In the course of the eleventh century, mentions of imprisonment creep back into the sources. In part this is because the number and variety of writings available to historians increase, if by no means as dramatically as they will do during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Miracle stories and charters now yield nuggets of information in addition to those from chronicles; and although these nuggets are scattered geographically and often difficult to interpret, they do shed some rays of light on the fate of captives. But it is not just a matter of sources. The other reason for the increase in information is the building of more permanent and better-defended residences for aristocrats, the castles, which permitted easier and rather cheaper detention of peasants or knights. Consequently there was a real, not just a perceived, growth in the number of prisoners.
The earliest descriptions of eleventh-century means of detention describe them in a very Hobbesian way as constraints on movement. They suggest that the simplest form of captivity consisted in chaining men to a beam or other heavy object which could not easily be moved. For example, the viscount of Limoges put a serf of Noblat into a heavy neck collar and chained it to one of the posts that supported the tower from which the viscount dominated his neighbourhood.1 The neck collar may have been a form of wooden stocks; but if so, the viscount relied on a chain to prevent the serf from absconding rather than putting his victim’s arms through holes beside his neck. The author of the story of the serf’s miraculous release regarded the weight of the collar and the fact that the victim was left out of doors, exposed to the hazards of the weather, as the particular cruelties of his treatment. How long the viscount expected him to be there is not stated; perhaps only a day. If the punishment was intended to bring on him the ridicule of his fellow villagers, as stocks in later periods were, in this instance it failed. Instead he became the fortunate recipient of the saint’s intervention. In this case, the victim was intended to be kept where he was put. But neck collars could also be used in moving prisoners, taking them to jail or elsewhere. The complaint of the villagers of Corro in Catalonia in the early twelfth century was that Pere de Bell-lloc had broken into the village, arrested men, and dragged them off, ‘often bound by the throat’, to prison.2 When the Siete Partidas law collection for Castile spoke of imprisonment for the duration of the campaign for those who, when fighting against the Moors, refused to follow orders or fomented discord, or three times recklessly consumed the army’s provisions, what was envisaged was probably some form of neck collar.3
The offenders will in any case have been secured in some way that forced them to keep moving along with the soldiers. Neck collars could also be used in confined spaces. According to the miracles of St Foy, the son of the castellan of Conques was thrown into a dark hovel and then confined by a neck collar which his captors fastened to a large corn store behind him.4 In this case, as with the serf of Noblat, the victim’s fear of choking or suffocating was dwelt upon by the narrator. While neck collars were almost impossible to escape from without divine aid, their cruelty was only too obvious, which may explain why they are less often mentioned in sources later lthan the eleventh century. The same is true of tight circles of iron, bound around different parts of the anatomy, which were regarded as standard for captives in eleventh-century Flanders, but not frequently found later.5
Shackles, which permitted movement although slowly, might be used as an alternative to neck collars, as we have seen in the story of the large number of shackled and hungry men who besought Odo’s help to pay their ransoms to the rebellious castellan of Tournai.6 They might also be used in prison, though there heavy leg-irons were more common. Metal rings around the wrist similarly chained to the beam or full manacles prevented the prisoner from using his hands to free himself. Both leg-irons and manacles were fastened by bolts, which sometimes proved to be the weak spot in the armoury, breaking or falling apart under such pressure as the prisoner could exert against them. Throughout the high middle ages, a prisoner of less than aristocratic status could expect to be fettered if imprisoned. Documentary evidence demonstrates the trouble lords took to see that chains of all sorts were kept in ready supply. In Henry II’s castle at Caen a house was provided for the blacksmith who made the fetters for his lord’s prisoners,7 a sign that the work involved was regular and important.
