London Medieval Murder Map

July 5, 2023 2:46 PM

"Each pin represents the approximate location of one of 142 homicides that occurred in the City of London in the first half of the 14th century. Click on a pin to read the story behind the event." One can filter by gender of victim, private or public location, year, weapon and ward, and switch between two maps of different dates. There are statistics by gender, occupation, day of the week, social space etc. There is a video about the project, and media coverage when this was published in 2018 included articles in the Guardian and the Smithsonian magazine.
posted by paduasoy (10 comments total)

I was wondering about that too Hippybear - looks like the violence level is stated as around 20/100k residents. (keeping in mind this is just the city proper)

Looking at this study (no clue on it's validity). That would land the medieval city of London in the top 50 of modern American cities.
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:25 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

In the criminal justice system, the crown is represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The Witchfinders, who investigate crime, and the Scalemasters, who weigh the offenders against the towne bible. These are their stories.

Dun Dun!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:48 PM on July 5, 2023 [23 favorites]

So, the actual homocide rate was over twice what was recorded across those 50 years? Because 142 is only around seven homocides a year for 50 years.

They only have the coroners’ rolls from nine different years, so those 142 homicides represent about 16 per year. The average population of London over that period was below 100,000, so the rate per 100,000 inhabitants is higher than 16. (The quoted rate of 20 per 100,000 is based on an estimated population of 80,000.)
posted by mbrubeck at 4:01 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Randomly picking a present-day US city with around the same number of people, I found that Bismark, North Dakota (pop. 73,622) had only 15 total homicides reported over the last nine years, making it 90% less murdery than fourteenth-century London. Source: crimestats.nd.gov.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:41 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

The new map is based on coroners’ rolls from the time, for which copies covering nine separate years between 1300 and 1340 survive. “Neither before nor afterwards are there records that describe violent events in such detail,” said Eisner, adding that the coroners recorded unnatural deaths ranging from suicides to murders and unfortunate accidents.

The paucity of later records presumably due to the arrival eight years later, in 1348, of a wave of the plague which wiped out ~30% of the population of the entire country? And probably quite a bit more than that in London?

I wonder what lesson that carries for us today.
posted by jamjam at 5:52 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's something very Alan-Mooreish about this (cf. From Hell). Top marks to whomever can find five homicides on a certain theme that form a pentagram.

Also, picked out this tidbit of info: "Several homicide cases in 14th century London involve law students." Hmm... that shows promise for the pentagram.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:51 PM on July 5, 2023

This is definitely relevant to my interests...I enjoy these sorts of data visualizations, especially the way this one makes it easy and interesting to get the narratives from the various pins. Thanks for posting about it!
posted by theatro at 7:35 AM on July 6, 2023

I’d watch every episode of Cold Case: Medieval London.
posted by notyou at 11:11 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

notyou - there was History Cold Case with Sue Black in 2010, in case you missed it.
posted by paduasoy at 1:59 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: [btw, this post has been added to the sidebar]
posted by taz (staff) at 3:42 AM on July 8, 2023