Whoever buried the man in grave 19 on Stockbridge Down never found his money. He had six silver pennies on him, struck at the Winchester Mint in the name of Edward the Confessor, tied up in a small linen bag and tucked high into his armpit. The excavators who found them in the 1930s guessed the bag had been fixed to the hair there with a dab of wax. Three of the six coins came from the same die, the work of a man called Anderbode, and a coin specialist later used them to date the man’s death with unusual confidence to somewhere between the autumn of 1065 and the summer of 1066, quite possibly before Christmas.

So, in the last weeks of Edward the Confessor’s reign, somebody was taken up onto a chalk hill in Hampshire and killed, and he went into the ground with his savings still pressed against his skin. The hill gave up the rest of its dead by accident. In 1935, the people of Stockbridge were clearing a spot for a bonfire to mark the king’s silver jubilee, and the spades turned up a human skull. A Dr.

Gray Hill dug there over the next two summers and found at least 41 people in about 100 square meters of turf. The graves were shallow and careless. Several of the dead lay with their wrists crossed behind their backs as though the cord had gone into the earth with them. Some had been beheaded.

One headless man shared his grave with a large dog, and the dog had lost its head as well. Nobody knows why. A few of the graves held buckles of a style that came in after the Norman conquest, so the hill stayed in use under the new kings. One suggestion made for this site is that some of its dead were men put to death under the forest law—poachers, perhaps, with the dog a partner in the offense.

It can only be a guess. Archaeologists call a place like this an execution cemetery. England has a couple of dozen known examples, nearly all of them set on the boundary between two districts, away from any church, often on high ground beside a road. The people in them were the ones a community had decided to be rid of—thieves and killers and men who had been put outside the law and then caught.

A scholar who has studied the bones from several of these sites points out how few bodies they hold for the centuries they were in use. Stockbridge Down works out at something like one burial every ten years. Executions, on that showing, were rare events. Far more often, when a serious crime was committed in medieval England, the accused ran, and the law declared him an outlaw.

The old English word was utlah, someone outside the law, and the idea behind it is older than England. Early medieval kingdoms had no police and very few prisons, and their courts had almost no means of forcing anybody to turn up. If a man was accused of killing his neighbor and he simply walked off into the next shire, the court had one weapon left, and that weapon was to withdraw itself. We will no longer protect you.

Whatever anybody does to you from this day, we will not ask about it. Rank was no shield. In 1049, Swein Godwinson, an earl and the eldest son of the most powerful family in the kingdom, murdered his cousin, was declared a nithing—a man with no honor left in him—and fled to Flanders. He was forgiven once, then exiled again with the rest of his family, and finally set out to walk barefoot to Jerusalem in penance for the murder.

He died on the way home, never seeing England again. The man with the pennies would have been alive when that news came home. By the 1200s, the process had settled into a routine, and it started with a name being called. Say a man named Thomas was accused of a felony, a robbery, or a killing, or the theft of a horse.

Nobody had caught him, so, at the next meeting of the county court, the sheriff had him summoned aloud. County courts met every four weeks. Somebody called out, Thomas, son of William, come and answer. Nobody answered, and the clerk noted it.

Four weeks later, his name was called a second time, then a third and a fourth—the lawyers called this stage exigi facias, from the Latin for demanding. His family would know it was happening. At the fifth county court, if he still had not appeared, the judgment of the shire was pronounced, and he was an outlaw. The whole thing took about five months.

In that time, a man could change his mind, walk into the county town, and give himself up to jail and trial. Plenty did. Plenty of others weighed up the jail and a jury of neighbors who had already named him and stayed where they were. The old law books reached for an animal to describe what he became at that moment.

A legal collection from the early 1100s, written up under the name of Edward the Confessor, says that from the day of his outlawry, a man bears a wolf’s head—caput lupinum. Wolves in medieval England had a price on them. To say a man wore a wolf’s head meant that anyone who met him could cut him down. By later centuries, an outlaw was supposed to be taken alive and brought in where that was possible, and he could be killed if he resisted or ran.

In 1329, the royal judges ruled that killing an outlaw who was offering no resistance counted as homicide like any other. The man holding the sword, of course, was often the only witness left to say whether resistance had been offered. After his safety, the outlaw lost his property. From the moment of the judgment, every movable thing he possessed belonged to the king.

The coroner and a few men of the village went to his house and valued item by item—a brass pot, a cow, a coat, a few bushels of oats. For a peasant household, a list of nine or ten lines could be the whole of its wealth. And if the outlaw’s wife and children were living in that house, the pot and the cow went all the same. If he held land, the crown took it for a year and a day, and the king’s officers had the right to commit what was called waste—they could cut down his trees, sell the timber, and pull down his buildings.

