flesh on the bones: a historical and bioarchaeological

Fragments Volume 6 (2017) 38

Flesh on the Bones: A Historical and Bioarchaeological Exploration of Violence, Trauma, Sex, and Gender in Medieval England

ANNE L. GRAUERLoyola University [email protected]

ANDREW G. MILLERDePaul [email protected]

Abstract: Medieval England has been characterized as a particularly violent time and place in human history. Exploring the recently translated and digitized Calendar of the Patent Rolls (CPR), alongside data collected from human skeletal remains, provides novel and interdisciplinary means to evaluate this assertion. This study posed three questions: Could reliable quantitative measures of violence be developed using the CPR and skeletal evidence; could actions based on sex and gender be evaluated; and could engendered aspects of medieval violence be recognized and assessed? Our investigation found women recorded in the CPR having committed violent acts, but far less frequently than men. The analysis of human skeletal remains found that close to 13 percent of skeletons recovered from medieval archaeological sites displayed bone fracture, with males exhibiting almost twice the number of fractures as women. Interpreting these disparities is difficult. However, meshing history and bioarchaeology provides new insight into medieval sex, gender and trauma.

Key words: violence, gender, homicide, skeleton, fracture, urban, rural

IntroductionThe perils of life in the Middle Ages have greatly interested scholars and the public for decades. Barbara Hanawalt’s ingress into her popular work on peasant families, The Ties that Bound, begins, “The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were traumatic ones for the English peasantry. Each generation faced new threats to life and livelihood.”1 Violence, as described by Ruth Karras in her influential discussion on boys and men in medieval Europe, “was the fundamental measure of a man because it was a way of exerting dominance over men of one’s own social stratum as well as over women and other social inferiors.”2 In his recent examination of Violence in Medieval Europe, Warren Brown states that “The appeal,” at least to the public, “lies in the fact that violence in the Middle Ages was

GRAUER AND MILLER: Violence, Trauma, Sex, and Gender in Medieval England


personal, direct, and visceral.”3 As any medievalist will attest, medieval sources—including chronicles, lay and ecclesiastical court documents, saints’ lives, courtly literature, manorial records, coroner’s rolls, and even artistic images, to name a few—portray in detail instances of physical ag-gression, retaliation, murder and mutilation. Men, more often than not, appear to be the perpetrators and victims of violence and its resulting physical trauma.

Recent assertions by non-historians such as Steven Pinker have con-tributed to popular claims regarding the inherently violent and decid-edly bestial nature of the “impetuous, uninhibited, almost childlike” and “gross” medieval people.4 While the characterizations support an allegedly spectacular drop in homicide levels since the Middle Ages, an important point is ignored. It was precisely because the acts of violence committed against medieval people (as well as against their animals, clothing, and property5) were extraordinary that they were given valuable space within the expensive vellum upon which the contemporary “barbarian” scribes painstakingly recorded the events. In other words, the acts of aggression have come down to us for the very reason that they were exceptional to medieval societal norms.

While the types of violence and the circumstances leading up to vio-lent acts may have differed from those we find today, the frequency of violent acts may not. Indeed, in his reassessment of scholarship such as James Given’s pioneering study on homicide in medieval England, Warren Brown asserts that the number of homicides in England during the 1200s resembles that of homicides in Russia for the years 1999–2001 (22.1 per 100,000). This leads him to postulate that “it is possible . . . that thirteenth-century England as a whole was not significantly more violent than the US or EU around the turn of the twenty-first century,”6 especially once we factor in the role that modern medicine plays in dramatically lowering the rate of death among victims of trauma. Similarly, Christopher Ingraham states in the Washington Post (6 July, 2016): “If you start digging down to individual cities, the comparisons [of historical homicide rates] become more striking. The murder rate in Los Angeles in 2015 is similar to Eng-land’s murder rate in the time of Shakespeare. Living in Chicago today is similar to living in Italy in 1700, murder-wise. Washington [D.C.]’s murder rate last year was higher than the murder rate in the time of Chaucer. Baltimore . . . last year . . . at 55 homicides per 100,000 . . . [is] about the same as the murder rate in Dante’s Italy.”7

Historical SourcesScholarly exploration into medieval violence has traditionally relied on textual analyses. For instance, rolls (continuous, stitched sheets of parch-ment) from the sessions of the Eyres, which were documents created by



travelling courts empowered to hear and try cases throughout the counties of the English realm,8 have been analyzed extensively by James Given. A body of twenty rolls from the thirteenth century currently survive from five different English counties, as well as from Bristol and London. Given asserts that homicide was predominantly a male phenomenon—men killed 91.4% of the time, compared to women’s 8.6%; men were killed 80.5% of the time, women 19.5%. When women did commit murder, they less frequently acted on their own than their male counterparts, they more often killed their victims in the company of relatives, and they targeted local villagers far more often than male perpetrators did.

The use of medieval English coroner’s rolls (death records kept by coroners across the realm and transcribed onto an official written roll submitted to the Justices of the Eyre9) has also been instrumental in high-lighting aspects of medieval violence. Barbara Hanawalt made great use of such records to determine that women more often died by misadventure in the vicinity of the home while fetching water, cooking with fire, and performing supplemental economic activities, whereas men more often died outside the home while carting in the fields, working construction jobs, and transporting goods.10 In a thorough survey based on a substantial body of secondary scholarship and primary sources, Warren Brown argues that while medieval Europe was a violent society, the acts of violence were not “medieval” in a derogatory or barbaric sense. Instead, violence was redirected from emotional acts of personal vengeance to those sanctioned by the ruling fighting elites.11 Recently, coroners’ inquests and court in-dictments, which survive from early modern England (c. 1500–1680), have been scrutinized by K. J. Kesselring who analyzed them to explore the engenderment of crime and violence by drawing attention to the differ-ing reported frequencies of violence by sex, as well as to evaluate labile social contexts fomenting the reports.12

Our study seeks to take admittedly guarded first steps towards using the Calendar of the Patent Rolls (hereafter CPR) as a dataset. This recently digitized resource is derived from forty-five volumes containing compre-hensive English summaries of the original Latin entries (see below), and a 141-page supplement.13 A search engine, created by G. R. Boynton, is available online at http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/patentrolls/search.html and the University of Iowa libraries.14 Excluding prefaces and indices, but including appendices, 25,422 online pages are available to researchers. By comparison, in a modern five-volume translated edition, the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas is only 3,020 pages.15 Entries in the CPR include grants and confirmations of liberties, privileges, offices, dig-nities, lands, pensions, and wardships, to corporations and individuals, civil and ecclesiastical. It contains letters of protection, of credence, and of safe-conduct, pardons, special liveries, and licenses for alienation. It



also captures an appreciable number of coroners’ records. The translated collection stretches from the early years of Henry III’s reign, in 1232, to roughly the middle of Henry VI’s reign, in 1452. In other words, this source covers a 220-year span of English history from the generation after Magna Carta until a year before the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War. As H. C. Maxwell Lyte asserts, “[T]here is scarcely a subject connected with the history or government of this country . . . which is not illustrated by the Patent Rolls.”16

Interdisciplinary EndeavorsAlongside our analysis of the CPR, we sought to integrate a much newer (and yet historically contemporary) source of data that has entered the discourse on medieval life and death: human bones. Derived from archaeo-logical excavations of medieval sites throughout England, human skeletal remains provide researchers with new perspectives.17 Human remains stand in stark contrast to most all other historical resources: they have not been created or manufactured by humans; they are humans. Furthermore, while historical sources commonly reflect the lives of urban, educated, and socially privileged men, excavated skeletal remains more often than not are derived from poorer cemeteries and dissolved religious institutions, and thus reflect the lives of commoners, including women and children. Hence, synthesizing historical records with the analysis of human remains provides a provocative approach towards understanding the past.

The skeletal dataset incorporated into this study was large. It included data gleaned from published and unpublished archaeological site re-ports, and published books and articles generated from the excavation of English cemeteries. It also included primary data collected from 1,014 skeletons excavated from the poor parish cemetery of St. Helen on the Walls, in York.18 In all, data from 58 medieval sites, dating approximately 1200–1500, throughout England were amassed, representing close to 13,000 skeletons (Table 1, pp. 60–62). The only sites included in this study are ones that provide requisite information on the presence of skeletal trauma in females and males.

A great deal of information can be gleaned from the human skeleton.19 The determination of age at death of an individual, for instance, is achieved by examining areas of the body that theoretically change universally in humans regardless of genetics and environment. The determination of the age at death of children, for instance, rests on clinically substantiated patterns of human bone formation and development, and the formation and eruption of teeth, as bases of evaluation. For the determination of age at death of adults, the pelvic bones are examined along with degrees of fusion of the cranial sutures and the amount of dental wear present. While these techniques have a number of biases (which are highlighted



and discussed in DeWitte and Kowaleski, in this volume), especially when more specific ages at death are being evaluated, for this study we focused attention on the broad category of “adults.” That is, individuals who display skeletal maturity, recognized by fusion of virtually all skel-etal growth centers. Modern humans appear to reach skeletal maturity between 18 and 21 years of age.

The sex of an individual can also be determined from skeletal remains. This assessment requires the examination of areas of the body where sec-ondary sex characteristics (that is, characteristics resulting from and/or associated with reproductive capacity) creates skeletally evident sexual dimorphism. These areas include the skull and pelvic bones, which display the greatest degree of variation between females and males once adult-hood is reached. Unfortunately, since skeletally recognizable differences between females and males can only be reliably determined in adults, only individuals displaying skeletal maturity could be included in this study.

