8 ms·

A pig and a locust get into trouble with the law: On justice in medieval Europe

41 points by benbreen 4y ago

neaden 4y ago
There is a tendency to look back on midevil punishments as barbaric, but it's worth noting that they probably would consider our practice of locking people up for years, sometimes alone for 23 hours a day, as bizarre and cruel.
- xkcd1963 4y ago
  I think in your example it is more likely that infrastructure was really expensive back in the day. It was expensive to build dungeons. And often only prominent prisoners were locked up
  - ghaff 4y ago
    That is almost certainly true. People were fined, put in stocks, had body parts cut off--or executed. Yes, they'd probably be shocked at how many people are imprisoned today but likely mostly because they'd consider it a very inefficient use of resources given the much cheaper ways to punish people.
    - Xeoncross 4y ago
      > a very inefficient use of resources I wish we would consider prison a very inefficient use of resources. We put non-violent people in prison and fine the tax payers. It's a lose-lose for both parties.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        People found guilty are routinely fined as well. Perhaps even fewer people guilty of non-violent crimes should be put in prison as opposed to just being given house arrest or community service. (As many are today.) Though I suspect that a lot of people would see that as leniency for what are often "white collar" criminals.
      - dionidium 4y ago
        The extent to which this is true is often exaggerated. Violent criminals are the largest share of the state prison population [0], followed by serious property crimes, such as theft and burglary. The modal state prisoner is a violent repeat offender who is overwhelming likely to re-offend upon release. Even once you get down to the "drugs" and "public order" categories, quite a large share of these guys have plead down from more serious charges of which they're almost certainly guilty, and those who really are in for "drugs" are not guilty of mere possession (they're dealers, distributors, etc). Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html [0] Local jails are full mostly of people awaiting trial. That's a whole separate conversation. Federal prisons, too, are best thought of as a different topic, since the federal authorities are in pursuit of a particular set of criminals and the population skews heavily toward offenders who aren't representative of the broader prison population.
        swatcoder 4y ago
        You take a source that only indicates about 750,000 of 2M detained people have been convicted of violent crime, then toss in property crime because you think that’s equally justified too, then volunteer an unsubstantiated dismissal of the remainder as “plead down”. I mean, it’s cool that you included a foot note and a link here, since it makes it looks like you cited something, but the substance of your comment isn’t really informed by it, so it feels a little disingenuous.
        dionidium 4y ago
        > You take a source that only indicates about 750,000 of 2M detained people have been convicted of violent crime I anticipated this objection and addressed it explicitly in the footnote. You might not find my argument persuasive; that's fine, but I directly engaged with this response already.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        At least some types of non-violent criminals belong behind the bars, I would say. A very specific example are the fraudsters. Bernie Madoff type. There is something almost devilish about their combination of persuasion, charisma and utter disregard for consequences. And they tend to run new frauds if they have a possibility to do so, so it isn't very safe to let them walk.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Why should only non-violent criminals be shielded from the consequences of their actions? Non-violent criminals are often responsible for multiple orders of magnitude more damage than violent ones. The guy who stole my house shouldn't be less punished than the guy who slapped me. It makes sense under the theory that we put people in prison to protect the public, but when we put dangerous, violent people in prison, we make them far more dangerous and violent, then let them out of prison largely unemployable and with no means of support. That's generally funny to us; we feel that it's even more punishment, and more punishment is good. Drug people shouldn't be in prison because taking drugs shouldn't be a crime, not because it is a non-violent one.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Or exiled. That was incredibly common, and not so rarely effectively a death sentence.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Prisons were and still are expensive, but nobody went around saying "if only we could", either. The justice system then was explicitly retributive, with deterrence as a secondary goal, and rehabilitation as a distant third. So why even bother locking people up, when there are many other forms of punishment of various severity that don't take years to implement?
- t_mann 4y ago
  They also did lock people up, no worries.
site-packages1 4y ago
Really good read enjoyable prose, if not a bit "much" at times. This was thought provoking, particularly the second sentence: "Do not forget that medieval England was one of the most devoutly Catholic nations in Europe and one should never underestimate the ability of the pertinaciously pious to behave irrationally. A medieval person’s moral and world views were so intensely bound up with those of the Church that he would have had no doubt that these trials by ordeal were entirely genuine. It would never have crossed the mind of most medieval citizens that being tied up and lobbed into the local lake was not an effective method of proving guilt; shockingly, fluid dynamics and gravity weren’t particularly common topics of study in the thirteenth century. A person’s logic was interchangeable with that of the Church or the ramblings of the one-eyed crackpot codger at the local tavern." Was this true, did people really not question anything? I always assumed people went along with it for fear of punishment but probably thought it was a little ridiculous. Are we this, forgive me--stupid--today? I would like to think not, but I also see some of the things happening in my own country in places like Florida and think maybe this is just human nature to want to put down our sense of curiosity and willingness to question and give it over to another entity.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  Ah yes, the famous 'every past generation was ignorant and every future generation is lazy' I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of the past and think this is where people confuse intelligence with knowledge. We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?