When the year and a day had run, whatever was left of the holding went back to the lord it was held from, and the outlaw’s children had no claim on it. In cases of felony, the blood itself was said to be corrupted, so that his sons could inherit nothing from him and nothing through him. The lawyers had a Latin phrase for the result—civiliter mortuus, dead in civil law. An outlaw could bring no case in any court.

If someone owed him money, the debt could not be collected. If someone robbed him or beat him, he had no remedy, since the court no longer recognized him as a person who could be wronged. Oddly, he could still be sued. The law kept just enough of him alive to be punished.

For ordinary families, the hardest rule was the one about helping. To feed an outlaw, to give him a bed, to hide him in your loft, or lend him a horse was to share in his guilt. The older law put it bluntly—the helper could suffer the same penalty as the man he helped. One narrow allowance was made for wives, on the ground that a married woman was under her husband’s authority and could hardly be expected to accuse him.

His mother had no such allowance, and neither did his brother. Whole villages were fined for receiving outlaws. The whole machine is visible in a single entry from an eye roll of the 1200s, the record of the king’s traveling judges. Four people, it says, beat a man named Jordan Haywolf so that he died.

Two fled to a church and abjured the realm, meaning they swore to leave England for good. Two more had run, and the roll says, Let them be exacted and outlawed. Their tithings were fined as well. The clerk adds that the two fugitives had no chattels at all.

A dead man, two exiles, two outlaws, and two fines—all dealt with in half a dozen lines of abbreviated Latin, with three shillings to show for it. Entries like that fill the rolls. When the king’s justices came to Gloucestershire in 1221, they heard about something over 300 killings that had taken place in the county since the last visitation. One historian went through the roll and counted 14 people hanged and roughly 100 outlawed.

For each felon who swung at the end of a trial, the courts outlawed several who had never been found. England in the 1200s must have held thousands of these people at any one time, working under borrowed names at harvest in a county where nobody knew them, lodging with relatives who were breaking the law to keep them, or living rough. You might wonder why so many of them ran, given what running cost. Part of the answer lies in how a felony trial worked.

The theft of goods valued above twelve pence was a hanging offense, and twelve pence was a few days’ wages for a laborer, or near enough the price of a sheep. A man who had taken one ewe from a neighbor’s fold, if twelve local jurors said he had done it, could be hanged within the day. No lawyer spoke for him, and he had nobody to appeal to. Before any of that, he would be held in the county jail until the justices next came round—a wait of months in some cases, and jail killed a share of prisoners before they ever saw a judge.

A man who weighed all that and chose the woods had made a reasonable bet. Others ended up outside the law without having hurt anybody. By the 1300s, outlawry had become a handy way of forcing people to turn up to ordinary lawsuits, and it spread from felony into debt and trespass. A man sued over an unpaid loan who failed to appear could be called at five county courts and declared an outlaw over a few pounds, with his goods forfeit like any robber’s.

Powerful men learned to use this. Someone with a grudge and friends on the local jury could have a neighbor indicted for a robbery that never took place, and the neighbor then had to choose between surrendering to jail with his enemies waiting and disappearing. A poem survives from exactly that position, written in Anglo-Norman French around 1340. Its speaker says he served the king in Flanders and Scotland and Gascony, and now he has been falsely accused and dare not go home.

He will stay in the woods, he says, in the pleasant shade, in a place he calls the forest of Belregard where the jay flies and the nightingale sings, and where, in his words, no false stealing exists nor any bad law. A harsh commission, the poem suggests, made outlaws out of frightened men, and an innocent man with no money had as much reason to run as a guilty one. Hunger made them too. In the spring of 1315, it began raining across northern Europe and barely stopped for two years.

Seed rotted in the ground, sheep and cattle died of disease in the soaked fields, and the price of wheat rose to several times its usual level. This was the Great Famine, running on in waves until about 1322. A monk at St. Albans wrote down what he saw and heard in those years—people ate horses and dogs, and he passes on a report that in some places men and women secretly ate their own children.

However much of that happened, the court rolls from the same years show theft climbing steeply, and a great deal of what was stolen was food—bread, bacon, a bushel of peas. People who in an ordinary year would have lived and died as law-abiding tenants took what they could, were named for it, and fled. Five months later, they were wolf’s heads. War added its share.

Each time an English army was paid off, men who had spent a season learning to fight and plunder came home with no wages and no trade. After the Battle of Evesham in 1265, when Simon de Montfort was killed and his body was cut to pieces on the field, the king declared his supporters’ lands forfeit, and those men became known as the Disinherited. With no homes to go back to, they took to the Fens round Ely, the marshy isle of Axholme, and the forests of the Midlands, and lived by raiding. Among them was a Leicestershire man named Roger Godberd, who went into Sherwood.

