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Crime in later medieval England: some historiographical limitations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

J. B. Post
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Continuity and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , August 1987 , pp. 211 - 224
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

ENDNOTES

1 For an interesting review of developments see Sharpe, J. A., ‘The history of crime in late medieval and early modern England: a review of the field’, Social History 7 (1982), 187–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Given, J. B., Society and homicide in thirteenth-century England (Stanford, 1977), is notably rich in sensible caveats which the author himself disregards.Google Scholar

3 For complaints about misleading dependence on the Paston Letters, see (for example) Kingsford, C. L., Prejudice and promise in fifteenth-century England (Oxford, 1925), 26–8, 62–3Google Scholar, and Lander, J. R., Conflict and stability in fifteenth-century England (London, 1969), 168–9Google Scholar

4 Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), JUST 1/271, m. 13d; fascimile in Smith, L. M., ed., The making of Britain: the Middle Ages (London, 1985), plate 10.4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; transcript in Maitland, F. W., ed., Pleas of the Crown for the county of Gloucester… 1221 (London, 1884), no. 174.Google Scholar

5 Post, J. B., ‘Sir John le Breton and the mutilation of Sir Godfrey Millers’, Norfolk Archaeology 39 (1985), 189–92Google Scholar

6 Morris, T. and Blom-Cooper, L., A calendar of murder: criminal homicide in England since 1957 (London, 1964).Google Scholar

7 For an analysis of the coherence of detection and accusation procedures, see Summerson, H. R. T., ‘The structure of law enforcement in thirteenth-century England’, American Journal of Legal History 23 (1979), 313–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, in broader detail, Dr Summerson's introduction to his edition to Crown Pleas of the Devon Eyre of 1238 (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, N.S. 28, 1985), xv–xx.

8 E.g. Hanawalt, B. A., Crime and conflict in English communities, 1300‘1348 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979), 13–14 (‘most crimes had been committed even if by people different from those indicted’).Google Scholar

9 Given, Society and Homicide 2 (‘I have had to assume that all those accused of having committed a murder probably did so’); cf. Westmann, B. H. (= Hanawalt), ‘The female felon in fourteenth-century England’, Viator 5 (1974), 253–268CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This sort of assumption is widely regarded as undermining Hanawalt's main work: see reviews by Kaye, J. M. in English Historical Review 97 (1982), 405–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and (in more detail) by Powell, E. in Michigan Law Review 79 (1981), 967–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also, more generally, reviews by Mad-dicott, J. R. in History, N.S. 65 (1980), 467–8Google Scholar, and Given, J. B. in Speculum 56 (1981), 139–40 (which is critical of other statistical methods used).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 For these and other examples, see Post, J. B., ‘Ravishment of women and the statutes of Westminister’, in Baker, J. H., ed., Legal records and the historian, (Royal Historical Society, Studies in History, 1978), 150–64, at 155–6.Google Scholar

11 For an important and detailed study see Green, T. A., Verdict according to conscience: perspectives on the English criminal trial jury, 1200–1800 (Chicago, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 For these points, see Post, J. B., ‘The justice of criminal justice in late fourteenth-century England’, Criminal Justice History 7 (1986).Google Scholar

13 Cockburn, J. S., ‘Early-modem assize records as historical evidence’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 5 (4) (1975), 215–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See the list in Putnam, B. H., ed., Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, (Ames Foundation, 1938), 34–7. A few further rolls have been identified since that list was compiled, but not enough to alter significantly the scale of known survivals.Google Scholar

15 List of various common-law records (Public Record Office, Lists and Indexes, Supplementary Series, I); Crook, D., Records of the General Eyre (Public Record Office Handbooks, 20, 1982); List of Plea Rolls of various courts (P.R.O. Lists and Indexes, 4).Google Scholar

16 Post, J. B., ‘Some limitations of the medieval peace rolls’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 4 (8) (1973), 634 and references there given.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 For a typical example, see The making of Britain, plate 10.2.

