Anger and the Common Law

Within the Anglo-American common law tradition, anger-fueled homicides have long been treated distinctly from comparatively cold-blooded, premeditated killings. Although felonious homicide was a monolithic category in medieval England, with no formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, jurors in actuality exercised great discretion in sorting the innocent from the guilty and the irredeemably guilty from the pardonable. By the early sixteenth century, the common law would differentiate between murder and manslaughter.Footnote ⁶ Relatedly, provocation, which took clear doctrinal shape in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, has historically provided for the mitigation of murder to manslaughter in instances in which a person exercised excessive force in response to an insult or affront to honor. In the classical form of the doctrine, the presence of justified anger could save a killer from the gallows. Jeremy Horder, in his pathbreaking study of the provocation doctrine's origins, argues that it would be wrong to assume that provocation did not have an important impact on medieval ideas of criminal responsibility, even if the concept had not yet taken doctrinal shape.Footnote ⁷ Here, I argue that the notion of provocation as an excusing condition was not yet carved into the medieval common law tradition, a point with which Horder would likely agree. Unlike Horder, I also contend that the path toward later doctrinal developments may have been circuitous rather than straight because of complicated and conflicting understandings of anger in medieval England. Moreover, this doctrinal delay may be caused partly by the fact that anger was a factor left to juries to sort out, not explicitly treated as part of the formal law.Footnote ⁸

Although provocation has deep legal roots, the historian hoping to locate vestiges of the doctrine in the more distant common law past strikes clay upon reaching the time period at issue in this article: in thirteenth and fourteenth century England, the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury, anger was treated in a remarkably different way. Although the tale of Alan la Zouche and John de Warenne does employ the concept of suddenly kindled anger, reminiscent of the later provocation doctrine, it stands out as a remarkable story in part because it relies upon an excuse that was not being employed in run-of-the-mill felony cases. Typically, individuals seeking pardon might argue that they had killed to save their own life, but not that they had killed in a heated response to a grave provocation, even if such conditions did perhaps underlie some claims of self-defense.Footnote ⁹ At least these are the narratives that have come down to us today, reflecting the words chosen by scribes and probably—but not necessarily—the words (translated into Latin) used by defendants and juries in relaying the facts of a case. To admit to anger, perhaps even justified anger, could place a pardon-seeker's petition in jeopardy. Anger was, in fact, closely associated with the very concept of felony. In describing the quintessential, felonious homicide and distinguishing it from a chance or accidental death, the author of the early thirteenth century treatise Bracton defined such a killing as undertaken “[b]y intention (voluntate), as where one in anger or hatred (ira vel odio) or for the sake of gain, deliberately and in premeditated assault, has killed another wickedly and feloniously and in breach of the king's peace.”Footnote ¹⁰ This juxtaposition of misadventure or accident with an anger-inspired attack appears in trial records as well.Footnote ¹¹ Anger, particularly of the premeditated variety described by Bracton, was often presumptively inculpatory rather than exculpatory or mitigating, and to understand why requires an exploration of the significance of anger in medieval English religious and popular culture.

This article examines the connection between anger and homicide in thirteenth and fourteenth century England. It draws upon formulaic references to anger within legal records, as well as upon the characterization of the emotion in literary and religious sources, such as the chronicle tale of the earl of Warenne relayed at the outset. The legal record, terse by nature, offers comparatively limited insight into the role played by anger in jury decision making. By highlighting the treatment of anger in religious texts, and finding parallels in popular literary sources, this article provides a window into cultural understandings of anger in the period, understandings that influenced how jurors reached verdicts in felony homicide cases. For reasons to be explored subsequently, I will focus more on the range of understandings of anger open to medieval English jurors than on the actual disposition of cases with anger as a prominent part of the fact pattern. Because anger was not explicitly treated in the formal law in this period, as it would be later after manslaughter became a distinct category, it would be misleading to speak of certainties rather than possibilities in parsing anger's role in medieval English felony cases. Juror discretion in interpreting and applying a blunt formal law of felony must be borne in mind, and this article aims accordingly to illuminate the cultural and societal factors that informed the exercise of that discretion.

The State of the Law of Felony in Medieval England

No black-letter law explicitly defined felony in medieval England, although the category was generally understood to encompass such crimes as homicide, theft, arson, and rape. Felonious homicide was a catch-all category, with no formal distinction drawn between murder and manslaughter.Footnote ¹² In general, jurors faced with a felony defendant had three options: they could convict, in which case the defendant proceeded to the gallows and forfeited his or her movable and real property; acquit, in which case the defendant walked free; or rely on self-defense or some other grounds for placing the defendant on the path to a royal pardon, a path that began with forfeiture of chattels and a trip back to gaol—that is, the local jail—to await a response on the granting of a pardon. No statutes enumerated the general or special parts of the criminal law; however, patterns can be traced through the surviving legal records to deduce the general outline of the meaning of felony during this formative period of the common law of crime. As I have described in earlier work, the medieval English concept of felony connoted a serious crime—most frequently homicide or theft—involving deliberation and forethought, an exercise of a person's reason and volition in the absence of necessity, and some measure of moral blameworthiness or even evil.Footnote ¹³ In the absence of one or more of these factors, jurors might either acquit a person of felony or, where responsibility for the wrongful act itself was not in doubt, provide grounds upon which the justices might remand the individual to gaol to await the king's pardon.Footnote ¹⁴ Anger, which could hamper an individual's capacity to reason but might also reveal pre-existing moral failing, complicated jurors' efforts to determine the boundaries of felonious behavior by pushing in either inculpatory or exculpatory directions depending upon the circumstances of an alleged crime. When alluded to directly in the legal record, anger was most often used to clarify the circumstances in which a homicide occurred, and, in self-defense cases, to inculpate the deceased in order to justify a pardon for the killer who acted in self-defense.

Anger was a complex passion in the medieval English and continental European imaginary.Footnote ¹⁵ On the one hand, anger was understood to be a mark of poor character formation, particularly when a person, such as John de Warenne in this article's opening story, exhibited a habitual predilection toward it. This could potentially increase the felonious nature of an anger-driven offense. On the other hand, medieval authors described the effects of extreme anger as hindering a person's ability to think rationally and act sanely. This pushed in the direction of exculpation, just as children and the insane were not seen to be entirely responsible for their harmful actions. For example, although John de Warenne had a reputation for anger management problems, he also relied on sudden anger in his effort to mitigate his responsibility in the attack upon Alan la Zouche. Anger presented some of the same complexities as drunkenness, which could also aggravate or alleviate the culpability of an actor according to contemporary theological understandings.Footnote ¹⁶ Jurors were in the unenviable position of having to weigh these possibilities, balancing such competing issues as prior character formation, innate temperamental idiosyncracies, and reasonable responses to provocative circumstances, all within the context of a felony adjudication system in which trials were swift and defendants had no legal counsel. It is perhaps because of the ambiguities of medieval understandings of anger that English felony law would not carve out an explicit doctrine of provocation until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷

By focusing on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this article explores the confluence of anger and violence after the heyday of the blood feud (loosely speaking, the tenth through the twelfth centuries) in medieval England and before the development of manslaughter as a distinct doctrinal category.Footnote ¹⁸ According to a blood feud paradigm, an affront to honor might inspire righteous anger and a calculated reprisal carried out by means of self help, as opposed to through the operation of the law courts.Footnote ¹⁹ With the centralization of felony pleas under the aegis of the crown, particularly after the Assize of Clarendon (1166), the common law of crime was consciously crafted to exclude from overt consideration the factors of anger and honor that had driven, and continued to drive, feuding behavior. Of course, with the expansion of the use of lay juries in felony procedure, including the adoption of trial juries after 1215, some matters downplayed by the formal law came in through the back door as jurors employed their own sensibilities in sorting the guilty from the innocent. Ultimately, the common law would adapt to reflect the jury's informal sorting of cases, with a distinction eventually drawn between manslaughter and murder by the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Provocation doctrine, with its stylized emphasis on anger as loss of control, played a part in this doctrinal transformation, although the doctrine's acceptance of anger as a justified response to an affront reflected a break from a pre-Reformation tendency, vigorously encouraged by church authorities, to condemn anger as a vice rather than accommodate it as a natural and perhaps even virtuous response. Whereas God the Father might have exercised righteous anger in the Hebrew scriptures, and Jesus exercised it as well in throwing the money changers out of the temple in the famous gospel narrative,Footnote ²¹ the average person was on warning that the indulgence of anger by mere mortals could be a risky pursuit.

