A pig and a locust get into trouble with the law: On justice in medieval Europe
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This was thought provoking, particularly the second sentence:
"Do not forget that medieval England was one of the most devoutly Catholic nations in Europe and one should never underestimate the ability of the pertinaciously pious to behave irrationally. A medieval person’s moral and world views were so intensely bound up with those of the Church that he would have had no doubt that these trials by ordeal were entirely genuine. It would never have crossed the mind of most medieval citizens that being tied up and lobbed into the local lake was not an effective method of proving guilt; shockingly, fluid dynamics and gravity weren’t particularly common topics of study in the thirteenth century. A person’s logic was interchangeable with that of the Church or the ramblings of the one-eyed crackpot codger at the local tavern."
Was this true, did people really not question anything? I always assumed people went along with it for fear of punishment but probably thought it was a little ridiculous. Are we this, forgive me--stupid--today? I would like to think not, but I also see some of the things happening in my own country in places like Florida and think maybe this is just human nature to want to put down our sense of curiosity and willingness to question and give it over to another entity.
I honestly struggle to understand the writings of common authors of the past and think this is where people confuse intelligence with knowledge. We have more knowledge now, but are we truly more intelligent than people 400 years ago? 1000 years ago?
I'm not sure that's necessarily fully true - most likely we're more rational than medieval peasants were, while they were probably more pragmatic than typically believed. But it is thought-provoking.
For example, in the medieval era, the upper classes has more surviving children than the lower classes. Without any economic growth (because the economy was tied to land, not capital or innovation, and thus the size of the economy was basically fixed), this creates a constant flow of downward social mobility, where the ten children of a wealthy couple must compete with each other to be among the two who get to inherit their parents' slot in society.
If you think that intelligence could improve someone's chance of rising to the top of such a society, and staying there, then yes, you'd logically think that people in the past were dumber.
Evolution is slow when creating new features. But evolution is very fast when it's just changing the proportions of existing features. It's not hard to see how the above trend would cause a 2 point IQ gain per century, which would mean 10 points in 500 years. There's a big difference between 90 and 100 IQ.
One son goes into the army. One goes into the clergy. I'm not sure about the third, if there even were five boys. Two or three is probably more common.
Absolutely. Nutrition is very important for development, and people today eat more diversely and better, on average than a 1000 years ago. Not to mention that nowadays pretty much everyone (in a developed and many developing) countries gets an education starting a young age, which surely helps too.
No, it's not. This is what an YouTube entertainer writes to get viewers, playing into gossipy, naive folk history to reinforce the narrative they want to tell.
There's no shortage of primary sources and modern academic history that show, very plainly, wide exercise of skepticism, logic, critical thought, diversity of thought and (of course) disinterest with abstract concepts altogether. Yes, there were times when one epistemic regime or another dominated public discourse, just like there is now, but it turns out people suck at conformance with those regimes and have their own private experiences independent of the public discourse, just like they do now.
Private and subculture beliefs are, and have always been, all over the place.
But we're not talking about educated people here, a very small elite of mostly clergymen, we're talking about an average peasant.
If you’re saying we can’t have insight into the experience of an average peasant from primary sources and modern analysis, then we can’t draw the conclusions suggested in the article either, right?
But if you accept that those sources may speak to the experience, the point is that the article’s supposition runs counter to them.
The article’s story just articulates an ahistorical, folksy ideology where historical people (and others) are more one-dimensional and uniform than enlightened “modern” people.
Sounds eerily similar to what we do day to day in the postmodern West, isn't it?
"Between 1050 and 1250, a 200-year stretch in the Common Era, the European legal system underwent a remarkable transformation. In continental Europe, trial by ordeal was replaced by confession under inquisition; in England, it was the beginning of the jury trial. In the first case, the judge could appeal to the precise and procedural nature of the law, which ‘dictated’ his judgement; in the second case, the judge could refer to peer judgement to defend his own decision. In both cases, the reasons that led to the transformation were the same: the reluctant witness, who refused to come forth and testify against persons suspected of committing a crime.
Let us first get a better grip on this issue. In order to accuse a person of some crime, one or several witnesses were needed; the judge (whether a civil magistrate or an ecclesiastical authority) could then appeal to legal provisions to pronounce a sentence. But the problem the judges faced was the reluctance of witnesses to come forth and do what was required. There were, to be sure, many reasons for this state of affairs--one chief reason being a scriptural injunction. Being a witness, one risked either lying (‘perjury’), an act forbidden by Scripture (‘thou shalt not bear false witness’) whose violation would send the believer on his way to hell; or one risked blood guilt, that is, carrying the blood of another human being on one’s hands. Despite many subtle attempts by theologians to solve this dilemma, it remained a huge concern; continental Europe and England took different routes to solve this problem." (p.110 of SN Balagangadhara's "Cultures Differ Differently" (Routledge, 2022).
Rome had juries. They were an improvement on Athenian trial-by-mob. The Magna Carta secured trial by jury around the time the Church abolished trial by ordeal, but the jury system was already being assembled before that by Æthelred the Unready and Henry II. It’s unclear if juries replaced ordeals in England versus both being driven by the same legalising trend.
I wish we would consider prison a very inefficient use of resources.
We put non-violent people in prison and fine the tax payers. It's a lose-lose for both parties.
Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
[0] Local jails are full mostly of people awaiting trial. That's a whole separate conversation. Federal prisons, too, are best thought of as a different topic, since the federal authorities are in pursuit of a particular set of criminals and the population skews heavily toward offenders who aren't representative of the broader prison population.
I mean, it’s cool that you included a foot note and a link here, since it makes it looks like you cited something, but the substance of your comment isn’t really informed by it, so it feels a little disingenuous.
I anticipated this objection and addressed it explicitly in the footnote. You might not find my argument persuasive; that's fine, but I directly engaged with this response already.
A very specific example are the fraudsters. Bernie Madoff type. There is something almost devilish about their combination of persuasion, charisma and utter disregard for consequences. And they tend to run new frauds if they have a possibility to do so, so it isn't very safe to let them walk.
It makes sense under the theory that we put people in prison to protect the public, but when we put dangerous, violent people in prison, we make them far more dangerous and violent, then let them out of prison largely unemployable and with no means of support. That's generally funny to us; we feel that it's even more punishment, and more punishment is good.
Drug people shouldn't be in prison because taking drugs shouldn't be a crime, not because it is a non-violent one.
Like, I wonder how often in daily life these things happened? As opposed to events that did not make the written histories, like "Alfred is accused of theft of apples. The local noble questions him and warns him not to do it again. He denies it, but no more apples are stolen." Would a historian know about that, or bother to write about it if he did?
> Gruesomely, it is believed the person would often still be conscious during this. The genitals would also be cut off and burnt in full view of the crowds and the victim. Talk about adding insult to injury. Only once the final stage was reached would the poor soul succumb to death, since before quartering he was usually beheaded. If you were wondering, “quartering” quite literally meant chopping the torso into four parts, generally with a huge axe. As this punishment was enacted less often than its more genteel counterparts, it would attract particularly large crowds.
This sort of defies any understanding I have of human beings. This isn't like, "how could they think hats like that looked good?" or, "They really lived in such small huts?" No, this suggests a fundamentally different kind of creature, one that could derive enjoyment from something that would make my stomach turn. You might as well tell me they thought human shit was a delicacy.
As I understand it, this stuff wasn't actually that common, in other words.
Simple minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds, in the commonplace.
There isn't much difference between a real crowd cheering someone's execution and a virtual crowd cheering someone being blown up.
On top of that, for a largely mundane life the execution of a criminal was a huge event.
Again, "commonplace" is kinda misused here. You can find examples of cruelty in the historical record, not so many of the opposite. Because no one kept statistics.
This article talks about medieval England in particular, which has excellent survival of detailed records of many things, including the bloodsports which were popular occurrences everywhere in the kingdom.
It doesn't sit right with me that watching roosters and dogs maul each other, often to death, was among the most popular of entertainments in the era. But it was.
Mandatory disclaimer: I'm not, in any way, shape, or form defending mistreatment of animals or humans, in this era or any other.
With that out of the way: yes, it IS misused. What you are saying is "it happened a lot."
But "commonplace" would means it happened all the time, everywhere. There are records of it happening, as you said, but there are no records, or very few, of it NOT happening: criminal acts which were not severely punished, say. Here's an example of what I mean:
If you look at "murders in Chicago" you find a lot, typically hundreds per month. Yet if you ask the random Chicago resident "How many people did you know who were murdered?" they might have one, or none. (Unless they live in certain neighborhoods.) I actually knew three, but that was over the course of an entire childhood.
Definition of commonplace (Entry 1 of 2)
commonly found or seen : ORDINARY, UNREMARKABLE
Compared to modern times it happened a lot. And no, violence and harm doesn't only mean murders.
If you went looking for a human in medieval England who had never seen animals fighting each other to injury or death, surrounded by (indeed part of) a crowd yelling enthusiastically and enjoying the spectacle, you might find orphans raised in monasteries. Or infants who died before getting a chance, there was more of that, but I feel it's fair to discount that entirely.
Easily 99.9% of these people would have experienced that.
It was commonplace, your protestations notwithstanding.
Humans in intense conflict are…different. Read up one what has gone in the context of almost any war, ever.
> As I understand it, the fact is that this stuff wasn’t actually that common, in other words.
Hanging, drawing, and quartering wasn’t very common in the long period it was a criminal punishment (in part because the kind of things that it was a punishment for often ended up with the accused being killed before facing judicial punishment – and were the kind of things that would have been true of even without the added pressure of the particular punishment that awaited them.)
Though the mid-16th through the 17th Centuries were an…interesting…period in that regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_hanged,_drawn_a...
No one's saying it didn't. The question is "what were your chances of it happening to you, if you committed some crime?"
Human societies practicing human sacrifice and or cannibalism are found in history more or less everywhere, likewise is opposition to them in some of the oldest recorded history.
There’s real danger in not being able to fathom people who do and think things unimaginable to you are actually very much the same as you with only minor changes. We all could be Nazis given the right circumstances. More likely so if we can’t imagine it possible.
Of course, nowadays we're so much more advanced than these medieval bumpkins. We've figured out how to have court cases against animals without the hassle of physically placing them in the court room. Such was the case in the 1987 trial of US vs. 2,507 live canary winged parakeets (the parakeets lost, probably to the benefit of their species)
To even conceive that idea? ...
[0]: https://www.liquisearch.com/trial_by_ordeal/ordeal_of_the_cr...
US intelligence does the same thing today with their continued use within their ranks of the completely unscientific polygraph test.