The human skeleton also records instances of trauma. Breaks or frac-tures of bone elicit three processes in the human body: inflammatory, reparative, and remodeling. Within hours or days, depending on factors such as the age and health status of the individual, and the severity of the fracture, hemorrhaging will lead to the development of a blood clot that encapsulates the impacted area. Through a complex process, a soft callus composed of cartilage and bone begins to form, initiating repair. The callus becomes harder as mineralized bone tissue replaces cartilage and the impacted area is stabilized. For months and years to follow, the body remodels the area into organized bone tissue. The callus, however, may never fully resorb if the original impacted area was large or the bone ends became misaligned. As seen in Figure 1 (p. 59), ribs, long bones, and even facial bones can bear the marks of fracture long after the trauma has healed and the skeleton has been exhumed.

For this study, trauma was defined as any type of ante-mortem bone fracture and was identified through basic visual inspection. Although im-aging techniques, such as radiography or CT scan, are extremely important in the recognition and assessment of skeletal trauma, in most instances they are unavailable to researchers examining skeletal collections, and thus were not employed in this study. All fracture types are included in this study, including depression fractures to the skull caused by weapons or accident, and fractures of unknown origin on other parts of the body.

Our exploration of the CPR and skeletal resources focused on address-ing three questions. First, could reliable quantitative measures of violence be developed using the CPR and skeletal evidence? Second, could actions based on sex and gender be evaluated? And lastly, could engendered as-pects of medieval violence be recognized and assessed? Taking cues from Larry Poos, this investigation sought to provide “rigorous, systematic,



explicitly articulated, and replicable” data.20 The goal of our collaborative investigation was to offer new means of evaluating engendered aspects of violence and trauma, and to serve as a resource for future researchers seeking insight into a wide range of behaviors and gender roles in the past.

ResultsThe Calendar of Patent Rolls (CPR)In order to address whether reliable quantitative measures of behavior could be derived from the CPR, the utility and potential limitations of the search engine were tested. The searchable presence of simple words such as “in” was first explored, yielding a list of 26,841 pages (excluding the indices), while “of” (26,387), “the” (25,866), “to” (25,776), and “and” (25,332) all yielded over 25,000 pages. This brought to light an issue: the number of pages containing these simple words often exceeded the num-ber of pages (excluding the indices) available to researchers (25,422). With further exploration, it was recognized that these simple words were com-monly found in headings, and appeared repeatedly in the appendices and front matter. The search for simple words also revealed that English words, such as “in,” were captured from all volumes, including the first two in Latin from Henry III’s reign (spanning the years 1216–1231) since “in” is a Latin preposition. Therefore, although common and/or specific words can successfully be isolated in the CPR, caution must be exercised when quantifying their presence. Concerned that the search engine might also over-enumerate/over-count the presence of a word by counting a single word multiple times within a single page, the word “whale” was tested. Searching “whale” in the CPR generated 64 pages. Sixteen of these occur in the indices, which can be removed by searching for the term exclusively within the indices [“url: index whale”] and then subtracting these from the total word count. A further search confirmed that the remaining 48 entries reflected individual pages containing the word “whale” at least once. Occasionally, the word “whale” appeared multiple times on a single page. Hence, throughout much of this study, unless explicitly stated oth-erwise, the numerical presence of a selected term reflects a conservative number—the number of pages upon which a term appears—irrespective if the page contains multiple entries or describes multiple events. Further-more, to avoid over-enumeration of words, the records associated with each term or phrase evaluated in this study were reviewed to insure that entries in Latin, headings, and words contained in the appendices were not included in our analyses.

In order to determine whether the CPR could be used to specifically explore the presence of violence and trauma in medieval England, par-ticular words were targeted. The word “death” was detected on 11,146



pages of the CPR, while “kill(s)(ed)(ing)” was found on 4,371, “died” was found on 3,080, “murder(s)(ed)(ing)” was found on 915, and “hang(s)(ed)(ing)” was found on 219 pages. The word “die” or “dies” was deliberately avoided because these terms appear in the first two Latin volumes of Henry III, since “die” means “day.” Hence, this preliminary search indi-cates that, with caution, the CPR can serve as a rich resource to examine a wide range of types and consequences of human behaviors involving violence and trauma.

To address our second question, whether actions based on sex (rec-ognized by ascribed binary terms “her/his,” “she/he,” for instance) and gender (extrapolated from social roles that individuals enact based on sex) could be quantified from the text, a basic search for the words “she” and “he” was employed. The word “she” appears on 2,773 pages, while “he” is found on 19,129. This indicates that when the pronouns “she” or “he” appears within the CPR, the word “she” is present approximately 12.6% of the time and “he” is recorded 87.4% of the time, and phrases “of her” (n = 2,122) combined with “of hers” (n = 47) appears 13.8% of the time, while “of his” (n = 13,479) appears 86.2% of the time. In this royal source, “queen” (n = 3,832) appears 13.9% of the time and “king” (n = 23,697) 86.1% of the time. To put this ratio into greater perspective, the word “queen” appears twice as often as “pope” (n = 1,918) in this decidedly English source. Furthermore, sex delineated aspects of agency, such as duty, liberty, and rights, along with ownership of land, animals, and goods, for instance, can be successfully culled from the CPR (Table 2, pp. 63–66). So, despite the more commonly found actions of men, it appears that the CPR records the deeds—quite literally: “her deed” (n = 4) and “his deed” (n = 18)—of both women and men.

Evaluating engendered aspects of violence and trauma required exami-nation of individual entries (see Table 3, p. 67). The phrase “he kill(s)(ed),” for instance, appears on 1,902 pages of the CPR, while “she kill(s)(ed)” appears on 21 pages. In nearly all instances, the perpetrator, the victim, and the circumstances are noted—e.g., by “misadventure” (n = 314), in “self-defence [sic]” (n = 1,968)—allowing the reader insight not only into medieval actions, but relevant social and legal attitudes concerning events. For instance, on 16 January 1293, the CPR records “Pardon to Adam son of Stephen le Norreys of North Elmeshale for the death of William le Norreys, as it appears by the record of Peter de Campania and his fellows, justices appointed to deliver York gaol, that he killed him by misadventure.”21

Having created a technique whereby entries regarding violence, trauma, sex and gender in the CPR can be explored, the context within which women and men were recorded in relation to violence and trauma becomes the next essential focus of attention (Table 3). Looking at the ultimate result of violence, death, “her death” appears on 22% (n = 392)



of the pages recording deaths, while “his death” appears (n = 1,386) on 88% of the pages. Similarly, “she die(s)(d)” is found on 65 pages and “he die(s)(d)” appears on 343. Actions potentially causing trauma are also present. Paying particular attention to specific terms regarding violence, and excluding instances where “her” refers the possessive adjective, we found two pages containing “wound her,” while the phrase “wound him” appears on 69 pages. The words “struck” or “strike”—limited only to physical trauma—appear on 142 pages in the CPR, with records of women being struck appearing on 19 pages, and records of men being struck ap-pearing on 123. In other words, of all pages recording individuals being struck, 87% describe men as victims and 13% describe women’s fate.

Perpetrators of violent acts are also recorded. As stated above, there are 21 pages where “she kill(s)(ed)” appears in the CPR, while there are 1,902 pages on which men are recorded as the offender (“he kill(s)(ed)”). For the term “assault(s)(ed)(ing),” women are recorded as the aggressors only once, while men are recorded 12 times. For the word “cut(ting)” women are the perpetrators 7 times (to men’s 18) and are always acting alongside a man or men during the incident. The sparse records associated with some searched terms call for interpretive caution. However, as we assert below, even in the presence of small numbers, the data potentially provide insight into the past.

Skeletal DataThe results of the skeletal analysis are based on the evaluation of 12,739 skeletons. Beginning with broad brushstrokes, when all data are ag-gregated, it appears that 1,606 of the skeletons (12.6%) included in this study display some type of fracture. When skeletons for whom sex could be determined are examined, 13.8% (n = 459) of women’s skeletons and 19.3% (n = 995) of men’s display fractures (Table 4, p. 67). This difference is statistically significant (χ2 = 43.35 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63).

In order to tease out context for these differences, specific fracture locations were evaluated. In a study undertaken by Grauer and Roberts, which evaluated the presence of long bone fractures in six British me-dieval skeletal populations, twice as many men than women displayed fractures.22 The current analysis of 58 archaeological sites yields a similar disproportion between men and women when skull fractures are assessed. A total of 213 individuals display cranial fractures, of which 54 (25%) are women, and 159 (75%) are men. If we evaluate both the percentages of women with cranial fractures out of all women’s skeletons capable of be-ing examined and the percentages of men with cranial fractures out of all men’s skeletons capable of being examined, the disparity remains. Out of the 4,002 female crania assessed, only 54 (1.35%) display fractures, while



out of the 5,912 male crania, 159 (2.69%) display fractures (Table 5, p. 68). These differences are statistically significant (χ2 = 20.39 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63).

Diving deeper into the data to find instances of fracture to smaller bones of the body is difficult. Many reports omit information on fractures to the hands or feet, or to the ribs, for instance. However, out of the 22 individuals with rib fractures from St. Helen-on-the-Walls for whom sex could be determined, 6 of the cases are in women, 16 are in men; of the 10 individuals displaying recognizable fractures to the fingers or toes, 5 are women.

