Okay, suppose you are an English peasant living in the Middle Ages. You find yourself in court on some sort of criminal charge. You would like to be able to honestly say you are a victim of circumstance, but the truth is…you are as guilty as a shame faced puppy standing next to an overturned kitchen waste basket. Just how worried should you be? Well, if you are found guilty you can expect to face rather severe punishment. But all hope is not lost. As in any era, if you know the system you may have a chance of getting away at least mostly intact.
As just stated, medieval punishments were extreme by modern standards. If you were found guilty of a crime you would likely face death or maiming. Long term imprisonment was not a realistic option at the time. Prisons cost money to maintain and few communities were willing or able to pay for them. It was more practical to either execute offenders or punish them in some sort of painful and often disfiguring way and then let them go. Thieves could be publicly exposed in the stocks for three days, and may have their hands cut off. A poacher who was caught illegally hunting on royal land could have his hand mutilated or his ears cut off. The laws of Cnut, established in the 11th Century, specified that an adulteress should lose “all she owns along with her nose and ears.” I guess having the nose and ears cut off was meant to make her less appealing and thus less likely to be a repeat offender.
If you were a murderer you would be executed by any number of means depending upon the exact nature of the offense. Hanging was quite common, though it wasn’t the sort of hanging you might expect. The 'drop-stop' method where by the condemned falls through a trap door and has his neck broken, was not done until the 19th century. In the middle ages a hanging victim was either pulled up by the neck or had a ladder kicked out from beneath them. If you were hanged this way, it is unlikely that your neck would break. Rather you can look forward to a death by slow strangulation which could take an hour or more. Not fun! But hanging was not the only means used. If you committed murder by the use of poison you would likely be boiled alive. Or If you were convicted of treason you would either be hung drawn and quartered, or burned alive. If you were a female traitor you would likely at least be shown the mercy of being strangled before being put into the fire. Lucky you!
But medieval punishment did not end with death. It was common practice to place the body of an executed criminal in a small cage and hang it from a gallows like structure called a gibbet (pictured below). The body would be left there to rot and be pecked at by crows for weeks on end as a warning to others. How effective this was as a deterrent is highly debatable, but the practice was very common. The frequency of the place name “Gibbet Hill” in England today is testimony to how widespread the use of the gibbet was. Pirates would be hung from gibbets over the water at ports as a warning to other would be pirates.
“Okay” you say “I get it. Medieval punishment was harsh and best avoided. But how can I avoid it if I’ve already been brought to trial? Is it even possible?” Well, in 1202, the city of Lincoln had recorded 114 murders, 89 violent robberies and 65 people injured in fights. In that same year only 2 people were executed for these crimes. This indicates that it was certainly possible to commit a crime and escape punishment. But how to go about it? There were multiple possibilities.
One way to gain an acquittal was by swearing you didn’t do it. “Really?” you ask “It was that simple? I Just raise my right hand and say ‘It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there?’” Well no, it wasn’t quite THAT simple. How seriously your oath was taken depended greatly upon who you were, what the crime was, and who would vouch for you. For example, if you happened to be a married woman whose husband had committed a crime, such as thievery of cattle, food or other goods, then it is possible that you and even your children might be considered to be accomplices. If convicted your entire family could be put into slavery. If this is the case, then it will go best for you if you are fortunate enough to have been born at least as late as the 11th century. At this time the “Code of Cnut” was the prevailing law of England. The Code of Cnut recognized that a wife had no way of preventing her husband from bringing anything he wished into their house or on to their property. What mattered with regard to her guilt or innocence was whether or not any of the stolen goods had been used by her or entrusted to her care. Women were considered to be responsible for household goods and assets. A wife held the keys to the “storeroom, her chest and coffer.” If her husband had stolen food or other such goods, but they had not been “brought under the wife’s lock and key”, then she could swear to this and be considered blameless in the actions of her husband.
Another means of gaining acquittal by oath taking was what was known as “compurgation.” The idea here was that the local town’s people would better know the character of an accused person than would a visiting judge. So if the defendant swore an oath to his own innocence, and could find twelve other people (compurgators) to also swear to their own belief that the he or she was innocent, then the defendant would be acquitted. While there is some validity to the idea that locals know each other best, it is easy to see how this could degenerate into a popularity contest. And privilege tends to breed a sense of entitlement. If you happened to be the son of a prominent and well respected family and you were accused of raping a less socially important girl, then all you would need to do is get twelve of your drinking buddies to support you in your claim to innocence and you are home free.
