Medieval murders most foul

Summary

History Extra Podcast: "Medieval Murders Most Foul" – Episode Summary

Release Date: March 3, 2025
Host: David Musgrove
Guest: Professor Manuel Eisner, Criminologist at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge
Produced by: Jack Bateman

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Introduction to the Episode

In the episode titled "Medieval Murders Most Foul," hosted by David Musgrove, listeners are transported back to the tumultuous streets of medieval England. The discussion centers around Professor Manuel Eisner's groundbreaking research project, Medieval Murder Maps, which delves into the intricacies of street violence and homicide in medieval towns and cities such as Oxford, London, and York.

Overview of the Medieval Murder Maps Project

Professor Eisner introduces the Medieval Murder Maps project, explaining its aim to map out murder cases using coroner's rolls from the 14th century. These records provide detailed accounts of violent deaths, offering a rare glimpse into the social dynamics and law enforcement practices of the time.

[02:36] Professor Manuel Eisner: "Today we are talking about a gory topic, but a fascinating topic and that is murder and violence in Medieval England."

Key Findings from Medieval Homicide Records

Eisner discusses the methodology of comparing bioarchaeological data with coroner's records. Surprisingly, both methods yielded similar estimates, suggesting that approximately 2-3% of the medieval population died due to interpersonal violence—20 to 50 times higher than modern England and Wales.

[03:14] Professor Manuel Eisner: "It was about 20 to 50 times more frequent than it is currently in England and Wales."

Detailed Case Study: Michael Cardoyle's Murder

One of the episode's highlights is an in-depth exploration of a specific murder case from November 1300, where Michael Cardoyle, a goldsmith, was fatally stabbed by Robert de Elminham. The narrative, enriched with details from the coroner's records, paints a vivid picture of the confrontation and its aftermath.

[07:23] Narrator: "On Friday after the feast of St Andrew 30th of November 1300, Michael Cardoyle was found dead in his house with a stab wound that penetrated his left breast."

Patterns of Violence in Medieval Cities

Eisner reveals that violence predominantly occurred within the middle strata of medieval society, contrary to the modern association of crime with marginalized groups. The majority of both perpetrators and victims were respectable, often engaged in trades like tailoring, goldsmithing, or carpentry.

[13:43] Professor Manuel Eisner: "Everybody, actually not the majority of people who were involved in violence in the Middle Ages were as wealthy as these two people were."

Additionally, the violent acts were overwhelmingly male-to-male confrontations, with nearly 100% in Oxford and around 90% in other cities.

[16:10] Professor Manuel Eisner: "About 90% of the cases in all three cities are men fighting men. This goes up to almost 100% of all cases in Oxford."

Justice Process in Medieval Times

The episode delves into the medieval justice system, highlighting the role of coroners and juries in investigating murders. Upon discovering a body, an investigative jury was convened swiftly, usually within a day, to determine the perpetrator based on available evidence and witness testimonies.

[23:03] Professor Manuel Eisner: "If you are that perpetrator, are you basically guilty as charged, or is there a way that you can get out of this?"

The process lacked formal detective work, relying instead on the coroner's expertise and the jury's collective judgment. Interestingly, despite the harsh penalties prescribed by law, 90-95% of cases concluded with not guilty verdicts, reflecting a societal tendency to consider the context and character of the accused.

[30:03] Professor Manuel Eisner: "Only a very small minority ended up being convicted for crimes that they had probably committed."

The Role of the Murder Instrument and Its Value

A unique aspect discussed is the valuation of murder instruments—the weapons used in the crimes. Coroner's records meticulously documented the worth of these objects, serving dual purposes: assessing property confiscation and contributing to royal revenue.

[35:45] Professor Manuel Eisner: "The deodant is such a strange thing, isn't it?"

Eisner explains that weapons like Irish knives (daggers) were commonly used, especially in guild-heavy areas like Cheapside in London. The type and value of the weapon often indicated the social standing of the perpetrator.

[37:29] Matt Murdock: "An Irish knife is actually a fighting knife. It's more like a dagger."

Social Implications of the Findings

The research underscores the prevalence of public, male-dominated violence in medieval cities, drawing parallels to modern high-violence areas globally. The findings challenge contemporary stereotypes about historical societies, revealing a complex interplay between social status, occupation, and propensity for violence.

