Medieval prison

The article is devoted to the problem of the emergence and functioning of the penitentiary system in medieval France. Based on the data of the royal legislation, local (customary) law records, materials of judicial practice, as well as works related to the so-called prison literature (that is, the writings of those authors who found themselves in prison and described their personal experiences), the author of the article comes to the conclusion about the extremely slow improvement of prisons in the kingdom. The ideal of such an institution, approved in regulatory documents, almost never (with rare exceptions) corresponded to reality: the architectural monuments (primarily the buildings of courts and local parliaments that have survived to this day, with prison buildings adjacent to them, as well as city fortress walls) and the illustrative material (rare miniatures, drawings and engravings) testify that throughout the Middle Ages, prisons were set up in rooms, most of which were extremely distantly related to the penitentiary system (for example, city taverns or private houses of the judges themselves). The main paradox of the entire penal system of France in the 14th–15th centuries was a requirement to provide criminals with comfortable conditions of detention (clean, bright and well-ventilated rooms) and at the same time to monitor them in the strictest way, preventing the slightest attempts to escape. The contradiction between the «convenience» of the prisoners and the «diligence» that their overseers were required to show was not overcome even by the end of the Middle Ages. According to the author of the article, the solution to this problem received a new impetus only much later, and not least thanks to the ideal prison project proposed at the end of the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham

Contradiction · Middle Ages · Penal code · Prison · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Medieval and Early Modern Justice