But trials were not always so easy and painless, far from it. If you were told by your judge that you would have to face a “trial by ordeal”, well I’ll be honest with you. Win or lose you have some unpleasant times ahead. The procedure was to put the accused through some sort of difficult, painful, or even life threatening situation and see what the outcome was. It was considered to be a form of judicium Dei (Judgment of God). It was based upon the premise that God would certainly favor the innocent. So if the accused survived intact then he must be guiltless. If not, then he was to be condemned. There were many variations on this theme.
On commonly used form was the ordeal by fire. An iron bar was heated in a forge or other fire to the point of being red hot. If you had to face this form of judgment then you would have to take this bar in hand and walk three paces holding it. Your severely burned hand was then bandaged and left alone for a period of three days. If the burns showed signs of healing after that time then God was saying you were innocent! If the wound had begun to fester well..don’t make any plans for the weekend.
At least the ordeal by fire offered some chance for acquittal. But it is hard to see the up side of ordeal by water. If you, as the defendant, were put to this test then you would find yourself bound hand and feet and thrown into a lake, river, or other body of water. If you floated then you would be considered guilty and likely be hanged. If you had the “good fortune” to be innocent then you would sink to the bottom and drown.
The most well known, and often romanticized, form of ordeal is certainly trial by combat. The accused would have to demonstrate his innocence by defending himself in an armed fight to the death. The risk of being challenged to an ordeal by battle likely averted a lot of petty litigation. Not everyone is necessarily skilled with a sword, and only women, children or the elderly could legally decline such a challenge. There were even instances where judges themselves were challenged to defend their decisions by means of combat. However, if you did find yourself in the position of having to prove your case by the sword, and you didn’t know one end of that sword from the other, there was another option open to you. Strictly speaking it was not really necessary for you to be the one holding the sword. So, if you were wealthy enough to afford it, you could hire a private champion to do your fighting for you. Many skilled men at arms made good money hiring themselves out as champions. It was even common practice for wealthy land owners and churches to keep permanently retained champions on the payroll for just such emergencies.
Eventually the church began to discourage certain forms trial by ordeal. In 1215 Pope Innocent III even forbade priests to cooperate at all in trials of either fire or water. Use of the more extreme forms began to decline in favor of compurgation, trial by jury, or confession through torture. But trial by ordeal did not completely disappear until the 16th century. Despite the horrific nature of many of the ordeals, many were reluctant to abandon it in favor of jury trials. They were still more comfortable with God making decisions of justice than they were with neighbors, many of whom might be harboring personal grudges against them. However a law instated in 1275 allowed the use of torture on any defendant who refused to be tried by a jury. This may have helped the public to be more accepting of juries.
Okay, let’s assume that you have been brought to court and have no money to hire a champion, and you are not confident of your chances of passing the other ordeals either. Fear not there is still a chance for you if you are clever enough. One possible means of evading harsh sentences (if not justice all together) was available to you as long as you happened to live no earlier than the late 12th century. Until that time it was traditional in England for courts of law to be jointly presided over by a secular magistrate and a church official, usually a bishop. This changed in 1166 when King Henry II established a new court system that entirely excluded church authority, and was answerable only to the king. The church understandably took issue with this move. A power struggle thereby ensued over this, and other issues, between Henry and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket maintained that such purely secular courts should have no authority over accused clergymen. This conflict between King and Archbishop culminated in the murder of Becket by four of Henry’s knights in 1170. In order to appease public outrage at this incident, the king made amends and concessions to the church. As a consequence of the Compromise of Avranches Henry accepted penance and agreed that clergymen would be tried only in ecclesiastical courts. So now any member of the clergy who was brought before a secular authority had the right to demand to be transferred to a church court. This was known as “Benefit of the Clergy.”