The largest group shut themselves up in Kenilworth Castle in 1266—around 1,200 men behind a great artificial lake—and held it for six months. By December, food had run out and disease was going through the castle, and they surrendered on terms. The settlement known as the Dictum of Kenilworth let most of the Disinherited buy their lands back at several times their yearly value, a price that left many of them ruined and sent some straight back to the woods. The Fens had sheltered men like this before.

Two centuries earlier, after the Norman conquest, a Lincolnshire landholder named Hereward came home from exile to find his family’s estate in Norman hands. A Latin account of his deeds, written a generation or two afterwards and fond of a good story, says he found his younger brother’s head set up over the door of the house, killed the men responsible that same night while they were drinking, and by morning had fourteen Norman heads over the door in its place. In 1071, he and a crowd of other dispossessed Englishmen made a stand on the Isle of Ely, then a true island in miles of reed and black water. King William came in person.

According to the monks of Ely, his engineers built a causeway of timber and hides across the fen, and when the knights crowded onto it in their mail, it sank under them. The monks wrote that in their own day men were still dragging skeletons in rusted armor out of those waters. In the end, the island was given up. Hereward escaped.

Of those who surrendered, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says only that the king did with them as he wished, and later writers say what that meant—life imprisonment for some, and for others the loss of their hands or their eyes before they were turned loose. Once judgment was given, the law treated them all alike, and the question for each outlaw was how good the local people were at hunting. They were fairly good at it, since the whole system had been built to make them so. Medieval England handed the job of catching criminals to the criminals’ own neighbors and then fined the neighbors when they failed.

The tithings—those groups of about ten men that every male joined at twelve—were the heart of an arrangement called frankpledge. If one member committed a crime and ran, the others had to produce him, and if they could not, they paid. Twice a year, the sheriff or the lord steward held what was called the view of frankpledge, going down the list to check that every male over twelve was enrolled in a group and that every group was complete. A missing name meant a fine.

The people with the strongest cash reason to drag Thomas out of that barn were the men he had grown up beside, who knew his habits and his relatives and the hiding places for miles around. On top of that sat the hue and cry. Anyone who came across a felony—a body in a ditch, a broken door, or a man running with a sack—was bound to raise a shout, and by the later Middle Ages, to blow a horn. Every able-bodied male who heard it, from fifteen to sixty, was bound to drop what he was doing and give chase.

The pursuit went from village to village, handed on at each boundary, and a village that failed to raise the hue was fined when the justices came round. In the Anglo-Saxon and Norman centuries, a thief run down with the goods still on him, taken hand-having as the phrase went, could be beheaded or hanged by his captors with very little ceremony. Roads were where many outlaws earned their living, and in 1248 something happened on a road in Hampshire that shows how seriously the crown could take it. Two merchants from Brabant were traveling through a wooded stretch called the Pass of Alton between Winchester and London when they were ambushed and robbed of 200 marks.

They complained to Henry III in person, who was then at Winchester. The king ordered an inquiry, and the first local jury declined to name anyone. The chronicler Matthew Paris says the king flew into a rage, had that jury thrown into prison, and empaneled a second one whose members looked at what had happened to the first and began to talk. It turned out that a good part of the county was involved—dozens of men, including local gentry and members of the king’s own household, some of whom had even been helping themselves to the royal wine as it came up the road.

Hangings followed in batches. One of the robbers turned informer to save his life. His name was Walter Blowber, and what he had to do to earn that life involved a field, a club, and another man’s death. A generation afterwards, Edward I tried to fix the roads for good.

His Statute of Winchester from 1285 opens by complaining that robberies, murders, and arson are more frequent than they used to be, and that local juries would sooner see a stranger robbed than indict offenders who are their own neighbors. Town gates were to be shut from sunset to sunrise. Every town was to keep a night watch through the summer months, and the watchmen were to arrest any stranger who passed and hold him till morning. Every man was to keep weapons in his house according to his wealth—a bow and arrows for the poorest, mail and a horse for the richer—ready for the hue and cry.

Along every highway between market towns, the land was to be cleared for 200 feet on either side, bushes and thickets cut back, and ditches filled where a man might crouch, so that a traveler could see who was coming from a bow shot away. A landowner who failed to clear his stretch answered for robberies committed on it. And if robbers were not produced within forty days, the whole hundred where the robbery took place had to make good the victim’s losses out of its own pockets. Seen from the outlaw’s side of the hedge, all of this meant that nearly every face was a danger.

The plowman in the field had a bow at home and a legal duty to use it. The village he skirted at dusk would be fined if it let him pass. His own former tithing wanted him found. In the earlier centuries, and in the border counties for much longer, anyone who did find him and had to fight him could take his head to the county court as proof.

