The Ideology of Mercy in English Literature and Law, 1200-1600

Abstract

In medieval and Early Modern England, the law required capital punishment for felons. Yet in the actual administration of criminal law juries, judges, and the Crown pardoned or mitigated the sentences of the accused with great frequency. Little is known of contemporary attitudes toward mercy’s role in secular judgment though the system depended on juries and lay officials to administer the law. How did generally shared beliefs about mercy affect the late medieval "crisis of disorder" and sixteenth-century reforms in criminal law?

Literature from the period 1200-1600 is used to identify the cultural value of mercy. Popular ideas embodied in the texts allow us to speculate on mercy’s place in the courts, and so in English governance. The sources are works from a variety of genres that enjoyed wide currency. The analysis is organized around a popular allegory of judgment known as the Four Daughters of God. Its subtext presents a strong statement about the purpose of mercy and its relationship to justice in the secular realm as well as in the divine. The medieval literature reveals an ideology of mercy: reconciliation must be preferred to retribution as the means for keeping order. But in early sixteenth-century literature this is reversed: the strict letter of the law must be enforced for the good of the individual soul and the commonwealth. New voices appearing in the literature between 1380 and 1420 indicate the beginnings of an ideology of justice which will dominate English society by 1600.

The gloss on mercy’s social function found in the literature allows us to see the convergence by the early sixteenth century of expressed attitudes toward mercy and its actual use in the courts. The law had been adjusted to incorporate community standards. A gradation of punishments had evolved, calibrated to the nature of the crime and the criminal. This process may have begun by the last quarter of the fourteenth century. Mercy was subsumed into the new ideal, that of justice available in this world through the king and his courts. This ideology of justice greatly enhanced the Crown’s authority.