ABSTRACT
The consideration of punishments which were actually inflicted will begin by discussing the several known examples of the use of execution or mutilation in eleventh-century Normandy. In 1091, four years after William the Conqueror's death, his two elder sons and successors, Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, and William Rufus, king of England, oversaw the compilation of a statement of some of the customs of the duchy of Normandy during their father's reign. The only Norman traitor whom Duke William the Conqueror kept in prison until his death was Grimold du Plessis, one of the participants, in the second rank, in the revolt of Guy of Burgundy and the western Norman viscounts in 1047. All are drawn from Normandy in the eleventh century. They show that decisive outcomes were possible, that, in fact, people were sometimes actually punished for misbehavior in ways that permanently altered their situations.
