BOOK: Quentin VERREYCKEN, Crimes et gens de guerre au Moyen Âge : Angleterre, France et principautés bourguignonnes au XVe siècle (Paris: PUF, 2023), 277 p., ISBN 9782130826439, €27

 

(image source: PUF)

Abstract:

Dans le royaume de France au XVe siècle, les violences charriées par la guerre de Cent Ans forgent une image particulièrement négative de l’homme de guerre. Face aux exactions perpétrées par les soldats (pillage, brigandage, viol, destruction), il devient urgent pour les autorités de réagir. Mais à une époque où la notion de « crimes de guerre » n’existe pas, pas plus que les conventions de Genève ou les tribunaux pénaux internationaux, comment réguler efficacement la violence militaire ? À la fin du Moyen Âge, dans un contexte de renforcement du pouvoir monarchique et de restauration de la justice, c’est par le biais de la répression mais également du pardon que le gouvernement royal parvient tant bien que mal à mettre au pas les gens de guerre.

A book presentation will take place on 12 December in Chaumont (Haute-Marne, France). More information here. 

ARTICLE: Thomas J. McSweeney's "The King's Courts and the King's Soul: Pardoning as Almsgiving in Medieval England" (2014)

Thomas J. McSweeney, William & Mary Law School, has posted The King's Courts and the King's Soul: Pardoning as Almsgiving in Medieval England, which will appear in "Law's Dominion: Medieval Studies for Paul Hyams," a special issue of Reading Medieval Studies 40 (2014): 159.  

Full text here

Abstract

This paper examines the workings of the English royal courts in the thirteenth century through one of their practices — pardoning — and argues that the king and his officials could see courts not just as venues for justice, but also as institutions through which the king could see to the health of his own soul. The royal courts and royal administration of the thirteenth century used the power to pardon to relieve people of many legal penalties, from amercements (what we would today call fines) to the death penalty in felony cases. Scholars who have studied these pardons have tended to use the medieval sources to try to find the rules of pardoning. They have assumed that pardoning followed some kind of legal logic, and that pardons were given to the worthy. Amercement pardons were given to those who could not afford to pay and felony pardons were given to those who were not culpable. This paper looks at pardons that cannot be explained according to this legal logic. It looks at the many pardons explicitly made “for the sake of the king’s soul,” many of which have nothing to do with the killer’s culpability or the amerced party’s ability to pay, and argues that they operated according to a different logic: the logic of alms. Pardons were granted or denied based on their ability to salve the king’s soul, leading to results that appear to be anomalous to us today — such as a blanket pardon for most felons that excluded Jews — but which would have appeared to be logical to people who were accustomed to view the courts not solely as agents of justice, but as extensions of the king’s person.