Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Crime and Punishment 1000 - 1500
- How William I changed
Saxon crime prevention
- Kept:
- Tithings
- Hue and cry
- Trial by ordeal
- Wergild
- Capital punishment only for very severe crimes and
re-offenders
- Introduced:
- Trial by combat
- The accuser and the accused fought to the death
or until one surrendered. The winner was
innocent, the loser was guilty and punished
- Only French spoken in
court procedures -
meaning that Saxons
didn't understand the
justice system
- The Murdrum Fine
- A severe fine imposed on all
the people of a region when a
Norman was murdered
- Forest laws
- Severe punishments for any Saxon
who cut down trees or hunted game
in William's 'Royal Forests' (about
30% of England)
- Church courts
- Less severe courts for members
of the clergy
- Women had no rights
- William introduced a justice system that
discriminated against the Saxons
- Punishments and
Justice systems
- Wergild:
punishment
- A system of fines for murder or physical assault -
different fines for different parts of the body
- Used to prevent people from
committing violent crimes as
they didn't want to pay a fine
- Hue and Cry: way to
catch a criminal
- If someone raised the hue and cry, the whole
village had to drop everything and help catch
the criminal
- Because there was no police force,
Saxons protected eachother from
crime
- Also made the odds of catching a criminal higher
- Tithings: way to
prevent crime
- A group of 10 men over the age of 12
formed a tithing. Anyone who
committed a crime was to be taken by
his tithing to court, or everyone else
had to pay a fine
- Tithings were based on loyalty and collective responsibility to the
other men in the tithing. No one wanted to betray the other people
in their tithing and so didn't commit crimes
- Execution:
punishment
- If a crime was too serious for a normal
punishment, the criminal was killed
- Made people fear the law which prevented
them from comitting crimes
- Mutilation: punishment
- If someone committed a crime, they may have had to
pay for it by losing a hand or an ear
- This could affect someone's life greatly as working
without a hand is very difficult - no one wanted to risk
this and so there was less crime
- Trial by jury: a way of judging if
someone was innocent or guilty
- If someone was accused of a crime, they were
taken to a jury who decided whether or not they
were guilty after hearing both sides of the story
- Was used so that almost the
whole village had had some say
in the fate of the accused and so
that they were judged fairly
- Trial by Ordeal: a way of
judging if someone was
innocent or guilty
- If the jury couldn't decide
if someone was guilty or
not, they left it up to god.
- 4 types of trial:
- Trial by hot iron
- Trial by hot water
- Trial by cold water
- Trial by 'blessed' bread
- So that god could 'decide' properly if the
accused was guilty or not - better to do this
than the jury make the wrong decision
- Prisons
- Rarely used except for keeping
the criminal until trial
- Kept criminals away from society