In considering these issues, this article also participates in a broader dialogue on the history of emotion, which historians have come to recognize as a meaningful subject for historical study.Footnote ²² To date, historians of emotion working on medieval England have tended to focus on anger as it pertains to depictions of the higher orders.Footnote ²³ Scholars such as Naomi Hurnard and Helen Lacey have studied the use of the king's pardon power, focusing primarily on pre-fourteenth century individual pardons in the case of Hurnard, and on fourteenth century individual and general pardons in the case of Lacey.Footnote ²⁴ My intervention is to undertake a close analysis of the language of anger as it appears in legal records, while also bringing insights from nonlegal cultural texts—literary and religious, categories that admittedly overlap—to bear upon otherwise ambiguous legal evidence, to illuminate the vernacular legal imaginary of medieval English jurors tasked with distinguishing excusable anger from condemnable irascibility and hatred.

A Brief Word About Sources

The tale of the fatal scuffle between the men of John de Warenne and those of Alan la Zouche appears in a monastic chronicle; however, the more typical homicide cases come from official records kept for administrative purposes, records that are comparatively brief in their discussion of the underlying facts. The two primary types of legal record referenced throughout are coroners' rolls and plea rolls. The richest homicide narratives often appear in the rolls of the coroner, the royal official summoned immediately when a body was discovered under circumstances that gave rise to a suspicion of homicide or suicide. Technically a servant of the king, the coroner was also a local man of some prominence within the affected community.Footnote ²⁵ Once summoned, the coroner, in turn, aided typically by a bailiff, gathered a jury or inquest of men from the neighboring rural vills or urban wards. Such jurors were well positioned to know the parties involved or, at the very least, to have the local connections necessary to access information about the incident in question. The inquest jurors assisted the coroner in examining the corpse, measuring any wounds, and determining to the best of their ability the likely cause of death. Neighbors and the first finder (i.e., the first person to have found the deceased) were also called to appear before the coroner's inquest, presumably to share any knowledge that they had about the death and, if necessary, to offer an alibi. The end result was a narrative produced by the inquest describing all that was known about the circumstances leading up to and proceeding from the alleged homicide. A scribe, trained in the secretarial hand of the common law courts, recorded this narrative on a parchment membrane, the coroner's roll, which was kept by the coroner to be produced when the king's justices arrived to try cases within the locality. As a pretrial record, the coroner's roll did not offer any verdicts. However, inquest jurors often used pointed language—admittedly transmitted and possibly redacted by scribes—presumably to signal to potential future trial jurors their sense of how the case should be resolved.Footnote ²⁶

Plea rolls, the second category of legal record referenced here, provide further evidence of the kinds of formulaic phrases relied upon by scribes tasked with describing fact patterns involving the operation of underlying anger, hatred, or wrath. These rolls relay what occurred at trial, usually at gaol delivery or an eyre. Gaol delivery occurred when royal justices came to town to empty a gaol of any prisoners awaiting trial, either releasing them, remanding them to gaol to await a royal pardon, or sending them to the gallows. An eyre was similarly a judicial visitation by royal justices, but in this instance to hear civil as well as criminal pleas. These trial records typically do not offer as rich a narrative as coroners' rolls, in part because in cases of homicide the coroner's roll itself was physically produced in court, obviating the need to record such a narrative again. Furthermore, these records were primarily kept for administrative purposes, most notably to record any fines or forfeitures of property. What plea rolls do offer, in some instances, is a verdict of guilt, acquittal, or recommendation of pardon. Unfortunately, verdicts are not always available even in these records, because of a multitude of circumstances, most notably the fact that many alleged felons fled the locality to avoid trial. Furthermore, in most instances, it is impossible to match the richer pretrial narratives of coroners' rolls with corresponding trial records because of the spotty survival of medieval rolls. As a result, what often remains are rich narratives lacking verdicts, combined with verdicts lacking informative narratives. Historians can be grateful that medieval English legal records survive in abundance, even if they do provide challenges in exegesis.

Moreover, the terminology of anger found in the legal record can be placed in conversation with discussions of anger in theological, pastoral, and literary texts to build a more comprehensive picture of jurors' understandings of the emotion and its implications for a defendant's guilt or innocence. This methodological approach is based on my conviction that the legal historian must necessarily look beyond the legal record to understand juror mindsets, which were never the priority of medieval legal scribes tasked with producing a pithy administrative record. It bears noting that some of the genres to be explored subsequently in this article would have been far beyond the reach of the average medieval English juror. To take one example, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica was not likely to have been read by any jurors, many of whom were incapable of reading even in the vernacular. However, Aquinas's writings directly influenced the authors of manuals for parish priests,Footnote ²⁷ who in turn transmitted ideas to the laity. Jurors, counting themselves among the post-Lateran IV faithful, were likely to gain exposure to ideas regarding anger both by listening to sermons and by participating in confession.

The penetration of a common corpus of ideas about anger through a wide-ranging hierarchy of literature, from the elevated Latin of Aquinas, to the less sophisticated Latin of sermon exempla, to the Anglo-Norman French of elite literary texts, to the more humble English vernacular of manuals for similarly humble parish priests, provides further evidence of a shared and multifaceted cultural understanding of the nature of emotion. Moreover, despite relatively low literacy rates, ideas circulated within families and among neighbors, both through stories shared around the hearth, as well as through instances in which those who could read read to those who could not. This article will typically begin with examples from the more elite literature and place such examples in comparison with less elite texts. It will highlight a remarkable consistency in the approach to anger in elite and non-elite texts alike, suggesting that these sources can offer insight into jury mindsets on issues about which the plea rolls are doggedly silent. Peering beyond the legal record enables the legal historian to hypothesize about many of the mysteries yet unsolved behind the early common law system of felony adjudication, with its surprisingly high acquittal rate, reliance upon escape valves such as abjuration and benefit of clergy, and lack of statutory development. Using a single emotion as a lens, this article will help illuminate the development of felony law in the first centuries of the criminal trial jury, long before the doctrine of provocation or even the category of manslaughter took formal shape.

The Language of Anger

As with my recent work on felony, some discussion of word meanings will help clarify the use of emotion words that may carry a different valence today.Footnote ²⁸ At times, this article interchanges such words as ire, wrath, anger, and even hatred. This reflects the use of these terms in the primary sources, which sometimes conflated, or at least treated as intimately related, these varied emotions. When the sources allow me to distinguish among them, I do so, remaining faithful to the text whenever possible. Aquinas, for example, treated anger and hatred as two very distinct passions; whereas the former might be ennobling and rightful, the latter was entirely condemned.Footnote ²⁹ John Gower, in his vernacular writings, crafted a virtual taxonomy of anger-related words.Footnote ³⁰ The semantic range of legal records is at times comparably simple, with the use of formulaic words and phrasings, as will be explored further.

