Oath Helpers

 People in the Middle Ages totally believed in the rule of law.  They were not always sure what the law was, and often they seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they believed at least as much as do modern people in doing things in a lawful manner.  Even though modern laws in the West grew directly out of medieval legal practice, there are plenty of differences.

One of the best examples of this is oath helpers.  Most discussions of guilt and innocence, of who did what to whom, turned as they did today on witness testimony and physical evidence.  But how to tell if someone was actually telling the truth?

As I have discussed previously, someone's truthfulness might be tested by ordeal, that is that they would swear to something and grasp a red-hot iron as proof of their veracity.  If the burn healed up as it should, they were indeed telling the truth.  Understandably, most people would prefer to be proven to be truthful by less extreme means.  Indeed, more people threatened to undertake trial by ordeal than actually went through with it.  (In some ways it was a bluff, saying "I'm so certain I'm innocent that I'll accept a horrible burn to prove it," forcing the other side to start to doubt their accusations.)

An alternate method was to gather oath helpers.  These fidejussores as they were known in medieval Latin would swear to the truthfulness of someone else's oath.  They were not witnesses, as they need not have any insights into what had happened, and they were not even character witnesses, as they were not expected to say (for example) that the accused was an affectionate husband and father who wouldn't hurt a fly.  Instead they swore oaths that someone else's oath was true.

So someone accused of (say) murder would swear on holy relics that they had never touched the victim.  Everyone would watch to see if he started frothing at the mouth and falling down.  If he didn't, he would provide oath helpers who would similarly swear.  Six or twelve men (or some different number, it wasn't absolute) would swear that this oath was true.  If any of them gasped and choked and fell down while trying to swear falsely, guilt would be pretty well established (pending of course further discussion, medieval judgments always required a big discussion).

But even if the accused managed to get all his oath helpers to swear to his own oath's veracity, he was not necessarily found "not guilty."  Part of any trial was "what everyone knew."  If the accused was, in everyone's mind, clearly the murderer (in this example), then they'd keep going.  They might require an ordeal, with further oaths from the fidejussores.  They might have a combat or dunk the accused in water.  Best of all, they might find that the knife stuck in the victim's throat was the accused's own distinctive knife.

When someone ultimately found guilty was to be punished,  all his oath helpers were also punished.  In the stories they were sometimes hung, although that was probably an extremely rare outcome.  But being an oath helper was a serious business, as the fidejussor knew that if the person whose oath he was helping actually was guilty, he himself would be punished, by the court or by God.

(In the "Court Scar" series I've written with my husband, we include several examples of legal judgments that carry the plot along, based on real medieval events.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval law, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Conflict resolution

In an earlier post, I discussed medieval violence.  There was certainly plenty of violence then (as now!), but there were also plenty of ways to defuse conflicts before they became violent.

It used to be thought that, in an era without the courthouses, police forces, and clear law codes we take for granted now, then anarchy was the only possibility.  This was far from the case in the Middle Ages, in large part because everybody agreed on (or at least gave lip service to) the ideal of peace.

If two men (say, in a drunken brawl) leaped at each other, their friends were supposed to grab them and pull them back, not egg them on.  Hot-headed violence was deplored in all the epics and romances, not celebrated.  (Our own movies and TV shows glorify violence a lot more than did medieval literature.)  Local authorities, whether landlord, sheriff, count, or even king, were expected to act as peacemakers.

A quarrel would be brought before a court, not anything like our judicial courts, but the court of a powerful man (or sometimes woman).  Both sides would present their positions.  Long discussion would ensue.  Both sides would bring forth witnesses, oath-helpers, and material evidence.  More discussion would ensue.  The judge would not end up ruling definitively for one or the other, but rather act more as a mediator, trying to reach some sort of agreement.  The only way one party would get a summary judgment against them would be if they failed to show up.

Sometimes one party or the other would volunteer to undergo trial by ordeal.  The other side, realizing no one would volunteer to do something so painful unless completely convinced they were right, would often yield at this point, leaving the other side the winner.  If someone were accused of major crimes, and everyone knew they were guilty, a good defense would be to suddenly become penitent and head off to Rome or Jerusalem on pilgrimage.  By the time one came back, with luck things would have blown over.

If one had a quarrel with a church, or even a quarrel that involved such sacraments as marriage or oaths, one side or the other could stop the proceedings cold by appealing to the pope, from the early twelfth century on.  Both sides would then go to Rome, get in line to await judgment (a line often years long), and usually end up settling it between themselves anyway.  (By the later Middle Ages, popes started just referring most cases back to the local bishops, so appealing to Rome was much less useful.)

Churches would try to forestall quarrels over pious donations by getting all relatives of the donor to agree ahead of time.  This was much easier than the alternative, trying to persuade one's saints to blast the malefactors.  Threats of such saintly blasting, however, could be quite persuasive.

Castles also acted, by their very presence, to forestall violence.  Although one now thinks of castles as centers of fighting, most would not be attacked for centuries.  Their very presence sent a clear message, Don't even think of it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval society, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.