[21:14] Matt Murdock: "Domestic violence is not very often visible in these documents."

Conclusion and Resources

The episode concludes by directing listeners to the Medieval Murder Maps website, where they can explore detailed maps and listen to additional in-depth cases.

[42:37] David Musgrove: "You can check out the Medieval Murder map [e-mail] where you can also listen to a series of in depth podcasts."

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Resources Mentioned:

• Medieval Murder Maps Project: medievalmurdermap.co.uk

Featured Guest:

• Professor Manuel Eisner: Criminologist at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge

Produced by:

• Jack Bateman

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This episode offers a compelling exploration of medieval urban violence, blending meticulous historical research with engaging storytelling to shed light on the darker aspects of England's past.

Transcript

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[David Musgrove]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. You're on the jury of a medieval murder case where a man has been fatally stabbed with a sword. Why do you need to know how much the sword was worth? Well, that's one of the questions that Professor Manuel Eisner answers in this conversation with David Musgrove. It's all about street violence and homicide in towns and cities in the Middle Ages. The conversation is based on Manuel's fascinating research project, Medieval Murder Maps, where along with a team of investigators, he has mapped out murder cases in Oxford, London and York based on the records of these crimes in the coroner's rolls, giving some fascinating insights into the mean streets of medieval cities.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

Today we are talking about a gory topic, but a fascinating topic and that is murder and violence in Medieval England. And we're talking off the back of a really interesting project, the Medieval Murder Maps Project. So Mano, how likely were you to get murdered in a late medieval English town or city?

[Matt Murdock]

Well, first of all, you were quite likely to be murdered. I'll give you Some figures in a minute. But I think just for the listeners to understand, there are two basic ways to try and estimate murder in medieval England. One is bioarchaeology, and the other is records. Bioarchaeologists have looked at corpses in graves, especially the skulls, and they then tried to estimate, on the basis of the lesions, primarily of the skull, how many people have been killed through interpersonal violence. One study has done this for London, and it shows that probably around 2 to 3% of people who were buried in cemeteries died through interpersonal violence. Our approach was to use the coroner's records. So these are documents by officials in the late Middle Ages who had the task of recording every violent death that happened in their community. And because these records have been preserved in very large numbers, we can use them to try and estimate how frequent homicide was. It was about 20 to 50 times more frequent than it is currently in England and Wales. So far, far more frequent, similar to the frequency in very violent cities in the United States or in South America. Interestingly, the two approaches, looking at the bioarchaeological record and looking at the coroner's records, lead to approximately the same estimate, namely that about 2% of the population ended up dying a violent death. More males than females and probably more young people than older people. So it had a similar distribution in the population as it has today.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

But before we get too far into it, I'd like to hear a little bit about the project you've been working on, as you said, using the coroner's roles. What have you been doing? What are the specific geographical and chronological remits of your project?

[Matt Murdock]

So we started with this project in London, by far the largest city in medieval England. And then we added two other cities, namely Oxford and York. We used records that were produced in the 14th century, so the late Middle Ages, partly before and partly after the Black Death, which killed a very large proportion of the population. These three cities are really interesting because London is by far the largest city in the realm, with about a population of about 100,000, maybe 120,000. York is the second largest city, but very different in terms of the economical background. And Oxford, of course, very interesting because it's a university town, and we learn something about violence in the context of. Of a university and tensions between town and gown. Once we had decided on these places, we retrieved all cases of interpersonal violence. Some of the cases are related to accidents, and we kept those accidents for London, but not for York or for Oxford. And then we coded these cases. So we retrieved information about the Age of the perpetrator, the gender of the perpetrator, the motive, what happened after the event. And one important element that we coded was the exact location where the event happened. Sometimes this information is surprisingly detailed, but we ended up producing these maps that you can look at on the Internet. It's called medievalmurdermap.co.uk you can read the case, try to understand the case. And in some cases we actually have a recording, a voiceover that tells you the story behind the case.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

And it is an absolutely fascinating resource, obviously. Well, let's dive into one of the cases you've explored and we're going to have a listen in a second to one of the recordings that's from your website that the listeners can go and access, which is basically the account that you get in the coroner's role. Right, so let's have a listen to that now.

