Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

Explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts
Challenges the accepted knowledge that the practice of using churches as sanctuaries died out after the medieval times
Seeks to understand why this phenomenon flourished again under the Tudor regime
Offers a new way to look at how law, religion, culture, and politics intersect over the period 1400-1550
Presents evidence through vivid stories of crime and political machinations uncovered in the archival records of the time

Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

Description

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

1:INTRODUCTION: RICHARD SOUTHWELL FLEES TO SANCTUARY
Seeking Sanctuary in Late Medieval and Tudor England
Explaining the Tudor Resurgence of Sanctuary
Sanctuary and the Partiality of the Archives
2:TAVERN BRAWLS, CIVIL WARS, AND REMEDIES FOR TYRANNY: THE EVOLUTION OF SANCTUARY IN ENGLAND, C. 1380-1500
Herman Stokfyssh and his Flight to Westminster: The Development of Chartered Sanctuary c. 1400
Sanctuary-Seeking 1400-1550: The Numbers
Sanctuary and the Wars of the Roses
Sanctuary, Mercy, and Redemption
Ecclesiastical Liberties as a Weapon Against Tyranny: St. Edmund and Sheriff Leoffstan
3:DEAN CAUDRAY AND THE CITY OF LONDON: THE POLITICS OF SANCTUARY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The Escape of John Knight
St. Martin le Grand and the City of London: Liberties, Franchises, and Jurisdictions
Dean Caudray and the Events of September 1440
Marshalling Cases
The End of Dean Caudray's Days
4:THE HOSPITALLER'S CLOAK: MERCY, JUSTICE, JURISDICTION
Richard Pulham, Ralph Toker, and the Hospitaller's Cloak
The Hospitaller Order, English Criminal Justice, and Christian Mercy in Action
Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1400-1485
Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1485-1520
Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller properties, 1520-1539
5:FRANCIS WOODLEKE'S WINDOW: STRANGER SHOEMAKERS, BOUNDARIES, AND SANCTUARY IN LONDON IN THE 1530S
Living in the Precinct of St. Martin Le Grand
Governing St. Martin's Precinct in the Reign of Henry VIII
Stranger Artisans, Sanctuary Men, and the City
The Boundaries of St. Martin's
The Dissolution of St. Martin le Grand and Beyond
6:THE SANCTUARY TOWN OF KNOWLE: CRIME, LOCAL AUTHORITIES, AND THE STATE IN 1530S ENGLAND
The Goat Inn Robber and Sanctuary at Knowle
Robbery, Flight, Sanctuary
Sanctuary at Knowle and the Administration of Law and Justice in the 1530s
The Knowle Sanctuary and Tudor State Formation
7:CHESHIRE FEUDS: ARISTOCRATIC VIOLENCE AND THE USES OF SANCTUARY IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII
Affrays in St. Paul's Churchyard
Breaching Sanctuary
Sanctuary and Aristocratic Violence in the Reign of Henry VIII
8:CONCLUSIONS: SANCTUARY, LAW, AND POLITICS
The Statute of 1540 and Sanctuary's Precipitous Decline
Sanctuary, Law, and Politics in England, 1400-1550

Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

Author Information

Shannon McSheffrey, Professor of History, Concordia University

Since finishing her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1992, Shannon McSheffrey has taught at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is now Professor of History. She has won several awards for her research and teaching. Over the last twenty-five years she has published books and articles on a number of aspects of late medieval and Tudor England, exploring issues as varied as gender roles, law, civic culture, marriage, literacy, heresy, and popular religion. Seeking Sanctuary grew out of a curiosity about how English people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries used law, legal records, and legal archives.

Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2018 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize awarded by the Canadian Society of Medievalists

"[Seeking Sanctuary] presents a bold and plausible new interpretation. Yet what makes the book such a pleasure are the fascinating tales it tells about the individual experiences of seeking, running and protecting specific sanctuaries ... Seeking Sanctuary makes an outstanding contribution: while the book may not be the last word on the subject, it has transformed it." - Paul Cavill, History

"Seeking Sanctuary is a marvellous piece of historical research and writing, which greatly advances our understanding of the role and place of sanctuary in early Tudor England. McSheffrey explores her subject through a series of beautifully-crafted case studies and engaging vignettes. ... any subsequent studies of late medieval sanctuary will be greatly in Shannon McSheffrey's debt." - Martin Heale, Sehepunkte

"Seeking Sanctuary's principal contribution is its ability to intertwine the rather haphazard approaches to sanctuary in recent literature, in a way that opens up new and exciting dialogues between the legal, social, political, and religious developments they identified. The footnotes are extensive and the bibliography impressive, attesting to Seeking Sanctuary's position as arguably the most comprehensive treatment of sanctuary-seeking in England for a century. ... Seeking Sanctuary will thus, no doubt, establish itself as the pathfinder for much of the subsequent scholarship on the subject." - Edward J. Everett, Renaissance and Reformtion

Seeking Sanctuary

Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550

Shannon McSheffrey

From Our Blog

Isobel and me: medieval sanctuary and Whig history

For the last fifteen years I have been having an intense dialogue in my head with a long-dead historian, Isobel D. Thornley (1893-1941). Isobel is my best frenemy. Two pieces she wrote in 1924 and 1932 remain standard citations for one of my favourite subjects, medieval sanctuary; this is a feat of scholarly longevity that few of her contemporaries can boast.

Posted on July 24, 2018

Read the blog post