In Middle English, “ire” signified anger or wrath, or alternatively a jealous rage or even the wrath of God; it might also refer specifically to a fit of anger or anger's personification, a common trope in prescriptive literature.Footnote ³¹ These meanings tracked closely with the use of “ira” in Latin, which might refer to anger, rage, or indignation, as well as righteous anger or the wrath of God; it might also denote the physical effect of anger, or choler, and a grudge or resentment.Footnote ³² In Anglo-Norman French—one of medieval England's three primary languages alongside English and Latin—anger or wrath were also typically signified by the word “ire.”Footnote ³³

The Middle English “wrath,” a word of Germanic origin, was closely related to ire, insofar as texts might refer to Judgment Day as the “dai of ire” (the vernacular form of dies irae) or the “dai of wrath,” or might signify sinful persons as either “children of ire” or “children of wrath.”Footnote ³⁴ “Anger,” which had Old Norse rather than Latinate roots, carried a somewhat different valence of meaning, possibly referring to distress or agony, including the anguish of love, a meaning no longer in use today, but also referring to a generally hostile attitude or surliness, resentment, rage, wrath, or a fit of anger.Footnote ³⁵ Although similarly having its own distinct range of meaning, the Middle English “hate” (or “haine” in Anglo-Norman French and “odium” in Latin) often appeared in vernacular discussions of the sins related to ire, anger, and wrath. The Middle English Dictionary defines “hate” as the emotion of extreme anger or the deadly sin of wrath, whereas the Anglo-Norman Dictionary includes hatred and malice among the definitions of “haine.”Footnote ³⁶ Finally, the Latin “rixa,” sometimes used to refer to women, connoted a particular type of noisy and potentially violent anger or brawling.Footnote ³⁷ In other words, medieval England had overlapping semantic fields with regard to the issue of anger.

This is true in literature, and it is also true in legal records. The medieval English common law made no explicit concession to anger or any other emotion in denoting the bounds of felony, with the possible exception of fear, which was often operative in self-defense narratives in order to excuse the defendant's homicidal actions. As noted, the modern distinction between murder and manslaughter, often described colloquially as killing in cold versus hot blood, had no formal place in medieval English law, which treated all felonious homicides and other felonies as capital crimes.Footnote ³⁸ Nevertheless, anger mattered, insofar as parchment-conserving scribes bothered to highlight, in subtle ways and in formulaic phrasing, the operation of heated emotion in homicide cases.Footnote ³⁹ Rather than simply noting that one individual had fatally struck another, the plea rolls frequently specify that the perpetrator and victim had been fighting together (e.g., litigaverunt adinvicem), or that a dispute had arisen suddenly (e.g., mota contentione). In other instances, a scribe might allude to the presence of ancient hatred (i.e., antiqui odii) between two people. Such phrases served no overt technical purpose, not being required to establish jurisdiction or otherwise perfect an indictment or private action. Nevertheless, they were conventional, insofar as one can find these same phrases employed across temporally and geographically diverse plea rolls. The phrases may not easily be matched with patterns of verdict outcomes. This is not to suggest that the phrases were interchangeable, but rather reflects the frustratingly incomplete nature of the plea roll evidence, analysis of which is complicated by the manifold factors that make a simple accusation-verdict calculus nearly impossible: as noted, felony suspects often fled before they could be arrested, preliminary accusations made by coroners' inquests or juries of presentment can seldom be matched with later verdicts, and records of verdicts do not always indicate the circumstances of the underlying felony accusation. Some of the discussion to follow will therefore necessarily involve ambiguity as to the resolution of particular anger-driven homicide cases.

Cultural Understandings of Anger in Medieval England

“Dies irae dies illa, dies tribulationis et angustiae, dies calamitatis et miseriae…”Footnote ⁴⁰ A day of wrath, of tribulation and anguish, of calamity and misery—such was the day of judgment seen to await all medieval English men and women at the end of earthly time. This day of sorting, of winnowing the chaff, of separating the sheep from the goats—the day when all creation would awaken to respond to the ultimate Judge—this day was identified as a time of God's anger and wrath.Footnote ⁴¹ Anger was allied with justice and right judgment, albeit a righteousness to be feared even by the contrite: as a thirteenth century Franciscan poet would exclaim: “How much trembling there will be, when the Judge shall come, striking down all severely!”Footnote ⁴²

Anger played a central role in medieval understandings of divine judgment. Its role in earthly judgment was less clear, particularly when it was the anger of the judged, as opposed to the judge, that was at issue. A prominent Stoical strain in medieval thought, also rooted firmly in scripture,Footnote ⁴³ warned against the dangers of extreme emotion: “If you in ire a man hate, and that wrath will not abate,” cautioned English monk and chronicler Robert Mannyng in an early fourteenth century penitential manual, “grievously you are in sin, unless you forgive, and thereof blinn.”Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Mannyng, nurturing wrath or hatred placed an individual at risk of being escorted metaphorically to hell by ire, “the devil's daughter of hell fire.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Long-held wrath increased in severity with the passage of time. Left unabated, it would lead a person to the “ghostly” or spiritual slaying of the object of hatred, a curious phrase that suggests that wrath might be a grave sin even when not acted upon.Footnote ⁴⁶

Ghostly homicide was one thing, bodily homicide another. As medieval English coroner and plea roll evidence testifies, anger did spill over into the physical world, spurring violence and even homicide. A perpetrator of an anger-fueled act, if caught, faced an earthly judgment day that might soberly remind the defendant of the dies irae yet to come. Brought to trial, the defendant faced a jury of peers tasked with weighing the evidence and issuing a verdict. Such jurors brought with them an understanding of the nature of anger and its corollaries—hatred or wrath—that influenced how they approached the judging process.

Even before Lateran IV, which inspired an outburst of penitential texts geared at assisting parish priests with confessions, English scholars were writing about such issues thanks in part to the efforts of reform-minded bishops such as Richard Poore. In his Liber poenitentialis (1208–13), written at Poore's suggestion a decade or two before Aquinas' birth, Robert of Flamborough devoted considerable space to the anger-related prompts that a priest might employ to elicit a full confession.Footnote ⁴⁷ Beginning with the simple question, “Do you labor under ire?” (Ira laborasti?), the priest was urged to list the various forms ire might take, including impatience, blasphemy, rashness, rage, and shouting. John Mirk, writing his vernacular Instructions for Parish Priests in the late fourteenth century, also detailed the many-faceted nature of ire in his sample questions to be posed by priest to penitent.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mirk highlighted ire's ability to transform a neutral act into an evil one, such that firesetting would become arson, for example; its close correlation with witlessness or inability to reason; its location within the heart; and its tendency to bring harm to others, resulting in part from its location on a slippery slope leading to homicide. Through questions such as those posed by Flamborough and Mirk, thirteenth and fourteenth century confessors were trained to tease out anger's manifold manifestations in human thought and behavior, and in doing so taught penitents—jurors among them—how to recognize anger in their own person and in relationships with others.