[Narrator]

Simmering conflict erupts in a stabbing among goldsmiths in quisio capta corum corona toribus civitati. On Friday after the feast of St Andrew 30th of November 1300, Michael Cardoyle was found dead in his house with a stab wound that penetrated his left breast. The evening before, a certain Master John de Elminham and his brother Robert had been standing at the door of the Church of St Peter of Wood street in Cheapside while Michael was sitting at a goldsmith's stall. When Michael noticed John and Robert, he got up and entered John's stall. A wordy strife arose because of previous hatred and abuse. Robert drew an Irish knife and stabbed Michael in the left breast of which he died at midnight. After the crime, Robert took sanctuary in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene of Milk street with his knife drawn. His brother John also drew a knife and and initially ran after his brother to rescue him. He then entered his house, which was near the church, and escaped by a gutter to the church of Allhallows Honey Lane, where he remained and both refused to surrender. Asked who was present, the jurors said that a great number were passing by, but that they didn't know their names. The property of Master John and Robert was valued at 65 shillings. Robert obtained a royal pardon, which he presented to the Sheriffs of London.

[Matt Murdock]

So now that you've listened to this case, you will realize that there is a lot of information condensed in this case. It starts with saying something about exactly when this happened and it starts with describing how the person was found and where the person was found. This is the description that is provided by the coroner, how he found the dead Corpse. The next part of the text is always about the activity of the jury. Once the dead body is found, the coroner and the sheriff have the obligation to call together an investigative jury, usually of the parish where the crime happened and the three neighboring parishes or wards. When this jury comes together, they would look at the body and they would try to establish the facts of what had happened. So in this case it talks about this conflict, this simmering conflict between goldsmiths in the middle of London. So this happens in Westcheap, which it was at the time, kind of like Fifth Avenue of London. It was the place where the most expensive goods were sold, where there was lots of stalls, by tailors, by goldsmiths and so on. It tells us something about the knife that was used. It tells us something about the exact location of the wounds. And then the last part of the story is the part of the story that tells us about what happened after the crime had been committed. So Robert took sanctuary in a church, and we hear about his brother also drawing a knife. And we hear about how they tried to flee and then how they refused to surrender. And then the jurors are being asked who else was present. So the jurors are asked about any witnesses. That's a complicated thing to name witnesses in this case. And at the very end, we hear about the value of the property that Master John and Robert had, namely 65 shillings. And we hear something interesting in this case also about the outcome, namely that Robert at the end obtains a royal pardon, which he presented to the sheriffs of London. So royal pardon means that maybe because he could corrupt the judges, maybe because he was genuinely innocent and because he acted in self defense, he could buy himself out of the death penalty. He was restored in his rights and was no longer prosecuted.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

This has the makings of a script for a crime drama, hasn't it? Because we've got all the drama of the actual crime and then what happened afterwards, the men running away, refusing to surrender, and, you know, a sense of a crowd sort of baying around them. I mean, this is really colorful drama here.

[Matt Murdock]

Absolutely, yes. And there's so many interesting things if you think about it. So there is the taking sanctuary. So what is sanctuary about? And what happened while he took sanctuary? And what are the mechanics of this? And just to point at another little detail, Robert drew an Irish knife.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

Yes. What's an Irish knife? That's my next question. What is it?

[Matt Murdock]

So first of all, an Irish knife is not a multipurpose knife that people would use just for everyday purposes. So the Records make a distinction between fighting weapons and everyday knives that you use to cut your bread, to cut your meat, and all these things. That's a twitel. It's a short knife. It was used very frequently. An Irish knife is actually a fighting knife. It's more like a dagger. There were different types of daggers, an Irish knife, an unlas, a long knife, and so on. Sometimes I think of it like, you know, when in the United States, they would describe what make of a semiautomatic rifle was used. So in the Middle Ages, these people were experts in different types of knife, and they would describe exactly what knife it was. The knife would afterwards be confiscated, and therefore it was also important to describe what it looked like.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

We've gone pretty deep, pretty quickly in terms of this conversation, so should we broaden out a bit and try and tackle some of the bigger picture questions? What sort of people were most likely to be both perpetrators and victims?