Focusing on different environments, more specifically, exploring potential variation between rural and urban populations also provides interesting results. When data from major cities (London, York, Lincoln, Coventry, Bristol, and Norwich) are evaluated, half as many women, out of all women buried in cities, displayed trauma, compared to men (Table 6, p. 68). 13.3% of the women who were buried and recovered from major cities displayed fractures, while 21.8% of the men displayed fractures. This is statistically significant (χ2 = 51.30 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63). Interestingly, when examining data from rural populations, different patterns come to light. For instance, Mays, Harding, and Heighway report in their analy-sis of the Wharram Percy cemetery, a small rural village 25 miles from the city of York, that 54% of the males in the population and 43% of the females displayed fractures.23 Judd and Roberts indicate in their report on the Raunds Furnells population, which was excavated at a rural site in the East Midlands, that 21.5% of the men and 16.9% of the women displayed fractures.24

DiscussionContending With BiasHow do we interpret and integrate our documentary and skeletal sources? First, it is essential to grapple with the biases of our sources. Using the CPR as a dataset has its limitations. To begin, the source revolves around the king as much as his subjects. Excluding the indices, the word “king” (n = 23,697) appears on 93.2% of the pages (n = 25,422). If a person’s wealth, lands, crimes, or service was of little or no interest to the king, queen, or Crown, they will not likely be represented in the CPR. In a related man-ner, the word “pardon” (n = 12,273) appears on 48.2% of the pages while the words “custody” (n = 6,408) and “fine” (n = 6,041) appear on 25.2% and 23.7% of the pages, respectively. The governmental nature of the CPR is clear; the much less populated ancient capital of “Winchester” (n = 18,943), which “still exercised as a royal and commercial centre” during the high and later Middle Ages,25 appears far more often in the CPR than the cities of “London” (n = 12,810), “York” (n = 9,961) and “Lincoln” (n = 9,676). Thus,



while the lives of an impressive cross-section of people from all parts and different social strata of medieval England are represented in the text, actions by some, in certain regions more than others, were likely to be recorded, while the poor or marginalized were less commonly mentioned.

The CPR translation from Latin to English is also problematic. For ex-ample, did the translators consistently translate “beat” or “strike/struck” or “kill” from the same Latin words or phrases? Why do we read that someone “maimed” a woman, in some cases, and “wounded” her, in oth-ers? Or, for that matter, was the same term employed in the original Latin when a man broke an adversary’s pipes to “cut off” his water supply, when other men “cut off” their victims’ ears or testicles, or when a band of knights “cut off” the tail of a horse belonging to an abbot?26

A rather scathing review offered by Edward Powell, concerning the use of medieval criminal records by James Given and Barbara Hanawalt, also resonates with the use of the CPR. Specifically, Powell asserts, “Both Given and Hanawalt provide interesting and valuable figures on the col-lective nature of the crime, conviction rates, the ratio of female to male suspects and victims, and the degree of intrafamilial crime. But their usefulness is largely vitiated by . . . the failure to consider the records in their institutional and judicial context and to ask what they reveal about the workings of the courts and the courts’ role in society.”27 Our study does not consider changing socio-political or economic attitudes in the thir-teenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries. Therefore, we acknowledge the clear limitations of the CPR, along with its great potential as a database. The search engine is used in practical, innovative, and replicable ways to explore and analyze this veritable royal historical vacuum, which averages 115.5 pages per year for a 220-year stretch of medieval English history.

Skeletal remains also present implicit biases. Excavations of human remains occur more commonly in urban settings where land is repeatedly repurposed, and where modern development generates the need for rescue archaeology. Groups and individuals whose gravesites have little to no embellishment and are situated in parcels of land that are subsequently sold, and whose graves are no longer associated with extant religious institutions, are also more vulnerable to excavation. The effects of these biases on analysis and interpretation are great, for large segments of me-dieval citizenry, such as perhaps the clergy, merchants, and aristocracy, remain invisible to the skeletal analyst. Hence, careful interpretations of behaviors, attitudes, and actions from limited samples onto centuries of English medieval life is essential. In part, this is accomplished by integrat-ing data from many sources and appreciating the “potential investigative and interpretive power of analyses that critically integrate historical, archaeological, and skeletal evidence for reconstructing the biological histories and experiences of past individuals.”28



The human body itself is not without bias. For example, large, dense bones of the arms and legs are less likely to decompose over time than smaller bones, so finding fractures of hands or feet or the face or ribs can sometimes be impossible. Similarly, even if all bones are recovered from a skeleton, smaller, less catastrophic fractures can remain hidden from the bioarchaeologist. The human body has an extraordinary capacity to heal and bones are no exception. Bones of all sizes mend from fracture almost seamlessly if the break is a simple one. They also continue to mend throughout life, leaving at times little to no trace of the former in-jury. Without x-rays and other imaging technology, finding well-healed fractures can be impossible. So the number of fractures we see in medi-eval skeletons is likely a very small proportion of the actual number of fractures that occurred, preferentially recording the big breaks and not the smaller injuries.

Lastly, motives and circumstances leading up to bone fractures are virtually impossible to determine. Cranial fractures caused, for instance, by a falling object can appear identical to those caused by a deliberate blow to the head. Fractured ribs can be caused by a kicking horse or a disgruntled spouse. Lastly, ascertaining whether an individual died from skeletal wounds is almost always impossible. In part, this is due to the dif-ficulty in differentiating fractures that occurred immediately before death from those occurring immediately after. Fractures are most commonly recognized in the skeletal record by the presence of healing—that is, by indication that the individual lived long enough to begin the mending process. Hence, distinguishing accidents from murders on the basis on bone healing is virtually impossible in most contexts. All this reminds us that inferring the presence of trauma based on skeletal analysis is not unre-alistic, but asserting that trauma was due to violence can be problematic.29

Was Life in Medieval England Violent?Having appreciated the biases in the written and skeletal record, it is nonetheless clear that evidence of trauma and violence can be found throughout the CPR and in the skeletal record. The CPR contains 1,923 pages recording issuances of pardons to individuals who killed. Many of these pages contain multiple entries, revealing that page counts greatly under-enumerate the actual records. Other terms denoting violence, such as “struck/strike,” “assault,” “wound,” and “maim,” appear as well, albeit in far fewer instances. Perhaps a crude measure of violence can be derived by adding all pages containing aggressive terms under the rubrics “Vic-tims” and “Perpetrators” (see Table 3), which yield 5,423 out of a total 25,422 pages (21.3%). Hence, approximately 21% of all pages in the CPR contain at least one record of an action associated with violence.



Translating this statistic into a measure of violence within medieval society is difficult. The 45 searchable translated volumes (and one supple-ment) of the CPR encompass 220 years of records (excluding vol. 1 of Richard I), the number of which fluctuated appreciably year to year. If, however, we use the total number of pages containing aggressive terms (5,423) and conservatively state that there is only one record per page, and adopt Given-Wilson’s speculation of England’s population in 1377 of 2.7 million,30 then the per capita rate for recorded violent acts based on the CPR would be approximately 0.2% (5,423/2.7 million), or 18.4 violent acts per 100,000 people. But these figures are misleading since the 5,423 instances of violence were recorded over a 220 year span. Alternatively, if we calculate the average number of entries of violence in the CPR per year (5,423/220), then only 24.6 records of violence were recorded each year. Hence, based on this average, it appears that annually only 0.0009% of the population of England, or 0.9 per 100,000 people, were recorded in the CPR as having committed a violent act. These figures differ appreciably from murder rates calculated by James Given, where the highest homicide rate, 64 per 100,000, was calculated for Warwickshire in 1,232, and the lowest, 4 per 100,000, was in Bristol in 1227.31 Comparisons between medi-eval and modern rates of violence are even harder to construct. Mirabile, using uniform crime reporting in the US, compiled by the FBI from 2010 to 2015, establishes that the per capita five-year homicide rates for cities with populations above 250,000 range from 12.8 (Tulsa, Oklahoma) to 46.9 (New Orleans, Louisiana) per 100,000: figures that far exceed those derived from the CPR.

The obvious complications inherent to all calculations and comparisons of homicide (or violence) over time and between populations stem from the sources from which data were derived. Recall that the CPR recorded acts of violence precisely because they drew the king’s attention as a means to collect fines, to seek redress, or to secure a pardon. Its aim was not to record human actions or maintain demographic accounts. Other medieval sources, such as coroners’ rolls, document murders that went un-exonerated and deaths from many other causes. Similarly, modern statistics are often derived from medical examiners’ and law enforce-ments’ accountings: sources which differ profoundly in intent from the CPR. Hence, all statistics based on historical (or contemporary) sources, must, as Brown has asserted, be cognizant of and sensitive to the social milieu within which they were based.

The presence of trauma as a proxy for violence, is equally difficult to infer from skeletal remains. Analyses of bones suggest that physical trauma—that is, trauma capable of breaking bones—was detected in 12.6% of all examined skeletons (see Table 4). However, the causes of detected fractures remain mostly unknown, and the statistic is likely an



under-enumeration, as not all bones are recovered during archaeological excavation and not all fractures leave macroscopically recognizable marks. Cautiously using modern data to evaluate whether fracture rates were high in medieval skeletal remains might be one route to evaluate whether life in medieval England was violent and/or physically traumatic. Recent data on injuries in the US report that approximately 6 million people break a bone each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Sur-geons, and in 2010, 18.3 million office or hospital visits were associated with broken bones and were reported to the US Bone and Joint Initiative (www.usbji.org).32 According to the US Census Bureau, in 2010 there were approximately 308,745,000 people living in the US. Hence, as a very rough measure, 1.9% of the US population in 2010 suffered from a broken bone during that year. However, the rate of fracture in medieval England must be compared to modern data with trepidation, for one because the modern statistic represents a single year of data, while the medieval percentage is the culmination of multiple years of individuals’ lives over centuries of time. One individual, regardless of when they lived, had opportuni-ties to fracture bones each year of their life. With these caveats in mind, however, it appears that traumatic injury (perhaps associated at times with violence), measured by broken bones in medieval populations, was not as rampant as Pinker and others proclaim.33

Rather, it appears from the archaeological record that marked variation in fractures rates can be found between medieval skeletal populations. As seen in Table 6, an average of 13.3% of all skeletons analyzed from urban cemetery contexts display signs of fracture. Individuals from these environmental contexts were often poor parishioners, craftsmen, small merchants, urban laborers. As mentioned above, however, Mays et al. re-port that out of 85 skeletons dated to the medieval period from Wharram Percy, 25 (25%) displayed fractures.34 Higher rates of fracture (19.4%) were also reported by Judd and Roberts in their assessment of skeletons from Raunds Furnells, a country churchyard cemetery in Northamptonshire. They conclude that “A high individual fracture frequency is significantly associated with farming in medieval Britain, and suggests that this type of environment was more hazardous than that of urban neighbors, just as it is today.”35 Hence, it is clear that further investigation into the histori-cal contexts of each cemetery is imperative if generalizations regarding trauma in medieval England are to be made.