Yeah..okay but you’re no priest. So if you are a common thief or murderer, how does this help you? It has to do with how priests were required to prove that they were actually priests. At first priests had to appear before the court wearing the robe and having a tonsured head. But that was easy enough to fake. In an effort to curb abuse of this privilege, defendants claiming to be priests or brothers were obliged to prove it by means of a literacy test. They were typically required to read (appropriately enough) Psalm 51. Which says “Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam.” Or in English "O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness." Of course priests are not the only ones who can read. If you are a layman but can read then you can take advantage of the benefit of the clergy by saying you are a priest and reading the passage. But even if you cannot read, there is still a good chance that you can use this legal loophole. Psalm 51 was so commonly used for this purpose that if you managed to memorize it, you had a good chance of faking it through court and getting the change of venue. In fact so many used it to escape being hanged by secular courts (and were instead tried in the more lenient ecclesiastical courts) that psalm 51 was commonly referred to as “the neck verse.” It could literally save your neck.
Benefit of the clergy was not extended to women until 1624. But there were other means a woman could use of escaping, if only temporarily, the hangman’s noose. One such example was available by the late 14th century and was commonly referred to as “pleading the belly.” This was an aspect of English common law. It allowed condemned pregnant women (or women claiming to be pregnant) to be granted a temporary reprieve of their death sentences until they had given birth. Pleading the belly was not a defense. It was more of a stalling tactic. It could only be used after a verdict was reached and sentence of death was pronounced. If a female defendant claimed to be pregnant she would be examined by a group of women called a jury of matrons. If declared to be pregnant, she was usually granted the stay of execution.
As with any other legal technicality belly pleading was ripe with abuse. Often women who were not pregnant would claim to be so. And the jury of matrons were not medical professionals and not always accurate with their diagnoses. Consequently women were often fraudulently or mistakenly declared to be pregnant. The overuse of pleading the belly was dramatized in the novel Moll Flanders, written by Daniel Defoe in 1772. This book includes a condemned female character who avoided hanging by successfully pleading her belly despite being “no more with child than the judge that tried her.”
But what is the point of a brief delay if you are just going to end up being hanged anyway? It seems that a pregnant woman languishing in jail tends to evoke feelings of sympathy with jailors and judges. Analysis of records from the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I have demonstrated that women who had been granted a reprieve due to pregnancy sometimes had their sentences commuted, or were even pardoned altogether. There was no guarantee that this would happen but I guess a chance is better than nothing.
No one wants to be arrested in any time period. But the punishments awaiting the convicted and the means of trying defendants, in the Middle Ages were fearful indeed. However, with a little knowledge of how the system works there was at least a chance that the accused could avoid meeting the hangman and “slip the knot” so to speak (ba-dum-bum!). I hope this helped to darken your day. Morbid Monday to ya!!
As just stated, medieval punishments were extreme by modern standards. If you were found guilty of a crime you would likely face death or maiming. Long term imprisonment was not a realistic option at the time. Prisons cost money to maintain and few communities were willing or able to pay for them. It was more practical to either execute offenders or punish them in some sort of painful and often disfiguring way and then let them go. Thieves could be publicly exposed in the stocks for three days, and may have their hands cut off. A poacher who was caught illegally hunting on royal land could have his hand mutilated or his ears cut off. The laws of Cnut, established in the 11th Century, specified that an adulteress should lose “all she owns along with her nose and ears.” I guess having the nose and ears cut off was meant to make her less appealing and thus less likely to be a repeat offender.
If you were a murderer you would be executed by any number of means depending upon the exact nature of the offense. Hanging was quite common, though it wasn’t the sort of hanging you might expect. The 'drop-stop' method where by the condemned falls through a trap door and has his neck broken, was not done until the 19th century. In the middle ages a hanging victim was either pulled up by the neck or had a ladder kicked out from beneath them. If you were hanged this way, it is unlikely that your neck would break. Rather you can look forward to a death by slow strangulation which could take an hour or more. Not fun! But hanging was not the only means used. If you committed murder by the use of poison you would likely be boiled alive. Or If you were convicted of treason you would either be hung drawn and quartered, or burned alive. If you were a female traitor you would likely at least be shown the mercy of being strangled before being put into the fire. Lucky you!
But medieval punishment did not end with death. It was common practice to place the body of an executed criminal in a small cage and hang it from a gallows like structure called a gibbet (pictured below). The body would be left there to rot and be pecked at by crows for weeks on end as a warning to others. How effective this was as a deterrent is highly debatable, but the practice was very common. The frequency of the place name “Gibbet Hill” in England today is testimony to how widespread the use of the gibbet was. Pirates would be hung from gibbets over the water at ports as a warning to other would be pirates.
