Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England

Hanawalt, Barbara A.

doi:10.1017/s001041750000829x

Cited by 64 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…However, the evidence suggests a startlingly homogeneous pattern throughout Europe. Evidence based on coroners' rolls in fourteenth-century Oxford and London result in estimates in the order of twenty-five to 110 homicides per 100,000 (Hanawalt 1976;Hammer 1978), while estimates for other areas of England typically vary between eight and twenty-five homicides per 100,000. In the south of Europe, data from judicial archives in Florence (Becker 1976;Cohn 1980), Venice (Ruggiero 1980), Bologna (Blanshei 1982), and Valencia (Garcia 1991) yield estimates between a low of ten and a high of 150 homicides per 100,000.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Eisner¹

2003

Crime and Justice

401

148

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a b s t r a c tResearch on the history of crime from the thirteenth century until the end of the twentieth has burgeoned and has greatly increased understanding of historical trends in crime and crime control. Serious interpersonal violence decreased remarkably in Europe between the mid-sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Different long-term trajectories in the decline of homicide can be distinguished between various European regions. Age and sex patterns in serious violent offending, however, have changed very little over several centuries. The long-term decline in homicide rates seems to go along with a disproportionate decline in elite homicide and a drop in male-to-male conflicts in public space. A range of theoretical explanations for the longterm decline have been offered, including the effects of the civilizing process, strengthening state powers, the Protestant Reformation, and modern individualism, but most theorizing has been post hoc.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Eisner¹

2003

Crime and Justice

401

148

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“…Judicial torture in order to obtain evidentially admissible confessions was recognised by the Greek, Roman, and mediaeval European legal systems (Held 1985;Robbins 1960). Criminals torture to uncover loot: in early-fourteenth-century England, burglars placed a housewife on a trivet over a fire until she revealed the goods they sought (Hanawalt 1976 (Coleman 1990;Wistrand 1992) reached its apogee in the late Roman Republic and early Empire. The elaborate and theatrically sophisticated arena ceremonial ( Barton 1993;Lafaye 1896) had a twofold social purpose.…”

Section: Social and Cultural Elaborations Of Crueltymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cruelty's rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators

2006

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Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions -high arousal and strong affect -evoked by the pain-blooddeath complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence.

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“…However, with the risk of over simplification, one may distinguish three basic types of sources (Spierenburg 1996: 79): (a) Lists of coroner's inquests or body inspections of persons purportedly killed irrespective of whether the suspect was identified. This type of source has been used, for example, by Hanawalt (1976) for fourteenth-century England and by Spierenburg for Amsterdam in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (b) Records on suspected homicide offenders registered by judicial authorities, which in some areas may also comprise fugitive suspects.…”

Section: The Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective

Eisner¹

2001

British Journal of Criminology

281

159

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The present paper examines secular trends of homicide rates by means of a systematic re-analysis of all available quantitative studies on pre-modern homicide. The results confirm, first, that homicide rates have declined in Europe over several centuries. Second, the empirical evidence shows, that unequivocal decline began in the early seventeenth century. Third, the data indicate that the secular decline begins with the pioneers of the modernization process, England and Holland, and slowly encompasses further regions. These findings corroborate much of the civilizing process framework proposed by Norbert Elias. Yet, the diffusion of self-control was sustained not only by compliance to the state monopoly of power but by a variety of disciplining institutional arrangements. This includes, for example, the early expansion of schools, particularly in Northern Europe, the rise of religious reform movements, and the organization of work in manufacturing. Second, while social disciplining certainly is the central feature of the early modern period, it also served to push forward the rise of the specifically modern individualism that Durkheim sees as the cause of the decline of individual-level violence. About 20 years ago, in an article that has become highly acclaimed among historians of crime, Ted Robert Gurr (1981: 295) examined empirical evidence on secular trends in lethal criminal violence. Gurr primarily reviewed a number of historical studies on homicide in medieval and early modern England, each based on detailed analyses of records for specific periods and specific jurisdictions. While not originally concerned with computing homicide rates, the studies did provide counts that could be used for estimating the rates. Gurr plotted the some 20 estimates for the period from about 1200 to 1800 on a graph, added the London homicide rates for the modern period, and fitted an elegant S-shaped trend curve to the data points. It starts at about 20 homicides per 100,000 population in the high and late Middle Ages and ends after an extended downswing at about one homicide per 100,000 in the twentieth century. Gurr interpreted this secular trend as 'a manifestation of cultural change in Western society, especially the growing sensitization to violence and the development of increased internal and external control on aggressive behavior' (Gurr 1981; also see Gurr 1989). Since then, an impressive amount of research in the history of crime and criminal justice has greatly enlarged knowledge about historical manifestations of lethal violence. It has shown that the history of violence has to be firmly situated in the context of social and cultural history and the long-term development of the core institutions of modern 618

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Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England

Cited by 64 publications

References 2 publications

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime

Cruelty's rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators

Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective

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