[Matt Murdock]

The case that we've just been looking at is in some ways quite typical and also highlights an important difference to the kind of people who perpetrate homicides in modern societies. What we see in this case is active involvement of people who have a respectable standing in society. Everybody, actually not the majority of people who were involved in violence in the Middle Ages were as wealthy as these two people were. But most people are named with occupations with backgrounds that clearly suggest that they were respectable people. They would be tailor apprentices, they would be fishmongers, they would be clerics, they would be carpenters and so on. Clearly not people who are at the margins of society. In fact, in the London records and in the Oxford records and in the York records, people that we would describe as at the margins of society, beggars, people described as criminals, are a very small proportion of the suspects that are named, and they are a very small proportion of the victims. The violence is in the middle of society. It's something that happens because conflicts happen, because it is a society where there is always a potential for some altercation, for an insult, for a deep anger over territory, over some market space, over some legal rights. And people would then get into fights. When I say people, I have to say that at that time, violence was even more of masculine affair than it is in contemporary society. About 90% of the cases in all three cities are men fighting men. This goes up to almost 100% of all cases in Oxford. One of the things that we don't see often, either in York or in London, are what we would call gang fights or organized crime. We see Some of it. We have a few cases where I suspect some kind of like organized crime, involvement of the highest echelons of society. We have some turf wars between apprentices in the city center of London. But the only city where we have a lot of organized violence, really big scale, almost civil war like situations is in Oxford. Still getting around to that fix on your car? You got this on ebay. You'll find millions of parts guaranteed to fit. Doesn't matter if it's a major engine repair or your first time swapping your windshield wipers. Ebay has that part you need ready to click perfectly into place for changes big and small, loud or quiet. Find all the parts you need at prices you'll love. Guaranteed to fit every time. But you already know that ebay things people people love Eligible items only Exclusion.

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[Professor Manuel Eisner]

I presume this is going to link into the universities, is it?

[Matt Murdock]

Yes. In Oxford, like in many other medieval universities, cities across Europe, there were always tensions between town and gan, between the city and the university. And that had a number of reasons. One of them was that people in the university were protected from regular law. They were kind of like standing outside the obligations and the criminal justice system that applied to everybody else. People were seen as privileged, they were seen as spoiled. And there was continuous conflict between the interests of the town and the interest of the university. The second big source of tensions was that universities across Europe were basically organized by ethnic communities, if you will. They were organized by people who spoke the same language, who had similar ways of dressing. So the kind of communities that I'm talking about in Oxford would have been described as the southerners and the northerners. And they would hate each other, they would speak different language, they would go to different taxes, they would have their own identity, they would go to similar colleges. And there were always opportunities for these latent tensions to erupt. Somebody says a bad word, there is some tensions maybe linked to doing sports or something like that. And then there would be a fight very often ending with somebody being killed.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

So hot headed youth violence we're talking about here, the sort of things that people might recognize.

[Matt Murdock]

Yes, it's hot headed violence. Students were also much younger than they would be today. And it's an interesting difference to modern society, where really university students are not one of the highest risk groups for lethal violence in medieval society. I think it's fair to say that university students were probably the most violent group that you could possibly imagine.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

Well, that's a surprising fact, isn't it? So it was a dangerous thing to do to go to university. There was a decent chance you were going to be subject to some sort of violence in your course.

[Matt Murdock]

Yes, you would probably have thought of it as an exciting time away from home of people who thought of themselves very often as the elites of society with a ideal of masculinity that expected them to be good fighters. There was a lot of alcohol around and it often ended badly in fights.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

One of the things that we don't seem to see very much through the records you've examined, or you can correct me on this, is domestic violence or men being violent towards women. Is that right? Do you not see it very much? And is that probably because it wasn't recorded, or do you have any further insights into that?

[Matt Murdock]

Yeah, historians of the Middle Ages have been noticing this quite often. So you're quite right that domestic violence is not very often visible in these documents. And there are basically two ways to think about this. One is to say, or to assume that there was a substantial number of homicide cases that were related to domestic violence. Men beating their wives, maybe children being beaten in such a way that they were killed, and that these cases don't show up in the Corinth records. I have no doubt that this did happen, but we don't know how often that happened and how much it skews our data. But I think a second possibility is that the real dramatic difference of medieval society, where such a excess of violence happened, was not so much at home, but it was in public open space. That is where men came together, they got into conflicts, they were fighting for their interests, they were seeing themselves as also defending their interests and the interest of the community. And that's how violence came about. There is an interesting parallel here to modern society, by the way. When you look at patterns of violence across the world in modern society, and you go to societies with very high levels of violence, similar to medieval level of violence, say in Latin American cities, you find exactly the same pattern in these societies. What increases most is male to male violence in public space. And we see the same thing in medieval society.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

One thing we haven't done here is we've not established properly what happens if a body's found. So let's imagine a body's been found on a street in Oxford in the 1320s. What would be the process? What would go on in the city to try and establish what's gone on?

[Matt Murdock]

Let me start with the very first moment you see a dead body. So you walk back home in the evening, you come out of a pub and you see a dead body lying on the ground, and it looks like this may well have been a fatal stabbing. What you would first do is quickly process in your brain, shall I actually tell anybody, or shall I try to go back home, go to bed and not say anything? The reason why this is a really difficult decision for you to make is if you raise the hue and cry as you're supposed to do, you will be named as a witness. You may actually end up being suspected of having committed the crime and you might get into all kinds of trouble. And we saw at least of some cases where other passersby did not alert the authorities to the crime. So that's a first decision. If you have decided to alert the authorities to the crime, for example, because there are other witnesses around and you can't easily escape being known that you've noticed a dead body, you would have an obligation to raise the UN cry. So that's the activity where, similar to a 999 call, where you raise an alarm, you shout, make noise, and you try to alert everybody to their obligation to try and run after the perpetrator. Once you've done this, you would have an obligation to go immediately to the sheriff, or somebody would go and immediately alert the sheriff to what had happened. The sheriff would then communicate with the coroner and the sheriff and the coroner would then go to see the body, and the coroner would then have the obligation to call together the investigative jury. So the investigative jury would then gather around the dead body. They had an obligation not to touch the body or to move the body. So this had to happen quickly because otherwise it becomes quite Smelly. And then they would have the authority to call witnesses, to ask witnesses about what had happened. And then they would come to a verdict. And their obligation was to name a suspect or to say officially that they do not know who the suspect was, which would not have been easy for a jury to make. They almost always end up accusing somebody of having perpetrated the crime. Even if that perpetrator is alleged to have committed the crime in the midst of the night and fled somewhere else, they would still claim that they know who the perpetrator was.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

Can I just butt in for a second and just try and establish the timeline? This sounds like this is quite a short process. It feels like this is done in a matter of hours or a day after the body's been found. Is that right?

[Matt Murdock]

The process of calling together the jury after a body has been found would usually be within a day.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

And when we're talking about investigation, we're many centuries before the establishment of a police force of any nature in England and Wales. So what sort of investigation or detective work might go on and who would carry that out?

[Matt Murdock]

Well, there was not really detective work. So we don't have anybody who has kind of like a similar forensic skills as the police force has these days. What you have is a lay investigative jury who tries to understand the likely cause of the death. And you can see that the coroner might often have developed quite important skills, forensic skills, to better understand what might have caused the death. The coroner and the jury often go to quite some length to establish exactly how things happened. For example, that was an interesting problem when there were more than two perpetrators, and when there were more than two perpetrators and more than two wounds. And then it was important for the jury to establish which injury had been caused by which perpetrator, and it had the obligation to establish which injury had been lethal. They would make these statements saying, well, we found that perpetrator A caused an injury on the arm, but that wasn't lethal, while perpetrator B actually caused an injury of the head and that caused the death of the person. And so they would rely on intuition, maybe some forensic knowledge, but that's what they had to do. And they were trying their best to do this well, and they were relying partly also on medical knowledge of the time that actually tried to establish some rules about which injuries were more likely to lead to a death. They had to establish whether what the witnesses said lined up with the forensic evidence that they had. It's interesting, by the way, and I wanted to emphasize this, the jury would call witnesses, but at the same time, the jury was called together by people who would likely know something about the case. So, as you know, these days, juries, there is always this important principle that nobody who sits on a jury has any knowledge or any prior involvement in the case. In the Middle Ages, people would not have understood this. How can a jury establish what happened if they don't know anything about the background? And so in these medieval juries, you often see that it's people in the neighborhood, people who were not directly involved in the crime, but who might know something about the background because they are members of the same guild, because they're members of the same parish, because they're highly recognized, well known, honorable men in the neighborhood. They would be called to serve on the jury because they would be more likely to establish the facts.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

It sounds as if you've got the coroner and the jury working reasonably fast to come to a decision on who they think the perpetrator is, doing their best to establish the facts as far as they can see. But they're going to name a perpetrator if they possibly can. Once that's happened, if you are that perpetrator, are you basically guilty as charged, or is there a way that you can get out of this? Can you appeal what they're saying?

