The continuing research into medieval Coroner’s Rolls as to the incidence of violent death in English towns by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology has now progressed beyond the evidence for London to look at other cities such as York and Oxford.
The Oxford material is summarised, and together with a Murder Map of the medieval city, can be seen in an article which is available on the BBC News website.
The statistics, indicating a murder rate fifty times higher than it is today, are startling, shocking indeed, to modern eyes, even as we are rightly horrified by violent assaults and knife crime these days. Oxford was noticeably - four or five times so - more violent than was either London or York, doubtless due to the number of single youths in their teens living and studying in the town, and their interactions both with each other and with local youths from the same age group.
Involvement in such violence was not necessarily a problem for the future careers of those who survived. Thomas Polton, who in the early fifteenth century was successively Dean of York, Bishop of Hereford, Bishop of Chichester and Bishop of Worcester, and an English delegate at the Councils of Constance, Pavia-Siena and Basle, had previously received a dispensation because he was one of a group involved in a student fight in Oxford which resulted in one fatality.
I recall reading a Past and Present article some years ago which explores the same material about Oxford and it made the point there that the average member of the trading community of the town was far less likely to be a victim of violence than a student, and that there were clearly parts of Oxford that were safer or more dangerous than others, especially so, I can imagine, at night.
The article, with its accompanying map, can be seen at Medieval Murder Maps plots historic killings
The research is also reported upon, with some additional insights by CNN at Oxford was the murder capital of late-medieval England, research suggests
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