The royal accounts of the late 1100s include payments of so many shillings for the heads of outlaws, entered in the same businesslike hand as the cost of mending a bridge. When the locals could not manage it, the sheriff raised the posse of the county, the power of the shire—every man he could summon riding out together to beat a wood or ring a marsh. For a fugitive with a pursuit like that behind him, one door remained that the law itself had agreed to stop at. It was the door of the nearest church.

Every parish church in medieval England, together with the consecrated ground of its churchyard, was a place of sanctuary. The rule was old and everybody knew it. A man with the hue and cry behind him would make for the nearest tower he could see across the fields, and if he got through the churchyard gate before a hand closed on his collar, the chase had to stop. His pursuers could stand at the wall and shout, but to go in and take him was sacrilege, punishable by excommunication, and for the next forty days he belonged to the church.

What those forty days were like depended a good deal on who was outside. The law put the duty of guarding him on the neighboring villages, usually four of them, and those villages were fined if he slipped away, so they took it seriously. Men were posted round the church in shifts day and night. In some cases, in the coroners’ rolls, the watchers included the victim’s own kin.

Inside, the fugitive had the floor of the nave or the porch to sleep on. In the first days, somebody might bring him food—the priest, or a relative. After the fortieth day, the law forbade anyone to give him so much as a crust, and the watchers stayed where they were until hunger settled the matter. He was to be starved out.

The law offered one way out through the coroner. The fugitive could send word that he wished to confess. The coroner would ride over, and at the church door or the churchyard stile, in front of the assembled men of the villages, the fugitive had to say aloud what he had done. I stole two oxen from such a man at Michaelmas.

I killed a man on the Leicester road with a staff. The clerk wrote it down, and that confession was as good as a conviction. His goods went to the king, and his land went through its year and day and waste exactly as if he had been outlawed. In return, he was allowed to swear an oath to leave England and never come back.

The lawyers called it abjuring the realm. We have the words of the oath preserved in a formulary from around 1300. The man swears to hasten toward the port the coroner has given him, not to go out of the highway, and at the port he will seek passage and stay no longer than one flood and one ebb of the tide if a ship can be had. If no ship can be had, he swears that he will go every day into the sea up to his knees, trying to cross.

The law wanted a visible demonstration in front of the whole harbor that this man was trying to leave and that only the water was stopping him. Once he had sworn, he was dressed for the road. His own clothes were forfeit along with everything else. He went out ungirt, without a belt, bareheaded and barefoot, in a plain garment, sometimes in sackcloth.

In his hand he carried a wooden cross to mark him as under the church’s protection. The coroner named his port—Dover was the usual choice even from a long way inland—and sometimes the number of days he had to reach it. The Leicester coroner’s roll for the year 1400 has a man named John Middleton from Yorkshire who ran into a church at Dalby on the Wolds on the first of June. He confessed to theft, abjured, and was assigned Dover.

From Dalby to Dover is something like 170 miles. If the usual rules were kept, John Middleton walked that with no shoes and no hat and no money, carrying a stick cross in whatever weather that June gave him. After that entry, he vanishes, and nobody can say whether he arrived. Consider what that road did to a body.

Medieval highways were dirt and flint and the hardened ruts of cartwheels, and feet that had spent a lifetime in shoes would be cut open within days. He was forbidden to stay more than a night in any one place. He could beg, and people did sometimes feed abjurers, though he carried a sign in his hand announcing to every village that he was a confessed felon. He was safe only as long as his feet stayed on the road.

If he stepped off the king’s highway to cut a corner or sleep in a wood, the protection ended, and he was a wolf’s head that instant. The victim’s relatives knew the route, the port having been announced in front of everybody. The standard study of the medieval coroner found abjurers in the rolls who had been pursued and beheaded on the ground that they had strayed. Suppose he reached the coast.

He went down to the harbor and asked for passage across the channel with no money to pay for it, and ship’s masters had little reason to carry a penniless felon for charity. So each day, under the terms of his oath, he walked into the water until the sea reached his knees, stood there in view of the quay, and walked back out. If forty days passed with no ship, he was to go back into sanctuary and the whole business began again. If he did get across, he was put ashore in Flanders or France with no coin, no tools, often no word of the language, in the clothes just described.

Some must have found work. Others crept back to England under a new name, and an abjurer caught back in England could be hanged without any trial on the strength of the coroner’s record. Under the Tudors, the arrangement was tightened. An act of 1529 ordered that anyone abjuring was first to be branded on the base of the right thumb with a hot iron shaped like the letter A, so that he could be recognized afterwards.

A couple of years later, Henry VIII stopped sending them abroad altogether. The preamble to that act complains that English felons overseas were teaching foreigners archery and passing on the secrets of the realm, and from then on they were confined for life inside certain sanctuary towns. Those larger sanctuaries had existed for centuries alongside the ordinary parish sort, and their records are full of small human details. At Durham Cathedral, a fugitive who hammered on the door at any hour was let in, a bell was rung to announce that someone had taken sanctuary, and he was given a black gown with a yellow cross of St.

Cuthbert on the left shoulder and a place to lie on a grate near the south door. Durham’s register survives for the sixty years from 1464 and holds more than 300 fugitives, the great majority there on account of a killing. The protected ground ran out for about a mile round the minster, marked by stone crosses on the approach roads, and at the heart of it sat a plain stone chair called the frith stool, the peace seat. Bury St.

Edmunds let some of its fugitives stay for life, provided they swore an oath to carry no pointed weapon and to turn out when the town bell called them. A share of the men standing at the back of that minster on a feast day were killers who could never again walk more than a mile from it. Sanctuary held only as long as the people outside respected it, and the records show plenty of occasions when they declined to. Villagers broke in, dragged thieves out, beheaded them at the churchyard gate, and paid the fine afterwards.

Great men did the same on a larger scale. Hubert de Burgh had been the most powerful man in England under the young Henry III—the justiciar, the man who had held Dover Castle against a French invasion. In 1232, he fell from favor, was accused of a whole catalog of crimes, and ran. He ended up in a chapel at Brentwood in Essex.

The chronicler Roger of Wendover says that when the king’s men came for him, he stood at the altar with a cross in one hand and the consecrated host in the other, and they tore both from his grip and hauled him outside. They sent for a blacksmith to rivet fetters on his legs. The smith refused when he learned who the prisoner was and declared that he would die any death before he put iron on the man who had saved England from the foreigner. So they tied Hubert’s feet under the belly of a horse and took him to the Tower that way.

The bishop of London then threatened to excommunicate everyone involved, and the king backed down and had Hubert carried back to the chapel. Henry next ordered the sheriffs of Essex and Hertfordshire to surround the building. They dug a ditch round it, put up a palisade, and let no food go in. When his supplies were cut off, Hubert walked out and surrendered.

The forty-day rule had been applied to an earl exactly as it was applied to a sheep thief, with a ring of men round a church waiting for a stomach to give out. A breach that shocked London came at Westminster Abbey in the summer of 1378. Two squires, Robert Hawley and John Shakell, had captured a Spanish nobleman, the Count of Denia, at the Battle of Nájera eleven years before. By the custom of war, his ransom was theirs, and it was an enormous sum.

The count went home to raise the money and left his eldest son with them as a hostage. Years passed. The crown decided it wanted the hostage for diplomatic purposes of its own and ordered the two squires to hand him over, and they refused. That boy was the only security they had for a fortune.

They were put in the Tower. They broke out, got across London, and took sanctuary in the abbey. A royal letter to the abbot, Nicholas Litlington, demanding their surrender got nowhere. On the eleventh of August, the constable of the Tower, Sir Alan Buxhill, came to fetch them with about fifty armed men.

Shakell was taken. Hawley was in the church itself during high mass, and he resisted, and the soldiers killed him in the choir. A servant of the abbey named Richard, who was a sacrist, died with him. The monks’ own petition to Parliament says that armed men entered the church by force, killed a fugitive and a sergeant of the church, molested the monks, and interrupted divine service.

A church polluted by bloodshed could not be used until a bishop had reconciled it, and the abbey stayed shut for about four months. Buxhill was excommunicated and later paid a substantial fine to have the sentence lifted. Hawley the fugitive was buried in the south transept of the abbey where he died, in the corner that later filled up with poets. His slab is still there with the outline of a lost brass of a man in armor.

It happened again after the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. Beaten Lancastrians took refuge in the abbey church there with the Yorkists behind them. Two days later, the Duke of Somerset and a dozen or so others were brought out, given a quick trial, and beheaded on a scaffold in the marketplace, and the abbey was reconsecrated afterwards on account of the blood that had been shed in it. A man in a church porch with a crowd at the wall could never be fully sure of his forty days.

He was relying on the fear of God in people who hated him. For those who put no trust in that, or who never reached a church, or who came back from abjuring with a false name and a branded thumb, what remained was the wild country. A royal forest in medieval England was a legal area, a district where the king’s hunting law applied, and inside its bounds lay villages and plowland and open heath as well as trees. Sherwood in the 1200s covered something like 100,000 acres of Nottinghamshire, a good part of it sandy heath with birch and scattered oak crossed by tracks and dotted with hamlets.

Barnsdale up in Yorkshire was a stretch of wooded country straddling the great north road, convenient for anyone who meant to rob travelers. The Fens round Ely offered a different refuge, mile upon mile of reed and water, where a stranger could drown a few yards from a path that a local man could walk in the dark. An outlaw went to these places because they were hard to search and thinly settled. He was never truly far from people.