This article opened with a 1270 case involving two elite men, John de Warenne and Alan la Zouche. The status of the two men helps explain the lengthy narrative treatment the incident received in a contemporary monastic chronicle. Rarely does the medieval English legal historian strike such narrative gold with regard to ordinary men; however, every once in a while, a scribe took the time to tell a story that was perhaps too colorful to resist. The tragic encounter of John Oakes and Hugh de Weston was one such tale.Footnote ⁴⁹ After sunset on Christmas Day in 1287, a group of carolers gathered to sing in front of a tavern. A chaplain (capellanus) named Hugh de Weston, presumably in minor orders, happened to pass by the inn while the singers were engaged in revelry. Extremely drunk (immense… inebriatus), but apparently not in the Christmas spirit, Hugh quarreled with the singers. While arguing, he noticed among their number a familiar face, that of John Oakes, who lived in the locality. According to the jurors, Hugh had hated John for some time out of what appears to have been pure jealousy: John was not only a good singer, but also apparently a competitor for the affections of the same women as Hugh.Footnote ⁵⁰ The jurors described the resulting altercation as follows: Hugh grabbed an unsheathed sword and ran toward John, striking him three times on the head and also nearly severing two fingers from his left hand. John, kneeling and with hands uplifted, implored Hugh to respect the peace of God and the king. His desperate petition having failed, John rose from the ground and ran until he reached a corner, at which point he took out a knife to defend himself. When Hugh continued to race toward John, wishing to kill him (voluit ipsum occidisse), John finally struck his assailant fatally in the chest. A jury of twelve men, through whose testimony this narrative survives, were tasked with determining whether John had killed Hugh “in self-defense… or in felony or malice aforethought” (se defendendo…an per feloniam aut maliciam excogitatam). Under oath, the jurors swore that John had acted in self-defense. In cases such as this one, self-defense appears to be understood as a reasonable and presumptively pardonable response to another individual's lethal rage.

English felony law had no simple answer as to how the factor of anger should affect trial outcomes, leaving this matter largely to jury discretion. Here, the deceased's jealousy-fueled anger gave the jury reason to believe that the defendant had engaged in pardonable self-defense as a last resort against a raging rival. The narrative offers no hint of anger—righteous or otherwise—on the part of the self-defending singer. In contrast to the later development of provocation doctrine, with its tidy reliance on a mitigating notion of anger as “loss of self control,” medieval understandings of anger reflected complexity and contradiction, making assessments of anger-fueled homicidal actions dependent upon the jury's interpretation of the circumstantial facts surrounding the defendant and the deceased both as individuals and in relationship with each other. In Hugh de Weston's case, anger did give rise to a loss of self-control in the form of a murderous assault on a rival, but without any preceding sufficient provocation, to borrow later terminology, on the part of John Oakes that might perhaps otherwise, in the jury's estimation, have justified Hugh's outburst. However, Hugh's anger would not have been excusable even if he had been gravely provoked by John; rather, nothing short of mortal peril would justify Hugh's vicious assault on John under the formal medieval English law of felony. Whereas felony law made explicit concessions in cases involving insanity, infancy, and self-defense, it made no comparable exceptions for anger. Individuals petitioning the king for a pardon, for example, might rely on a claim of self-defense, but not on righteous anger in response to a provocation.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet anger mattered, as indicated by scribes' frequent use of formulaic phrases to point to its operation in homicide fact patterns. Given the ubiquity of these phrases in the plea rolls, anger appears to have operated quietly in the background of jury determinations of guilt and innocence in a large number of cases. An exploration of the treatment of anger in nonlegal sources helps to explain why anger mattered, and why felony law offered no simple answers as to its impact on verdicts, largely leaving the issue to jury discretion. The following sections will treat the issues of anger's relationship with reason, habit, and temperament to demonstrate the complex ways in which the emotion was understood in medieval England.

Anger's Relationship with Reason

Under the medieval English common law, pardons based on a defendant's insanity or infancy rested in part upon recognition that the individual was lacking full capacity to reason.Footnote ⁵² One might expect anger to operate similarly, such that a jury might be inclined toward leniency if the angered individual was not fully capable of rational decision making. According to Aquinas, it was a passion's subjection to the command of reason and volition that made it classifiable as morally good or evil.Footnote ⁵³ Aquinas drew upon Aristotelian ideas when he argued, “anger listens to reason somewhat.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As a “desire for vengeance,” anger involved “a comparison between the punishment to be inflicted and the hurt done.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This required an inference, which itself was “an act of reason.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Seneca, whose Stoical ideas continued to carry weight in medieval England,Footnote ⁵⁷ anger's relationship to reason and volition ruled out the possibility of excusing anger-inspired actions based on a theory such as heat of passion.Footnote ⁵⁸ Aquinas took a less strictly Stoical view of anger. Aristotle's qualification, that is, that anger listens somewhat to reason, was attributed by Aquinas to the fact that reason “listens not perfectly” in determining the “measure of vengeance.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Elsewhere Aquinas elaborated: “The beginning of anger is in the reason… but the passion of anger forestalls the perfect judgment of reason” because of “the commotion of the heat urging to instant action.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In the heat of the moment, Aquinas observed, “anger withdraws the light of understanding, while by agitating it troubles the mind.”Footnote ⁶¹ An angered person might lash out openly, rather than trying to hide.Footnote ⁶² Anger, therefore, might negate the planning, lying in wait, and other insidious characteristics of premeditation that we associate today with murder rather than manslaughter.

Aquinas's observations about anger—that it listens somewhat to reason, but can, in the heat of passion, result in a defect of understanding—are paralleled in other Latin sources of English origin. Theologian Thomas de Chobham, for example, in discussing righteous anger (ira per zelum), observed that Jesus never suffered loss of reason caused by anger, but that people in general might find themselves disturbed in their reasoning capacity because of the fragility of the flesh and the disturbance that was born from gall (nascuntur ex felle), thereby drawing a connection between anger-inspired irrationality and the bitterness of gall or fellness.Footnote ⁶³

This connection between anger and unreason may also be found in vernacular sources, which in some instances present a more extreme view of anger's crippling effects in comparison with the more Stoical views of Aquinas. For example, vernacular texts sometimes used the metaphor of insanity to characterize an enraged actor. The early thirteenth century Ancrene Wisse employed the analogy of madness (wodschipe) to describe anger.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such madness might take the form of illogically destructive acts, as evidenced by the literary trope of the enraged man who destroyed his household goods, such as drinking vessels, pots, and pans, and then moved on to beat his spouse, children, and servants, a theme that may even be found in Latin penitential sources.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a vernacular book of vices and virtues, the author warned about men who, mad (wod) with anger, might “smite and beat his wife, his children, his servants, and break pots, cups, and dishes, and all that he may set hand on, as a man who was out of his wit.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In a strikingly visual passage, the Ancrene Wisse urged anchoresses (women living a contemplative life) to be “softe ant milde” of heart, employing the imagery of the pelican to describe a wrathful anchoress.Footnote ⁶⁷ Not unlike a man trashing his household, the wrathful anchoress might be “so wrathful as to slay her own birds.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Even contemplatives were not immune to anger's turbulence. In the fourteenth century Speculum Christiani, the author cited St. Jerome for the idea that wrath greatly troubled the mind and gave the appearance of insanity or madness.Footnote ⁶⁹ And English poet John Gower, writing allegorically in French about Ire's daughters, described how ire, bubbling in one's thoughts like a fountain, might hamper the normal operation of reason, in some instances making a person boldly inclined to combat.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ire's fourth daughter, Discord (Contek), described a stage of ire in which the individual no longer could engage with his or her reason to determine the appropriate level of response to a perceived or real affront.