[Matt Murdock]

There is a number of things that can happen afterwards. First of all, in the majority of cases, people just disappear and they're never to be seen again. So they flee immediately because they don't want to be caught, they will never be arrested, or it's very unlikely that they get arrested. They become outlawed in the moment that they're named by the investigative jury as suspects, but they rather prefer to flee somewhere else and probably, hopefully, maybe with some help from friends, to reintegrate into society. That's one option. The second option is seeking sanctuary. So you immediately run from the place where you committed the crime to the sanctuary church where you're protected. Once you're inside church, nobody can touch you, nobody can arrest you, because you're protected by the sacred space. And this is for 30 days. While you're protected, you may negotiate with the coroner and the sheriff to abandon the realm. It required negotiations. The community had an obligation to feed you, to give you something to eat while you were in the church. And then you would negotiate a certain port where you would be leaving from London. It was usually Dover. You were given a certain amount of time to get to Dover. You would then have to walk there in four days, usually dressed in a dark cloth. You would have to Repent, you would have to admit to having committed the crime. And then you would sail across the channel to France. And then who knows what became of your life. A third option was to get a royal pardon. That was the most important process, where you could re establish your honor, your respect, and get recognized as being a respectable citizen. Most were the defense of self defense. So making a case that you had defended yourself in an honorable way, that you had defended your own life, but you had acted out of necessity. And if you had enough money to buy lawyers and to make your case, that was a way to get out of it. Otherwise you would be arrested or you would hand yourself in to the sheriff, and the sheriff would take you to the prison in London. It would be Newgate in Oxford, it would be in the old Norman castle. And then you would be kept there until the day of the trials, when all the prisoners in prison would be tried. That in itself was almost a death penalty. We know from London prison that each year about six to 10 prisoners who were kept in prison died. And just to give you an idea how much that is, if we translated this to the size of contemporary London, that would mean that about 1,000 people died in prison in London in any given year. So being sent to prison was absolutely lethal. If you managed to survive being in prison, which to a large extent depended on you having the resources to corrupt the prison personnel, because the prison was run privately for profit. If you managed to survive prison, you would then be taken to the trial. And the interesting thing is that although in principle medieval law was harsh, the only penalty for homicide that you could possibly get was death by hanging because you had committed a felony. And in medieval law, every felony required a death penalty by hanging. We know that 90 to 95% of all cases that ended up being tried ended with a non guilty verdict. So only a very small minority ended up being convicted for crimes that they had probably committed. Well, you were much more likely to be convicted to hanging if you had committed a simple theft than if he had committed a homicide. Stealing something was something primarily committed by outsiders of society. And it was primarily considered to be an evil crime because it required an intention to do harm. While homicide was more often considered something that is just resulting from a conflict that escalates unintentionally. People have some sorts, they have something to defend themselves. They would get into a fight and at the end somebody dies. And the way medieval juries might have thought about this would be to say, Robert the goldsmith, if he was taken to trial, he is a Respectable member of our community. He has been giving some money to the church. He goes to church services every Sunday. He has some apprentices that he trains. He does all kinds of things. Right. And here was this stupid conflict that ended up badly and somebody died. And so the suspicion is that for the jury, often they reached a non guilty verdict simply because on balance they thought this person doesn't deserve to be hanged.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

So if you do actually find yourself being subjected to trial, there's a reasonable chance you might get away with whatever crime you've committed. It sounds like perhaps the punishment was the fact that you ended up in prison to start with. And there's a pretty good chance you'll die there. Back to the coroner's role that we talked about at the start. One of the things that they made a point of identifying was how much the perpetrators were worth. Why is that something that they were worried about?

