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Public Order and State Violence: A View from Tenth-Century England

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Lambert, Tom 

Abstract

The corpus of law texts surviving from tenth-century England reveals a society that sought to maintain public order without anything resembling a police force. Rather than envisioning order as the product of state coercion, the kingdom’s upper-elite legislators understood society to attend to its own ordering on a local scale through a mix of individual action and communal self-regulation. This tenth-century idealized legal order is unlikely to hold much appeal today; it combined alarmingly libertarian assumptions about the legitimacy of lethal male violence with a harshly punitive communitarian approach to theft, involving both routinized execution and theft-prevention measures that intruded heavily on the lives of the ordinary people. Yet there is much to suggest that this vision of order was rarely realized: that communal control meant this culture’s cruel fantasies of retributive justice often ended up yielding in the face of the more humane sentiments embedded in local interpersonal networks.

Description

Keywords

4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Journal Title

Radical History Review

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0163-6545
1534-1453

Volume Title

137

Publisher

Duke University Press

Rights

All rights reserved