  - rm445 4y ago
    The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed. I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
>If the creatures could be physically transported to the courtroom for the hearing, then they usually were. This may sound utterly insane to our modern minds... Of course, nowadays we're so much more advanced than these medieval bumpkins. We've figured out how to have court cases against animals without the hassle of physically placing them in the court room. Such was the case in the 1987 trial of US vs. 2,507 live canary winged parakeets (the parakeets lost, probably to the benefit of their species)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  That isn't a similar situation. Modern trials with titles of State v. Object are very common, but they do not allege that the object committed any offense. They are a way of confiscating the object from its owner without allowing the owner to defend himself in court (because he's not being penalized, the object is).
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    Why are we penalizing objects that haven't committed any offense? That doesn't seem morally defensible.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      We're not penalizing them. We're taking them.
raincom 4y ago
Legal transformations wrought by the Church abolished "trial by ordeal". What replaced "trial by ordeal"? In the continental Europe, "confession under inquisition"; in England, "jury trail" "Between 1050 and 1250, a 200-year stretch in the Common Era, the European legal system underwent a remarkable transformation. In continental Europe, trial by ordeal was replaced by confession under inquisition; in England, it was the beginning of the jury trial. In the first case, the judge could appeal to the precise and procedural nature of the law, which ‘dictated’ his judgement; in the second case, the judge could refer to peer judgement to defend his own decision. In both cases, the reasons that led to the transformation were the same: the reluctant witness, who refused to come forth and testify against persons suspected of committing a crime. Let us first get a better grip on this issue. In order to accuse a person of some crime, one or several witnesses were needed; the judge (whether a civil magistrate or an ecclesiastical authority) could then appeal to legal provisions to pronounce a sentence. But the problem the judges faced was the reluctance of witnesses to come forth and do what was required. There were, to be sure, many reasons for this state of affairs--one chief reason being a scriptural injunction. Being a witness, one risked either lying (‘perjury’), an act forbidden by Scripture (‘thou shalt not bear false witness’) whose violation would send the believer on his way to hell; or one risked blood guilt, that is, carrying the blood of another human being on one’s hands. Despite many subtle attempts by theologians to solve this dilemma, it remained a huge concern; continental Europe and England took different routes to solve this problem." (p.110 of SN Balagangadhara's "Cultures Differ Differently" (Routledge, 2022).
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > What replaced "trial by ordeal"? In the continental Europe, "confession under inquisition"; in England, "jury trail" Rome had juries. They were an improvement on Athenian trial-by-mob. The Magna Carta secured trial by jury around the time the Church abolished trial by ordeal, but the jury system was already being assembled before that by Æthelred the Unready and Henry II. It’s unclear if juries replaced ordeals in England versus both being driven by the same legalising trend.
UIUC_06 4y ago
I'm ready for the article that unearths the actual statistics, not the grim examples. Similar to Steven Pinker's deep research on the actual prevalence of violence in medieval times vs. modern times. Like, I wonder how often in daily life these things happened? As opposed to events that did not make the written histories, like "Alfred is accused of theft of apples. The local noble questions him and warns him not to do it again. He denies it, but no more apples are stolen." Would a historian know about that, or bother to write about it if he did?
- dionidium 4y ago
  I've wondered about stuff like this, often: > Gruesomely, it is believed the person would often still be conscious during this. The genitals would also be cut off and burnt in full view of the crowds and the victim. Talk about adding insult to injury. Only once the final stage was reached would the poor soul succumb to death, since before quartering he was usually beheaded. If you were wondering, “quartering” quite literally meant chopping the torso into four parts, generally with a huge axe. As this punishment was enacted less often than its more genteel counterparts, it would attract particularly large crowds. This sort of defies any understanding I have of human beings. This isn't like, "how could they think hats like that looked good?" or, "They really lived in such small huts?" No, this suggests a fundamentally different kind of creature, one that could derive enjoyment from something that would make my stomach turn. You might as well tell me they thought human shit was a delicacy. As I understand it, this stuff wasn't actually that common, in other words.
  - UIUC_06 4y ago
    Yes. Something I read once stuck with me: Simple minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds, in the commonplace.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Go to any Reddit forum that follows videos from the Ukrainian war and look at the comments. Even today, some people are absolutely savage about other people getting killed, if they believe that they deserve it. There isn't much difference between a real crowd cheering someone's execution and a virtual crowd cheering someone being blown up.
justin66 4y ago
Sometimes it's readily apparent that an author is getting paid by the word.
mk89 4y ago
The most hilarious ordeal I read about was the so called "ordeal of the cross". [0] To even conceive that idea? ... [0]: https://www.liquisearch.com/trial_by_ordeal/ordeal_of_the_cross https://www.liquisearch.com/trial_by_ordeal/ordeal_of_the_cr...
sneak 4y ago
> It is thought, then, that the whole premise of being offered a trial by ordeal was a mental trick to force the guilty to confess, and it worked. US intelligence does the same thing today with their continued use within their ranks of the completely unscientific polygraph test.