Were Sex Differences in Violence and Trauma Detectable?Sex differences were noted in both the CPR and in the skeletal record. There are 21 instances where “she kill(s)(ed)” appears in the CPR. How-ever, there are 1,902 pages that mention men killing, many of which con-tain multiple records. Hence, while it appears on the surface that women



killed 1.1% of the time that men killed, the proportion is far less. If, as seen in Table 3, the presence of terms denoting violence (such as wound, cut, maim, etc.) is averaged by sex, it appears that women are recorded as victims of violent acts 13.3% of the time and are perpetrators 4.4% of the time. In other words, if all pages containing violent terms are summed, there are 5,422 pages, with 15.4% of the pages associated with women’s actions and 84.6% associated with men’s. But these statistics do not un-equivocally imply that men behaved more violently than women. Fewer records concerning the pardoning of women might reflect the Crown’s greater interest in pardoning men for violent crimes, as the king would have needed able-bodied men to serve in war and perform other royal duties. Thus, while women were being pardoned in local English jurisdic-tions, as Given and Hanawalt have shown, the bias of the Crown’s needs and intent rendered women’s cases less likely to be included in the CPR.

Other inherent biases of record-keeping become evident when Given’s statistics, based on the records of visiting royal justices and the stated imperative that all deaths from violence and suspicious causes be heard, are evaluated. Within these accounts, records of women as victims or per-petrators are far more numerous and are statistically different in number and proportion from those in the CPR. Given determined that women were killers in thirteenth-century England 8.6% of the time.36 Similarly, analyz-ing gaol delivery rolls for three English counties, along with coroners’ records, Hanawalt calculated that men were tried for homicide in 2,498 cases (92.7% of the total) whereas women were tried in only 198.37 Exam-ining the Lincolnshire Crown plea rolls for the years 1202 and 1281–84, Louise Wilkinson determined that of the 322 named persons accused or suspected of homicide in these rolls, 5.6% (n = 18) were women and 94.4% (n = 304) were men. As for the sex of the killers and victims, 203 of the 210 male victims were killed by men. When women killed, their victims were almost equally divided between men and women.38 Likewise, Sean McGlynn asserts that, with the exclusion of the crime of infanticide, “women as perpetrators of violent crime and murder appear far less often in court records than men, while proportionately forming an average of 10 percent of cases in Europe.”39 For early-modern England, Kesselring determined that men were accused of murder 80.5% (n = 3,522) of the time to women’s 18.9% (n = 825) with .6% unknown (n = 27).40 Finally, Kessel-ring also draws our attention to Manuel Eisner’s work, which “provides a succinct overview of the data on homicide throughout Europe, noting that women typically account for no more than 15 per cent of killers, when infanticide is excluded.”41 By modern comparison, in England and Wales between 1995 and 2000, “most homicide was committed by men (89%) . . . [and] 60% of homicide victims were women killed by men.”



Moreover, “68% of murdered women were killed by spouses, lovers or family members in 1997.”42

Our broad brushstrokes, painted by skeletal analysis, indicate that men display fractures at twice the rate of women. This is especially evident when the large bones of the arms and legs and the skull are examined. Does this suggest that men are violent or more physically aggressive to-wards one another than women? As a cursory measure this might appear to be so, but we looked at all fractures, not only ones potentially caused by interpersonal aggression. What becomes evident from skeletal analy-ses is that there is fluctuation in fracture rates not only between overall populations, but also in the ratio between female and male skeletons. For instance, reported instances of trauma found in skeletons excavated from four cemeteries within the city of York show 46 out of 640 females (8.9%), and 580 out of 2,404 males (16%) displaying fractures (Table 7, p. 68). In London, based on excavations of 10 cemeteries, 277 out of 1,566 women (18%), and 580 out of 2,404 men (24%) display fractures (Table 8, p. 69). The differences between fracture rates in women from York and women in London are significant (χ2 = 40.08 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63). Likewise, the dif-ferences between fracture rates in men from the two cities are statistically significant (χ2 = 19.41 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63). Attributing the differences solely to varying rates of violence is simplistic, in the face of potentially dif-fering socio-economic opportunities, population densities, and perhaps physical environments between the two cities. What the fracture rates do suggest is that despite the differences between the two cities, we cannot unequivocally point, as Pinker would have us do, to rampant violence that engulfed all, regardless of sex.43

Could Aspects of Gender be Explored?It is here, however, in an evaluation of the presence of sex differences in fracture rates in medieval skeletal populations, that the CPR might add flesh to the bones. Narratives describing events leading to trauma provide us with a glimpse of social interaction and, at times, of gender distinc-tions. This necessitates reading individual records contained on the pages of the CPR, rather than merely counting the number of pages containing a word or phrase. For instance, we counted eight records that include the relatively neutral term, “crush.” In one instance both men and women were crushed in the collapse of a church,44 and records show that both men and women suffered crushing trauma in incidents involving carts as well as crowds.45 The remaining three cases involve: a professional dueler being waylaid at the contest and crushed by a “multitude of men and trodden by the hoofs of horses” so that he “cried for quarter” and thereby lost the duel “to his eternal defamation”;46 a man crushed in a construction accident;47 and finally a man named Geoffrey, who discovered



his wife with a man named William. William rushed the husband with a knife, but Geoffrey dodged the blade and “crushed William so strongly between his arms that he died.”48

Narratives that include terms denoting violence also add flesh to the bones. Beginning with the example of “he kill” and “she kill,” a survey of male killers indicates that not only were most pardoned due to unfortunate instances of “misadventure” or, most commonly, in “self-defence [sic]”, but that the vast majority of their victims were adult males. For instance, there are 2,135 individual records detailing pardons issued to men who killed other men, and 71 records of men killing women. 1,912 pardons for killing were issued to men defending themselves against other men, and 5 in “self-defence” against a woman. Men were pardoned for killing another man by “misadventure” or “mischance” 206 times, and pardoned for killing a woman in such circumstances 56 times. Men killing due to “insanity,” “madness,” or in a “fit of frenzy,” appear in only 36 out of 2,206 (1.6%) reported cases involving “he killed.”

Of the cases in which women killed, striking gender disparities appear. First, there are 6 entries recording pardons of women killing a man (one of whom was a chaplain); in a seventh case the victim was a woman. In total, 8 women were pardoned on the basis of “self-defence [sic],”49 including an entry where a woman killed her husband while defending her father.50 There are 12 entries containing instances of women pardoned for killing children: in 6 instances the children were her own (5 boys and 3 girls, total), and in 6 further instances women killed other children (2 boys and 4 girls). Interestingly, in 8 of the cases pardoned—6 involving a woman’s own children and 2 involving someone else’s child—the cause of the killing was attributed to “insanity,” “madness,” “a fit of frenzy,” or “when in a state of fever and madness.”51 In all, 8 records indicate that a woman was pardoned due to mental incapacity, and in only four cases was “misadventure” or “mischance” recorded, and these all involved someone else’s children.52 In a final case a woman killed herself.53

The phrases “threw him” and “threw her” were also revealing (Table 2). For “threw him,” a few patterns emerge. First, most of the victims were laymen, although a dean, two parsons, and two monks were also targeted. Where victims were thrown is also interesting. For instance, one of eighteen incidents concerns a parson who complained that a group of laymen and fellow churchmen “took him when in his church, threw him down on the ground in front of the high altar, exposed his private parts [pudenda sua denudarunt], dragged him into the courtyard by his genitals [per genitalia], and carried away . . . his money.”54 While this finding might serve to reify the aggressive and dangerous lives of medieval men, both in and out of the church, as it were, it also firmly places conflict and ag-gression in a social context. Moreover, being an equestrian world, it is no



surprise that a couple of men were intentionally thrown off their horses,55 while a few victims were thrown to the ground, once by means of a horse’s breast.56 The vast majority of male victims, both clerical and lay, were thrown into open sewers, latrines and ditches, dirty water and wells, or “an exceedingly filthy pit (fovea vilissima),”57 although briar bushes or the top of a hill appear to have been noteworthy destinations in three cases.58

Searching the term “threw her” yields 5 relevant cases with a variety of circumstances. In one case a woman was thrown in a pit and trampled upon after a group of men attacked her,59 in another a group of men and women threw a woman out of a moving cart,60 and a lady (runaway nun?) was forced to wear a veil and then thrown into “a filthy place.”61 The remaining two cases involve dramatic domestic violence. A plea of matrimony between Matilda Bonamy and a man named Jordan went awry after Matilda obtained letters of excommunication against Jordan, “and he, meeting her as she was carrying them, snatched them from her and threw her to the ground, and took away her purse containing the said letters and 16 pence black Tours, by reason of which throwing, the child whereof she was pregnant died and was born abortive.”62 In another in-stance, Robert Couene, esquire, took his wife Margery and threw her into an old well. He was pardoned at the supplication of the Archbishop of Canterbury.63 So, while women in the CPR were rarely recorded as being “wounded” (n = 2), “maimed” (n = 2), or “beaten” (n = 2), they were more often recorded as being “thrown” or “cut.” Indeed, women were recorded as thrown 5 times and cut 7 times, while men were recorded as thrown 18 times, and cut 17 times (see Table 2).

