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

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.