[Matt Murdock]

There are a number of money related figures in these documents. One is the value of the property that was confiscated and the second is the value of of the instrument that caused the death. These two bits of information are contained in the records because one way to think about these records is to think about them as money making devices for the king. So the coroner was a royal official and one of the obligations of the coroner was to bring in money for the king. There were two ways of bringing in money for the king. One was to confiscate the property of the suspect. And so for that reason it was important to establish exactly how much the suspected perpetrator had owned. A second mechanism, by the way, to make money out of all these cases was to name witnesses. If you saw homicide event in the Middle ages, I would have recommended to you make sure that you're not named as a witness. Why? Because if you were named as a witness, there would be a very hefty fine against you if you then were not showing up at the trial. And your entire property could be confiscated if you did not show up at trial. And the final element was this interesting phenomenon of the deodant. The identification of the value of the object that had caused the death.

[Professor Manuel Eisner]

Yes. Tell us about Dir Dans because they are a very surprising and fascinating element of this.

[Matt Murdock]

The deodend is such a strange thing, isn't it? You have these cases in London. If you go on the map, you can filter the map and go for cases of accidents. And so you would have cases where a pig kills a little baby. And the next thing that the coroner establishes is what was the value of the pig. Or you have somebody falling down a ladder. Okay, the guy was drunk, and the guy falls down the ladder. And the next thing that we hear is, what was the value of the ladder? Or in another case, I mean, just the third case that we have among the accidents in London is somebody having to go to the loo. And as the person goes to the loo in the back of the house, the piece of wood on which the person sits breaks, and the person falls into the pit and dies down there. And we hear that the piece of wood was valued at 1 pence or 2 pence. It's an interesting combination of magical thinking and royal business making. The magical thinking behind it is that when we talk about a cause of something, as we all know this, it's not always easy to say exactly what we mean by the cause of something. In the Middle Ages, they were quite concerned about the problem. If somebody shoots somebody with an arrow. Say, what is the role of the arrow in this thing? Is it just the person who releases the arrow? Or is there something about the arrow itself that contributes to the fact that the person ends up being dead? Because it's the arrow that inflicts kind of like the lethal injury. And so, in medieval thinking, the object that contributes to the death is, in some ways, guilty. Now, if I say guilty, I don't mean to imply that by the late Middle Ages, people actually believed that a ladder that you fall down from is kind of like guilty in a moral sense. They were quite down to earth in many ways, but that thinking still is present in these medieval records. And so the jury had this complicated task of establishing exactly what this object was, and there were limitations to it. So, for instance, if there was an accident, the jury had to establish which objects were involved in causing the death. There is one interesting example of a case of a cart that killed a child in one of the markets. The jury starts piling up, not just a cart, but also the horses and the objects that are on top of the cart. And it all adds up to a very high sum that is then confiscated and, of course, is taken away from the guilty person. I think in the end, it reminds me of almost a sense of strict liability, a sense of, this person should actually have controlled the cart better. The person who is responsible for the sow, for the pig that killed the king should have looked after the pig better. But because there was no kind of, like, sense of insurance and civil law that would have allowed them to prosecute was prosecuted. It was punished through the confiscation of the object that had caused the death. In the case of homicides, it would have been the murder instrument. And so in many cases, the value of the murder instrument is established. In the York cases, for instance, they would say it was a title that was worth one pence, which was a very cheap knife. It could have been a dagger, which would have been worth more like 6 pence or 10 pence, or it could have been a sword that would have been worth two or three shillings, and then that object would have been confiscated. For us, it's interesting because it tells us something about the social class background of the perpetrators. You can look at the geographic distribution of different weapons in London and what you can see, for example, is that the simple working knives, the Twitels, were mostly concentrated along the river in the poor neighborhoods where lots of workers were working to unload and upload the strips that came into London, the daggers. And we saw this in the case that we talked about, the daggers were mostly concentrated around Cheapside, which was the area of the guilds. And then you have the swords even further west, where you have the big courts of inn and where you have people from the nobility living in very expensive mansions. And so to some extent at least, the geographic distribution of the murder instruments tells us something about the social geography of London.

[David Musgrove]

That was Professor Manuel Eisner, criminologist at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. You can check out the Medieval Murder map [e-mail] where you can also listen to a series of in depth podcasts that the team behind the maps have recorded on some of the most fascinating cases they've investigated. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.

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