In medieval English legal records, certain phrases seem to connote anger suddenly kindled, as compared with the long-standing anger or hatred associated with premeditated homicide. One of the most common anger-related phrases employed by medieval English scribes was that of “an argument arising between” two individuals, usually involving some form of “mota contentione” or “mota lite,” with “orta” sometimes replacing “mota.”Footnote ⁷¹ One coroner's roll entry from 1336, for example, records that an argument had arisen (contencione mota) between two men, William son of William MuschetFootnote ⁷² and Thomas Holebrok, at a tavern. William struck Thomas with his hand, throwing him to the ground. Thomas, standing back up, took out his knife and issued a fatal wound to William, killing him feloniously (felonice).Footnote ⁷³ Thomas fled but was soon captured.

The coroner's inquest narrative, being a pretrial record, fails to satisfy our curiosity as to Thomas's fate. Nevertheless, some tentative conclusions present themselves. For example, it appears that William and Thomas had been drinking together before the argument arose, a common scenario in the coroners' rolls;Footnote ⁷⁴ alcohol may have fueled the conflict. If the narrative reflects reality, William struck Thomas with his hand alone, although the blow must have been severe enough to leave Thomas on the floor. It is also known that Thomas responded with a knife. Based on other cases, one can speculate that, barring a rewrite of the altercation between William and Thomas (i.e., changing the narrative to place Thomas' life more immediately at risk),Footnote ⁷⁵ Thomas would have failed if he tried to plead self-defense. Typically the use of disproportionate force, such as wielding a knife in response to a punch, would have been fatal to a self-defense plea.Footnote ⁷⁶

One might also speculate that the reference to “contencione mota” signaled something of import to a potential future trial jury. What may appear to be boilerplate could be an aide-mémoire, helping jurors and court officials to remember exactly which homicide they were discussing if a trial followed months or even years after the initial coroner's report. For one thing, the phrase ruled out the possibility of a premeditated homicide, which was further reinforced by the fact that the deceased struck first, and that the killer, Thomas, drew his knife only after having been pushed to the ground. Furthermore, although we know the men had likely been drinking together, and that such behavior lent itself to surges of emotion, there was something of the element of chance or the unexpected encapsulated in the word “mota,” a passive form of the verb movere, to move, set in motion, or disturb.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rather than saying William started an argument with Thomas, or vice versa, the choice of phrasing suggested that the commotion had arisen suddenly, as if of its own accord, leaving the assignment of blame more ambiguous.Footnote ⁷⁸

In some instances, this phrasing appears in fact patterns involving chance encounters on the road, suggesting that what one might be seeing with this particular scribal choice of words is the antecedent of the later common law category of “chance medley.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Writing in the eighteenth century, William Blackstone would describe chance medley as a species of self-defense “whereby a man may protect himself from an assault, or the like, in the course of a sudden brawl or quarrel, by killing him who assaults him.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Blackstone explained that what some call “chance-medley,” others refer to as “chaud-medley,” signifying in the former instance a “casual affray,” and in the latter “an affray in the heat of blood or passion.”Footnote ⁸¹ The fact pattern surrounding William Muschet's death might fit within the latter chance medley category.

To return to Thomas Holebrok, the alleged felon, a search of the contemporary Cambridgeshire gaol delivery rolls yields a few clues as to his fate. We know he spent time in the Cambridgeshire gaol. The first entry I have located indicates that he was arrested for the death of William, who is described in the gaol delivery roll as having been killed feloniously (felonice interfecti).Footnote ⁸² The roll also records that Thomas was indicted before the coroner and was led into the presence of the royal justices of gaol delivery by the sheriff. However, because the coroner's roll allegedly indicated neither the year nor the day of the alleged felony, a curious accusation in light of the thoroughgoing nature of the surviving coroner's roll, the coroner was ordered to inquire into the full truth (plenius veritatem) before the next session of gaol delivery.Footnote ⁸³ Thomas appears to have been remanded to gaol in the meanwhile, but unfortunately the next entry regarding his case is close to illegible, leaving ambigous whether he faced the gallows or perhaps secured a pardon instead.Footnote ⁸⁴

In other instances, a spontaneous mota contentione or mota lite fact pattern led undeniably to the gallows for the person who killed in the heat of a dispute. For example, it was reported at the 1268 Wiltshire Eyre that one Philip of Whaddon had been hanged before the justices of gaol delivery for killing Robert son of Martin with a knife to the chest after the two men fell to arguing upon leaving the house of Ralph Seman, where the two were at tavern.Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly, at the same eyre, John Martin of Draycot was hanged for killing his brother Walter after a dispute arose between them and a third brother named William as the three left a tavern together.Footnote ⁸⁶ Compounding John's guilt was his craftiness in pretending to have stumbled upon Walter's lifeless body as an innocent first finder. The complicity of the third brother, William, was unclear, but he was outlawed at the eyre for taking flight in the homicide's aftermath. Also at this eyre, a jury reported that Laurence, the Chaplain of Bristol had been killed by his servant, Adam, after a dispute arose between them while they were lodging in the house of John le Croy in Wilton. Perhaps the close quarters of their shared chamber exacerbated matters; however, it clearly did not excuse Adam's axe blow to his master's head. Given the master–servant relationship between the two men, the anger-inspired killing was not remedied by a trip to the gallows alone. Rather, Adam was drawn first prior to being hanged.Footnote ⁸⁷ These cases illustrate that homicides arising out of sudden quarrels were taken seriously by jurors, who sent some killers to the gallows under those circumstances. It is possible that a close reading of any given case might reveal what tipped the balance in favor of conviction. For example, in the first two of the three Wiltshire cases, the defendant fatally stabbed his victim, with no indication on the record that the victim had wielded a weapon as well. In the third case, both the brutality of an axe blow to the head and the underlying master–servant relationship may have forestalled any possibility of jury sympathy for a heat-of-passion killing. What can be stated with certainty is that homicides arising out of sudden quarrels were not presumptively excusable and may indeed have been presumptively condemnable unless the killer could persuasively claim self-defense.

Some defendants managed to rebut this presumption. In her study of the royal pardon, Naomi Hurnard observed that when pardons were secured in cases of slaying mota contentione but without reference to self-defense, it was typically with the assistance of a patron. “Thus help was secured in a very high proportion” of these cases, Hurnard concludes, “and this suggests that there was real need for it.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Hurnard argues that the claim of an excusable slaying might be plausible, but that it would be unwise to rely on such a claim without outside help.

Hurnard further contends that in cases where it was impossible that a killing resulting from a fight had been in self-defense, juries inclined to acquit might “fall back on the notion of a fortuitous cause—a chance rather than an accident in the modern sense.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Malice aforethought might be downplayed according to Hurnard if the parties were strangers to each other who quarreled over a small matter, thereby ruling out long-standing enmity. On top of that, however, the “man who killed mota contentione needed to be able to show that he had not been the aggressor but a reluctant participant.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Like Hurnard, I am inclined to draw a connection between the later chance medley category and killings resulting from “mota contentione” fact patterns. However, Hurnard emphasizes the importance of the parties being strangers to each other, whereas I would contend that the element of chance was present whether or not the parties knew each other.Footnote ⁹¹ Two acquaintances or friends drinking in a tavern, for example, might have an argument arise suddenly between them, just as two strangers might. What made it a sudden argument and not otherwise was the absence of pre-existing enmity or hatred, not the level of familiarity between the individuals.Footnote ⁹² Anger kindled suddenly, in turn, might result in acts of violence that might have been averted had the aggressor been capable of reasoning with greater equanimity.

