A NEW SOURCE FOR MEDIEVAL MURDER

Medieval Murder Maps throws you into the deadly world of medieval Oxford on an average Sunday afternoon

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When I was an undergraduate, reading for my History degree, I took a course on law and political society in late medieval England.

This, along with the general survey paper on English medieval political history that I read in my first year, left a deep impression on my 18/19 year old mind. What I learned then has been the basis for much of the work I have done since.

One of the consequences, perhaps only partly intended, of reading the law and society paper was that I also developed early - and have kept - a salacious interest in what we might call medieval true crime.

There is no fatal drunken fight outside a village tavern in fifteenth-century rural Suffolk that will not pique my interest. No shadowy stabbing of a foreign diplomat in the streets of London after curfew that will not have me rubbing my hands with voyeuristic glee.

Medieval Murder: Three Ways

I do not say I am proud. I am just telling you how it is.

Anyway, knowing this, you may imagine my delight when I read about a new online resource that allows users to explore, analyse and compare the details of medieval murder cases from the cities of Oxford, York and London. It is called Medieval Murder Maps, and over the last few weeks I have enjoyed digging into its archive.

There are a few headlines to report.

First, it is striking that Oxford puts in a good claim to be the murder capital of medieval England - not least because of tensions involving the young, male, booze-soaked student population. Students fought each other. They fought the townsfolk. They went around tanked up and heavily armed. And they could do bad things with relative impunity, claiming benefit of clergy to dodge the severe sanctions of the common law for violent crime.

Oxford had a murder rate approximately 50 times higher than the average UK city today, and although that has to be seen in the context of a drastically lower murder rate overall since the Middle Ages, it is still a bracing statistic to consider.

(Let us not forget it is to a spasm of violence in Oxford in the early thirteenth century that we owe the existence of my alma mater, Cambridge; a bunch of scholars fed up with the criminal hellscape of Broad Street upped sticks and started a new university in the Fens.)

Second, it is surprising just how much detail we can glean about long-ago murder cases from basic administrative records. I think it is often assumed that outside the monastic chronicles, sources from the Middle Ages are fusty or dry. Nothing could be further from the truth.