Local Concerns: Suicide and Jury Behavior in Medieval England

Abstract

When confronted with cases of self‐killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon's goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on the verdicts put forward by members of the jury during the various stages of the legal process. While these elements form the base of jury verdicts relating to self‐killings, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that medieval juries did not respond uniformly to cases of suicide. Rather, jurors at various stages of the process differed widely in their familiarity with the dead and this familiarity had an impact on their judgments. Members of the coroners’ inquest juries were often neighbors of the dead, and thus their verdicts reflected a more local resolution to the death of a community member than the verdicts of presentment or trial juries.

Review of periodical literature published in 2006

“…Law and communal values are discussed by Butler ( Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies ) who argues that jurors’ attitudes to suicide in the period were not at all straightforward or generally inclined to generosity of interpretation, but were instead mediated through attitudes to social status. Butler ( History Compass ) also argues that members of coroners’ inquest juries were influenced significantly by their own local knowledge and were far more likely to find according to their familiarity with the suicide than were trial or presentment jurors. The difficulty of separating legal process from its wider socio‐political context is also considered by J.…”