In 1273 Charles of Anjou had hastily to order a forge to be established at Canosa, because the castellan complained that he had no fetters for the safe-keeping of prisoners.8 The comparatively rare high aristocrat who found himself immured in prison would normally avoid chains. But instances of chaining of knights in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are too frequent to argue for their exemption9 (in some places knights were only beginning their social ascent into the aristocracy in the twelfth century).10 Nor could status guard lords against such a fate where the accusation against them was serious. A charge of treason was enough (according to Matthew Paris) to bind in irons Frederick II’s famous servant Piero della Vigna when he was captured at Cremona in 1249.11
In the course of the eleventh century, chains came to be reinforced by locks or barred doors, with the re-emergence of rooms that could, when needed, serve the function of prisons. All over Europe, though at somewhat different times depending on area, better fortified and more permanent aristocratic dwellings began to appear. As great families restricted the area within which they itinerated and began to put down roots in particular neighbourhoods, they naturally decided to invest more in safer residences, which came over time to symbolize their lordship over the area. Georges Duby first drew attention to this phenomenon in La société aux xie et xiie siècles dans la région mâconnaise,1 a groundbreaking book in which he charted ‘the rise of the castellans’.
Working from the charters of the great abbey of Cluny, he argued that the very early years of the eleventh century saw in the Mâconnais the decline of comital power, the loss of authority by vicecomites, along with the disappearance of the old public courts over which they had presided, and their replacement by castellans, resident in new, fortified dwellings, holding courts for their own localities, in which they judged indifferently the cases of freemen and serfs. In other words, the old administrative and legal system that had regulated the lives of free men gave way quite suddenly to a newer, and in his view more effective, form of local control in which physical force played a more dominant role than it had done in the past, and in which freemen were subjected to treatment hitherto reserved for serfs. The building of castles was crucial to this change.
There has recently been much dispute about this model, both in itself and in its application to areas other than the Mâconnais.13 Most of the arguments are not relevant to the subject of this chapter, . But Duby’s work has focused attention on castle-building all over western Europe in the decades after 1000, on possible links between what can be deduced from charters and the fragmentary archaeological remains, and on a style of building that once again facilitated imprisonment. We are also indebted to Duby for a view of what he initially called ‘feudal lordship’, the power wielded by the lords of these castles, a power based on military force and on the exaction from the local population of what came to be called ‘evil customs’, malae consuetudines. On these there is a large literature, historical opinion being polarized between those who, like E. Magnou-Nortier, regard malae consuetudines as a hostile name for old-established rights, and those who, like T.N. Bisson, see them as imaginative new forms of extortion.14 Their importance for our subject is that, if new, these exactions offer some explanation for the apparent growth in detention by lords of their peasants: if the lower classes were increasingly burdened by debts, whether of money or of goods, their creditors, the lords, would prefer to use temporary captivity as a means of coercing them into paying, rather than whipping or other physical punishment which might impair their ability to work and thus postpone payment.
That castles initially differed radically in architecture from the aristocratic dwellings that preceded them cannot be demonstrated. But they did symbolize lordship more effectively, dominating the landscape with their high towers and creating the illusion of impregnability by their surrounding earthwork fortifications. Over time, castles evolved from simple wooden towers on mottes surrounded by earthworks topped by palisades, to early twelfth-century stone donjons with baileys surrounded by earthworks, and then in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries into large-scale stone residences with massive stone curtain walls. Across the same period, the quality of the stone work improved markedly, increasing the impression of permanence.
As castles grew more expensive to build, so in general they declined in number. Despite variations in timescale over different parts of western Europe (new castles were still being erected in fairly large numbers in thirteenth-century Germany), there was little major divergence from this overall pattern. At each stage of the castle’s evolution the builders designed them to withstand the siege weapons available at that time, and also to combine the roles of intimidating the surrounding populace and offering them protection against enemies from elsewhere.15 It is not, therefore, particularly surprising that much of the literary evidence for imprisonment emerges just at the time when castles were being built across southern France, the area which seems to have pioneered the defended dwelling for individual lords in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.16 If a central reason for the rarity of captivity before the millennium was the absence of anywhere suitable to keep prisoners securely for any length of time, the development of more permanent and well-defended structures may in itself provide an explanation for an increase in the habit of seizing men, whether defaulting dependants or defenceless strangers, in order to coerce them into paying for their release.
