Medieval murder hotspots revealed
A new digital map from the Violence Research Centre of the University of Cambridge has revealed a history of gruesome deaths in medieval London.
The London Medieval Murder Map ( vrc.crim. cam.ac.uk/vrcresearch/london-medieval-murder-map) charts the locations of 142 murders committed between 1300 and 1340.
In medieval England, homicides, suicides and accidental deaths were investigated by the coroner and sheriffs, with the help of a jury from the local wards. The jury’s findings were recorded in detail in documents known as coroners’ rolls. Nine coroners’ rolls from the capital in this period survive, and formed the basis for the map.
Prof Manuel Eisner, who plotted the map, said that the coroners’ rolls showed a world where “weapons were never far away, male honour had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand”.
The map reveals fascinating tales of crime and violence. For example, on 30 November 1321 Michael le Gaugeour (his surname meant an officer who measured wine) was found “dead of an unnatural death” in the ward of Langborne (now spelled Langbourn). John Faukes, a courier, had stabbed him after a quarrel over a dice game called Hazard.
Michael’s wife Agnes found his body and raised the hue and cry. John fled into the church of the Augustine Friars and confessed the crime to the coroner and sheriff, but refused to surrender himself and eventually escaped.
Estimates of 14th-century London’s population range from 40,000 to 100,000. Assuming a rough figure of 80,000, the homicide rate was about 20 per 100,000 inhabitants per year, or 15–20 times higher than it is today.
The map allows users to filter the results by date, ward, the weapon used and the gender of the victim.
Building on 40 years of work by the historian Barbara Hanawalt, Prof Eisner has identified significant trends in the data.
He found that the most common areas for homicide were Cheapside and Cornhill. Weekends were more dangerous than weekdays, and about 77 per cent of murders took place between the hour of vespers in the early evening and the first hours of curfew.