Clergy and Criminal Violence in Later Medieval England and Wales - 9781108843805

Clergy and Criminal Violence in Later Medieval England and WalesAuthor(s): Peter D. Clarke\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781108843805, 978-1108843805\nSynopsis\nClergy formed a distinct and privileged group in later medieval society as regarded violent crime. Church law was intended to protect them from it, induce them to avoid it, and exempt them from secular justice following it. But in practice, were the clergy so separate from the violent culture around them and different from the laymen who dominated it? In the first full-length study of this subject in the later medieval period, Peter Clarke shows that clergy accused of violent and other crimes increasingly submitted to secular justice like laymen, seeking clerical immunity only as a last resort. It reveals that church authorities, in providing legal redress for clerical victims of lay violence, sought to heal divisions between laity and .