By the second or third decade of the eleventh century, archaeological investigations have shown that the towers and simple castles built on a model commonly found in France had main entrances that opened to the first floor, leaving the ground floor for storage or other purposes.17 Archaeological findings here fit with the information taken from miracle stories, our chief literary evidence for mprisonment in this period. The simplest type of dungeon from which St Leonard or St Foy led out the captives was a deep hole, freshly dug for the purpose, under the lord’s tower.18 (Here it is appropriate to remember that the word ‘jail’ derives from the Latin caveola, a hollow, cavity, den, cage or coop.)19 In better-built structures prisoners were kept in an already existing storeroom, either below or on the ground floor of the tower.20 Where a castle was erected on a rocky eminence, as was very common, digging below the foundations was not possible; so the ground floor was constructed as if it were a cell. Access was only through a hole in the floor above; there were no windows and only an air slit high up. The prisoner was thrown down the hole to endure the darkness; the hole was then covered by a wooden trapdoor, on which the guards slept at night. In the day time it might be kept shut by rolling a huge boulder on to it. At the castle of Conques, the prison floor was so far below the trapdoor that it was necessary to shin up a pole to escape.21
Yet the poor quality of eleventh-century building (in one case a prisoner escaped by tunnelling under the door,22 in another he took advantage of the absence of mortar between the stones of the tower to pull them apart and push his way out,23 in a third the whole tower in which he had been imprisoned collapsed just after his escape24), forced the guards still to rely principally on the prisoner’s chains to prevent him from attempting to flee. The frequent miraculous bursting asunder of chains or the equally miraculous discovery that they had become as malleable as wax suggests that the blacksmith’s craft, like that of the builder, left room for substantial improvement.25
The dungeon in the foundations of the castle survived throughout the high middle ages and for much longer. In some later castles, it was sited on the ground floor of one of the towers of the gateway, and accessible only from the first floor.26 Elsewhere it was in the keep.27 The notorious late medieval Bottle Dungeon in St Andrews castle, with its terrible history, survives to demonstrate to the modern tourist the appalling cruelty of detention in an underground hole. The permanent blindness which afflicted the Bottle Dungeon’s inmates after a period of incarceration was presumably a fate shared by others kept for long periods in similar conditions.
Not all eleventh-century lords’ castles were based on the pattern described above; and not all that were had dungeons. Where storage space at ground level was needed, an obvious alternative was to keep prisoners at the top of the tower, from which escape would be difficult. In one eleventh-century case, the prison of Castelpers in the Rouergue was simply a room at the top of the tower beside the lord’s bedroom, but overlooking (perhaps overhanging?) the rest of the castle.28 It had no window, so the prisoner whom St Foy chose to help had to find his way into the lord’s room next door before he could climb down, first the tower and then the very steep cliff side, then run away, still encumbered by his chains. That towers like this were no figments of the hagiographer’s imagination can be shown by later references in more sober works. For example, Suger, the famous royal counsellor and abbot of St Denis from 1122 to 1151, described how Anselm de Garlande, castellan of Corbeil, was captured by Hugh de Crécy and imprisoned in the tower of his own castle, a particularly humiliating change of fortune.29 Similarly Louis VII ordered a captured aristocrat to be held in the tower of Gournay.30
The absence of windows in some tower rooms is attested also by John of Marmoutier, writing c. 1180 but recording events of the 1120s, who said of some Poitevin knights kept by the seneschal Josselin at the insistence of his lord Geoffrey le Bel, count of Anjou, that they were chained at the top of the tower in a dark room.31 Their sufferings will have been almost as bad as those of the inmates of dungeons. On the other hand, some prisoners who did have windows in their towers may have regretted it. Robert of Torigny described the formidable tower at Henry I’s new castle in Rouen, with its window called ‘Conan’s leap’ because here Henry was reputed to have defenestrated Conan, the traitor, who had presumably been imprisoned there before he met his terrible end.32 Much later Margaret of Burgundy, allegedly adulterous wife of the king of Navarre, was shut up in the bitterly cold tower of Chateau-Gaillard in the early summer of 1314.33
On occasion towers and chains were thought inadequate as restraints. Sometimes prisoners had to share their chamber with a guard whose duty it was to prevent escape.34 Others suffered more fearsome constrictions. According to the Book of Ste Foy, Adalhelm, lord of the castle of Roche d’Agoux, faced with a captive who had apparently demonstrated too much initiative in abortive escape attempts, locked him up in a narrow wooden cage with extremely tight leg-irons to deny him all hope of freedom.35 Much later, after being routed by the Visconti, Napoleone della Torre of Milan was left to die in a cage.36 Then the furious Edward I commanded that Mary, sister of Robert the Bruce, and Isabel, countess of Buchan, be housed in cages attached to the towers of Roxburgh and Berwick castles respectively, apparently exposed to the jeers of passers-by.37 A cage might also be part of a more humane regime. Enzo, bastard son of Frederick II, passed his long imprisonment in the communal palace in Bologna; according to the Annals of Genoa, he had reasonable freedom of movement in a hall during the daytime, but was locked up at night in a small cage.38 The captors of important men clearly anticipated that the hours of darkness, when the guards might well drop into deep sleep, brought real danger of escape which had to be prevented by radical means.
