Studying the law or being a priest were no guarantee of moral or ethical standing in medieval cities. University students clashed with town folks and would not refrain from using mortal weapons.
In 2018 the London Medieval Murder Map was launched at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, to unexpected international acclaim. Professor Matthew Gabriele compared it to Games of Thrones in a review on Forbes and web visitors shot up to 63,443 in 2018 and 68,268 in 2019, an unprecedented success for unfunded research.
In 2022 an AHIF grant allowed Prof Manuel Eisner, now director of the Institute of Criminology, to continue the project and add new maps of Oxford and of York.
The York map was researched by Dr Stephanie Brown, a historical criminologist at the Institute of Criminology. Dr Brown gathered and translated the cases from original 14th-century manuscripts.
The murder maps of London, York and Oxford are hosted on a new, improved website, which will be shared at the launch event.
The digital maps are interactive and come with podcasts of interesting cases, narrated by a voiceover actor. Maps also include fatal incidents and allow people to filter the murders and incidents by gender, weekday and crime scene. Description of cases, gleaned from original documents in archives, have been translated into modern English.
The event has now passed, but you can visit the now launched site here!