Feud, Violence and Practice

This fine tribute to a much admired scholar, edited by Belle S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado, invites readers to journey through a variety of legal cultures between the lava fields of Iceland and the shores of the Mediterranean. William Miller reflects on a concept familiar to modern game theorists—‘threat advantage’, the edge enjoyed by those able to induce fear in their opponents by posing a threat. He shows that this has much utility for medievalists; indeed, he reclaims it for them, drawing on Icelandic sagas to show that ‘medieval people understood threat, played with it, made it the subject of their best tales’ (p. 14). John Hudson examines ‘Feud, Vengeance and Violence in England from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries’, approaching feud as a process which could involve a range of elements, including the vengeance motive, the use or threat of violence, the involvement of multiple parties, and prolonged duration. Hudson finds plentiful evidence of each of these taken separately, but, other than the well-known Northumbrian blood-feud of the eleventh century, he identifies very few cases where all of them are manifest. He finds more impressive the evidence that royal authorities sought to channel and control vengeance, limit the legitimate use of violence, narrow responsibility for retribution, and quicken the process of resolution. Indeed, Hudson is unable to find any unambiguous evidence that ‘people in tenth- to twelfth-century England had a particular mental category of dispute’ which is ‘translatable as “feud”’ (p. 48). In these respects ‘the situation in England contrasted with not just Celtic Britain but much of Continental Europe’ (p. 50). This contrast is brought out by Robert Bartlett, who focuses on a specific legal state, ‘mortal enmity’, in which people made it known that they intended to kill one another. This ‘was a generally recognized relationship hedged by ritual, expectation and sanction’ (p. 198). Special rules applied. People in a state of mortal enmity were allowed extra legal latitude, for it was justification for otherwise unjustifiable behaviour. It was therefore carefully defined: enmity needed to be openly declared, and there were customary restrictions and inhibitions on, for example, where and how it could occur, and what constituted a legitimate cause. Bartlett concludes by offering reflections on the kinds of societies in which such attitudes to enmity were permissible, listing caveats to the presumption that legal enmity flourished within weak states. His chapter ranges widely in time and space, drawing examples from ‘most parts of Europe throughout the Middle Ages’ (p. 198), but, given the contrast between the legal culture he invokes and that described by Hudson, it is striking that none of his examples relate to England

Archaeology · Criminology · Feud · Honor · Miller · Political science · Sociology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History