How to Avoid the Death Penalty in Medieval England, Part I - podcast episode cover

How to Avoid the Death Penalty in Medieval England, Part I

Sep 28, 20249 minEp. 2689
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:
Metacast
Spotify
Youtube
RSS
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

(Host: Samantha) In medieval England, just because you received the death penalty for your crimes doesn't mean you necessarily had to actually die. Here, Samantha looks at two methods of avoiding having your sentence carried out: benefit of clergy and turning to outlawry.

 

For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com/

Transcript

Today in the first of two installments I’m  going to tell you about two strategies that people who were sentenced to death could  use to avoid the hangman’s noose. Tune in to learn about benefit of clergy and to hear a  bit about outlawry. And next time I’ll give you even more strategies to save your neck if you  ever travel back in time and commit a crime. Hello and welcome to Footnoting  History. I’m your host Sam and today

I want to talk to you about avoiding  punishment in the Middle Ages. Now, culturally we’re really primed to think  about the medieval period as a backwards and brutal time where people were tortured and  sentenced to death for the smallest of offenses. Here on Footnoting History, we know that  this idea is completely inaccurate. And I can’t get into all of the reasons  why right now. That would be its own

podcast – heck it could be its own course.  Instead, I’m going to focus on how people could avoid punishment in medieval England  even after they were convicted of a crime. Before we get into the main topic though, I’d like to emphasize that there were also a lot  of ways to avoid being convicted to begin with, so my list today doesn’t even begin to  cover all of the ways to avoid punishment. I’m going to focus on four ways a  person could avoid being punished,

even after a guilty sentence was  pronounced. These methods are: claiming benefit of clergy, becoming an  outlaw, taking sanctuary, and receiving a pardon. I will be talking about the first two  today, but you’ll have to wait until the next episode to get to my personal favorite  strategy to avoid the hangman’s noose. Let’s start though with benefit of  clergy. This strategy comes from the idea that members of the clergy were supposed  to hold themselves up above secular society

and to serve as models to everyone else.  Men of the cloth were supposed to take moral and legal codes very seriously  – “Thou shalt not kill,” for example, was taken to mean that members of clergy should  not shed blood at all. Though admittedly this ideal developed gradually and in the early  part of the Middle Ages there were warrior

bishops and even warrior popes. Because members  of the clergy were not supposed to shed blood, by the later medieval period, ecclesiastical  courts could not sentence people to death, though it could turn people who it deemed deserving  of death over to the secular authorities. In theory, men who were in holy orders –  and that included not only all bishops, archbishops, and priests but also lower-level  clerks, including pretty much all students

enrolled in universities – were only supposed to  be subject to the laws of the Church. In theory, if a clergyman committed a crime (even a heinous  crime like rape or murder) he could only be tried before the ecclesiastical courts. Because  those courts could not assign a death sentence, effectively the worst thing that could happen  to a criminous clerk was that he could be held in the bishop’s prison or he could be  stripped of holy orders or both. Now,

neither of these punishments were minor things.  Medieval prisons were not exactly nice places to live (though recent research suggests that they  might not have been quite as bad as you imagine). And a man stripped of holy orders could not do any  of the things that had previously given him his livelihood – he could not give mass, he could  not preside over a parish church, or preach, or teach, or even attend a university. But he was  still alive, and presumably that was a good thing.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people who  were accused of committing felonious crimes, wanted to be tried by the Church courts  (which could not kill them) as opposed to

the secular courts where the only punishment  for felonious crimes was death. And so we have a phenomenon in the later Middle  Ages in which men (and sorry, ladies, this strategy only worked for men) pretended  to be clerks so that they could claim “benefit of clergy” – or the right to be tried in an  ecclesiastical court rather than in a secular one.

How, you might ask yourselves, could one prove  that they were a member of the clergy? There was no comprehensive, searchable list of all  ordained clergymen (as much as we historians might wish there was). But there was one  thing that distinguished the clergy from most other people – at least until the latter  half of the fourteenth century – and that was

the ability to read. A man who could  read certain prayers was assumed to be a member of the clergy and to have the  right to trial before the Church courts. That said, the method of trying felons often  ensured that suspects were held in jails for an extended period of time (sometimes even  for years) while they were waiting for the

right justices to come and place them on  trial. This meant that some enterprising individuals could use this time to learn how  to read (or at least to read the prayers that they were likely to be given). We also have  some records which suggest that some people were just memorizing the appropriate prayers  and when they were shown a different passage,

they failed their test. And so we see this  phenomenon in the later Middle Ages in which men who were accused of a crime or who  intended to pursue a life of crime were increasingly literate. And through this deceit  they were sometimes successful in avoiding death. I should also note that benefit of clergy could  be claimed at any point during a trial – it could claimed before a trial started, during the  proceedings, or even after a verdict was rendered.

There were some people, it seems, who waited  to see whether or not the jury would decide to kill them before claiming clerical privileges. Of course, the medieval authorities weren’t stupid and they realized that people were gaming the  system by learning to read. Secular authorities

began to impose a few limits on claiming benefit  of clergy in the fifteenth century. And the bishops, though usually very careful to defend  their rights, made some concessions in this regard because they didn’t particularly want to have  their prisons filled up with fake clerics either. So let’s say you’re convicted of a crime but  you can’t learn to read. If you’re lucky you might be able to run away, which generally meant  becoming an outlaw. Limited policing and sometimes

lax enforcement of prisons and parish sanctuaries  meant that people did escape from time to time. If someone was let out on bail and then escaped the  people who had stood surety for them (that means the people who had promised they would come  to court) were fined. If someone escaped out of a jail or prison the person who was responsible  for that jail had to pay a fine. And if someone escaped out of a sanctuary, then those who were  responsible for keeping watch over that sanctuary

had to pay a fine. So there’s a punishment  to the community if people managed to escape. Once an individual fled, they were  typically proclaimed an outlaw (or if they had not already been tried, they could  be tried in abstentia and then proclaimed an outlaw). Once someone was outlawed they  lost all protection of the law which meant,

at least in theory, that there was no rule  against killing them on sight. We don’t have many surviving references, however,  to outlaws being summarily executed. That said, outlawry would have been a pretty  big deal. At the very least the outlaw had to leave their community and start over somewhere  else without family, or financial resources, or property. It’s not shocking, therefore,  that many of those who were outlawed joined

up with criminal gangs. We actually know  a fair amount about some of these gangs, and maybe we should do an episode about  one or more of them in the future but for today’s purposes it suffices to know  that there were groups who banded together for mutual protection and, sometimes,  to perpetrate ongoing crime sprees.

That said, an outlaw did not need to be  a permanent condition. It was possible to either pay the king for a pardon or to  join the king’s service to earn a pardon, which effectively wiped the slate clean (at least  from a legal point of view, it probably was more difficult to reestablish one’s standing within  the community if one were to try to go back home).

In my next episode I will talk more  about pardons and I will tell you one other method to avoid dying without  necessarily embracing a life of crime. But for now I will bid you adieu. I hope  you’ve enjoyed this episode of Footnoting History and if you did I hope that you will  join us again soon or visit our website www.footnotinghistory.com to learn about  more ways that you can support our podcast.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast