This chapter turns to the experiences of the laity when they found themselves in ecclesiastical courts in disputes over marriage, wills and burial, disorderly behaviour, or unacceptable use of language: speech crimes: brawling, defamation and blasphemy. It looks at examples of the costs and consequences to the laity of finding themselves in ecclesiastical courts, and the role of the debtors’ prisons.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.