“Okay” you say “I get it. Medieval punishment was harsh and best avoided. But how can I avoid it if I’ve already been brought to trial? Is it even possible?” Well, in 1202, the city of Lincoln had recorded 114 murders, 89 violent robberies and 65 people injured in fights. In that same year only 2 people were executed for these crimes. This indicates that it was certainly possible to commit a crime and escape punishment. But how to go about it? There were multiple possibilities.
One way to gain an acquittal was by swearing you didn’t do it. “Really?” you ask “It was that simple? I Just raise my right hand and say ‘It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there?’” Well no, it wasn’t quite THAT simple. How seriously your oath was taken depended greatly upon who you were, what the crime was, and who would vouch for you. For example, if you happened to be a married woman whose husband had committed a crime, such as thievery of cattle, food or other goods, then it is possible that you and even your children might be considered to be accomplices. If convicted your entire family could be put into slavery. If this is the case, then it will go best for you if you are fortunate enough to have been born at least as late as the 11th century. At this time the “Code of Cnut” was the prevailing law of England. The Code of Cnut recognized that a wife had no way of preventing her husband from bringing anything he wished into their house or on to their property. What mattered with regard to her guilt or innocence was whether or not any of the stolen goods had been used by her or entrusted to her care. Women were considered to be responsible for household goods and assets. A wife held the keys to the “storeroom, her chest and coffer.” If her husband had stolen food or other such goods, but they had not been “brought under the wife’s lock and key”, then she could swear to this and be considered blameless in the actions of her husband.
Another means of gaining acquittal by oath taking was what was known as “compurgation.” The idea here was that the local town’s people would better know the character of an accused person than would a visiting judge. So if the defendant swore an oath to his own innocence, and could find twelve other people (compurgators) to also swear to their own belief that the he or she was innocent, then the defendant would be acquitted. While there is some validity to the idea that locals know each other best, it is easy to see how this could degenerate into a popularity contest. And privilege tends to breed a sense of entitlement. If you happened to be the son of a prominent and well respected family and you were accused of raping a less socially important girl, then all you would need to do is get twelve of your drinking buddies to support you in your claim to innocence and you are home free.
But trials were not always so easy and painless, far from it. If you were told by your judge that you would have to face a “trial by ordeal”, well I’ll be honest with you. Win or lose you have some unpleasant times ahead. The procedure was to put the accused through some sort of difficult, painful, or even life threatening situation and see what the outcome was. It was considered to be a form of judicium Dei (Judgment of God). It was based upon the premise that God would certainly favor the innocent. So if the accused survived intact then he must be guiltless. If not, then he was to be condemned. There were many variations on this theme.
On commonly used form was the ordeal by fire. An iron bar was heated in a forge or other fire to the point of being red hot. If you had to face this form of judgment then you would have to take this bar in hand and walk three paces holding it. Your severely burned hand was then bandaged and left alone for a period of three days. If the burns showed signs of healing after that time then God was saying you were innocent! If the wound had begun to fester well..don’t make any plans for the weekend.
At least the ordeal by fire offered some chance for acquittal. But it is hard to see the up side of ordeal by water. If you, as the defendant, were put to this test then you would find yourself bound hand and feet and thrown into a lake, river, or other body of water. If you floated then you would be considered guilty and likely be hanged. If you had the “good fortune” to be innocent then you would sink to the bottom and drown.
The most well known, and often romanticized, form of ordeal is certainly trial by combat. The accused would have to demonstrate his innocence by defending himself in an armed fight to the death. The risk of being challenged to an ordeal by battle likely averted a lot of petty litigation. Not everyone is necessarily skilled with a sword, and only women, children or the elderly could legally decline such a challenge. There were even instances where judges themselves were challenged to defend their decisions by means of combat. However, if you did find yourself in the position of having to prove your case by the sword, and you didn’t know one end of that sword from the other, there was another option open to you. Strictly speaking it was not really necessary for you to be the one holding the sword. So, if you were wealthy enough to afford it, you could hire a private champion to do your fighting for you. Many skilled men at arms made good money hiring themselves out as champions. It was even common practice for wealthy land owners and churches to keep permanently retained champions on the payroll for just such emergencies.
