The New Murrey and Blue blog

If you go to this link How to Get Away with Murder in the Middle Ages (medievalists.net) you will find a very interesting article about the unsolved London killing in December 1276 of one Simon of Winchester. Unsolved? Perhaps. Because it seems to have been a case of knowing whodunnit but not knowing where the scoundrel was.

In our modern age of forensics, DNA, cadaver dogs, computer analysis and all manner of other scientifically accurate ways of following trails and identifying the culprit, it’s hard to realise just how easy murder used to be. Simon’s bloody death would have been solved in a jiffy today, and the servant named Roger would have found himself behind bars before he knew what had hit him. Instead he legged it and was never found. No GPS and smartphones then either!

At the end of the article is the following: “….You can find Simon of Winchester’s murder, and other untimely deaths, in Emilie Amt and Katherine Allen Smith’s Medieval England, 500 – 1500: A Reader, along with a whole bunch of other snippets of interesting primary sources….”

Coincidentally while seeking images to use on this present article, I came upon the one below, which also turned out to be from Medievalists.net—Five Murders in Medieval Oxford (medievalists.net)

At the end of this second article you will find the following: “….You can read these and more records of homicides and unusual deaths in Records of Mediaeval Oxford. Coroners’ Inquests, the Walls of Oxford, Etc., edited by H. E. Salter (Oxford Chronicle Company, 1912). It is available online at Archive.org….”

So if you’re of a mind to spend an evening reading about Blue Bloody Murder, Medieval Style….