Anecdotal evidence points to the tower as the normal place of confinement for those of higher birth, and the dungeon for the peasant or the serf. However this was not the invariable rule. St Leonard secured the release of one man described as miles from a dungeon;39 and conversely a peasant rescued by St Foy had been kept in an upper room.40 Charles of Anjou ordered that his high-ranking Greek prisoners held at the castle of Trani should be confined in the lower room, where they could be well guarded.41 While no peasant could enjoy the conditions of honourable captivity extended to some aristocrats, aristocrats who failed to keep faith with princes might easily find themselves suffering the fate of peasants, as happened to Gerald of Montreuil-Bellay when he infuriated Geoffrey le Bel, count of Anjou, for the third time, and was thrown, chained, into a dungeon.42
Thus far we have considered towers as the major, in early days often the sole, constituent of an isolated lord’s castle. But towers could also form part of town walls or be erected free-standing within such walls. The abbot of Vézelay, imposing peace on the rebellious inhabitants of the town, identified the fortified houses of Vézelay, some with towers, as lying at the root of the opposition he faced there, and therefore ordered their destruction.43 It is probable that these houses and also the far more familiar aristocratic towers found within most twelfth-century northern Italian towns, and surviving to this day in San Giminiano, Bologna and Pavia, were seen as particular threats to the peace at least in part because prisoners might be kept within them. Twelfth-century sources from Italy certainly portrayed the towers as fulfilling in an urban context the same roles as castles in the countryside.44 In a vivid passage the monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, described the destruction by the thirteenth-century governor of Rome Brancaleone degli Andalo of a hundred and forty towers in the city.45 The aristocratic clans who used them as their bases in the constant street fighting that beset the city then suffered a terrible, if temporary, blow.
Where kings or other great princes dominated towns, royal or princely prisons began to appear in the course of the twelfth century. In England in 1166, Henry II ordered each sheriff to build a prison either in a royal castle or in a burgh, if one had not already been constructed in the county.46 In some cases the buildings were reasonably flimsy; where there was a large and well-defended castle already in a town, small wooden huts were erected within its courtyard. 47 Here the main defence against escape must have been the high surrounding walls and the large number of guards within. The normal place of incarceration in town castles remained the tower. Fifteenth-century evidence points to a tower on the eastern wall of Caen castle as having been a prison in earlier times.48 Philip Augustus ensive ‘tour du prisonnier’, a round stone tower still to be seen at the royal castle in the border town of Gisors, the purpose of which was to secure his Norman lands.49 He also ensured tight security for those captured in 1214 at the battle of Bouvines, in the tower of his great castle at the Louvre in Paris.50 The English kings came to favour the Tower of London for those who had aroused their hatred.
An alternative, but equally popular and traditional, site for a prison was either in or beside the gatehouse in the town walls. This must have been a convenient place for incarcerating enemy soldiers captured in the course of a siege, and continued to be seen as sensible for other prisoners even in towns where the prospect of siege had receded markedly by the thirteenth century. The Châtelet, where the prévot of Paris had both his courthouse and his prison, was sited beside the gate that controlled the bridge across the Seine; its prison was in a tower of the fortress.51 In 1188 Henry II bought a piece of land beside the city gate in London and paid £36 0s 11d to two carpenters and a blacksmith to build the first Newgate prison, its name an indication of its site. Unlike the Châtelet, this was apparently conceived as a fairly temporary building, with an expectation that it would need frequent repair. In 1236 Henry III ordered the building of a proper prison in one of the turrets of the gatehouse.52 An impression of what a gatehouse jail may have looked like can be gained today in the Alsatian town of Riquewihr, where the Tour du Dolder, much restored over the years but originally built in 1291, rises above the town wall, dominating the market square from within and externally commanding the main entrance to the town.
