregisel’s contingent. Sichar, a casualty of the encounter, made his escape, leaving his wounded retainers behind in the priest’s house, where they were slaughtered by Austregisel’s men. These then stole goods from the house. Sichar later recovered the goods by force, killing not only a certain Auno, in whose house they were stored, but also his son, brother and some slaves. Another of Auno’s sons, Chramnesind, swore vengeance and refused Bishop Gregory’s placatory intercession of compensation. As the ensuing feud escalated, both families suffered woundings, mutilations, deaths of retainers and slaves, and the burning of homes. A legal solution was finally settled between the two families and peace was restored. The families were reconciled and resumed the habit of socializing over convivial dinner and drinks. Sichar, possibly drunk, made the gauche comment that Chramnesind should be grateful to him for killing his relatives, as the consequent compensations and inheritances had left him a rich man. For his egregious insensitivity, Sichar received from Chramnesind an axe in his head. Chramnesind hung his body on the fence post of his house.
Such private wars as these abated during the high medieval period, only to re-emerge with renewed vigour in post-Black Death Europe, reflecting a central period when comparatively strong government stamped upon any diminution of its controlling status. But this did not mean any reduction in local or judicial violence. What was important to all elements of society at all times was the difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence, and the need for the former to suppress the latter. Those in power were expected to exercise violence in pursuit of social order, in a pre-Weberian form of condoned violence in pursuit of social stability. There was little point in villagers appealing to the better nature of a group of marauding brigands to spare their homes and chattels; far better for the authorities to hang them, thereby sending out a strong message to deter further bandits while obviously also preventing this particular group from causing any further problems.
Medieval society is frequently, if restrictedly, viewed in terms of its three principal orders: the bellatores, oratores and laboratores – those who fought, those who prayed and those who worked. The last of these is typically regarded in terms of peasantry, but actually encompasses the middle and mercantile classes. In exploring medieval violence, we shall have cause to address each: the Church through its opinions, practices and attempts to limit the violence; the warriors through images of kingship, political control, and the practice and culture of war; and, first of all, the laboratores through their personal exposure and attitudes to criminal violence.
Visual violence, in its cautionary and minatory forms, was ubiquitous in the medieval period. Barbara Tuchman’s classic study A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) makes this gruesomely clear:
The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of atrocious martyrdom – by arrows, spears, fire, cut-off breasts – usually dripping blood.5
Entertainment was also very often violent. Sometimes, like today, it was the offshoot of a sporting event. In the early thirteenth century Roger of Wendover reports a wrestling match that erupted into a full-scale riot, with extensive damage to property. The ringleader was executed and his leading cohorts had their hands and feet amputated. By modern standards, this was a zero-tolerance society. Violence was commonly the explicit purpose of the entertainment. Even football originated as campball, the camp designating a field of battle, an apt term to apply to some of these early, highly aggressive games. More blatant still were games with animals. One involved the chasing of a pig by men with clubs, the aim being to beat the poor animal to death; another, its match in subtlety and intellectual elegance, involved nailing a live cat to a post so that competitors could headbutt it to death. (Brutal as these pastimes were, they are not so very different from festival entertainments that persisted in Spain until at least the end of the twentieth century.) The links between play and punishment could be close, as we shall see later.
Literature also chose violence as one of its central themes. Chivalric works are replete with knights being cleft from shoulder to saddle. Morality tales were hardly any less scary. One recounts how a woman eloped with a monk. She is found in flagrante delicto by her outraged brothers. They castrate the monk, hurling the dismembered parts into her face and forcing her to eat them. Then she and her lover are drowned. Extreme as this sounds, the reality of punishment was not so very different; it is hard to determine here whether art is imitating nature or vice versa: the case of Abelard and Héloïse comes painfully to mind. Judicially, there are similarities as well with the unfortunate end of Hugh Despenser the Younger in 1326: he was forced to experience castration and to watch as his genitals were cast into flames before his own final execution. Such forms of execution were devised to reflect the crime of sodomy. (At this time Portugal held more liberal views towards homosexuals: here punishment was not a life taken on the gallows but a life spent serving in the galleys.)
With few prisons and no police force, severe punishment was deemed invaluable as a deterrent to crime; the more extreme the crime, the more extreme the punishment it warranted. Expectations exceeded Old Testament notions of an eye for an eye. Capital punishment for non-violent crimes was normal: in France, counterfeiters could expect to be boiled alive in a cauldron. Political crimes, especially those of treason, were dealt with particularly harshly: by the thirteenth century in England, treason was punishable by disembowelling, hanging, drawing, quartering and burning at the stake.
Where temporal powers failed or were unable to prosecute, God stepped in. Medieval chronicles are never short of stories of divine retribution for human failings; mankind brought war, famine, pestilence and all manner of calamities upon himself through his lassitude, moral turpitude and persistent sinning. More often than not, divine punishment was directed at those who had offended against the Church or religious sensibility. Abbot Suger relates from 1119 the fate of Enguerrand de Chaumont. Having destroyed some lands belonging to the Church of Notre Dame in the archdiocese of Rouen in Normandy, Enguerrand was struck down by a serious illness. For a long time he was racked by ‘continual bodily pain, which he deserved but could not bear’; he died ‘having learned too late what was due to the Que
en of Heaven’.6 Sometimes divine intervention was instantaneous. Anglo-Norman records tell us of the pickpocket caught in the act of thieving by the crime-busting St Ecgwin, who trapped the criminal’s hand in the purse from which he was stealing, and then caused the hand to shrivel up. Even minor digressions were not overlooked. The otherwise dependable Roger of Wendover offers the cautionary tale of the washerwoman who took in laundry on a Sunday; for this outrage she was tormented by little black pigs who sucked her dry. Society expected transgressors everywhere to meet with just retribution, whether divine or secular.
Manor rolls from medieval England show that deaths from manslaughter were far more frequent than accidental deaths. Protagonists of violent crime came in all shapes and sizes, from normally docile, henpecked husbands to abused women, and from drunken old brawlers to the most prominent grouping, young men. Most killers, whether guilty of manslaughter or murder, were young male adults; they often had accomplices; their victims were predominantly male; and both perpetrator and victim were usually poor. If this is not so very different from our own day, the development of the law to deal with these offenders is. Although it does not lie within the scope of this study to explore legal and judicial issues, it is necessary to draw attention to legal responses to criminal violence, as this reveals much about approaches and responses to the problem of violence in medieval society.