Insane In Medieval England

In our current day and age, our society has been unsuccessful in dealing with the mentally insane and the mentally challenged. Our current legal scholars focus on debating the legal rights and challenges of the inhabitants of mental institutions. Obviously, those deemed insane in medieval England did not fare much better and in fact encountered even more difficulties by the very nature of society during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The king claimed jurisdiction over crimes and felonies as Pleas of the Crown that included homicide, mayhem, wounding false imprisonment, arson, rape, burglary, robbing and larceny which were punishable by loss of life or member and disherison. However, the fate of criminals was heavily influenced when their mental condition was taken into account. The law provided for an exemption of punishment on the grounds of insanity through the king’s power of the royal prerogative to grant pardons. Anglo-Saxon law was mainly focused on regulating the system of emendations that ruled the relationship between the individual committing the wrongdoing, the victim and their families.
The main focus of this writing will be on the legal status of the insane criminal who committed homicide, and how under common law, he was eligible for the king’s pardon for any felony (At the king’s