When the terms “cut her” and “cut his” are searched, and the records individually reviewed, both actions and consequences yielded highly gendered implications. Of the 7 records recounting instances where the words “cut her” are found (not referring to the possessive adjective, such as “her servant”), a woman’s “eyes and tongue” were cut out on 4 occa-sions.64 In the first case, a group of men and women broke into a woman’s house, imprisoned her, and so mutilated her;65 in the second, several men abducted a woman and so mutilated her,66 in the third, a group of men and a pregnant woman so mutilated a man’s wife as they ransacked their house,67 and finally a man and others broke into a man’s house, bound him up, and tore out the eyes and cut off the tongue of his wife.68 In the three remaining cases of “cut her,” a woman lost a hand while valiantly defending her husband from a sword’s blow,69 a man cut off a woman’s ears “in his anger,”70 and finally, a woman had the misfortune of falling between two carts, one of which cut off her ear.71 The CPR, therefore, informs us that women’s eyes and tongue—arguably perceived as their source of power—were targets of aggression. This is a noteworthy find-ing, for it seems to confirm quantitatively what scholars have analyzed



qualitatively regarding the punishment or disfigurement of women—and particularly “scolds”—in medieval England and Europe.72 Indeed, when we searched “her tongue,” six cases are recorded involving “slitting” or “cutting out” her tongue, while men, whose lives and actions are recorded in approximately 85% of all records in the CPR, were found to suffer this fate only 9 times.

What about the men? There are 17 records containing “cut his,” almost all of which record groups of male aggressors—but which in five cases include an accompanying woman or women—who gang up on a male target. For example, one man lost an ear to a random attack on the street,73 and others lost a head, arms, hands, eyes, ears, noses and tongues—or combinations thereof—in an array of unfortunate encounters, including a man who had his foot cut off by a knight, at which sight the man’s pregnant wife, “for fear and grief at the assault, died.”74 Notably, one of the five men to have his tongue cut out was a messenger,75 which is sig-nificant as an act of emasculation in the same vein as cutting off the tail of a messenger’s horse,76 or forcing a messenger to eat a writ, to defame and silence him.77 Six men had hands or arms cut off and, when speci-fied, 5 of these were the right.78 Finally, the last three cases of “cut his” involve testicles. We should first note, considering the relative paucity of women in the CPR, that it may be significant that a woman was present in the groups of assailants in two out of three of these cases.79 And in the third case—in which no women are specifically mentioned as having taken part—it is recorded that Hugh de Aston had sent members of his household to waylay a man named Ralph de Pipe; they “cut off his privy parts because he had lain with the wife of the said Hugh.”80 So, just as a woman’s eyes and particularly her tongue appear to have been targeted by aggressors in medieval England to “scold” her, a man’s right hand and genitals—perhaps symbolic of his power and potency—appear to have been targeted.

Equally illuminating is a search of the terms “strike” and “struck.” In this search, an array of aggressors and victims are encountered, as well as some unfortunate accidents. These terms are also interesting because not only do both men and women strike and get struck, but tales of the medieval body emerge. In other words, just as we are told who or what was “crushed” or “cut,” the CPR now shares who struck, with what, and where on the victim’s body the blow landed.

The terms “strike” and “struck” yield 142 individual cases involving domestic abuse, interpersonal conflict, unfortunate accidents, and just plain bad luck. In two cases a father beat his child to death, in one case with a rod.81 A brother killed his brother by chastising him with a rod.82 Similarly, a man, “moved by no malice,” killed his servant by striking him “lightly on the head with a rod to chastise him.”83 In another case,



a man named Robert was being chased by a mean dog so he threw a rock at it—the rock missed but killed Joan who was standing nearby.84 Likewise, a man shot an arrow at a cock pheasant in a hedge. The arrow flew through the hedge and into the left ear of a woman named Alice.85 And at least two men accidentally killed a friend while horsing around.86 By the same token, a man rode up to a group of men shooting arrows at targets and so he placed his cap on the ground and said “Shoot at my cap.” A chaplain obliged and shot an arrow which glanced off a stone and struck a bystander—“who was sitting by the high road under a bramble-bush”—near the navel whereof he died.87 Finally, contrary to the docile female stereotype, a stranger would have ravished a widow whose house he had entered but she, “by the aid of a dog who to defend his mistress bit the man, felled him to the ground and struck him with a knife on the head on one of his temples making a mortal wound.”88

The words “struck” or “strike” also appear in the CPR to occur in the heat of the moment, sometimes because words were exchanged between individuals. For example, after a man “publicly acknowledged that he had lain with Gilbert’s wife,” Gilbert struck him with a knife and killed him.89 In another case a fishmonger struck and killed a fellow fishmonger be-cause of “various boastful, superfluous and unseemly words.”90 Similarly, a tailor and weaver and baker were all hanging out at the baker’s house,

in the company of others, drinking and singing by turns, and there came Wil-liam Cook of Nor[t]hampton . . . [weaver] and made assault on Thomas touching his singing, whereupon abusive words passing between them, the said William Cook and Thomas Osbatteley assaulted each the other, and William with a . . . [pitchfork] . . . struck Thomas on the head, whereupon Thomas drew a sword . . . and would have struck William Cook, but William Hedge [also a weaver] intervened and was struck by William Cook with . . . [the pitchfork] under the right ear and by Thomas with the . . . [dagger] . . . in the belly on the left side under the navel, making a wound 9 inches deep.91

Other chance encounters resulted in people striking or getting struck. For example, two men “were engaged in a chance medley” when someone “came upon them” and stabbed one of the men to death.92 Nor was this a unique case involving “chance medley” (a homicide resulting from an unpredictable encounter or sudden fighting) and violence in the CPR.93 Finally, consider that Robert Fitz Neel was not allowed to testify in court regarding his deceased daughter’s holdings because “inasmuch as the said Robert, having been struck on the head by a lance at certain jousts, has lost his memory.”94

A final review of the word “struck” or “strike” suggests that out of the 142 instances of an individual recorded as suffering a “strike” or being “struck,” it is the head that is hit 50% of the time, with the chest and legs injured less than 20% of the time. Surprisingly, the skeletal data



indicates that cranial trauma occurs in only 1.6% of the skeletons. Is the term “struck” preferentially used by the chronicler when a blow occurred to the head? Were blows to the head considered a more egregious act, and therefore more likely to make it to the crown’s court? Or, as an alterna-tive explanation for the discrepancy, are the human torso and extremities easier targets to hit than the head?

ConclusionWhat can we conclude from our analyses? First, with careful assessment of records and a hearty note of caution, the CPR provides a provocative qualitative and quantitative dataset. Researchers interested in far-reaching aspects of medieval life can assess the presence of human actions, actors, and social contexts through the well-regarded tool of textual analysis alongside quantitative inquiries which provide, at times, a statistical means of evaluation. In this study, regardless of the preferential recording of men’s activities in the CPR, aspects of women’s lives were documented consistently in the texts; on average, women’s actions, belongings, and agency appear on 9–21% of the pages, depending on the term chosen in the search. Likewise, human skeletons serve as extraordinary datasets, allowing researchers to detect the presence of trauma on bodies of indi-viduals, males and females alike, whose actions were perhaps less likely to appear in historical documents.

Three questions were posed in this study. The first examined whether medieval violence could be detected and measured in the CPR and skeletal record. This exploration yielded many records within the CPR imply-ing the presence of violence: thousands of pages contain terms such as “kill(s)(ed)(ing),” “death,” and/or “assault(ed),” and approximately 12% of the skeletons evaluated displayed fractures. These testaments of violence, however, when critically evaluated alongside other documentary sources reported by other researchers, and modern accounting of violence and trauma in today’s world, do not support the contention that medieval life was violent and brutish.

The second question asked whether the CPR and skeletal populations evinced sex differences in medieval violence and trauma. They did. Evaluated quantitatively, the CPR yielded clear differences in pardonable acts of violence perpetrated and suffered by men; with records of men “assaulting” and “killing,” and dying (“he died”) and being assaulted, appearing far more often than those of women. This unique analyti-cal method validated the potential of the CPR, and other documentary sources, to uncover the lives of women despite clear medieval biases fa-voring the recording of men’s actions for political, economic, and social pursuits. The skeletal record offered further insight into sex differences. Fractures were found in women half the time that they were detected in



men. Statistically significant variation in fracture rates noted between women and men buried in York and London, and differences reported between urban and rural populations, underscore the need for rigorous interpretation: women’s lives were not simply less traumatic or violent than men’s, but rather require close scrutiny within socio-political and environmental contexts.

Lastly, we questioned whether aspects of gender, that is, labile or rigid social roles based on sex, could be realized within the two disparate data-sets. It was here that the CPR, evaluated both quantitatively and through close textual analysis, yielded provocative results. While the CPR recorded pardons issued for the cutting of women and men, women’s tongues and men’s genitals and hands appear as different targets. And, as a powerful window into the past, women are repeatedly pardoned for killing due to “insanity,” “madness,” and “fit(s) of frenzy,” while men most commonly meet the Crown’s objective with pardons associated with “misadventure” or acts of “self-defence [sic].”

It appears that alongside the hazards of urban and/or rural life for both sexes, tight social bonds and interaction, fostered by close fam-ily ties, friendship, and physical proximity, presented other “hazards” for both men and women. We find that both men and women suffered trauma as a result of playing together, working together, or simply by happenstance. Knives, swords, daggers, pitchforks, and staffs, which were essential components of the everyday work-kit, were also hazardous ob-jects and ready weapons. To be sure, in the Benedictine Rule, monks are clearly warned to remove their knives before sleeping, lest they injure themselves,95 while Philippa Maddern determined that in fifteenth-century East Anglia, daggers, bows and arrows, and farm equipment were used in 26% of murder cases.96 Hence, our synthetic cloth, woven from docu-ments and bones, clearly shows us that men and women aren’t simply violent actors or “victims” of their occupations, lifestyles, or their physical environments (causing trips or falls, or run-ins with carts and animals, for instance). Rather, they are players in complex social environments. These social environments are given voice in historical documents, and indeed, fleshed out of human bone.

