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posted by martyb on Sunday January 06 2019, @10:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-go-there dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behavior, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.

That's just one of the true-crime gems to be found in a new interactive digital "murder map" of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city Coroners' Rolls, the map shows the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The map launched to the public in late November on the website for the university's Violence Research Center, and be forewarned—it's extremely addictive. You could easily lose yourself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. (It works best with Google Chrome.)

"The events described in the Coroners' Rolls show weapons were never very far away, male honor had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand," said Eisner, who embarked on the project to create an accessible resource for the public to explore the historical records. "They give us a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life."

[...] The greatest risk of violent death in London was on weekends (especially Sundays), between early evening and the first few hours after curfew.

[...] As Eisner notes, "Sunday was the day when people had the time to engage in social activities—drinking and playing games that would occasionally trigger frictions leading to assault." Mondays were the second most likely day for homicides, perhaps because frictions spilled over from the weekend.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/addictive-interactive-murder-map-lets-you-explore-medieval-london-crime/


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  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Sunday January 06 2019, @11:20PM (17 children)

    by Sulla (5173) on Sunday January 06 2019, @11:20PM (#782898) Journal

    In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behavior, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.

    More like self-defence map

    Famines were familiar occurrences in Medieval Europe. For example, localised famines occurred in France during the fourteenth century in 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–1317 (the Great Famine), 1330–34, 1349–51, 1358–60, 1371, 1374–75, and 1390.[2] In England, the most prosperous kingdom affected by the Great Famine, there were famines such as in 1315–1317, 1321, 1351, and 1369.[2] For most people there was often not enough to eat, and life was a relatively short and brutal struggle to survive to old age. According to official records about the English royal family, an example of the best off in society, for whom records were kept, the average life expectancy in 1276 was 35.28 years.[2] Between 1301 and 1325, during the Great Famine it was 29.84 years while between 1348 and 1375 during the Plague, it was only 17.33 years.[2] It demonstrates the relative steep drop between 1348 and 1375 of about 42%.[3]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%9317 [wikipedia.org]

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 06 2019, @11:49PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 06 2019, @11:49PM (#782922)
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @02:30AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @02:30AM (#782979)

      Mods getting dumb? You dont see the connection between the apparent 800 year cycle of climate change and famine?

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 07 2019, @12:42PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 07 2019, @12:42PM (#783139) Journal

        <sarcasm> Oh my! What is this, heresy? Don't you know - as all right-minded people know - that climate change is man-made? The earth has never seen such things as an increase in annual temperatures before!! </sarcasm>

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 07 2019, @05:47PM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 07 2019, @05:47PM (#783264) Journal
        What's supposed to be special about 800 years? You cherry picked two past eras of trouble and claimed on the basis of three data points a cycle. There's been a lot more history than just those three points. But having said that, there is another period of drought [wikipedia.org] around 2200 BC and lasting a century. I'd take this theory more seriously, if the climatic events were similar in scale and type. But we have stuff ranging from a huge megadrought to a couple of years disruption (in the 500AD example), severe but very temporary. And nothing for -300 BC. A lot [wikipedia.org] of climatic events have happened over the past bunch of millennia. One needs more than a few data points to establish a pattern, much less a model of what caused the pattern.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:07PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @10:07PM (#783403)

          What's supposed to be special about 800 years? You cherry picked two past eras of trouble

          No I didnt. Those are the start dates of the three most notable periods of societal upheaval that have been linked to climate:

          ~ 1300 AD
          https://www.jstor.org/stable/203063
          https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-54337-6

          ~500 AD
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age
          https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2652

          ~ 300 BC
          ???

          ~1100 BC
          https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312000416

          ~ 2200 BC (~1900 BC?)
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event

          ~2700 BC
          ???

          I didn't know about yours, but yea that should be included. Of course, the further back in time you go the less certain the dates, so all these dates should have error bars.

          Also, these climate change won't noticeably (to us, millennia later) affect the societies of every region at the same time, so to go further we would have to account for that. The earlier data is mostly from Mesopotamia and north Africa, wile the later is more from Europe.

          But I would say put +/- 300 years on all those dates for the true "start" is ok as a rough estimate.

          One needs more than a few data points to establish a pattern, much less a model of what caused the pattern.

          Yes, but this is just the first step of science. We are organizing the data to look for a pattern that may require explanation. I think it looks interesting enough at this point to put more effort into cleaning the data up, estimating uncertainty around the dates, looking for something that may be relevant ~300BC, playing with the cycle period (perhaps the best fit is not constant but is monotonically getting longer each time), etc. Not yet ready to go to the next step.

          Next step would be guessing at what could have caused it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning), after that is deducing predictions from our guess about what should happen in the future, then finally we collect the new data and compare to our predictions.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:10AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:10AM (#782934)

    When the Muslims finally took over England in 2022, average life expectancy for Christians dropped to 19.5 years.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:47AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:47AM (#782943)

      But will the Muslims bring back Doctor Who, decapitate the Doctor, and have her regenerate into a Coloured man?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:51AM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:51AM (#782946)

        He'll marry his former incarnation, discipline her (and his other wives) with Quaranic beatings and lefties and feminists will declare it progressive. Inshallah!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:01AM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:01AM (#782950)

          Too late. The Doctor was strangling his companions 35 years ago. [youtube.com]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:09AM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:09AM (#782952)

            Nicola Bryant is too attractive to be in modern Who. Women who look like that should be wearing a burka because... feminism!

            • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:12AM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:12AM (#782953)

              In modern Who the women are ugly and the black companion is a pretty boy.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:16AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @01:16AM (#782954)

                But not trans?!? The show needs some real progressive values like jihad and murdering evil white males. Do away with the Valeyard, this is all progressive stuff.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @12:48PM (#783141)

      And, at the same time, the life expectancy of Muslims went UP to 19.75 years.

  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday January 07 2019, @01:16AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Monday January 07 2019, @01:16AM (#782955) Journal

    Steal or starve.

    A few hundred years later, they started sending them to Botany Bay.

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday January 07 2019, @01:51AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday January 07 2019, @01:51AM (#782964) Homepage

    " A porter killed by a potter "

    You gotta hand it to those gore sites, they sure are good with humor and wordplay.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @04:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @04:43AM (#783031)

    From TFA, > A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.
    While it's not murder this time around, the current Catholic church scandal (sex w/minors) is continuing proof of this statement.