Public Order and State Violence: A View from Tenth-Century England
Accepted version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
Authors
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
Journal Title
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1534-1453