Medieval Oxford Was Dangerous

Steven Pinker is generally correct that society has grown progressively less violent over time.

The research suggests that Oxford’s student population was by far the most lethally violent social or professional group in any of the three cities.

The team behind the Medieval Murder Maps – a digital resource that plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.

Among Oxford perpetrators with a known background, 75% were identified by the coroner as “clericus”, as were 72% of all Oxford’s homicide victims. During this period, clericus is most likely to refer to a student or member of the early university.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” said Prof Manuel Eisner, murder map investigator and Director of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.

Consider the source as this is from the University of Cambridge.

It also, in my mind, supports the case for removing the secrecy from the juvenile justice system. By all means, we should not give legal effect to stale criminal convictions or juvenile offenses, but we should also be informed by them, especially when it comes to estimating recidivism risk. Age eighteen is right in the middle of the peak age range for criminal conduct. Young men do "age out" of criminal activity, but this happens in their 30s or early 40s. The most powerful predictor of repeat criminality is how early, how often, and how intensely offenders committed crimes as juveniles. Further, secrecy encourages institutional rot because its flaws are not exposed to public inspection.