A new interactive map produced by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology plots each murder that occurred in early Medieval England to support research into the history of violence in London. It shows a per capita homicide rate higher than modern London but lower than the modern U.S.
The research study covers one square mile of London and focuses on coroner’s records from the time period 1300-1340. Within that time, 142 murders occurred — or at least were recorded. Each murder spot is plotted on a Google map using their interactive JavaScript API framework. Clickable markers reveal the date and circumstances of each murder, along with the names of the victim and assailants.
One example of a case happened on a Monday, on the Feast of St. Andrew (November 30) in 1321:
John of Canterbury, a saddler, was found dead of an unnatural death in a first-floor room rented by Agnes de Cranesle from Richer de Refham… The preceding Sunday, after curfew, two boatmen called William Count and Ralph Sutor met John of Canterbury in Hog Lane in East Smithfield. They purposely assaulted John with their wooden oars. They mortally beat his legs and back, while William Count beat John on the forehead, inflicting a wound that penetrated the brain.
This project, led by criminology professor Manuel Eisner, doesn’t just include salacious details of centuries-old attacks. The thorough website for the project also includes interesting insight into patterns of violence. For example, poor John’s killing on a Sunday was pretty typical. Eisner found that 31% of homicides occurred on Sunday, and 21% on Monday, meaning those two days comprised the majority of times in which someone would be killed.
Eisner writes that “Sunday was the day when people had the time to engage in social activities – drinking and playing games that would occasionally trigger frictions leading to assault. Mondays had the second highest frequency of homicides. It is unclear why, but one possible explanation might be that weekend’s conflicts spilled over into the first day of the week.” Also, sometimes wounds weren’t immediately fatal, and people assaulted on Sunday may have died on Monday.
Additionally, “77% of all murders occurred between the early evening and the first hours after curfew, when a bell signaled that city’s inhabitants were expected to extinguish their fires and go to bed,” according to the project website. Thus, being out and about in a busy area of the city on a Sunday or Monday around dusk was a particularly dangerous activity in early 14th century London.
Many of the murders involved protecting men’s honor — 92% of them were committed by men — and the heinous act spanned social classes, with evidence of upper class assailants and even clergy committing homicide, in addition to the commoners. The map, Eisner said in a press release, provides “a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life.”
Given the data in this project cover a time period from 1300 to 1340, and given Eisner’s average of 80,000 people living in London during that time, the approximate homicide rate per capita in early 14th century London was 4.5 per 100,000. By comparison, contemporary London has a murder rate of 1.5 homicides per 100,000 per year. The highest metro murder rate in England today is Greater Manchester, with about 2.5 homicides per 100,000. 21st century England is clearly much safer than it once was.
By way of comparison with American data, however, the medieval London murder rate is close to our national average of 5 per 100,000. The national average, of course, flattens out the data from a variety of regions in the country. If we were to compare the modern data from Greater Manchester, a large city of half a million people, with similarly sized American urban areas like Tucson AZ or Oklahoma City OK, however, the difference is even more stark. Manchester’s 2.5 homicides per 100,000 people per year is significantly lower than Tucson’s at 8.7 or Oklahoma City’s at 12.5.
Eisner, however, notably does not draw these comparisons to modern society, finding them “problematic. We have firearms, but we also have emergency services. It’s easier to kill but easier to save lives,” he noted in the press release. “The trend in London is in line with the long-term decline of homicide found across cities in Western Europe, a decline that led to the pacified spaces that were essential for the rise of urban life and civility in Europe.”
Similar declines can also be seen historically in the US, where the homicide rate in the 1700s, estimated at over 30 per 100,000 people, was higher than in the 1800s at about 20 per 100,000, and under 10 by the 1900s. Aside from a rise in violent crime in the U.S. from the 1970s-90s, America has also followed the general pattern of decline in violent crimes that Western Europe has experienced over time. Our per capita murder rate, however, is still multiple times higher than that of any other developed country, leaving the U.S. an anomaly in societal violence.
“By digitally mapping these murder cases,” Eisner says, “we hope to create an accessible resource for the public to explore these remarkable records.” Understanding the long history of interpersonal human violence is important for both interpreting the past and for moving forward into a safer future.
