Dr Stephanie Brown, University of Hull
How can a map of medieval homicides help teach about law, violence and society? In lots of ways, actually.
The Medieval Murder Map is an innovative digital humanities project that visualises homicides drawn from the coroners’ rolls of three English towns: London, York, and Oxford. Entries of homicide cases from the coroners’ rolls have been translated and modernised to ensure that students can engage with the stories and then pinned onto the maps. Each pin on the map marks the site of a felonious killing, linking archival narratives with spatial context. The result is a compelling glimpse into the realities of medieval urban life, and a surprisingly powerful teaching tool.
Teaching Ideas: Bringing the Map into the Seminar Room
For lecturers in history, medieval studies, criminology, law, or the broader humanities and social sciences, the Medieval Murder Map offers an accessible and imaginative way to introduce students to questions of violence, justice, society, and historical interpretation. Here are five ways I have found the Medieval Murder Map useful in higher education:
1. Histories of Urban Space and the Geography of Violence
The map encourages students to connect violence with place. What kinds of homicides happened in marketplaces, churches, or alleys? Why might certain parishes see more murders? What kinds of violence happen in public vs private spaces? Comparing London, York, and Oxford opens discussions on urban structure, social function, and the relationship between geography and risk. Wider discussion questions could include: what role does urban space play in the narratives? How do location and environment shape the context of the crimes? What does the physical clustering of deaths suggest about medieval towns as social and spatial environments.
2. Introducing Legal and Social Histories
These cases reveal how law operated in the absence of modern police or prosecution services, what counted as evidence, and how communities responded to interpersonal violence. Students can explore ideas of culpability, gender, intention, and legitimacy. This fuels discussion of pre-modern legal processes, ideas of justice, the role of witnesses, and the significance of the body. What counts as murder in 1300? Who gets recorded? Who is over/underrepresented? How does the role of the coroner compare to modern institutions like the police or forensics? What do these cases tell us about everyday life in medieval towns? What can we learn about the people named in the records? What do they tell us about women or migrants in medieval England.
3. Exploring the Archive and its Silences
The sparse, formulaic records prompt rich discussions about what is missing: the voices of women, the perspectives of the dead, and the social context of the violence? The cases encourage students to think about why these records were created. What can we learn from these sources? Perhaps more importantly, what can we not learn? Does the original purpose of these rolls differ from the questions asked of them by historians and other scholars? What methodological problems are presented and how best to mitigate any issues? What responsibilities do we have when interpreting stories of harm and loss? The Medieval Murder Map is an accessible way to introduce students to the idea of theorising the archive, questions of absence and bias, and the ethics of working with historical violence.
4. Comparative Exercises
You could ask students to compare a medieval case to a contemporary one. How have legal definitions or social responses to murder changed? What kinds of continuity exist in how violence is gendered or racialised? Alternatively, using all three maps allows students to identify regional variation in recorded violence. What is different about Oxford, a university town? How does York’s political and religious status affect how violence was handled? This encourages comparative thinking and prompts questions about institutional power, gendered violence, and class. A third option is to ask students to compare the maps with the secondary literature on medieval coroners’ rolls (such as work of Sara Butler, Barbara Hanawalt, and Mike Thornton). Using James Buchanan Given’s work, students could also compare the maps with the cases appearing in the thirteenth-century Eyre.
5. Creative, Critical, or Reflective Tasks and Assessment
The briefness of the cases makes them ideal for creative interpretation. Students can write from the perspective of a witness, a coroner, the jury, or even the deceased. They could also reflect critically on the ethics of storytelling, data visualisation, and the digital humanities. For creative assignments, students might write a reflective journal, compose a monologue, blog about certain cases or a particular theme, or even create digital reconstructions of particular scenes. These activities help students humanise the past while practising empathy and ethical storytelling. Some discussion questions include: how does the Medieval Murder Map shape your engagement with the material differently than reading a written source? What are the benefits and limitations of mapping historical data in this way? How might we responsibly use digital tools to make stories of violence more accessible, without sensationalising them?
Why it Works
The Medieval Murder Map is effective because it is immediate. There is no need to wade through dense readings to start engaging with core questions about law, violence, and society. Students are drawn in by the drama of individual stories, a knife fight after too much wine, a tavern brawl, a fatal fall during an argument, and move on to the bigger questions: What is justice? Who gets remembered? How should we discuss harm?
It also invites deeper historical and interdisciplinary thinking. With a few guiding questions, the map can support nuanced discussions around historical method, legal categories, structural violence, and how we tell stories about the past. The map aids connection between narrative and space, story and structure. Students can see how microhistories of violence reflect broader social patterns such as hierarchies of gender, race, class, and power that still resonate today.
The Medieval Murder Map is an example of how digital tools can bridge past and present, theory, story, data, and humanity. It helps students think spatially, ethically, and critically about violence and justice, and it reminds us that even the most fragmentary sources can be used to spark meaningful dialogue.
From coroners’ rolls to the classroom, it is a resource that brings together digital innovation, historical imagination, and critical pedagogy – one pin at a time.
About the author: Stephanie Brown is a lecturer in criminology at the University of Hull and member of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre. She is a historian of crime, punishment and policing from 1300-1900. Her research lies at the intersection of the histories of violence, gender, and community in England and Wales.