Crime and Punishment

Crime and punishment

In 1202, there are 430 reported crimes in the town of Lincoln, which include 114 murders and 45 rapes. Criminal activity is more prevalent in towns, where there is overcrowding and more opportunity to escape notice. Markets are a perfect place for thieves to operate, so watch your purse. Crime flourishes particularly in periods of civil war, of which there are many. Henry II, keen to keep his kingdom together, makes justice available to all free men – an early form of the common law. Juries of 12 hear cases at the king's courts that travel around the country. The poorest, though, who are not free, have to make do with justice from the lord of the manor, which is often swift and harsh.

In the late 1100s, suspected felons are put to trial by ordeal. One ordeal involves carrying a red-hot metal bar or removing a stone from boiling water. If your skin blisters, you are pronounced guilty. Depending on the seriousness of the offence, you might be put in the stocks (so people can yell abuse or throw rotten food), dragged along the ground by a horse, blinded or hanged.

Another ordeal involves being trussed up and lowered into a pool of consecrated water. If you float – that is, if the holy water doesn't accept your sinful body – you're judged guilty and might then have a foot chopped off. Poachers on the royal hunting grounds risk losing a hand.

Crime is not the preserve of the poor. At the end of the 1300s, Eustace Folville, a Leicestershire lord's son, is part of a gang which carries out rapes, murders and kidnappings to order for people in power.

At the Tower of London, Edward IV uses thumbscrews and the rack as means of torture. Traitors can look forward to being partially hanged, then disembowelled and castrated before having their heads cut off and stuck on a pole; after that, their limbs are dispatched to the places most affected by their actions. Horrible punishments are carried out in public as a deterrent.

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