Where royal, episcopal or lordly government was unpopular, the building of such an obvious symbol of oppression as a prison in a well populated area could have its own dangers. Burgesses began relentless and frequently successful battles to prevent lords’ jails being used for purposes of extortion or revenge. Louis VI’s charter for the men of Etampes in 1123 was typical of other charters of the period in laying down that the inhabitants of the town should not be arrested unless they were caught red-handed in committing a crime.53 The inhabitants of Montpellier in 1204 won from their lord, among the many other concessions in their Great Charter, that he would not arrest them without cause.54 Later James of Aragon, their new lord, saw them destroy his tower and fortress as a symbol of the freedom he had been obliged to grant them.55 In 1257, Charles I of Anjou promised the inhabitants of Marseilles that his officials would not imprison anyone or otherwise detain him against his will if he could produce bail, unless the crime of which he was accused was so heinous as to require it.56
These examples illustrate a broader phenomenon so well known as to need only the briefest of mentions here, that of burgess power, more obviously visible in areas of relatively weak lordship, Italy, the Rhineland, southern France. In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, much criminal jurisdiction, sometimes limited in scope, sometimes extensive, over the inhabitants of towns across the whole of western Europe, passed from bishops, local lords, or kings to urban courts under the control of town councils or communes. 57 Whether the town’s representatives were sovereign, as in the Italian city states, or under the regular inspection of princely or royal officials, as in England and, by the second half of the thirteenth century, in much of northern France, the need for a town jail then became apparent. In some cases, as in many English towns, a jail had usually already been established before an element of control passed to the localities. In other places the existing castle became town property. Italian and Flemish towns tended to have to show greater initiative in finding premises for incarceration; the townsmen either raised money for a purpose-built jail or they used space in the palazzo communale58 or in an almshouse59 or, as in the case of Siena before 1327, they rented space in a private palace.60
The consequences of such developments might be considerable. The jail could in some circumstances provide the first and only building that belonged to the town as a whole. So in Scotland, town councils sometimes met in a cellar or in a ground floor room of the prison.61 In these conditions, urban identity was presumably closely linked with the power of detention. This was appropriate, since the control of criminal jurisdiction was the solidest sign of the burgeoning political and economic importance of towns. The podestà (chief magistrates, usually elected for a brief period) or the échevins (urban judges) or the town counsellors were at their most visible and awesome in punishing disorder or dishonesty. Consequently prisons became the subjects of urban legislation in many parts of Europe. In Cambrai, where there had been much friction between the bishop and the townsmen on the question of jurisdictional rights, an ordonnance pour le prison was promulgated in the course of the thirteenth century, in order to ensure that the practices of detention there conformed with the wishes of both parties.62 The prison there represented the part of the judicial system which the bishop was most willing to leave in the citizens’ hands even after he had suppressed their commune. Independent Italian cities dealt with details of detention in the course of broader legislation designed to offer solutions to pressing problems. Their self-confidence in tackling their own difficulties was bolstered by their conscious imitation of ancient Rome’s legislative programme.
Social status in towns was less rigidly defined than in the countryside. Therefore, it was relatively easy for lawyers based in towns to make the mental leap of relating the conditions of captivity less to rank than to the seriousness of the offence that had led to its perpetrator’s arrest. Beaumanoir, in his famous Coutumes de Beauvaisis, declared that those held for serious crimes should be relegated to the dungeon and put in irons, while those accused of less serious offences for which the penalty would not involve loss of life or limb should be kept in a more humane way.63 On this precept, the miseries that had always attended those accused of treason were to be extended to murderers and other serious criminals of whatever rank.
