"Unheard of" violence

 Medieval Europe was violent, which should not be surprising, given that pretty much all societies are if a lot of people live close to each other (including ours).  It of course didn't help that macho swagger among the well-to-do required walking around with a sword on one's hip.

But violence was neither considered normal nor acceptable in the high Middle Ages.  In fact, the most common characterization of violent acts in twelfth-century chronicles was that they were "unheard of," inaudita.  That is, when describing some act of violence a chronicler would want readers to know that such acts were unusual, in fact so unusual that no one had ever heard of such things before.

This made for excellent rhetoric.  In refusing to accept violence as normal, the chroniclers were telling their contemporaries that it was never acceptable.  Now in fact they did recognize some violence as acceptable.  Self-defense was fine, and so was protecting the weak, generally characterized as women, churchmen, and the poor.  But in all these cases the other guy, the bad guy, had started it.

Attacks by the powerful against the weak, bullying writ large, were especially "unheard of."  Chroniclers would really emphasize all the horrible things the malefactor had done to peasants or artisans or churchmen or women, justifying their brutal slaying in retaliation.  Unfortunately some modern scholars seem to have missed the inaudita, arguing that such attacks on the weak must have been everyday events, or they wouldn't keep showing up in the chronicles.

Epics and sagas from the Middle Ages are sometimes read as glorifying violence. And they do have a lot of people whacking away at each other.  But these stories always end up demonstrating that violence is not the answer.  When the hero ends up dead and everyone else in the story is grief-stricken, that's usually an indication that the author is saying that violence is a bad idea.  A lot of epic authors tried to work their moral in delicately, portraying all the great deeds of knightly violence (against other knights only, however) to draw in their audience before showing them that peace-making was the better way.

These days in the US one tends to fear the poor.  One is told not to go into "certain" neighborhoods.  This idea was upside down in the Middle Ages.  Then the violent people one feared were the elite.  Let's face it, a lot more damage can be done with a sword than a simple club.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval knights and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other online bookstores.  Also available in paperback