41 points by benbreen 4y ago

There is a tendency to look back on midevil punishments as barbaric, but it's worth noting that they probably would consider our practice of locking people up for years, sometimes alone for 23 hours a day, as bizarre and cruel.

xkcd1963 4y ago
I think in your example it is more likely that infrastructure was really expensive back in the day. It was expensive to build dungeons. And often only prominent prisoners were locked up
- ghaff 4y ago
  That is almost certainly true. People were fined, put in stocks, had body parts cut off--or executed. Yes, they'd probably be shocked at how many people are imprisoned today but likely mostly because they'd consider it a very inefficient use of resources given the much cheaper ways to punish people.
  - Xeoncross 4y ago
    > a very inefficient use of resources I wish we would consider prison a very inefficient use of resources. We put non-violent people in prison and fine the tax payers. It's a lose-lose for both parties.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      People found guilty are routinely fined as well. Perhaps even fewer people guilty of non-violent crimes should be put in prison as opposed to just being given house arrest or community service. (As many are today.) Though I suspect that a lot of people would see that as leniency for what are often "white collar" criminals.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      The extent to which this is true is often exaggerated. Violent criminals are the largest share of the state prison population [0], followed by serious property crimes, such as theft and burglary. The modal state prisoner is a violent repeat offender who is overwhelming likely to re-offend upon release. Even once you get down to the "drugs" and "public order" categories, quite a large share of these guys have plead down from more serious charges of which they're almost certainly guilty, and those who really are in for "drugs" are not guilty of mere possession (they're dealers, distributors, etc). Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html [0] Local jails are full mostly of people awaiting trial. That's a whole separate conversation. Federal prisons, too, are best thought of as a different topic, since the federal authorities are in pursuit of a particular set of criminals and the population skews heavily toward offenders who aren't representative of the broader prison population.
      - swatcoder 4y ago
        You take a source that only indicates about 750,000 of 2M detained people have been convicted of violent crime, then toss in property crime because you think that’s equally justified too, then volunteer an unsubstantiated dismissal of the remainder as “plead down”. I mean, it’s cool that you included a foot note and a link here, since it makes it looks like you cited something, but the substance of your comment isn’t really informed by it, so it feels a little disingenuous.
        dionidium 4y ago
        > You take a source that only indicates about 750,000 of 2M detained people have been convicted of violent crime I anticipated this objection and addressed it explicitly in the footnote. You might not find my argument persuasive; that's fine, but I directly engaged with this response already.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      At least some types of non-violent criminals belong behind the bars, I would say. A very specific example are the fraudsters. Bernie Madoff type. There is something almost devilish about their combination of persuasion, charisma and utter disregard for consequences. And they tend to run new frauds if they have a possibility to do so, so it isn't very safe to let them walk.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Why should only non-violent criminals be shielded from the consequences of their actions? Non-violent criminals are often responsible for multiple orders of magnitude more damage than violent ones. The guy who stole my house shouldn't be less punished than the guy who slapped me. It makes sense under the theory that we put people in prison to protect the public, but when we put dangerous, violent people in prison, we make them far more dangerous and violent, then let them out of prison largely unemployable and with no means of support. That's generally funny to us; we feel that it's even more punishment, and more punishment is good. Drug people shouldn't be in prison because taking drugs shouldn't be a crime, not because it is a non-violent one.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Or exiled. That was incredibly common, and not so rarely effectively a death sentence.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Prisons were and still are expensive, but nobody went around saying "if only we could", either. The justice system then was explicitly retributive, with deterrence as a secondary goal, and rehabilitation as a distant third. So why even bother locking people up, when there are many other forms of punishment of various severity that don't take years to implement?
t_mann 4y ago
They also did lock people up, no worries.

