rationale behind table manners but about the history of homicide.
In 1981 the political scientist Ted Robert Gurr, using old court and county records, calculated thirty estimates of homicide rates at various times in English history, combined them with modern records from London, and plotted them on a graph.2 I’ve reproduced it in figure 3–1, using a logarithmic scale in which the same vertical distance separates 1 from 10, 10 from 100, and 100 from 1000. The rate is calculated in the same way as in the preceding chapter, namely the number of killings per 100,000 people per year. The log scale is necessary because the homicide rate declined so precipitously. The graph shows that from the 13th century to the 20th, homicide in various parts of England plummeted by a factor of ten, fifty, and in some cases a hundred—for example, from 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century Oxford to less than 1 homicide per 100,000 in mid-20th-century London.
The graph stunned almost everyone who saw it (including me—as I mentioned in the preface, it was the seed that grew into this book). The discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present. When I surveyed perceptions of violence in an Internet questionnaire, people guessed that 20th-century England was about 14 percent more violent than 14th-century England. In fact it was 95 percent less violent.3
FIGURE 3–1. Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000: Gurr’s 1981 estimates
Source: Data from Gurr, 1981, pp. 303–4, 313.
This chapter is about the decline of homicide in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, and its counterparts and counterexamples in other times and places. I have borrowed the title of the chapter from Elias because he was the only major social thinker with a theory that could explain it.
THE EUROPEAN HOMICIDE DECLINE
Before we try to explain this remarkable development, let’s be sure it is real. Following the publication of Gurr’s graph, several historical criminologists dug more deeply into the history of homicide.4 The criminologist Manuel Eisner assembled a much larger set of estimates on homicide in England across the centuries, drawing on coroners’ inquests, court cases, and local records.5 Each dot on the graph in figure 3–2 is an estimate from some town or jurisdiction, plotted once again on a logarithmic scale. By the 19th century the British government was keeping annual records of homicide for the entire country, which are plotted on the graph as a gray line. Another historian, J. S. Cockburn, compiled continuous data from the town of Kent between 1560 and 1985, which Eisner superimposed on his own data as the black line.6
FIGURE 3–2. Homicide rates in England, 1200–2000
Source: Graph from Eisner, 2003.
Once again we see a decline in annual homicide rates, and it is not small: from between 4 and 100 homicides per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to around 0.8 (eight-tenths of a homicide) per 100,000 in the 1950s. The timing shows that the high medieval murder rates cannot be blamed on the social upheavals that followed the Black Death around 1350, because many of the estimates predated that epidemic.
Eisner has given a lot of thought to how much we should trust these numbers. Homicide is the crime of choice for measurers of violence because regardless of how the people of a distant culture conceptualize crime, a dead body is hard to define away, and it always arouses curiosity about who or what produced it. Records of homicide are therefore a more reliable index of violence than records of robbery, rape, or assault, and they usually (though not always) correlate with them.7
Still, it’s reasonable to wonder how the people of different eras reacted to these killings. Were they as likely as we are to judge a killing as intentional or accidental, or to prosecute the killing as opposed to letting it pass? Did people in earlier times always kill at the same percentage of the rate that they raped, robbed, and assaulted? How successful were they in saving the lives of victims of assault and thereby preventing them from becoming victims of homicide?
Fortunately, these questions can be addressed. Eisner cites studies showing that when people today are presented with the circumstances of a centuriesold murder and asked whether they think it was intentional, they usually come to the same conclusion as did the people at the time. He has shown that in most periods, the rates of homicide do correlate with the rates of other violent crimes. He notes that any historical advance in forensics