He could usually see their smoke. His own smoke was the difficulty. Anyone living rough in England needs a fire for most of the year to dry clothes, to cook, and to get through a January night. And a fire shows by day as a gray thread above the trees, and by night as a glow.

The royal foresters who rode those woods were paid to notice such things. Food meant theft one way or another. The deer were the obvious meat, though they came with a lore of their own. Grain has to be threshed and carried to a mill, and the miller knows every face for miles.

Bread, the bulk of what a medieval person ate, was close to unobtainable. In practice, most outlaws who lasted more than a season must have been supplied by somebody in a village—a sister or an old friend, or a farmer who had been warned what would happen to his ricks if the sack of meal was not left by the gate. Whoever it was committed the offense of harboring each time. The deer belonged to the king, and the Norman kings defended them savagely.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in its long entry on the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, breaks into a bitter piece of verse about him. It says he set up a great protection for the deer and made laws for it that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded, and that he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. Under his successors, the penalties named in the sources are blinding and castration. Dogs suffered for the deer as well.

Any large dog kept inside the forest bounds had to be lawed, as the term went—the animal’s forepaw was set on a block of wood, and a man with a chisel and a mallet struck off three claws at one blow so that it could never again run down a deer. By 1217, the barons had forced a change. The Charter of the Forest, issued as a companion to Magna Carta, laid down that no man should henceforth lose life or limb for the king’s venison. The punishment became a heavy fine or a year and a day in prison for those who could not pay.

A fine meant nothing to an outlaw who owned nothing, and any forester who caught him had a wolf’s head in his hands. Whatever was in the cooking pot, the forest courts dealt with some hard men all the same. A case from Rockingham Forest in 1272 tells of foresters who came on a band of poachers with bows and were shot at for their trouble. When they went back, they found that the gang had cut off the head of a buck and set it on a stake in the middle of a clearing with a spindle wedged in its jaws so that the mouth gaped toward the sun in great contempt, says the roll, of the Lord King and of his foresters.

Men who had grown up with head stakes on the parish boundary knew exactly what that was meant to say. Winter did the rest. A person sleeping on the ground in wet wool, underfed, loses heat faster than he can make it. Feet that stay damp and cold for days go numb and white, and then the skin splits and peels away—the condition later armies called trench foot.

A cough that a man under a roof would shake off in a fortnight can settle on the chest of a man under a hedge and become a fever, and he lies in his hollow with nobody to fetch him water. The coroners’ rolls carry entries for bodies found in fields and outlying barns, often without a name, with a short verdict from the local jury: died of cold, died of hunger and cold, a stranger, name unknown. Nobody can say how many of those strangers were outlaws. Some of them surely were.

For people of the time, the fate of the soul weighed at least as much as the fate of the body. A medieval Christian expected to die with a priest beside him, to confess, to be absolved, to be anointed with oil, to take the host one last time, and to be buried in the consecrated earth of his own parish among his parents and grandparents, where the living would pass his grave each Sunday and pray for him. The church taught that every one of those steps mattered for what came next. A soul that left the body unconfessed carried all its sins with it.

The outlaw could count on none of this. Serious offenders were often excommunicated on top of everything else. No priest was likely to visit a thicket. A man killed and beheaded as an outlaw was usually put in the ground near where he fell, or at a crossroads, or on a hill like Stockbridge Down at the edge of the hundred—in earth no bishop had blessed, with nobody to pay a penny for a mass.

By the teaching he had grown up with, he was going to his judgment from a ditch. Loneliness pushed most outlaws into company, and company brought its own torment, with every man in the band a possible price for another man’s pardon. The crown made steady use of a figure called the approver. An approver was a captured felon who, instead of going to the rope, confessed everything and offered to accuse his former companions.

The king then kept him alive in jail at the crown’s expense, a penny or so a day, and he began naming names. The sheriffs’ accounts show how long this could go on—one account claims an allowance for keeping eight approvers for 226 days, the better part of a year spent in a castle jail naming former friends. Each person an approver named was arrested if he could be found, and each had the right to deny the charge and demand that the approver prove it on his body in a judicial duel. Walter Blowber, the informer from the robbery at the Pass of Alton, was one of these.

In 1249 at Winchester, he accused ten men. Six of them promptly turned approver themselves, and so the accusations multiplied. Three fled and were outlawed. The tenth, Hamo, denied everything and chose to fight.

We know roughly what it looked like, since the clerk who kept the plea roll drew the scene—one of very few such pictures from medieval England. Two men in short tunics, bareheaded, each holding a small square shield and a weapon like a pick with a curved double head. Approvers’ duels were fought with these staves tipped with horn. The rule was that the fight went on from sunrise until one man was dead or cried craven or the stars came out.