site-packages1 4y ago

Really good read enjoyable prose, if not a bit "much" at times. This was thought provoking, particularly the second sentence: "Do not forget that medieval England was one of the most devoutly Catholic nations in Europe and one should never underestimate the ability of the pertinaciously pious to behave irrationally. A medieval person’s moral and world views were so intensely bound up with those of the Church that he would have had no doubt that these trials by ordeal were entirely genuine. It would never have crossed the mind of most medieval citizens that being tied up and lobbed into the local lake was not an effective method of proving guilt; shockingly, fluid dynamics and gravity weren’t particularly common topics of study in the thirteenth century. A person’s logic was interchangeable with that of the Church or the ramblings of the one-eyed crackpot codger at the local tavern." Was this true, did people really not question anything? I always assumed people went along with it for fear of punishment but probably thought it was a little ridiculous. Are we this, forgive me--stupid--today? I would like to think not, but I also see some of the things happening in my own country in places like Florida and think maybe this is just human nature to want to put down our sense of curiosity and willingness to question and give it over to another entity.

Xeoncross 4y ago
Ah yes, the famous 'every past generation was ignorant and every future generation is lazy' I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of the past and think this is where people confuse intelligence with knowledge. We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?
- rm445 4y ago
  The implication, though it's still quite conspiracy-minded, is that we're just as credulous today about things that fit within our worldview, the current paradigm. And utterly blind to what those things are, they just seem to be how the world works. Yet future generations will boggle at the the things we believed. I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

>If the creatures could be physically transported to the courtroom for the hearing, then they usually were. This may sound utterly insane to our modern minds... Of course, nowadays we're so much more advanced than these medieval bumpkins. We've figured out how to have court cases against animals without the hassle of physically placing them in the court room. Such was the case in the 1987 trial of US vs. 2,507 live canary winged parakeets (the parakeets lost, probably to the benefit of their species)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
That isn't a similar situation. Modern trials with titles of State v. Object are very common, but they do not allege that the object committed any offense. They are a way of confiscating the object from its owner without allowing the owner to defend himself in court (because he's not being penalized, the object is).
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Why are we penalizing objects that haven't committed any offense? That doesn't seem morally defensible.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    We're not penalizing them. We're taking them.