AcknowledgementsDeep thanks are owed to the creative minds who developed and organized this truly interdis-ciplinary conference—Robin Fleming and Katherine French—and to our attending colleagues who provided insightful and constructive feedback. Thanks are also owed to Sharon Farmer for her valuable comments as well as to the many bioarchaeologists who graciously shared their published and unpublished data, to Dr. Charlotte Roberts, University of Durham, for assisting with this project for the past two decades, and to Shelby Doubek for assisting with the collation of data.



Figure 1. Examples of bone fracture in skeletal remains from St. Helen-on-the-Walls, York. (A) Individual 5237 with (from left to right) healed rib fractures, healed fracture of the humerus, healed fracture of the tibia, and the fibula. (B) Individual 5773 displaying healed fractures of the nasal bones. Photos by A. L. Grauer.

(A)

(B)

List of TablesTable 1. Data from archaeological sites included in the analysis of medieval trauma.Table 2. Frequency of pages containing words associated with sex/gender in the CPRTable 3. Frequency of pages containing words indicative of violence and trauma in the CPRTable 4. Fractures in English medieval skeletal populationsTable 5. Cranial Fractures in English medieval skeletal populationsTable 6. Fractures in English medieval skeletal populations from major citiesTable 7. Fracture rates reported in medieval cemeteries in York, England.Table 8. Fracture rates reported in medieval cemeteries in London, England



Table 1. Data from archaeological sites included in the analysis of medieval trauma.

SITES USED N = COUNTY CONTEXT

Bermondsey Abbey, St. Saviour Monastic Cem-etery, London

Bekvalac et al. 2008

182 London Abbey

Blackfriars Friary, School St., Ipswich, Suffolk

Mays 1991 250 Ipswich, Suffolk Friary

Blackfriars Friary, Gloucester

Wiggins et al. 1993

129 Gloucestershire Friary

Box Lane, Pontefract Boylston n.d. 14 Yorkshire ???

Brighton Hill South Waldron 1987 52 Sussex Village Church Yard

Chapel Flats, Ripley Wiggins 1992 17 Yorkshire ???

Chelmsford Dominican Priory, Chelmsford

Bayley 1975 138 Essex Priory

Chevington Chapel, Chev-ington, Northumberland

Boylston et al. 1998

48 Northumberland Chapel

County Hospital Her-eford, Hereford and Worcester (St. Guthlac’s Priory)

Roberts 2005 35 Hereford and Worcester

Hospital

Dominican Friary, Carter Lane, London


57 London Friary

Dominican Priory, Oxford Lambrick 1985 83 Oxfordshire Priory

Dunstable Friary, Dun-stable, Bedfordshire

Keeping 2000 65 Bedfordshire Friary

East Smithfield Black Death, London

Kausmally 2007 636 London Black Death

Elstow Abbey, Elstow, Bedfordshire

Keeping 2000 106 Bedfordshire Abbey

Fishergate House, York Holst 2005 244 Yorkshire ???

Franciscan Friary, Hartlepool

Birkett 1986 150 Cleveland Friary

Grove Priory, Bedfordshire

Stirland n.d. 28 Befordshire Priory

Guildhall Yard East, London

Cowal 2007 68 London Churchyard

Guildford Friary, Sussex Henderson 1981, 1984

113 Sussex Friary

Gisborough Priory, Gis-borough, Cleveland

Anderson 1994; Anderson and Marlow 1995

46 Cleveland Priory




Hospital of St. James and Mary Magdalene, Chichester

Lee 2001 384 Sussex Hospital

Holy Trinity Priory, London

Conheeney 2005 58 London Priory

Hull Magistrates Court, Austin Friary, Hull

Boylston, Holst, and Roberts 2001

245 Yorkshire Friary

Jarrow Anderson, Well, and Birkett 2006

189 Tyne and Wear Monastic

Jewbury, York Lilley et al. 1994 475 Yorkshire Jewish Cemetery

Lichfield Cathedral Nave, Lichfield

Loe 2005 24 Staffordshire Cathedral

Maldon Priory, Norwich King and Rob-erts 1993

9 Norfolk Priory

Merton Priory, London Mikulski et al. 2007 online, Waldron 1985

676 London Priory

Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire

Ensor et al. 1993 65 Bedfordshire ???

Minster Yard, Lincoln Boylston and Roberts n.d.

17 Lincolnshire ???

Rivenhall Church, Riven-hall, Whitham, Essex

O’Connor 1984 (AML)

108 Essex Churchyard

Spital Square, London (aka years ago as St. Mary Spital)

Bekvalac et al. 2007, Conheeney 1997

124 London Priory

St. Andrew Gilbertine Priory, Fishergate, York

Stroud and Kemp 1993

271 Yorkshire Priory

St. Anne’s Charterhouse, Coventry

Cole 2000 44 Warwickshire Monastery

St. Bartholomew’s Hospi-tal, Bristol

Stroud 1998 30 Avon Hospital

St. Benet Sherehog, London

Bekvalac and Cowal 2007

39 London Churchyard

St. Clementhorpe Priory, York

Keeping 2000 128 Yorkshire Priory (Nunnery)

St. Gregory’s Priory, Northgate, Canterbury (sample)

Anderson and Andrews, 2001

91 Kent Priory

St. Helen-on-the-Walls, York

Grauer 1989, Dawes and Mag-ilton 1980

1014 Yorkshire Churchyard




St. Mary Graces (Royal Mint Site), CistercianAb-bey, London


389 London Abbey

St. Martin’s, Wallingford Anderson and Boston 2002

187 Oxfordshire Churchyard

St. Mary Spital, London (huge site currently in press—not same site as Spital Square)

Connell et al. 2012

3485 London Hospital

St. Nicholas Shambles, London

White 1998 234 London Churchyard

St. Paul’s Square, Bedford Stirland and Jackman n.d.

35 Bedfordshire ???

St. Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber

Waldron 2007 632 Lincolnshire Churchyard

St. Neots Duhig n.d. 45 Cambridgeshire ???

Stonar, Kent Eley and Bayley 1975

147 Kent Village Churchyard

Stratford Langthorne Abbey

Stuart-Macadam 1985a, 1985b, 1986

128 London Abbey

Taunton Priory, Taunton Rogers 1984 162 Somerset Priory

Timberhill Castle Mall, Norwich

Anderson 1996 189 Norfolk Churchyard

Welton-Lincoln Trunk Main

Boylston and Roberts 1994

38 Lincolnshire Churchyard

Wharram Percy Mays 2007 85 Yorkshire Village Churchyard

Whitefriars, Ipswich Mays 1991 15 Suffolk Friary

York Minster Dawes n.d. 127 Yorkshire Cathedral

St. James’ Priory, Bristol Loe 2006, Lamb 2006

278 Avon Site1 = Monastic Site2 = Lay

Lewes Friary, Lewes,Sussex

Browne 1996 52 Sussex

TOTAL 12,769



Table 2. Frequency of pages containing words associated with sex/gender in the CPR

WOMEN MEN% WOMEN

(Women/Women+Men)

“women” (n = 157) “men” (n = 8263) 1.9%

“Jewess” (n = 18) “Jew” (n = 561) 3.1%

“abbess” (n = 1207) “abbot” (n = 29,514) 3.9%

“woman” (n = 63) “man” (n = 1160) 5.2%

“prioress” (n = 1230) “prior” (n = 9727) 11.2%

“she” (n = 2773) “he” (n = 19,129) 12.6%

“queen” (n = 3832) “king” (n = 23,697) 13.9%

“nun” (n = 1016) “monk” (n = 2798) 26.6%

Noun/Pronoun Average 9.8%

The household

“her proctor” (n = 12) “his proctor” (n = 195) 5.8%

“her heir” (n = 281) “his heir” (n = 4281) 6.2%

“her messenger” (n = 6) “his messenger” (n = 91) 6.2%

“her court” (n = 21) “his court” (n = 312) 6.3%

“her kinsman” (n = 20) “his kinsman” (n = 202) 9.0%

“her knight” (n = 11) “his knight” (n = 109) 9.2%

“her lord” (n = 7) “his lord” (n = 66) 9.6%

“her men” (n = 221) “his men” (n = 2093) 9.6%

“her charge” (n = 22) “his charge” (n = 203) 9.8%

“her man” (n = 2) “his man” (n = 15) 11.8%

“her friend” (n = 10) “his friend” (n = 75) 11.8%

“her bailiff” (n = 54) “his bailiff” (n = 94) 12.1%

“her servant” (n = 146) “his servant” (n = 986) 12.9%

“her tenant” (n = 38) “his tenant” (n = 209) 15.4%

“her household” (n = 108) “his household” (n = 534) 16.8%

“her steward” (n = 25) “his steward” (n = 93) 21.2%

“her family” (n = 5) “his family” (n = 18) 21.7%



WOMEN MEN% WOMEN

(Women/Women+Men)

“her master” (n = 13) “his master” (n = 38) 25.5%

Household Average 12.3%

Agency

“her authority” (n = 0) “his authority” (n = 29) 0.0%

“her prerogative” (n = 0) “his prerogative” (n = 17) 0.0%

“in her hand” (n = 32) “in his hand” (n = 2391) 1.3%

“her custody” (n = 43) “his custody” (n = 1527) 2.7%

“her loss” (n = 5) “his loss” (n = 114) 4.2%

“her age” (n = 4) “his age” (n = 83) 4.6%

“her complaint” (n = 1) “his complaint” (n = 16) 5.9%

“her title” (n = 2) “his title” (n = 28) 6.7%

“her name” (n = 18) “his name” (n = 206) 8.0%

“her pleasure” (n = 21) “his pleasure” (n = 189) 10.0%

“her duty” (n = 3) “his duty” (n = 25) 10.7%

“her liberty” (n = 12) “his liberty” (n = 91) 11.7%

“her claim” (n = 5) “his claim” (n = 33) 13.2%

“her right” (n = 125) “his right” (n = 764) 14.1%

“her power” (n = 11) “his power” (n = 65) 14.5%

“her mandate” (n = 13) “his mandate” (n = 70) 15.7%

“her testament” (n = 4) “his testament” (n = 21) 16.0%

“her letter” (n = 61) “his letter” (n = 279) 17.9%

“her inheritance” (n = 83) “his inheritance” (n = 203) 29.0%

Agency Average 9.8%

Body and soul

“her soul” (n = 74) “his soul” (n = 601) 11.0%

“her head” (n = 4) “his head” (n = 27) 12.9%

“her body” (n = 117) “his body” (n = 642) 15.4%



WOMEN MEN% WOMEN

(Women/Women+Men)