Walter won. At the edge of the clerk’s drawing stands a gallows with a small figure hanging from it, labeled with Hamo’s name, for the loser of such a fight, if he was still breathing, was hanged at once. Had Walter lost that duel, he would have gone to the gallows himself as a proven liar. Most approvers did end that way sooner or later.

Walter, having won and having named everyone he could, was allowed to abjure the realm. And so his reward was the barefoot walk to the coast. An outlaw taken alive who did not turn approver went to the county jail to wait for the justices, and the wait was a punishment nobody had sentenced him to. Jails were mostly the cellars and gatehouses of royal castles.

Prisoners were commonly held in irons, and the crown did not feed them. A prisoner ate what his family brought him, or what charitable passersby handed in. An outlaw had usually been caught far from home, and his family had been stripped of everything months before, so he depended on alms among men dying of the fevers that went through every prison. Coroners had to view the body of anyone who died in custody, and their rolls from the famine years carry those deaths in long runs—one entry after another, died in prison of hunger and want.

Some prisoners chose to make their dying longer, and the reason goes back to those inventories of pots and cows. Under English law, a man could only be tried by jury if he consented to it by entering a plea. If he stood mute, the trial could not begin. A statute of 1275 laid down what was to be done with such people—prison forte et dure, strong and hard imprisonment.

In the early version, he was put in the worst cell, barefoot and barely clothed, on the bare earth, and given a little stale bread on one day and a few sips of standing water on the next, never both on the same day, until he agreed to plead or died. By the early 1400s, it had turned into pressing. The man was stretched on his back on the floor with his limbs tied out to the corners of the room. A board was laid on his chest, and iron and stone were piled on it—in the words of the later formula, as much as he could bear and more.

It could take days. Men chose that knowing exactly what it was. And the law explains why. A man who died under the weights died unconvicted.

With no conviction, the crown could claim no forfeit, and his blood stayed uncorrupted. His widow kept the house, and his son got the land. He lay down on a cellar floor and let them crush the breath out of him so that his children would not be beggars. England also had outlaws of a very different sort who rode good horses and ate well and held whole districts in fear.

Among the best documented of them came from a village called Ashby Folville in Leicestershire, and they were the sons of the lord of the manor. Sir John Folville died in 1310 and left seven boys. The eldest, another John, got the land and mostly kept his hands clean. The other six got very little, and for the next twenty years their names run through the court records of the Midlands.

Eustace, the second son, was their captain. One of the younger brothers, Richard, was a priest, rector of a small parish called Teigh over the border in Rutland, and he was as deep in it as any of them. They made their name on the nineteenth of January 1326 with a killing on the road. Sir Roger Bellers was a baron of the Exchequer, one of the king’s senior financial judges, and a close ally of the Despenser family who were then running the country.

He had set out from home to dine in Leicester when a band of around fifty men came at him near the village of Rearsby and stabbed him to death. The Leicester chronicler Henry Knighton, writing within living memory, calls Eustace Folville the man who slew Bellers. Warrants went out for four of the brothers, the priest included. Some of them got overseas, and the county court began calling their names.

Their luck turned within the year. The government they had offended was itself overthrown. Queen Isabella invaded, Edward II was deposed, the Despensers were butchered, and the new regime looked on the killers of Roger Bellers as something close to allies. A pardon for the Folvilles was rushed through in February 1327, ten days after the new king’s coronation.

They came home and carried on. One historian, who pieced their careers together from the rolls, found Eustace alone accused over the next few years of three or four murders, a rape, and three robberies. The gang rode about Leicestershire and Lincolnshire armed and in force, and one of their trades was violence for hire. In 1331, a canon of Sempringham Priory and the cellarer of a Cistercian abbey paid them £20, a very large fee, to go and wreck a watermill belonging to a rival.

Two religious houses hired outlaws to smash a neighbor’s machinery, and the brothers took the money and did the job. Their boldest stroke came in January 1332. Sir Richard Willoughby was a justice of the King’s Bench traveling on the king’s business, and the Folvilles, working with allies from Derbyshire, seized him on the road between Melton Mowbray and Grantham. The indictment says they carried him from wood to wood, helped themselves to more than £100 worth of his goods, and let him go for a ransom of 1,300 marks.

For scale, an income of £40 a year was enough to oblige a man to become a knight, and 1,300 marks was more than twenty times that. Knighton saw the kidnapping as revenge for the Trailbaston sessions of the year before. Few people seemed to have wept for the judge. He was later accused in Parliament of selling the laws as if they had been oxen or cows.

