Social Research and the Use of Medieval Criminal Records

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Michigan Law Review Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Michigan Law Review.Over the last decade historians of crime have reacted to the anecdotal impressionism of their predecessors by adopting a more systematic, statistical approach.' They seek a more comprehensive picture of the nature, incidence, and causes of crime by using "social research" -the umbrella term used to describe the concepts, methods, and techniques derived from the social sciences.2 Crime is no longer studied qualitatively and in isolation, but quantitatively and in a broad historical and social context so that patterns within the society and between societies can be observed. The historian of crime can no longer get by on high moral tone and a sharp eye for the titillating barbarities of a bygone age; he must be at once historian, criminologist, statistician, anthropologist, sociologist, and lawyer. The recent works of Professor Given (Society and Homicide inThirteenth-Century England) and Professor Hanawalt (Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348) extend the moder approach to the history of medieval crime in England. Both authors presume that the study of crime provides insights into social relationships: "The relationship between the two participants in the criminal drama tells much about crime and about social interactions in general"

Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective

“…Both criminologists who are used to the problems of examining crime trends over periods of 10 or 20 years, and historians aware of the manifold pitfalls of historical sources may question the usefulness of quantitative statistics stretching over a period of some 800 years. Powell (1981), for example, has compared the statistical approach to the history of crime to riding statistical bulldozers that level the important features of a landscape that needs much more sensitive methods. Sharpe (1984: 43), on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic approach by saying that quantification, if nothing else, 'provides a framework for future research, and a starting point for future debate about the history of crime'.…”

“…Some historians of crime have repeatedly cautioned that the comparison of quantitative data on pre-modern homicide is fraught with difficulties (see, e.g. Powell 1981;Stone 1983). First, some authors point out that the legal concept of intentional killing was not fully developed in earlier periods and that, hence, many recorded murder and manslaughter cases might have been accidents rather than intentional acts.…”