ByTom Metcalfe
Published October 3, 2023
• 5 min read
The Middle Ages were a deadly time to be a student at the University of Oxford—they were roughly three times more likely to commit murder or be brutally murdered than other residents of the medieval English city.
This startling statistic, based on legal records from the period, was likely due to the large number of young, single male students and the ubiquity of deadly weapons, alcohol, and sex workers, say researchers.
This wasn’t just a problem at Oxford, but also at many universities in mainland Europe at this time, says Manuel Eisner, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge.
“Complaints about student violence were common across Europe, in Paris and in Bologna,” he says. “Students everywhere were considered to be a particular problem.”
Murder most foul
Eisner is the lead investigator for a project called Medieval Murder Maps, which pinpoints murders in England recorded in the “rolls” of medieval officials called coroners.
There were no police at the time, so coroners held investigations (“inquests”) with a jury of local people whenever a violent death occurred, to try to determine who was responsible. Medieval coroners’ rolls are among the earliest English legal records, and they are now an important resource for researchers, Eisner says.
Until recently the project featured only London, with murder scenes located on a detailed map pieced together by the Historic Towns Trust. But the researchers have now added Oxford and York—major English cities at the time—to reveal the patterns of murder that took place there as well.
The coroners’ rolls identified 75 percent of murderers and 72 percent of murder victims in Oxford as “clericus,” a term for student and teachers at the university.
Archaeologist Julian Munby, who wasn’t involved in the project, explains that the early university was funded by the church, and all students were “clerks in minor orders”—the lowest rank of churchmen—even if they had no religious inclinations. As such, Eisner notes, murderous students could also plead “benefit of clergy”—a loophole that prevented their execution under the common law.
The London coroners’ rolls record 142 murders between 1300 and 1340 (the records from other years have not survived), while 130 murders are recorded in the northern trading city of York for the four decades from 1345 until 1385.
Coroners’ rolls in Oxford, however, record 68 murders in just a few years, mostly between 1342 and 1348.
Given Oxford’s much smaller population, the researchers estimate that’s about five times the murder rate of London and York at the same time. In addition, they note that the murder rate in those medieval cities was about 20 times that of today—a difference they think partly due to the lack of modern policing and medical treatments.
Male bravado
Eisner says the student violence in Oxford stemmed mainly from teenaged male bravado: university students often left home for the first time around 14 or 15 for crowded lodgings in the city, and were likely to engage in risky behavior.
Violent tensions between students could be worsened by ethnic or territorial issues: rivals might be from Ireland, Wales and Scotland, for example, or from the northern and southern parts of England. Everyone also carried a small everyday knife for eating, which meant everyone was armed; some students carried even larger knives, swords, and other weapons specifically for fighting, Eisner says.
In addition, alcohol was readily available in alehouses and taverns on almost every street; and several documented clashes between Oxford students were over “harlots”—sex workers—who were a common presence in the medieval city.
Meanwhile, many murders in York were connected to the textile trade, notes historian Stephanie Brown of the University of Cambridge, a co-researcher on the project. The city at the time was powered by the wool industry, and York’s coroners’ rolls reveal murders between artisans in the same profession, such as glovemakers and hatters.
The prosperous city also attracted foreign workers, especially from the region that now includes Belgium and the Netherlands. But while the immigrants might have been made scapegoats by the local people, their names don’t appear on the coroners’ rolls any more than would be expected from their numbers—implying they were seen as legitimate members of society, says Brown.
She adds the rolls sometimes record homicides between immigrants and the native English, which underlines the fact that they all lived and worked in the same places—a previously unknown level of integration in medieval England.
“Homicide is a social relationship—people tend to know each other before the conflict starts,” says Brown.
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