Shifting Attitudes to Theft in Medieval Western Europe

Summary

THEFT OCCUPIES A very particular place in the history of “deviance.” If our definition of crime follows that chosen by those responsible for punishing it, theft was by far the most common type, and certainly the most prosecuted. Theft was unanimously perceived as a serious transgression, which threatened both morality and law, and which undermined political and social order, as well as the balance of commerce. It was a major crime. However, it was not treated in the same way across Europe. The penal response to theft varied according to period and region. Socio-political considerations meant that sometimes theft was dealt with via composition, sometimes by punishment, sometimes according to a logic of reparation, sometimes in the interests of the common good. It was shaped by the power or dissolution of public authority, from the Carolingian empire to fragmented lordly rule and feudal relationships. Roman law, forgotten and then rediscovered, was also an important influence. Finally, it was intertwined with anxiety about sovereignty when the public peace was threatened by the growth of brigandage and apparently sustained by the intervention of royal justice.

The repression of theft sheds particular light on the complexity of the relationships which bound members of a society and their shared values. At the same time, the category of theft involved a strikingly disparate group of actions, both in substance and in gravity: theft included all incursions on property, from petty theft and pilfering, to felonious theft, and armed attacks. Responses ranged from fines to death, and varied according to circumstances, and the profile of the accused. Courts assessed the role of thieves differently in different areas. Prescribed punishments, in particular violent ones, tended to parallel the evolution of the growth of public justice, both in how they were carried out, and in terms of the theoretical framing of the punishment. At the end of the Middle Ages, legislation against, and repression of, theft, became major political strategies, centred on the preservation of peace and the protection of the common good.

When medieval clerics wanted to evoke the reign of sin and disorder, they often drew on biblical tradition and the Church fathers, and used the metaphor of the Speculum latronum (Jr 7:11). Theft apparently destroyed the trust which should govern a community, and thus undermined the community itself.