18 In the P.R.O. class of Estreats: E 137.

19 See Post, J. B., ‘Local jurisdictions and judgment of death in later medieval England’, Criminal Justice History 4 (1983), 11 and n. 132.Google Scholar

20 P.R.O., E 101/311/2.

21 P.R.O., E 101/571/35.

22 Numerous classes of such records can be identified by way of the Exchequer sections of the Guide to the contents of the Public Record Office I (London, 1963).Google Scholar

23 See the use made by Hamil, F. C., ‘The king's approvers’, Speculum, 11 (1936), 232–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 E.g. Prescott, A., ‘London in the peasants' revolt: a portrait gallery’, London Journal 7 (1981), 125–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See the remarkably narrow range of sources listed in Hanawalt, Crime and conflict, 325.

26 Cf. Hanawalt, , Crime and Communities, 3–5Google Scholar: ‘The definition of crime used in this book is based upon fourteenth-century common and statute laws.… In any case, the medieval definition is not far from the modem one.… Since a study of all [the] different courts would have been impossible for one researcher, I have confined my survey to those matters which were considered to be criminal in the fourteenth century and were, therefore, handled in the king's criminal courts.’ That therefore is a gross non sequitur.

27 A good example of the broader approach is Ingram, M. J., ‘Communities and courts: law and disorder in early-seventeenth-century Wiltshire’, in Cockburn, J. S. ed. Crime in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977), ch. 5Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of the problems of defining ‘crime’ historically, see Sharpe, J. A., Crime in early modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1984), ch. 1Google Scholar. On informal litigation, see Post, J. B., ‘Equitable resorts before 1450’, in Law, litigants, and the legal profession, Ives, E. W. and Manchester, A. H. eds., (Royal Historical Society, Studies in History, 1983), 68–79.Google Scholar

28 E.g. Hilton, R. H., The English Peasantry in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), ch. IV.Google Scholar

29 E.g. Herbert, A., ‘Herefordshire 1413–61: some aspects of society and public order’, in, Griffiths, R. A. ed., Patronage, the Crown, and the Provinces in later medieval England (Gloucester, 1981), 103–23Google Scholar; Powell, E., ‘Settlement of disputes by arbitration in fifteenth-century England’, Law and History Review 2 (1984), 21–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. C. Carpenter, ‘Law, justice, and landowners in late medieval England’, ibid. 1 (1983), 205–37.

30 Putnam, , Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace, xciii–xcvGoogle Scholar; Post, , ‘Some limitations’, 633–9.Google Scholar

31 J. B. Post, ‘Jury lists and jurors in the late fourteenth century’, forthcoming in a symposium on the English criminal trial jury to be edited by T. A. Green and J. S. Cockburn.

32 P.R.O., JUST 2/155.

33 Over a period of sixteen years, the number of inquests was 7 in January, 13 in February, 15 in March, 20 in April, 18 in May, 24 in June, 24 in July, 27 in August, 21 in September, 11 in October, 13 in November, and 14 in December.

34 Victoria County History of Hampshire, II, 479.Google Scholar

35 Given's Society and Homicide, Hanawalt's Crime and Conflict, and Samaha's, J.Law and order in historical perspectives: the case of Elizabethan Essex (London, 1974) all handle large amounts of data as though the sources were homogenous and uniformly veracious.Google Scholar

36 The low accuracy of Hanawalt's data capture is shown by Hunnisett, R. F. in American Journal of Legal History 22 (1978), 257–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Compare, for example, the figures supplied by Given in Society and homicide with those given on the errata slip of the same work.

38 Hair, P. E. H., ‘A note on the incidence of Tudor suicide’, Local Population Studies 5 (1970), 36–43Google Scholar, and ‘Deaths from violence in Britain: a tentative secular survey’, Population Studies 25 (1971), 5–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 The sample is from Chantsinger's roll of inquests (above, n. 33 and text).

40 Cf. Powell's, remarks on Hanawalt's samples: Michigan Law Review 79 (1981), 972–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar