History of England 1-6

A ‘scotale’ or drinking party took place at Ashley, near Cirencester, on 7 September 1208; it was in honour of the birthday of Our Lady, and the local officer of the forest sold drinks at his alehouse to celebrate the occasion. It was essentially a form of local tax, because the inhabitants felt obliged to attend in fear of incurring his displeasure. John Scot was riding back from the alehouse when he invited Richard of Crudwell to sit behind him on his horse. Richard thought that he was offering him a lift, but John took up a knife and stabbed him in the shoulder; the wound was 4½ inches (10.12 centimetres) deep. Richard fell from the horse, and John dismounted. He stabbed Richard once more, and proceeded to rob his purse of forty-three shillings. Somehow Richard crawled home, on all fours, and on the next day informed the king’s sergeant. This seems to have provoked John Scot who, five nights later, broke into the house of Richard’s mother and beat her so badly that it was believed she would not live.

At a convent, near Watton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the 1160s, one nun had lost her virginity to a young priest; when her condition became obvious, the nuns interrogated her about the offending man. When she revealed his identity, the nuns captured him. They took him to the cell of the pregnant nun. She was given a knife and forced to castrate her lover; whereupon the nuns stuffed his genitals into her mouth. She was then flogged, and bound with chains in a prison cell. In an age when the call of heaven was direct and unequivocal – and when the spiritual world was pre-eminent – a general indifference was maintained to the fate or the sufferings of the physical body. When one English king was asked if he regretted the thousands of soldiers he sent into slaughter, he remarked that they would thank him when they were in heaven. The chronicler, after telling the story of the savage nuns, exclaimed, ‘What zeal was burning in these champions of chastity, these persecutors of uncleanness, who loved Christ above all things!’

These stories of physical cruelty would have been familiar to all the people of England in a period when violence was tolerated to a surprising degree. Village justice could be savage and peremptory, largely going unreported. The violence of lord against villein does not often appear in the historical record. In this society men and women took weapons with them; even small children possessed knives. William Palfrey, aged eleven, stabbed and killed the nine-year-old William Geyser outside the village of Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire. There was in any case what would now be called a culture of violence. Children were educated with severe physical discipline. Corporal punishment was familiar and usual in all elements of society. Public whipping, for a variety of offences from adultery to slander, was commonplace.

A genuine pleasure was also derived from bitter disputation, denunciation and vilification. This was a culture of rhetoric and the spoken word. A wide vocabulary of scatological abuse could be employed, while sexual misdemeanours were commonly and loudly publicized. In a society of intense hierarchy, a preoccupation with good name and standing is only to be expected. Disputes were sometimes settled by ritualized fights in the churchyard. Slights and insults were the occasion of bloody disputes. The smallest incident could provoke a violent fracas. One man came into a hostelry, where strangers were drinking. ‘Who are these people?’ he enquired, for which question he was stabbed to death. An element of gratuitous cruelty could also be introduced, as in the case of one man who was dragged to a local tavern and there obliged to drink a cocktail of beer and his own blood.

So the incidence of criminality was great. The justices who travelled to Lincoln in 1202 were confronted with 114 cases of murder and 49 of rape; this is not to mention the scores of incidents of theft and assault. When the body of a murdered man was found the men of the neighbourhood were summoned, while the corpse was raised upon a wooden hurdle and exhibited for seven days with logs burning around it to provide recognition at night. All males over the age of twelve, from the four nearest villages, were summoned to an inquest.

There was a popular phrase for a felon – ‘to become a wolf’s head that anyone may cut down’. He could be killed on sight by anyone who encountered him. Real wolves did in fact still inhabit thirteenth-century England. They were not exterminated until 1290. In that year Richard de Loveraz was noted as holding land by the service of hunting the wolf in Hampshire ‘if one can be found’. The wolf was deemed to be vermin, fit for nothing except death. So his fate was transferred to the unfortunate offender.