Sanctuary

Medieval churches could be places of sanctuary.  That is, malefactors could hide out in a church and be (sort of) safe from attack.  It wasn't absolute, and there were no clear guidelines on where the sanctuary area began (church steps? the cemetery? the altar?).  One also had to hope that the priests or monks in the church didn't throw one out.

But because those in the church resisted bloodshed and capital punishment, churches could be good places to which to escape.  In the Merovingian era, when brothers and cousins in the royal family often plotted against each other, one prince spent months in a monastery hiding from his relatives.

But there was more to it.  One of the chief issues was conflict over jurisdiction.  Although it might seem confusing to us now, in the Middle Ages people had no trouble thinking of the landscape as divided into many different jurisdictions.  So you'd have the duke or count, the local castellan, several churches, maybe a city council, all claiming the right to have cases (both criminal and civil) heard in their courts.  Sometimes this depended on where the crime took place (or whose tenants the claimants were in a civil case), sometimes how serious the case was.

In England the situation was further complicated by the English sheriffs, who both prosecuted and judged criminal cases and who supposedly represented the crown.  Many French cities in the twelfth century worked out elaborate agreements between count, bishop, and city council over who had the right to prosecute which cases.

So the assertion of sanctuary was an assertion that the church had jurisdiction, the right to decide whether or when someone would be brought to judgment.  One interesting story that combined sanctuary with conflict over jurisdiction was told in the town of Bury St. Edmund in England.  Here the major church was the monastery that had the relics of Saint Edmund, a Christian martyr, and the monks collected miracle stories about their martyred saint.

Supposedly a wicked sheriff decided he wanted to prosecute a woman who had irked him (wicked sheriffs are found a lot of places besides the Robin Hood stories).  But she had sought sanctuary in St. Edmund's church.  The wicked sheriff was not happy about this and said, "Let's see who is more powerful, the judge [that is, he himself] in condemning people, or the martyr in freeing people."  (Given that this story was told by people recording the miracles of Saint Edmund, you can probably guess that it is not going to end well for the sheriff.)

So he sent his men into the church, pushing past the protesting monks, to drag the woman out.  The monks cursed them with all the curses of the Old Testament and called on their saint to "unfurl his war banners" and crush God's enemies.

The wicked sheriff stayed outside the church, in fact hiding behind a priest's tomb, in the hope that he would thus avoid committing sacrilege.  As you probably already guessed, this didn't work.  No sooner did his men drag the woman out of the church than the sheriff went mad, falling down screaming and foaming at the mouth.  His men dropped the woman, who quickly escaped, while trying to figure out what was wrong with their boss.  As if they couldn't guess!

He died shortly thereafter and was buried, but his body worked its way back to the surface.  It was widely considered that he was possessed by a demon, both in life and death.  Rather than let him further pollute the graveyard, the city council had him sewn into a calf's skin, weighted down, and sunk in the lake.

Stories like this underscored the importance of sanctuary and warned people about defying the martyr, as well as settling the particular case's question about who had jurisdiction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval justice and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.