Unfortunately there is too little surviving evidence about French urban jails for us to know whether this kind of legal thinking affected practice. But in Italy, social status was not necessarily forgotten in the actual construction of urban jails. In 1279 the public jail in Florence, the Stinche, was built with the intention of keeping criminals apart from debtors, men from women, and the upper classes from the lower.64 A different kind of social separation obtained in Cambrai where, in the thirteenth century, the jail had relatively airy and clean private rooms on its top floor for those of high status or deep pockets. It is interesting that enough of such people made their way into incarceration for special arrangements to be made for them. Below that, in common rooms, men were kept separate from women.65 Whether there were dungeons below the common rooms is unclear from the surviving text. But there were so at the Paris Châtelet by the end of the thirteenth century.66 In Siena, by contrast, the threefold separation was between those awaiting trial, debtors, and those already convicted of crime, with no apparent social distinctions at all.67
One feature distinguished most medieval town jails from many of their late antique or modern equivalents: the gallows were normally situated, not within or beside the jail, but apart, beyond the town walls (though this was not true of Venice).68 This separation meant that the rituals associated with execution, made famous by Foucault, for which fragmentary evidence survives from the end of the thirteenth century, were not before that an integral part of prison life, and even then had relatively little impact on the other inmates. They need not therefore command the kind of attention they usually do in examinations of later prisons.69
The other innovation of the thirteenth century was the ecclesiastical jail which, though still rare, was spreading as bishops, abbots and inquisitors began to appreciate the deficiencies of putting delinquent clerics or laymen who had committed serious offences against canon law into jails run by secular officials. The drawbacks were particularly evident to clerics who, for historical reasons, engaged in constant battles over jurisdiction with their lay counterparts. Unwillingness to cooperate with the prévot of Paris almost certainly explained the decision of the chapter of Notre Dame cathedral to build prisons in its cloister, as it had by 1285.70 These were presumably rather like the huts mentioned above erected within Henry II’s castle walls. An arrangement more inconvenient for the canons could hardly be imagined. But at least they could keep a sharp eye on their prisoners. The bishop of Paris, more sensibly, had his prison attached to the court room of his jurisdiction, the For-l’evêque.71 Inquisitorial prisons, when purpose built, had dungeons and upper chambers like the majority of urban ones.
Before leaving the subject, there is one more form of detention in the high middle ages that needs to be considered briefly, because it has been claimed (in my opinion needlessly) to cause confusion for historians.72 All jurisdictions of the thirteenth century agreed with Hobbes that moral chains, exactly comparable with the physical chains found in prisons, could be created by citizens freely promising to accept some form of long-term restriction on their liberty. Therefore they devised a form of self-binding detention, described in some places as ‘open’ as opposed to ‘closed’ imprisonment. Of this, debtors were often the beneficiaries. For example, in a Venetian statute of 1242, it was laid down that persons cited for debt in the city should initially be confined for 30 days to the central district of Venice; they might not cross a bridge out of this area. Only if they had not paid at the end of this period or if they broke the terms of their confinement order – which could not, presumably, be easily policed – would they be subjected to proper imprisonment.73 This public restriction on the debtor’s liberty was intended to prevent him from fleeing while yet giving him a chance to raise the money he needed. It will have made his plight well known to all his neighbours, thereby increasing the pressure on him to pay.
There were similarities between this Venetian expedient and the one followed by Philip IV of France with the burgesses of Reims. When that city failed to discharge the full sum it owed for the costs of his coronation in 1285, the king sent a number of the burgesses to the royal city of Laon, where they lived, not ‘in prisione clausa sed in prisione in villa’. (Not in a closed prison but imprisoned within the town.)74 This meant that they were free to move about Laon but on their honour not to leave it. Indeed, so relatively ordinary was their life in their new abode that they were deemed liable to the same taxes as Laon’s inhabitants, a liability against which they appealed unsuccessfully to the Parlement of Paris. Again, the purpose of their confinement, here in an alien rather than in their own city, was presumably to focus their minds on the question of how they could repay the king as quickly as possible. Again, they will have realized that if they did not pay, full imprisonment would follow. Interesting though this form of temporary banishment is, it was an expedient open only to a powerful ruler, and to one who, in the first few months of his reign, did not wish to incarcerate debtors lest he make himself unpopular. We should not imagine most medieval French towns as peopled by displaced persons trying to repay debts.
