We do not get to learn much about the incidence of crime, partly because, in 1979 at least, no-one had much idea about how people there were in England or about their age structure, beyond a suspicion that with high mortality it was probably a young population with lots of young men of criminal age - with bulges of such often being responsible, even now, for bulges in the crime statistics.
But there is a great deal of documentary evidence in the form of pipe rolls maintained by the courts, tales of dirty deeds, their victims and perpetrators from, in this case, around seven hundred years ago, many of which have survived the various ravages of time. Evidence which includes all kinds of fascinating legal jargon, jargon which can, I dare say, be traced through to our own jargon and practises. Do students of law spend any time on such stuff? It would be a pity if they have so much other stuff to learn - perhaps about the mountains of regulations coming from both our own Houses of Parliament and the gang in Brussels - that there was no room for a bit of background. Just in case, I offer a few bits of said jargon.
Trespass. I had always thought of trespass in terms of being on someone's land without their permission. Trespassers will be prosecuted and all that. But it seems that in the olden days it was almost any offence not serious enough to count as a felony or treason. And given that the economy of the time was largely agricultural, and that agriculture meant land, a fair bit of this involved being on someone else's land.
Also excluded were misprisions of a felony or treason. With a misprision, it seems, being a failure to report something, in this case a felony or a treason, to the proper authorities.
I think that the Hanawalt hierarchy of larceny, burglary, robbery and homicide were all forms of felony. Larceny being simple theft, burglary involving breaking and entering, robbery involving violence against persons, or threats of same and homicides meaning murder of one sort of another. Which looks very like our own hierarchy. Maybe the form was that if the value of goods involved was low, the victim was un-important or the perpetrator was important, then the offence was either dismissed or treated as a trespass.
Then we had commissions of trailbaston. OED tells me that a trailbaston is a corruption of a French expression meaning somebody carrying a cudgel, or by extension anything else of that sort, something of a serious menace in the 14th century. A commission of trailbaston empowered someone to go after these people.
And commissions of oyer and terminer. A corruption of another French expression, this one meaning to hear and determine, a sort of paraphrase of the legal process of the time. Commissions of oyer and terminer were usually used to go after people involved in major disturbances, rebellions even. Nobles even, people who were usually exempted from due process.
Lastly we had juries and jurors. It seems that the form back then was that the jurors acted as private detectives, made their own assessment of a case before it was heard by a justice and with the hearing consisting largely of their testimony to the justice. Plus, they were much more apt to come down hard on strangers than on people from their own towns and villages, the friends and relatives of whom they would want to continue to live with. Not how we do things now at all.
All great fun.
PS: it is a pity now that I did not get a senior official of what is now the National Archives to show me a real live pipe roll when I had the chance. I made do with some tallies instead; Treasury flavoured and interesting enough, but not as interesting as a pipe roll.
Reference 1: Crime and conflict in English communities 1300-1348 - Barbara Hanawalt - 1979.
Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/felony.html.
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