The year is 897, and Pope
Stephen VI has ordered the
eight-month-old corpse of his
predecessor removed from its vault
at St. Peter’s. The
former, and very dead, pope is clad
in his old pontifical vestments,
placed on a throne in a Roman
basilica, and put on trial. A
few decades later, at least if you
believe the Annals of Winchester, King
Edward the Confessor accuses his
mother of adultery. But
Edward’s mother proves her innocence
by walking barefoot and unharmed over
red-hot ploughshares.
Fast forward to 1386, in Paris,
where the King and Parliament decide
to resolve charges of rape and
defamation by having the accused and
his accuser mount horses for a
jousting battle. The
two men will go at it until one or the
other is dead. Whoever
wins the battle, all agree, will be
vindicated as a matter of law.
Strange doings. Medieval
trials
seem very curious to the modern mind.
In this account, we survey several of
these peculiar trials, spanning almost
a half millennium. Our
goal is to make sense--if sense can be
made--of the unusual means for
resolving conflicts and punishing bad
actors in The Middle Ages. What
were these people thinking? How
did it come to this? Ancient
Greece and Ancient Rome each had
pragmatic and evidence-driven methods
for resolving disputes and criminal
charges.
What happened?
What
happened, in the first half of the
sixth century, was that a curtain
fell on the ancient world. In
the 530s, the Black Death swept
through much of Europe. Soon
marauding barbarians entered the
continent. They
killed, conquered, and converted. And,
in the process, the invaders
transformed Europe’s systems of
justice. The
relatively sensible approach to
crime found in Ancient Rome gave way
to something much different....