The Grand coutumier de Normandie, one of the earliest surviving law books from the middle of the thirteenth century, spoke of ‘viva prisonia ducis Normannie’ (open [or living] prison of the duke of Normandy) for the custody extended either to the appellant or to the defendant in a serious case who could produce competent guards among his own friends or relations to keep him secure before the trial and produce him on the required day.75 In other words there were localities in which the bail offered to those of good reputation who had not been caught in flagrante delicto might be talked of as a form of imprisonment. Again, a breach of promise by the appellant or the defendant would lead to full imprisonment (which by implication was equated with death).
These examples have provoked the suggestion that historians can easily exaggerate the number of persons incarcerated in castles or urban jails by counting those on bail among them. Caution is indeed necessary in checking that full imprisonment was always in the minds of chroniclers or notaries when they spoke of the fate of those who had been arrested. But usually the context makes plain that this was indeed the case. It is notable that the Venetian, Parisian and Norman texts used above were all scrupulous to record the unusual meaning of the phrases in their special circumstances. Moral chains clearly did exist in medieval Europe; indeed bail was to be found everywhere as a standard response to an accusation of criminal activity. But it was not by most medieval authors left undistinguished from detention behind the walls of castles or jails, despite the wording of the Grand coutumier de Normandie. As for the debtors of Venice and Reims, they were unusually fortunate in being granted time to repay before the prison gates clanged behind them. These instances of ‘imprisonment’ therefore constitute rare usages of the word, not its standard meaning; they need not detain us further.
Notes
1. Miracula antiqua, AASS, November III, p. 156.
2. T.N. Bisson, Tormented Voices. Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia 1140–1200 (Cambridge, Mass, 1998), p. 84.
3. J.F. Powers, A Society Organized for War. The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages 1000–1284 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1988), p. 196.
4. The Book of Ste Foy, p. 148.
5. Platelle, ‘La violence et ses remèdes’, 52–3.
6. Herman of Tournai, The Restoration of the Monastery of St Martin’s at Tournai, trans. L.H. Nelson (Washington, DC, 1996), p. 96.
7. M. de Boüard, Le Château de Caen (Caen, 1979), 13.
8. RCA, lv, 1.
9. For example Vita Gaufredi, p. 194.
10. For a recent summary of a much debated point, see C.B. Bouchard, Strong of Body, Brave and Noble. Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca, 1998), 23–7.
11. For a recent discussion, A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages. Vol. I: The Violent Against Themselves (Oxford, 1998), pp. 82–4.
12. Paris (1953).
13. The debate is largely contained within the volumes of Past and Present: T.N. Bisson in 142 (1994), 6–42; D. Barthélemy in 152 (1966), 196–205; S.D. White ibid, 205–23; T. Reuter in 155 (1997), 177–95; C. Wickham ibid, 196–208; and T.N. Bisson’s final response ibid, 208–25. For a recent comment, see Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making 843–1180, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2000), xv–xxiii.
14. E. Magnou-Nortier, ‘Pouvoirs, finances et politiques des premiers Capétiens’ in Pouvoirs et libertés au temps des premiers capétiens, ed. Magnou-Nortier (Maulivrier, 1992), 125–68; T.N. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution”’ , Past and Present, 142 (1994), 6–42.
15. See G. Fournier, Le Château dans la France médiévale: essai de sociologie monumentale (Paris, 1978).
16. Although the phenomenon of incastellimento was found earlier in Italy, Italian castelli were fortified villages rather than castles.
17. M. de Boüard, Le Château de Caen, p. 104. The same pattern can be found in most early thirteenth-century Irish castles; see D. Sweetman, The Medieval Castles of Ireland (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 68.
18. For example, earliest set of Miracles of St Leonard, AASS, November III, p. 157.
19. Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J.A. Murray (Oxford, 1901), vol. 5, part 22, p. 546.
