Medieval coroners’ rolls are among the earliest English legal records, and they are now an important resource for researchers, Eisner says. There were no police at the time, so coroners held investigations (“inquests”) with a jury of local people whenever a violent death occurred, to try to determine who was responsible. “Students everywhere were considered to be a particular problem.” Murder most foulĮisner is the lead investigator for a project called Medieval Murder Maps, which pinpoints murders in England recorded in the “rolls” of medieval officials called coroners.
“Complaints about student violence were common across Europe, in Paris and in Bologna,” he says. This wasn’t just a problem at Oxford, but also at many universities in mainland Europe at this time, says Manuel Eisner, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge.
This startling statistic, based on legal records from the period, was likely due to the large number of young, single male students and the ubiquity of deadly weapons, alcohol, and sex workers, say researchers. The Middle Ages were a deadly time to be a student at the University of Oxford-they were roughly three times more likely to commit murder or be brutally murdered than other residents of the medieval English city.
