The Criminalization of Violence in the Medieval West

Summary

TO TALK ABOUT when and how violence in the medieval West became criminal, we need first to decide what we mean by “violence” and what we mean by “criminal.” We also need to decide when our definitions might apply. The meanings of the English words “violence” and “crime,” and the Latin and French words on which they are based, have changed considerably over time. If we go into the Middle Ages using them in ways that its denizens would not have understood, we risk misunderstanding and mischaracterizing the period. We would also miss an opportunity. For much of the Middle Ages, what constitutes “violence” and what constitutes “crime” are moving targets. The ways that these words and their meanings evolved over the course of the period both reflect and help us see the process by which many if not most acts of what we would call violence came to be thought of as what we would call crimes.

In modern legal English (as opposed to broader popular or literary usage), the word “crime” covers offences against the common good as defined by the law, and punishable by the state whose job it is to uphold the law. Crimes are therefore tantamount to offences against the state as the representative of society as a whole, as opposed to actions that cause harm to person or groups qua persons or groups (i.e., civil wrong, or tort). The word of course has a medieval antecedent; it derives from the Latin crimen, through the old French crime. But for much of the Middle Ages, crimen had a much more flexible and extensive semantic field than that of the modern word crime. It could refer to a broad range of wrongs or offences. It was not restricted to any particular category of acts, save that it might lean towards the idea of sin. “Crime” as a legal category with something like its modern meaning only begins to emerge from the twelfth century onwards.

“Violence” in modern English covers more or less all acts of destructive force against people or objects. It is also morally neutral; we can talk about justified and unjustified violence. The word first emerges in English in the later Middle Ages, at the turn of the fourteenth century, with more or less the same semantic field.