Whereas “mota contentione” raised an element of passivity and chance, another common phrase evoked anger in a more active sense. Frequently the verb litigare was used to describe a conflict leading to a homicide. Although the primary meaning of litigare was “to go to law, to litigate,” much as it is today, the verb had a secondary meaning, “to quarrel, argue, dispute.”Footnote ⁹³ One assumed the risk of a felony conviction and hanging when engaging in a fight. This does not mean that medieval English individuals eschewed fighting, but it most certainly did inspire many to flee town or seek sanctuary in a scuffle's aftermath. In fact, in the fifty-nine instances of dispute-related homicide in the 1268 Wiltshire Eyre, flight followed in all but seven cases.Footnote ⁹⁴ To stay behind could be deadly. In some cases employing the language of litigando, the defendant was convicted and sent to the gallows. For example, Richard of Essex was hanged before the justices of gaol delivery in Wiltshire circa 1268 after striking Roger Fresel fatally with a knife to the stomach while the two men were quarreling together (litigaverunt).Footnote ⁹⁵ Similarly, in the 1279 case of William Faber, William was hanged, perhaps summarily, before the eyre justices. According to the record, William and Alan Land had fought together (litigaverunt ad invicem), and Alan died immediately after William struck him on the head with a pickaxe. William was immediately captured and hanged before the justices, and the record notes that he had chattels valued at 21 shillings as well as some landed property.Footnote ⁹⁶

Typically terse, the entry does not reveal the nature of the argument, the existence of pre-existing enmity, or even who instigated the fight. It does give the impression, however, of lopsided and excessive force; it is unusual to read about an attack with a pickaxe, and also somewhat rare for a homicide victim to die on the spot. This might have been perceived as an aggravating factor, insofar as it meant that Alan Land never had an opportunity to receive last rites, thereby dying unconfessed.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although the record tells us relatively little, it does reveal that William held land and would therefore have been known locally prior to the incident. It is not clear whether there had been direct witnesses, or whether perhaps William had confessed. The fact of his hanging suggests that there had been little doubt as to William's culpability. Frequently, in cases involving a homicide preceded by fighting (litigando), just as with other dispute-inspired killings of the mota contentione variety, the alleged perpetrator fled either immediately after the attack or once the victim had died.Footnote ⁹⁸

Although one might speculate that cases invoking litigare might not involve sudden encounters such as those described as mota contentione, no such generalization can safely be made.Footnote ⁹⁹ Both these phrases might be combined to describe a particularly contentious incident. At the 1329–30 Northamptonshire Eyre, for example, Simon Osbern appeared in court in response to an indictment, and the jurors described how Simon had quarreled with the deceased, Nicholas fitz Simon, on the way to a tavern.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A fight ensued (described as litigauerunt ad inuicem et mota contencione inter eos), and Nicholas struck Simon's head with an ashen staff. Although Simon managed to stand and flee, Nicholas pursued him and, as the standard self-defense formula indicates, intended to kill him (ad ipsum Simonem interficiendum si potuisset). Caught between two houses with no means of escape, Simon struck back at Nicholas with a small pole-axe, killing him on the spot. The jurors were clear in indicating that Simon acted to save his life, and not in felony or malice aforethought (non per feloniam aut maliciam precogitatam). Simon, as a result, was pardoned. Whereas an argument alone would not excuse homicidal behavior, an argument that led someone to homicidal behavior could provide a partial excuse if it resulted in an act of homicide purportedly driven by self-preservation.

In self-defense narratives such as this one, the deceased was sometimes depicted as essentially out of his wits, singlemindedly intent on killing. As noted, literary texts metaphorically employed words of madness and unreason to connote anger. Similarly, anger was used as a signifier for insanity. For example, legal texts might refer to an insane person as “enraged” (enrage) or “furious” (furiosus).Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, anger was not equated with madness in adjudicating felonies: insanity offered an explicit ground for a pardon recommendation, but anger did not. This may reflect a concern with the antecedent factors giving rise to anger: whereas insanity might be perceived to be a state largely outside a person's control, anger could be characterized instead as a character flaw for which a person should rightly be condemned, particularly if it grew into a habit.

Anger as Habit, and the Danger of Escalation

In some instances, evidence of habit could prove damning to a felony defendant. Most commonly, this was the case with individuals described as “notorious” thieves or felons, an epithet that signaled a repeat offender in medieval plea rolls.Footnote ¹⁰² Concerns for recidivism may have encouraged juries to convict. Emotions might also be habitual, and anger, if cultivated as habit, could escalate. Wrath's progressive phases inspired English theologian Thomas de Chobham to map distinct species of “vicious ire” (ira per vitium) in his Summa Confessorum. On the one hand, there was the sort of ire that might move one to harm or injure another, but if reason intervened so that one did not proceed to give injury, the sin remained only venial.Footnote ¹⁰³ If, however, moved in this way, a person proceeded to insult or injury, then the offense was transformed into mortal sin.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Theologians such as Aquinas and Thomas de Chobham cautioned against nursing hatred. A mid-fourteenth century sermon demonstrates how their vision of wrath's cumulative nature might have reached wider lay audiences. John Gaytryge described how wrath, “a wicked stirring or boiling of the heart,” might lead a person to vengeance, proceeding from quarreling and swearing, to slander and fighting, and even to “felony and often manslaughter.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As a result, for the purpose of weighing sin, long-held wrath or anger was treated more severely than anger spontaneously ignited. This was nothing new. In a line of thought traceable to the early medieval penitential tradition, homicide differed in quality if motivated by long-held hatred as opposed to occurring suddenly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sudden anger, although not excused,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ provided grounds for a steep reduction in penance, just as it would offer the possibility of a reduction from murder to manslaughter through the doctrine of provocation by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Habitual anger or long-standing hatred, by comparison, were presumptively condemnable.

In a 1279 Surrey Eyre case, the itinerant justices heard about a vengeful homicide perpetrated by one Elyas Duballe, servant (gar çon) of Henry Foun. On account of some discord (pro quadam discordia) that existed between Elyas and Henry, the phrase suggesting longer-term disharmony rather than a sudden argument, the disgruntled servant set fire to Henry's home. A woman named Agnes de Warre as well as Henry's daughter Alice were burned (combuste fuerunt) in the house, and Elyas immediately fled the scene.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Elyas's story could be mistaken for a cautionary tale out of a sermon or confessor's manual, illustrating how unresolved discord and anger could erupt in violence, in this case aggravated by Elyas's lashing out not only directly against his master but also indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally, against innocent women in the lord's household.

