ABSTRACT
Wounding and recompense or punishments for such acts are central to medieval law and legal practice. The issue of civil wounding has received significant interest from historians working on early medieval laws and customs, in which fines for personal injuries were designed to offer a less violent alternative to the blood feud in which physical injury was an accepted means to avenge the death or dishonouring of a family member. Legal historians of the later middle ages, however, have seemingly been largely disinterested in exploring changes to the legal provisions that deal with wounding, despite the fact that these were fundamental building blocks of criminal law and criminal legal practice in the later middle ages and beyond. This chapter considers the later medieval period through a comparative study of wounding and personal injury in a legal context using case studies from England and Scandinavia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It looks at the rules concerning wounding in normative texts, or laws – their descriptions of the types of wounds, the role and methods of healing, and the legal punishments for such acts. Using other sources including court records and literary works, a picture emerges of whether and how these laws were implemented. It is thus possible to reflect on the significance of the number of witnesses to the wounding, the number and categorization of wounds, the obligation to inspect wounds, the requirement for and success of treatments, and the literary fascination for dwelling on the seriousness of a wound.