raincom 4y ago

Legal transformations wrought by the Church abolished "trial by ordeal". What replaced "trial by ordeal"? In the continental Europe, "confession under inquisition"; in England, "jury trail" "Between 1050 and 1250, a 200-year stretch in the Common Era, the European legal system underwent a remarkable transformation. In continental Europe, trial by ordeal was replaced by confession under inquisition; in England, it was the beginning of the jury trial. In the first case, the judge could appeal to the precise and procedural nature of the law, which ‘dictated’ his judgement; in the second case, the judge could refer to peer judgement to defend his own decision. In both cases, the reasons that led to the transformation were the same: the reluctant witness, who refused to come forth and testify against persons suspected of committing a crime. Let us first get a better grip on this issue. In order to accuse a person of some crime, one or several witnesses were needed; the judge (whether a civil magistrate or an ecclesiastical authority) could then appeal to legal provisions to pronounce a sentence. But the problem the judges faced was the reluctance of witnesses to come forth and do what was required. There were, to be sure, many reasons for this state of affairs--one chief reason being a scriptural injunction. Being a witness, one risked either lying (‘perjury’), an act forbidden by Scripture (‘thou shalt not bear false witness’) whose violation would send the believer on his way to hell; or one risked blood guilt, that is, carrying the blood of another human being on one’s hands. Despite many subtle attempts by theologians to solve this dilemma, it remained a huge concern; continental Europe and England took different routes to solve this problem." (p.110 of SN Balagangadhara's "Cultures Differ Differently" (Routledge, 2022).

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> What replaced "trial by ordeal"? In the continental Europe, "confession under inquisition"; in England, "jury trail" Rome had juries. They were an improvement on Athenian trial-by-mob. The Magna Carta secured trial by jury around the time the Church abolished trial by ordeal, but the jury system was already being assembled before that by Æthelred the Unready and Henry II. It’s unclear if juries replaced ordeals in England versus both being driven by the same legalising trend.

UIUC_06 4y ago

I'm ready for the article that unearths the actual statistics, not the grim examples. Similar to Steven Pinker's deep research on the actual prevalence of violence in medieval times vs. modern times. Like, I wonder how often in daily life these things happened? As opposed to events that did not make the written histories, like "Alfred is accused of theft of apples. The local noble questions him and warns him not to do it again. He denies it, but no more apples are stolen." Would a historian know about that, or bother to write about it if he did?

dionidium 4y ago
I've wondered about stuff like this, often: > Gruesomely, it is believed the person would often still be conscious during this. The genitals would also be cut off and burnt in full view of the crowds and the victim. Talk about adding insult to injury. Only once the final stage was reached would the poor soul succumb to death, since before quartering he was usually beheaded. If you were wondering, “quartering” quite literally meant chopping the torso into four parts, generally with a huge axe. As this punishment was enacted less often than its more genteel counterparts, it would attract particularly large crowds. This sort of defies any understanding I have of human beings. This isn't like, "how could they think hats like that looked good?" or, "They really lived in such small huts?" No, this suggests a fundamentally different kind of creature, one that could derive enjoyment from something that would make my stomach turn. You might as well tell me they thought human shit was a delicacy. As I understand it, this stuff wasn't actually that common, in other words.
- UIUC_06 4y ago
  Yes. Something I read once stuck with me: Simple minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds, in the commonplace.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Go to any Reddit forum that follows videos from the Ukrainian war and look at the comments. Even today, some people are absolutely savage about other people getting killed, if they believe that they deserve it. There isn't much difference between a real crowd cheering someone's execution and a virtual crowd cheering someone being blown up.

justin66 4y ago

Sometimes it's readily apparent that an author is getting paid by the word.

mk89 4y ago

The most hilarious ordeal I read about was the so called "ordeal of the cross". [0] To even conceive that idea? ... [0]: https://www.liquisearch.com/trial_by_ordeal/ordeal_of_the_cross https://www.liquisearch.com/trial_by_ordeal/ordeal_of_the_cr...

sneak 4y ago

> It is thought, then, that the whole premise of being offered a trial by ordeal was a mental trick to force the guilty to confess, and it worked. US intelligence does the same thing today with their continued use within their ranks of the completely unscientific polygraph test.