20. The Book of Ste Foy, p. 100.
21. Book of Ste Foy, p. 150.
22. Book of Ste Foy, p. 149.
23. Book of Ste Foy, p. 185.
24. AASS, November iii, 6th day, p. 157.
25. For example AASS, November III, p. 169; Book of Ste Foy, p. 102.
26. D. Sweetman, The Medieval Castles of Ireland, p. 55, re Nenagh and Ferns.
27. For the variety of places in use in English castles, see N.J.G. Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales. A Social and Political History (Cambridge, 1990), p. 100.
28. Book of Ste Foy, p. 105.
29. Suger, p. 66.
30. Registres, no. 25, p. 70.
31. Vita Gaufredi, pp. 194–6.
32. Robert of Torigny, p. 106.
33. J. Favier Philippe le Bel (Paris, 1978), p. 528.
34. Olim, t. 1, p. 210.
35. Book of Ste Foy, pp. 190–91.
36. Memoriale Potestatum Regiensium, in RIS VIII, ed. Muratori, c. 1142.
37. G.W.S. Barrow, Robert Bruce, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 230 and 233 n.
38. L. Frati, La prigionia del Re Enzo a Bologna (Bologna, 1902), 137.
39. AASS, November III, p. 169.
40. The Book of Ste Foy, p. 186.
41. RCA, x1viii, 129 and 133.
42. Vita Gaufredi, p. 222.
43. Hugh of Poitiers. The Vézelay Chronicle, ed. J. Scott and J.O. Ward (Binghampton, NY, 1992), pp. 214, 217, 218.
44. D. Waley, The Italian City Republics (London, 1968), pp. 172–82. For the suggestion that knights and nobles in Italy had once enjoyed the right to prisons, see Jones, Italian City State, p. 420.
45. Chronica Majora, ed. H.R. Luard (London, 1881), V, 209.
46. Pugh, Imprisonment, p. 4.
47. Pugh, Imprisonment, p. 347.
48. M. de Boüard, Le Château de Caen, p. 43.
49. J.W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), p. 299.
50. Guillaume le Breton, Philippide, in Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. H.-F. Delaborde, t. 2 (Paris, 1885), Sections 163 and 200.
51. F.L. Cheyette, in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. 3, 278–9.
52. M. Bassett, ‘Newgate prison in the middle ages’, Speculum XVIII (1943), 234–5.
53. Chartes de Louis VI, t. 1, no. 207.
54. J. Baumel, Histoire d’une seigneurie du midi de la France: Naissance de Montpellier (Montpellier, 1969), p. 253.
55. Ibid., p. 278.
56. R. Sternfeld, Karl von Anjou als Graf von Provence (1245–65) (Berlin, 1888), p. 291, Clause 15.
57. See e.g. E. Ennen, The Medieval Town (Amsterdam, 1978), pp. 95–126.
58. As in Bologna; see J. Larner, The Lords of the Romagna: Romangol Society and the Origins of the Signoria (London, 1965), p. 48.
59. As Ghent apparently did; Olim, t. 2, 1274–1318, p. 23.
60. Bowsky, Siena under the Nine, p. 117.
61. G.W.S. Barrow, Kingship and Unity. Scotland 1000–1306 (London, 1981), p. 89.
62. Le droit coutumier de Cambrai, pp. 219–21.
63. Beaumanoir, Chapter 1, 48.
64. Jones, Italian City State, p. 382.
65. Le droit coutumier de Cambrai, p. 220.
66. F.L. Cheyette, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. 3, 278–9.
67. W. Bowsky, Siena under the Nine, p. 118.
68. Jones, Italian City State, p. 378, note 109.
69. See e.g. R.J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996).
70. L. Tanon, Histoire des justices des anciennes églises et communautés de Paris (Paris, 1883), p. 138.
71. Tanon, Histoire des justices, p. 171.
72. A. Porter-Bitker, ‘L’Emprisonnement dans le droit laïque du Moyen Age’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 46 (1968), 215.
73. F.C. Hodgson, Venice in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London, 1910), p. 89.
74. Olim, t. 2, p. 307.
75. La summa de legibus Normannie in curia laicali, p. 188.
Written by Jean Dunbabin in "CAPTIVITY AND IMPRISONMENT IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 1000–1300",Palgrave MacMillan, USA, 2002, excerpts chapter 3, pp. 32-45. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.