Crime in Medieval Europe: 1200-1550 (The Medieval World)

What is the difference between a stabbing in a tavern in London and one in a hostelry in the South of France? What happens when a spinster living in Paris finds knight in her bedroom wanting to marry her? Why was there a crime wave following the Black Death? From Aberdeen to Cracow and from Stockholm to Sardinia, Trevor Dean ranges widely throughout medieval Europe in this exiting and innovative history of lawlessness and criminal justice. Drawing on the real-life stories of ordinary men and women who often found themselves at the sharp end of the law, he shows how it was often one rule for the rich and another for the poor in a tangled web of judicial corruption. "Crime in Medieval Europe plunges the reader straight into theft and violence in England and France, and shows how social status and origin often dictated the court's response, and punishment." "Beginning with the growth of criminal justice in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - the courts, the judges, their procedures - Dean then turns to issues of judicial corruption which accompanied that growth, and the late-medieval crime waves that followed in the wake of the plague. Subsequent chapters deal with women as both perpetrators and victims of crime, with the persistence of revenge, and with punishment." "Drawing on the real-life stories of ordinary men and women who often found themselves at the sharp end of the law, Crime in Medieval Europe provides a fascinating insight into the history of victims, criminals and their punishment."--Jacket In this ambitious history of lawlessness and legal retribution in medieval Europe, Trevor Dean ranges widely across the continent - and Britain. He uses court records to illuminate the lives of ordinary men and women, who often found themselves at the sharp end of the law.