Eventually the church began to discourage certain forms trial by ordeal. In 1215 Pope Innocent III even forbade priests to cooperate at all in trials of either fire or water. Use of the more extreme forms began to decline in favor of compurgation, trial by jury, or confession through torture. But trial by ordeal did not completely disappear until the 16th century. Despite the horrific nature of many of the ordeals, many were reluctant to abandon it in favor of jury trials. They were still more comfortable with God making decisions of justice than they were with neighbors, many of whom might be harboring personal grudges against them. However a law instated in 1275 allowed the use of torture on any defendant who refused to be tried by a jury. This may have helped the public to be more accepting of juries.
Okay, let’s assume that you have been brought to court and have no money to hire a champion, and you are not confident of your chances of passing the other ordeals either. Fear not there is still a chance for you if you are clever enough. One possible means of evading harsh sentences (if not justice all together) was available to you as long as you happened to live no earlier than the late 12th century. Until that time it was traditional in England for courts of law to be jointly presided over by a secular magistrate and a church official, usually a bishop. This changed in 1166 when King Henry II established a new court system that entirely excluded church authority, and was answerable only to the king. The church understandably took issue with this move. A power struggle thereby ensued over this, and other issues, between Henry and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket maintained that such purely secular courts should have no authority over accused clergymen. This conflict between King and Archbishop culminated in the murder of Becket by four of Henry’s knights in 1170. In order to appease public outrage at this incident, the king made amends and concessions to the church. As a consequence of the Compromise of Avranches Henry accepted penance and agreed that clergymen would be tried only in ecclesiastical courts. So now any member of the clergy who was brought before a secular authority had the right to demand to be transferred to a church court. This was known as “Benefit of the Clergy.”
Yeah..okay but you’re no priest. So if you are a common thief or murderer, how does this help you? It has to do with how priests were required to prove that they were actually priests. At first priests had to appear before the court wearing the robe and having a tonsured head. But that was easy enough to fake. In an effort to curb abuse of this privilege, defendants claiming to be priests or brothers were obliged to prove it by means of a literacy test. They were typically required to read (appropriately enough) Psalm 51. Which says “Miserere mei, Deus, secundum misericordiam tuam.” Or in English "O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness." Of course priests are not the only ones who can read. If you are a layman but can read then you can take advantage of the benefit of the clergy by saying you are a priest and reading the passage. But even if you cannot read, there is still a good chance that you can use this legal loophole. Psalm 51 was so commonly used for this purpose that if you managed to memorize it, you had a good chance of faking it through court and getting the change of venue. In fact so many used it to escape being hanged by secular courts (and were instead tried in the more lenient ecclesiastical courts) that psalm 51 was commonly referred to as “the neck verse.” It could literally save your neck.
Benefit of the clergy was not extended to women until 1624. But there were other means a woman could use of escaping, if only temporarily, the hangman’s noose. One such example was available by the late 14th century and was commonly referred to as “pleading the belly.” This was an aspect of English common law. It allowed condemned pregnant women (or women claiming to be pregnant) to be granted a temporary reprieve of their death sentences until they had given birth. Pleading the belly was not a defense. It was more of a stalling tactic. It could only be used after a verdict was reached and sentence of death was pronounced. If a female defendant claimed to be pregnant she would be examined by a group of women called a jury of matrons. If declared to be pregnant, she was usually granted the stay of execution.
As with any other legal technicality belly pleading was ripe with abuse. Often women who were not pregnant would claim to be so. And the jury of matrons were not medical professionals and not always accurate with their diagnoses. Consequently women were often fraudulently or mistakenly declared to be pregnant. The overuse of pleading the belly was dramatized in the novel Moll Flanders, written by Daniel Defoe in 1772. This book includes a condemned female character who avoided hanging by successfully pleading her belly despite being “no more with child than the judge that tried her.”
But what is the point of a brief delay if you are just going to end up being hanged anyway? It seems that a pregnant woman languishing in jail tends to evoke feelings of sympathy with jailors and judges. Analysis of records from the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I have demonstrated that women who had been granted a reprieve due to pregnancy sometimes had their sentences commuted, or were even pardoned altogether. There was no guarantee that this would happen but I guess a chance is better than nothing.
No one wants to be arrested in any time period. But the punishments awaiting the convicted and the means of trying defendants, in the Middle Ages were fearful indeed. However, with a little knowledge of how the system works there was at least a chance that the accused could avoid meeting the hangman and “slip the knot” so to speak (ba-dum-bum!). I hope this helped to darken your day. Morbid Monday to ya!!
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