Concerns about the danger of untreated anger, quoted previously from Latin theological tracts, may also be found in vernacular texts. Robert Mannyng used the metaphor of ire as “the devil's daughter of hell fire” to capture the escalating nature of anger, warning that one who loathed another and failed to repent was hell bound.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Similarly, the Speculum Christiani defined hateful wrath as “the gate of all vices.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ “Just as a boar runs from madness against a sword,” the Speculum cautioned, “so runs an ireful man to sin.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Such concerns seem to motivate the advice of Chaucer's parson, who opined about the potentially explosive nature of ire which, left unaddressed, might flare up within a person's heart and reach irremediable proportions: “Look,” he observed, “how that fire of small coals that are almost dead under ashes will come alive again when touched with brimstone? Just so ire will invariably quicken again when it is touched by the pride that is concealed in man's heart.”Footnote ¹¹² By using this analogy between anger and hot coals, Chaucer was drawing upon a Latinate tradition, exemplified by the fourteenth century preachers' handbook, Fasciculus Morum, which described how wrath (ira) might quickly burst into flames, “just as a fire that is given dry sticks is easily kindled and cannot stop of itself until all the sticks are burnt.”Footnote ¹¹³

By some accounts, long-held anger might give way to hatred, which, according to Gower, held in her breast hidden ire (que deinz sa pectrine/ Ire ad covert) and conspired day and night until she brought about the ruin of her neighbor.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This aligned well with Aquinas's understanding of hatred, which similarly viewed it as a more permanent disposition that sought evil for its own sake.Footnote ¹¹⁵ According to Gower, Ire's third daughter, Hatred, was so overtaken by ire as to be incapable of fostering love.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In other words, what might start out as an impulsive feeling of anger might evolve into an entertained thought of anger, but by the time it reached the level of Ire's third daughter, it had festered into full-blown heart disease, in the sense of shutting out charitable sentiment. Moreover, Hatred counted two servants in her retinue, Rancor (Rancour) and Evil Will (Maltalent); the former servant held enclosed in his heart little causes of ire written on paper, which Evil Will sealed with wax.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Gower's personification of Hatred emphasized its cumulative nature, with its many grievances carefully tallied and then permanently sealed by a will inclined toward evil. Elsewhere, in his Confessio Amantis, Gower characterized hate as wrath long held:

Legal narratives from the plea and coroners' rolls frequently describe the operation of long-standing hatred or wrath. In a case of self-defense from 1309, for example, the jury indicated that Thomas le Shepherd, the homicide victim, had nursed ancient hatred (antiqui odii) toward William Boton. It is unclear whether the long-standing hatred was mutual, but according to the narrative, the ratcheting up from hatred toward violence was a one-sided affair, damning to Thomas' memory. Seeing William on the road, Thomas lay in wait intending to kill him. As William drew near, Thomas jumped from hiding and attacked him with a staff; William raised the hue and fled. Followed by the murderous Thomas, William found himself cornered between a hedge and a dike. Unable to flee further and fearing his imminent death, he struck Thomas a single time on the head, inflicting a fatal injury. Employing the typical self-defense formula, the jurors stated that William did not kill Thomas in assault or felony aforethought (insultu seu feloniam precogitatam) but rather in self-defense and to avoid his own death. William, who did not flee, was remanded to gaol to await the king's pardon.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this instance, and many others like it, the jury presented the homicide victim as acting out of long-standing enmity, which had boiled over into premeditated violence, and portrayed the self-defender as comparably restrained and peaceable, stirred to violence only to avert his own death. This aspect of medieval English self-defense narratives is striking, particularly because it might conceivably be a risky strategy to malign a homicide victim. For example, it might raise the ire of the victim's kin or give rise to doubts generally in light of the fact that, unlike the defendant, the victim did not have a voice at trial. However, it appears that the strict rules on self-defense necessitated placing the homicide victim in as damning a light as possible in the hope of securing a pardon.

In some instances, a scribe might add additional verbiage to emphasize the condemnable nature of a homicide involving ancient hatred. In a 1270 Bedfordshire case, for example, the description of an attack carried out for ancient hatred (pro antiquo odio) was accentuated with the adverb nequiter (evilly) modifying the verb insultavit (assaulted).Footnote ¹²⁰ Geoffrey Scot, a smith, encountered Stephen son of Geoffrey Yve, who was walking home with new irons for his plough. The specific mention of Geoffrey's occupation and Stephen's recent purchase suggests that these details may have been significant; perhaps Stephen had taken his business to a rival smith. Geoffrey allegedly split Stephen's head to the bone, gouged out an eye, and severed his tongue. In the clause enumerating chattels, the alleged killer was identified as “the said felon” (predictus felonus), thereby emphasizing his preordained guilty state, although the gruesome nature of Stephen's wounds left little doubt as to the spirit in which Geoffrey attacked his victim. Such details appearing in a coroner's roll likely sealed the defendant's fate should the case have proceeded to trial, signaling to a jury the condemnation of the accused by the coroner's inquest; indeed, in this case we do know that Geoffrey was outlawed at a subsequent eyre. Furthermore, local knowledge of pre-existing hatred between two individuals might lead to a person's arrest on suspicion of felony. For example, in another 1270 Bedfordshire case, a coroner's inquest stated that they suspected a man named Gilbert of having brutally killed Robert Gomelot, going so far as to cut off two fingers and nearly sever his left arm. Their suspicion was the result of their knowledge that “there was previously a quarrel between them and they had a hatred of each other.”Footnote ¹²¹ In this case and the previous one, gruesome mutilation provided evidence that the attack was driven by long-standing and bitter animosity. However, defendants might also use accusations of hatred defensively to counter a felony allegation, insofar as some individuals might channel their hatred not into bodily mutilation or even milder forms of violent self help, but might instead use the law courts as a means of pursuing vengeance.Footnote ¹²² Felony accusations, which incurred the death penalty if successful, were particularly attractive to unscrupulous vengeance seekers.Footnote ¹²³ In either event, whether dodging a body blow or a wrongful accusation, beware the neighbor nursing an ancient grudge.

Bodily Manifestations of Anger as Temperament

Anger was also understood to be more generally situated in the temperament of certain individuals and possibly more prevalent among, but not entirely limited to, the privileged classes, the purview of men such as John de Warenne and Alan la Zouche.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, anger erupting between two powerful men had far-reaching ramifications: as a fourteenth century tract on the vices and virtues explains, “when there is war between two great lords, it happens often that there are many dead who had no guilt,” listing among the indirect harms of elite conflict the robbing and burning of churches and towns; the destruction of abbeys, priories, and granges; and the disinheritance of men, women, and children alike.Footnote ¹²⁵ However, anger was not entirely limited to high-status men. Both the powerful and the common person might be prone to the disruptive force of anger, although the latter might only engage in war “without arms and without resources,” to borrow a colorful line from Seneca.Footnote ¹²⁶

Anger might also manifest itself differently in men than in women. An encylopedic discussion of anger in John de Foxton's Liber cosmographiae, for example, described how women were less inclined toward physical fights, but might nevertheless spar with words and, indeed, argue violently, captured by the Latin verb rixare.Footnote ¹²⁷ In some instances, medieval English literary texts describe women as prone to outburts of angered speech, in contrast to the patient silence of men. In Gower's Confessio Amantis, the story of Socrates's patience played upon this stereotype, relaying the philosopher's ability to withstand his wife's taunts and maintain a stoical composure as she raged against him. Having returned home bearing water from the well in mid-winter, Socrates' wife grew angered after seeing her husband sitting idly by the fire reading a book. “She commenced a mad rage,” confronting him for failing to acknowledge her hard labors. Eliciting no response from Socrates, the wife “began within to swell” and held the pot full of well water aloft until, “angered that he so behaved” in remaining silent, she poured the water onto the taciturn philosopher's head. Maintaining his patience, Socrates finally spoke, commenting that his wife had made both wind and rain—referring to her angry words and the well water—conditions appropriate to the winter season. He then resumed his seat by the fire to dry his clothes.Footnote ¹²⁸

Tellingly, in Gower's rendition of the story of Tiresias and the snakes, the wrathful Tiresias, who in anger struck two serpents dead, was condemned by the gods and, in punishment, was transformed into a woman. “That was to him an angry jape,” commented the poet. “But for that he with anger wrought, his angers angrily he bought [i.e., paid for].”Footnote ¹²⁹ Further bolstering a connection between anger and the feminine, Gower also related the story of an argument between Juno and Jupiter over whether husbands or wives were the more amorous. The two chose Tiresias to render judgment. When he judged in favor of Jupiter, Juno “was wroth and would not forebear, but took away forevermore the sight from both his eyes.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In these examples, anger was gendered feminine. Accusations in the legal record of anger-fueled homicide, however, were typically directed toward male defendants, with some vivid exceptions.