“her eye” (n = 6) “his eye” (n = 27) 18.2%

“her ear” (n = 3) “his ear” (n = 11) 21.4%

“her foot” (n = 1) “his foot” (n = 2) 33.3%

“her tongue” (n = 6) “his tongue” (n = 9) 40.0%

Body and Soul Average 21.7%

Property: land

“her church” (n = 2) “his church” (n = 327) 0.6%

“her property” (n = 1) “his property” (n = 10) 9.1%

“her land” (n = 147) “his land” (n = 1406) 9.5%

“her farm” (n = 10) “his farm” (n = 92) 9.8%

“her house” (n = 112) “his house” (n = 955) 10.5%

“her manor” (n = 193) “his manor” (n = 1483) 11.5%

“her chapel” (n = 6) “his chapel” (n = 43) 12.2%

“her castle” (n = 55) “his castle” (n = 339) 14.0%

“her close” (n = 94) “his close” (n = 550) 14.6%

“her park” (n = 109) “his park” (n = 632) 14.7%

“her estate” (n = 126) “his estate” (n = 577) 17.9%

“her deed” (n = 4) “his deed” (n = 18) 18.2%

“her grange” (n = 4) “his grange” (n = 17) 19.0%

Property:Land Average 12.4%

Property: animals

“her dog” (n = 1) “his dog” (n = 141) 0.7%

“her ox” (n = 1) “his ox” (n = 22) 4.3%

“her horse” (n = 15) “his horse” (n = 188) 7.4%

“her beast” (n = 5) “his beast” (n = 57) 8.1%

“her cattle” (n = 6) “his cattle” (n = 58) 9.4%

“her swan” (n = 1) “his swan” (n = 9) 10.0%



WOMEN MEN% WOMEN

(Women/Women+Men)

“her sheep” (n = 4) “his sheep” (n = 29) 12.1%

“her deer” (n = 8) “his deer” (n = 58) 12.1%

“her palfrey” (n = 1) “his palfrey” (n = 7) 12.5%

“her swine” (n = 2) “his swine” (n = 9) 18.2%

“her fish” (n = 12) “his fish” (n = 51) 19.0%

Property: Animals Average 10.4%

Property: moveable goods

“her possession(s)” (n = 27) “his possession(s)” (n = 261) 9.4%

“her cart” (n = 4) “his cart” (n = 38) 9.5%

“her goods” (n = 340) “his goods” (n = 3033) 10.1%

“her money” (n = 16) “his money” (n = 105) 13.2%

“her chest” (n = 5) “his chest” (n = 30) 14.3%

“her chattel” (n = 8) “his chattel” (n = 32) 20.0%

Property: Moveable Goods Average 12.7%

Property: agricultural

“her wood” (n = 29) “his wood” (n = 283) 9.3%

“her corn” (n = 25) “his corn” (n = 230) 9.8%

“her pond” (n = 2) “his pond” (n = 14) 12.5%

“her crop” (n = 21) “his crop” (n = 147) 12.5%

“her grass” (n = 14) “his grass” (n = 84) 14.3%

“her stew” (n = 25) “his stew” (n = 135) 15.6%

“her tree” (n = 58) “his tree” (n = 305) 16.0%

Property: Agricultural Average 12.9%



Table 3. Frequency of pages containing words indicative of violence and trauma in the CPR

General terms

“Death” (n = 11,146)

“Kill” (n = 4371)

“Murder” (n = 915)

“Misadventure” (n = 314)

“Hang” (n = 219)

Victims (Women/Women+ Men)

“Wound her” (n = 2) “Wound him” (n = 69) 2.8%

“Assault her” (n = 44) “Assault him” (n = 916) 4.6%

“Maim her” (n = 2) “Maim him” (n = 41) 4.7%

“Beat her” (n = 2) “Beat him” (n = 36) 5.3%

“Struck/Strike her” (n = 19) “Struck/Strike him” (n = 123) 13.4%

“She died” (n = 65) “He died” (n = 343) 15.9%

“Threw her” (n = 5) “Threw him” (n = 18) 21.7%

“Her death” (n = 392) “His death” (n = 1386) 22.0%

“Cut her” (n = 7) “Cut his” (n = 17) 29.2%

Victims Average 13.3%

Perpetrators

“She kill(s)(ed)” (n = 21) “He kill(s)(ed)” (n = 1902) 1.1%

“She assault(s)(ed)” (n = 1) “He assault(s)(ed)” (n = 12) 7.7%

Table 4. Fractures in English medieval skeletal populations

Population(58 archaeological sites)

Total number in population

Number of skeletons with fractures Percent

Total Population 12,739 1,606 12.6%

All Women 3,331 459 13.8%*

All Men 5,157 995 19.3%*

* Difference between women and men is statistically significant (χ2 = 43.35 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63)



Table 5. Cranial Fractures in English medieval skeletal populations

Population(58 archaeological

sites)


Number of skeletons with fractures

Percent

Total Population 9,914 213 2.15%

All Women 4,002 54 1.35%*

All Men 5,912 159 2.69%*

* Difference between women and men is statistically significant (χ2 = 20.39 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63)

Table 6. Fractures in populations English medieval skeletal populations from major cities*

Population(25 archaeological

sites)


Number of skeletons with fractures

Percent

Total Population 8,589 1145 13.3%

All Women 2,313 330 14.2%**

All Men 3,247 710 21.9%**

*London, York, Lincoln, Coventry, Bristol, and Norwich** Difference between women and men is statistically significant (χ2 = 35.55 > χ2 p = .01 = 6.63)

Table 7. Fracture rates reported in medieval cemeteries in York, England

York N n w/frac % #F #F w/

Trauma % F #M #M w/Trauma %M

St. Helen-on-the-Walls, York

Grauer 1991, Dawes (nd)

1014 55 0.054 285 17 0.06 247 35 0.14

St. Clem-enthorpe Priory, York

Keeping 2000 128 4 0.031 62 2 0.03 30 2 0.07

St. Andrew Gilbertine Priory, Fishergate, York

Stroud and Kemp 1993

271 75 0.277 89 13 0.15 220 62 0.28

Jewbury, York

Lilley et al. 1994

475 21 0.044 151 11 0.07 163 8 0.05

Fishergate House, York

Holst2005244 34 0.139 53 3 0.06 57 10 0.18

2132 189 0.089 640 46 0.07 717 117 0.16



Table 8. Fracture rates reported in medieval cemeteries in London, England

London N n w/frac % #F #F w/

Trauma % F #M #M w/Trauma %M

East Smith-field Black Death, London

Kausmal-ly 2007 636 33 0.052 104 6 0.06 189 24 0.13

Dominican Friary, Carter Lane, London

Bekvalac et al. 2007 57 5 0.088 12 3 0.25 16 0 0.00

Guildhall Yard East, London

Cowal 2007 68 6 0.088 15 2 0.13 18 3 0.17

Holy Trin-ity Priory, London

Conhee-ney 2005 58 4 0.069 8 0 0.00 20 4 0.20

Merton Priory, London

Mikul-ski et al. 2007 (Waldron 1985)

676 70 0.104 49 7 0.14 399 60 0.15

St. Nicholas Shambles, London

White 1998 234 10 0.043 71 4 0.06 93 5 0.05

St. Mary Graces (Royal Mint Site), Cicste-rian Abbey, London


389 19 0.049 68 1 0.01 136 16 0.12

St. Benet Sherehog, London

Bekva-lac and Cowal 2007

39 2 0.051 4 1 0.25 8 1 0.13

St. Mary Spital

Connell et al. 2012

3485 760 0.218 1212 249 0.21 1482 462 0.31

Spital Square, London (aka years ago as St. Mary Spital)

Bekvalac et al. 2007 Conhee-ney 1997

124 9 0.073 23 4 0.17 43 5 0.12

5766 918 0.159 1566 277 0.18 2404 580 0.24



Notes1. Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1986), 3.2. Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formation of Masculinity in late Medieval Europe

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 21.3. Warren Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Longman, 2011), 1.4. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York:

Penguin, 2011), 59–106, quotations from 68–69.5. Andrew G. Miller, “Deer Parks and Masculine Egos: Knights, Priors, and Bishops in the

Medieval North of England,” in Princes of the Church: Bishops and their Palaces, ed. D. Rollason (New York: Routledge, 2017), 127–141; Andrew G. Miller, “‘Tails’ of Masculinity: Knights, Clerics and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval England,” Speculum 88.4 (October 2013): 958–995; Andrew G. Miller, “To ‘Frock’ a Cleric: The Gendered Implications of Mutilating Ecclesiastical Vestments in Medieval England,” Gender and History 24:2 (August 2012): 271–91; Andrew G. Miller, “Knights, Bishops and Deer Parks: Episcopal Identity, Emasculation and Clerical Space in Medieval England,” in Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Jennifer Thibodeaux (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2010), 204–37.

6. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe, 4–5. We discuss Given’s work below. See also Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979), 98 and Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 507–08.

7. Christopher Ingraham, “Why living in some U.S. cities is literally like living in the Middle Ages,” The Washington Post, July 6, 2016.

8. James Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).

9. H. F. Hunnisett, “The Medieval Coroners’ Rolls,” The American Journal of Legal History 3:3 (Jul., 1959), 205–221, at 205.

10. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, esp. 271–74. See also Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict; Hanawalt, “Violent Death in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England,” Journal of Compara-tive Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 297–320. For a critique of Given and Hanawalt, see Edward Powell, “Social Research and the Use of Medieval Criminal Records,” Michigan Law Review 79:4 (March 1981), 967–978.

11. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe, 8–25.12. K. J. Kesselring, “Bodies of Evidence: Sex and Murder (or Gender and Homicide) in

Early Modern England, c. 1500–1680,” Gender and History 27:2 (August 2015), 245–62. See footnote #4 in Kesselring’s piece for a very thorough and recent bibliography concerning women, crime, and violence in both medieval and early modern England as well as Europe.

13. There are forty-eight volumes in total, but we omitted the first two volumes which are in Latin as well as the first volume of Richard II’s reign, which is not searchable due to copyright restrictions.

14. http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/patentrolls/search.html. According to the website, the data-base will be migrating to HathiTrust (URL not indicated) on 1 August 2016, but is accessible as of 29 July 2017.

15. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, The Summa Theo-logica of St Thomas Aquinas, 2nd ed. (1920).

16. CPR, 1327–1330, v.17. Anne Grauer, “Where Were the Women?” in Human Biologists in the Archives: Demog-

raphy, Health, Nutrition, and Genetics in Historical Populations, ed. D. Herring and A. Swed-



lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 266–88; Anne Grauer, “Macroscopic Analysis and Data Collection in Paleopathology.” In Advances in Human Paleopathology, ed. Ron Pinhasi and Simon Mays (Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 57–76: Anne Grauer, “Introduction: The Scope of Paleopathology,” In A Companion to Paleopathology, ed. Anne Grauer (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–14; Roberta Gilchrist and B. Sloane, Requiem: the Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain, Museum of London Archaeological Service, London; Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012).

18. Anne Grauer, “Life Patterns of Women From Medieval York.” In The Archaeology of Gender, ed. D. Walde and N. D. Willows (Calgary, Canada: Chocmool Archeological Society, University of Calgary, 1991), 407–413 and Anne Grauer, “Patterns of Anemia and Infection from Medieval York, England,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 91:2 (1993), 203–213.

19. For overviews of established methods and techniques that are commonly used to collect data from human skeletal remains see Jonathan Haas, Jane Buikstra, Douglas Ubelaker, and David Aftandilian, Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains: Proceedings of a Seminar at the Field Museum of Natural History (Fayetteville: Arkansas Archeological Survey, 1994), and Megan Brickley and Jacqueline McKinley, Guidelines to the Standard for Recording Human Remains (Reading: Institute of Field Archaeologists, 2004).

20. L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6.

21. CPR, 1292–1300, 4.22. Anne Grauer and C. A. Roberts, “Paleoepidemiology, Healing and Possible Treatment

of Trauma in the Medieval Cemetery of St. Helen-on-the-Walls, York, England,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 100:4 (1996): 531–544.

23. S. A. Mays, C. Harding and C. Heighway, The Churchyard. Wharram: A Study of Settle-ment on the Yorkshire Wolds, XI (York: York University Archaeological Publications, 2007).

24. M. A. Judd and C. A. Roberts, “Fracture Trauma in a Medieval Farming Village,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 109:2 (1999): 229–243.

25. Derek Keene, “Medieval London and its Region,” London Journal 14:2 (1989), 99–111, at 103.

26. CPR,1301–1307, 539; CPR, 1307–1313, 246; CPR 1313–1317, 245; CPR, 1416–1422, 147.27. Powell, “Social Research,” 976.28. M. Zuckerman, “Mercury in the Midst of Mars and Venus: Reconstructing Gender,

Sexuality, and Socioeconomic Status in Relation to Mercury Treatment for Syphilis in Sev-enteenth- to Nineteenth-Century London,” in Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology, eds. S. C. Agarwal, J. K. Wesp (Albuqueque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 222–261.

29. Jennifer Wakely, “Limits to interpretation of skeletal trauma—Two case studies from medieval Abingdon, England,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6:1 (1996): 76–83.

30. Mark Bailey, “Population and Economic Resources,” in Chris Given-Wilson, ed., An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 41–57, at 42.

31. Given, Society and Homicide, 35–37.32. “By the Numbers. Musculoskeletal Injuries. Diseases, disorders, and injuries relat-

ing to bones, joints, and muscles”; A. Pollack and S. Watkins-Castillo, “Falls and Traumatic Injuries.” Both published at www.boneandjointburden.org.

33. Pinker, Better Angels, 59–106.34. Mays et al., The Churchyard. Wharram, 143–153.35. Judd and Roberts, “Fracture Trauma,” 242.36. Given, Society and Homicide, 36–65 and 134–48.



37. Barbara Hanawalt, “The Female Felon in Fourteenth-Century England,” Viator 5 (1974), 253–68, at 267–68.

38. Louise Wilkinson, Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), 154–157.

39. Sean McGlynn, By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), 29; Sean McGlynn, “Violence and the Law in Medieval England,” History Today 58:4 (April 2008), 5. http://www.historytoday.com/sean-mcglynn/violence-and-law-medieval-england.

40. Kesselring, “Sex and Murder,” 247.41. Kesselring, “Sex and Murder,” 257–58, n. 4.42. Maggie Wykes and Kirsty Welsh, Violence, Gender and Justice (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009),

25.43. Pinker, Better Angels, 59–106.44. CPR, 1266–1272, 523.45. CPR, 1247–1258, 106, 607–08; CPR, 1258–1266, 71, 236, 261.46. CPR, 1266–1272, 579.47. CPR, 1385–1389, 461–62.48. CPR, 1258–1266, 118.49. CPR 1281–1292, 161; CPR, 1292–1301, 4; CPR 1334–1338, 109, 278; CPR 1361–1364, 6;

CPR 1364–1367, 117; CPR 1381–1385, 419.50. CPR 1247–1258, 150.51. CPR 1247–1258, 100, 491; CPR 1266–1272, 490; CPR 1272–1281, 356; CPR 1281–1292,

125, 146; CPR 1301–1307, 458; CPR 1317–1321, 509.52. CPR 1258–1266, 417; CPR 1281–1292, 225; CPR 1292–1301, 29; CPR 1354–1358, 367.53. CPR 1391–1396, 206. Evidence for suicide was rare; a search of kill/slew herself and

kill/slew himself revealed that the suicides of 2 women and 9 men were recorded in the CPR.54. CPR, 1327–1130, 155–56.55. CPR, 1313–1317, 136; CPR, 1317–1321, 280.56. CPR, 1266–1272, 615; CPR, 1272–1281, 469; CPR, 1350–1354, 202.57. CPR, 1247–1258, 605; CPR, 1301–1307, 197–98, 353; CPR, 1307–1313, 125, 174; CPR,

1313–1317, 596; CPR, 1330–1334, 381; CPR, 1350–1354, 333; CPR, 1354–1358, 555.58. CPR, 1321–1324, 384; CPR, 1391–1396, 295, 357.59. CPR, 1313–1317, 139.60. CPR, 1281–1292, 307.61. CPR, 1340–1343, 214–15, 311.62. CPR, 1301–1307, 303.63. CPR, 1391–1396, 209.64. CPR, 1313–1317, 40; CPR, 1317–1321, 292, 403; CPR, 1354–1358, 21; CPR, 1391–1396,

8; CPR, 1405–1408, 310; CPR, 1446–1452, 568.65. CPR, 1317–1321, 292.66. CPR, 1317–1321, 403.67. CPR, 1354–1358, 8, 28.68. CPR, 1405–1408, 310.69. CPR, 1446–1452, 568.70. CPR, 1354–1358, 21.71. CPR, 1313–1317, 40.72. Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadel-

phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Derek Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 175–86; Anna Roberts, Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1998), 219–23. Also see

http://www.historytoday.com/sean-mcglynn/violence-and-law-medieval-england




Patricia Skinner, “Marking the Face, Curing the Soul? Reading the Disfigurement of Women in the Later Middle Ages,” in Yoshikawa NK, editor. Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture [Internet]. Suffolk (UK): Boydell & Brewer; 2015. Chapter 9. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK311275.

73. CPR, 1358–1361, 63.74. CPR, 1354–1358, 610; CPR, 1385–1389, 416.75. CPR, 1358–1361, 154. For the other tongues: CPR, 1321–1324, 55, 370; CPR, 1338–1340,

366; CPR, 1413–1416, 189–90.76. Miller, “’Tails’ of Masculinity,” 984–985.77. Miller, “To ‘Frock’ a Cleric,” 283–84.78. CPR, 1317–1321, 606; CPR, 1327–1330, 74; CPR, 1330–1334, 204; CPR, 1334–1338, 140;

CPR, 1348–1350, 518; CPR, 1391–1396, 166.79. CPR, 1307–1313, 246; CPR, 1321–1324, 454.80. CPR, 1358–1361, 145.81. CPR, 1232–1247, 152; CPR, 1358–1361, 134.82. CPR, 1367–1370, 281.83. CPR, 1354–1358, 586.84. CPR, 1324–1327, 17. A similar misadventure involved a man throwing a stick at an

ox. CPR, 1396–1399, 152.85. CPR, 1364–1367, 297.86. CPR, 1354–1358, 10; CPR, 1358–1361, 280.87. CPR, 1367–1370, 42.88. CPR, 1361–1364, 48389. CPR, 1364–1367, 229.90. CPR, 1436–1441, 68.91. CPR, 1446–1452, 465. We have modernized some of the spelling.92. CPR, 1370–1374, 64, 68.93. CPR, 1364–1367, 173, 220, 328, 340, 355, 389, 425; CPR, 1367–1370, 32.94. CPR, 1348–1350, 413. Similarly, a man died in a jousting accident after being struck

by a lance that glanced off his shield. CPR, 1301–1307, 313.95. Terrence Kardong, Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary (Collegeville, Minn.:

Liturgical press, 1996), 226.96. Philippa Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia 1422–1442 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1992), 20 n. 29.

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