Crime and royal punishment in Carolingian Francia and late Anglo-Saxon England, c. 775–1025

This thesis examines and compares the development of criminal law in Carolingian Francia and late Anglo-Saxon England between c. 775 and c. 1025 by analysing the changing roles of kings in punishing and enforcing against wrongdoing. Its central argument is that this period is critical to understanding the formation of the concept of ‘crime’, both as an offence against the king or public and as a particular group of offences principally subject to royal or public punishment. The first part of this thesis traces the formation in both kingdoms of parallel categories of ‘malefaction’, whose constituent offences represented the worst breaches of God’s law. Carolingian and late Anglo-Saxon kings, as God’s representatives and rulers of a Christian people, came to punish acts of malefaction as offences against themselves. In the process they appropriated the conceptual framework (peace and enmity, compensation and vengeance) of secular dispute resolution. The second part reassesses the ambiguous evidence to argue that homicide, an essential component of our conception of ‘crime’, became a core offence within the malefaction categories of Carolingian and pre-Conquest law: kings demanded compensation from intentional killers or exacted vengeance on God’s behalf. Some intentional killings were nonetheless justifiable, and the different parameters of justifiability in England and the Continent reflect divergent strategies of enforcement against malefactors. The third part analyses these strategies to show how kings sought to ensure that malefactors routinely faced justice. This involved strengthening royal control over the process leading to an offender’s appearance in court. Where Carolingian kings stressed the enforcement responsibilities of royal officials, however, late Anglo-Saxon kings emphasised those of the whole community. These parallel developments argue for viewing these centuries as a distinct period in the legal history of Western Europe, one that paved the way for the rise of ‘felony’ in English common law.