During the 1321 London Eyre, for example, a homicide occurred within the church of All Hallows by the Wall in London's Broad Street ward.Footnote ¹³¹ A woman named Isabel of Bury conversed loudly with Joan le Clerkes, drawing attention and a reprimand from Gilbert Lyter, a clerk of the church, who ordered the two women to leave. Moved to anger by this (inde ira mota), Isabel struck Gilbert in the chest with a knife, killing him. Joan was arrested immediately and imprisoned at Newgate, while Isabel initially tried to claim sanctuary within the church. Unsure how to proceed, the eyre justices sought ecclesiastical guidance. In response, the ordinaries of the Bishop of London produced a decretal to the effect that a person who committed violence within a church should not then be able to claim sanctuary within its precincts. Isabel was duly expelled from the church and imprisoned at Newgate, eventually being hauled before the justices to stand trial. At first remaining mute, Isabel eventually relented and claimed self-defense, arguing that the deceased had struck her. She then changed her response and denied the felony entirely, after which a jury was appointed and determined that she should hang for her anger-inspired attack upon the cleric. Isabel's case may prove more the exception than the rule, as women were seldom tried for homicide, much less homicide explicitly fomented by anger.Footnote ¹³²

Although not emphasizing gender, Aquinas believed individuals in general might be temperamentally patient, volcanic, or something in between these two extremes.Footnote ¹³³ According to his theory, a disposition toward anger reflected “a bilious temperament;” bile was the fastest-moving of all the humors, and could therefore be likened to fire.Footnote ¹³⁴ Aquinas quoted the Moralia of Gregory the Great for the proposition that a heart inflamed with anger “beats quick, the body trembles, the tongue stammers, the countenance takes fire, the eyes grow fierce, they that are well known are not recognized.”Footnote ¹³⁵ This vision of wrath burning in one's heart appears in vernacular texts as well, such as the fourteenth century Kentish poetry of William of Shoreham, who described how, once wrath produced much heat (wanne hy het to meche hete), it left charity behind (Hyt letteþ charite) and replaced it with “quarreling and misbehavior” (cheste and mysdoynge) and “withdrawing from God” (wyþ-drawynge of god).Footnote ¹³⁶ John Mirk, too, addressing a clerical audience in the vernacular, described how the wrathful man might observe how “with fire of hell his heart burneth” (wyþ fuyre of helle hys herte breneth).Footnote ¹³⁷

This view of the bodily manifestation of anger had deep roots.Footnote ¹³⁸ The word “felony” itself drew upon corporeal metaphors, containing within its root the Latin fel, or gall, a humor associated with bitterness and, by association, treachery and wickedness.Footnote ¹³⁹ A medieval medical treatise, the Trotula, specifically associated gall with the heating of blood, discussed in the context of excessive menstruation. According to the treatise, an excess of bile flowing from the gall bladder could cause a woman's blood to heat excessively and overflow the veins as a result.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This physiological description of menstruation's effects further reinforces literary accounts describing anger as gendered feminine.

Anger was likewise a visceral emotion in the writings of medieval English authors. In characterizing Saul prior to his conversion, John Mirk described how “he would froth at the nose and the mouth for anger” upon hearing people speak of Christians, who in turn were frightened by Saul's menacing appearance.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Most often, medieval authors situated anger less visibly within a person's heart. Gower compared the effects of anger to a heart attack (cardiacre), which would desiccate the heart (Le Cuer ensecche) beyond repair.Footnote ¹⁴² Anger induced a cardiac event of monumental proportions, and afflicted individuals were cautioned to heed its early warning signs and seek rehabilitative treatment.

In sum, medieval English understandings of anger reflect a notion that different individuals may be more or less naturally prone to anger, coupled with a moral conviction, grounded in theology, that individuals could and should actively form their consciences and work to replace anger with patience and charity. Anger, in other words, was both a nature and a nurture phenomenon in medieval England, thereby complicating efforts to determine culpability.

Anger and the Medieval English Jury

Even where anger might seem to be an appropriate response to the situation at hand, plea roll evidence suggests an unwillingness to rely on righteous anger as a defense to felonious homicide. In a salacious homicide case from 1311, the jury narrated how Robert Mahen, the indicted, had left his wife Alice and Richard de Fenlake alone while engaging in local business. Later, failing to find Alice at home, Robert went looking for her and discovered her alone with Richard (solum cum sola) in a field off the highway, “hiding and illicitly and dishonestly sitting and speaking together.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Robert accused Alice of committing adultery (adulterium) with Richard and, to castigate her, struck her in the face with the palm of his hand, at which point Alice cried out for help to Richard.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Matters quickly escalated, with Richard rushing toward Robert, sword drawn, while Robert, fearful (metuens) and wishing to flee but pursued through the field by Richard, eventually responded in kind. Robert raised the hue and ultimately issued Richard a fatal blow. The jury specified that Robert did not kill Richard through felony or malice aforethought (per feloniam aut maliciam excogitatam) but only in defending himself and avoiding his own death (se ipsum defendendo et mortem suam propriam evitando). Therefore, despite the fact that Robert would have reasonably been angered with Richard, the jury did not make an argument based on such righteous anger in recommending that Robert be returned to gaol to await the king's pardon. In fact, the jury narrative suggests that Robert's anger was directed initially toward his wife, at whom he lashed out first, more so than at Richard. Rather, the jury relied on the typical self-defense formula, possibly whitewashing Robert's story to justify a self-defense verdict.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This required that the verdict be phrased in terms of necessity rather than anger. If the narrative concedes that Robert was compelled to kill by emotion, it was fear and not anger that was allegedly at work.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In this way, the common law of felony reflected a long-standing tradition of approaching the issue of anger, even apparently justified anger, as a cause for circumspection.

The complexities of anger made jury decision making difficult. In a 1272 Bedfordshire case, William son of William Fraunceys was collecting his cattle along with his 10-year-old son when he encountered Ranulf Bene. The two men argued suddenly (mota contentione) over seisin of the cattle, and Ranulf struck William a fatal blow above the ear.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Faced with making sense of the incident, the coroner's jury described the killing as having occurred by misadventure, in self-defense, and unwillingly.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ One senses that the inquest jury simply did not know what to make of the facts. The crown took a harsh view of the matter and quickly began granting away the possessions of Ranulf, who was outlawed at the next eyre.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

In another Bedfordshire case, a favorable coroner's narrative was replaced with a more damning story at the eyre. Brother Richard from Newham Priory had come across Philip, the 13-year-old son of Nicholas le Wannere, gathering grain in a field and, according to the coroner's inquest, had “jokingly” told him that it was the prior's corn.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He threw a stone purportedly “in jest,” but it struck Philip on the head, inflicting a fatal wound. Although the coroner's inquest narrative painted the incident in a favorable light, using language reminiscent of the Bracton treatise's discussion of accidental, pardonable homicide, a later presenting jury found that the lay brother had been moved by anger when he threw the stone, and that he had subsequently been stripped of his vestments and expelled from the priory.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Richard, who had taken flight, was outlawed. In this instance, anger was used to inculpate a person previously exculpated by a comparably sympathetic coroners’ inquest.