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To the stocks with him! We all have a vision of Medieval justice as violent and barbaric. According to Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel, this was simply not true:
“The common view of the medieval justice system as cruel and based around torture and execution is often unfair and inaccurate,” said University of Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel. Most criminals received gentle sentences merely meant to shame them, Carrel said, with the punishments often carried out in the open so townspeople could bring them charity.
Her work covers only medieval English civil society: punishment traditions in other parts of Europe were perhaps nastier and more closely aligned with our Hollywood induced image of the era.
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Unfortunately, shaming only works when people live in small communities and must rely on their personal reputations to succeed. In our highly mobile largely anonymous society, such punishment would be largely pointless. (Although, it still works informally in small towns)
I think a lot of the “barbarity” that one associates with pre-industrial times resulted from the simple fact that life was very hard for the vast majority of the population. Imprisonment was proportionally much more expensive and in a time when even hard working, law abiding people spent most of their live undernourished, providing criminals with a roof over their head and three squares a day must have seemed actively immoral. Physical punishments like flogging or mutilation would have been the only effective deterrents.
Link fixed. I managed to insert an errant carriage return when I saved it the last time.
Well, the due process side of things was a little barbaric. That and, while there may have been a number of light punishments, there were also a fair few that weren’t light. I do believe in the death penalty, but defending Virginia on the basis that they often don’t worry too much about traffic offenses doesn’t seem like a strong argument.
The French punished a lot with taunting and farting, if I remember my mideval history per MP correctly.
I became a medievalist because it let me sleep so much better at night than reading about the early-modern period’s horrific brutality.
Maybe “Freedom and Law” by Bruno Leoni will help to clarify this common mistake. This seminal work on the relation between economics and laws clarify the origins of the modern law systems and explains a bit about middle-age laws. Extremely interesting.
Well I was always a cheeky little git
But short.
Now! thanks to medievalism!!
I am 6′ 2″!!
Anybody got groat for some Carlsberg Mulled wine?
The townsfolk may indeed have brought you charity and refreshment whilst you languished in the stocks. Mostly, however, you were more likely to be beaten to death (or stoned, tarred, raped, burned, defecated upon etc). The stocks, certainly, were not civil or civilised punsihments – they pandered to the worst instincts of the mob.
That may be so, but you seem to be peddling the line that this post is railing against, without any evidence to support your position. The stocks may well have pandered to the worst instincts of the mob. How often did these instincts see the light of day? The stocks might just have conceivably inspired the very Christian virtue of charity. Which thesis do you favour, and why? Just declaring the former without any justification is not sufficient.
Unfortunately, shaming only works when people live in small communities and must rely on their personal reputations to succeed. In our highly mobile largely anonymous society, such punishment would be largely pointless.
We may be physically mobile, but no one can outrun the internet.
Reputation-shaping information about anyone can be universally available to anyone who checks. Certainly, state posting of information about sex offenders (including photographs and current location) shows that, while in medieval times you couldn’t even run, in the modern era, you can run but you can’t hide.
If you found yourself in the Royal court system you were in real trouble – death (and other harsh punishments) were common.
However, most people did not get into the Royal court system (there were, of course, other systems) and if they did find themselves in it many people got out of it.
For example, if you could read it was possible to claim “benefit of clergy” (i.e. claim some connection to the Church by being able to read some scripture) and get into the Church court system (where punishments were indeed less harsh).
On a recent trip to Ludlow I passed the old market court where disputes in the market place (including violent acts) were once judged “while the dust of the market was still upon all involved” – rather than rotting while waiting trial in a Royal court or (if one survived the wait) being hanged for (say) theft after the (often incomprehensible – remember Royal courts first used Norman French and then, after this was done away with, a mixture of strange “English” words known as “lawyers cant”) trial.
As for civil disputes, even as late as the 18th century government courts (either the Common Law ones or the Court of Chancery Equity courts were only used by the very unlucky indeed.
Delays were vast (as they are now in England and Wales and the United States) and the judgements were often perverse (as they are now).
The Scot Lord Mansfield reformed the English and Welsh court system (as regarded civil disputes), but this did have the down side of making it more nomal to use the government courts.
On the criminal law side there was a determined effort to make the government criminal law system workable in the 19th century (although the Scottish priciple of “either they come to trial within X number of days or they walk” was not adopted), and this did make the criminal law courts both more proportional (i.e. no more hangings for theft) and quicker and more just.
This did have the downside of making it more normal to use the government criminal law system (although this had been on the rise in England and Wales since the Reformation – which was about more than hitting the Church, other insitutions of civil society were hit to).
About 1900 the government court (and prison system) worked O.K. (certianly better than it has before or since).