And a generation on, the poet William Langland could mention Folville’s laws in passing as a byword for rough justice done on those who deserved it. Some part of the public plainly enjoyed watching these brothers humiliate a royal judge. Eustace Folville was never punished. He earned pardons by serving in the king’s wars and died in 1346, and his tomb is in the church at Ashby Folville.

His brother, the priest, had a different end. In 1340 or early in 1341, a keeper of the peace named Sir Robert Colville came to Teigh with a body of men to arrest Richard Folville, and Richard retreated into his own parish church with some companions. He had been rector there for twenty years. From inside, he shot arrows at the men surrounding it, killing one and wounding others.

Eventually, Colville’s men got him out, and he was beheaded on the spot in his own churchyard as a man taken in arms. Afterwards, Pope Clement VI instructed the Bishop of Lincoln to absolve Colville and his men for killing a priest, on condition that they did penance by being whipped at each of the main churches of the district. The Folvilles’ partners in the Willoughby kidnapping were a Derbyshire family named Coterel, and their operation looks more like what we would call a protection racket. James Coterel and his brothers Nicholas and John worked out of the Peak District, the high limestone country with its gorges and caves.

In 1330, they were blamed for the killing of a knight, Sir William Musard. Summoned, they failed to appear, and they were outlawed in March 1331. Outlawry seems to have troubled them very little. The indictments have the brothers riding armed publicly and secretly in manner of war by day and night.

What the Coterels understood was that a threat is cheaper than a robbery. They sent letters. A man of property would receive a message naming a sum and explaining the alternative. The mayor of Nottingham, a rich merchant, paid £20.

A Bakewell man paid 100 shillings. Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, the Lincolnshire knight who commissioned the famous psalter with the farming scenes in its margins, was told to find £40. They had friends everywhere. The chapter of Lichfield sheltered and employed them, and the prior of Lenton sent warning when a royal commission was on its way.

By one account, a local man sent to hunt them down ended up riding with them. One letter of this sort survives in full from Yorkshire in 1336, and whoever wrote it had a sense of humor. It is written in French and dressed up as a royal writ: Lionel, king of the rout of raveners, salutes but with little love his false and disloyal Richard of Snawhill. Richard was a parson who had put the wrong man into the vicarage of Burton Agnes, and King Lionel commands him, on pain of losing all that can stand forfeit against our laws, to remove that man at once and accept the candidate chosen by the abbot of St.

Mary’s. The letter closes like a real writ: given at our castle of the wind in the Greenwood Tower, in the first year of our reign. When special judges finally came to Derbyshire in the early 1330s, nearly everyone named was acquitted. Historians who have studied the Coterels note that they never seemed to have been especially unpopular locally, and that they were supplied and employed by respectable people throughout.

James Coterel went off to fight in Scotland, collected his pardon, and within a few years the crown was commissioning him to arrest other men. The famine years bred the same thing in the far north. Sir Gilbert de Middleton was a Northumberland knight of the king’s own household, and his county had been raided bare by the Scots for years. On the first of September 1317, he and his men stopped a party on the road south of Durham that contained the bishop elect of Durham, the bishop’s brother, and two cardinals sent by the Pope.

The cardinals were robbed and then allowed to go on, and their goods were later given back. The bishop and his brother were taken to Mitford Castle and held for ransom into October. A few months later, some neighbors talked their way in at the gate of Mitford, overpowered the porters, and took him. In January 1318, he was dragged through London to the gallows, hanged, cut down, and beheaded, and his heart was cut out and burned.

His quarters were sent to Newcastle, York, Bristol, and Dover. Towns could be targets as well. Boston in Lincolnshire held one of the great fairs of medieval England, the fair of St. Botolph, where merchants from Flanders and Italy came each summer to buy English wool and sell cloth and spices.

In 1288, according to the chronicler Walter of Guisborough, a squire named Robert Chamberlain arrived with a company of men and staged a tournament there with one team dressed up as monks and the other as canons. Then they set fire to the town in several places. While people ran to fight the flames, the gang plundered the booths and burned what they could not carry. Guisborough says that gold and silver melted in the heat and ran in a stream toward the sea, and that all the money in England could hardly have made good the loss.

Chamberlain was caught and hanged. He confessed his own part and refused to name the others, and most of them were never found. Roger Godberd belongs in this company, the man from the wreckage of Evesham. He was a substantial tenant farmer from Swanington in Leicestershire who had served in the garrison of Nottingham Castle and backed Simon de Montfort.

After Montfort’s fall, he was pardoned once and then slid back into outlawry. Between about 1267 and 1272, the records call him the leader and master of the outlaws of three counties. He was accused of burglaries and homicides and of a raid on Stanley Abbey in Wiltshire in which a monk was killed and a large sum taken, a charge he denied. A royal letter of 1272 describes the state of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire in those years: outlaws and robbers, mounted and on foot, wandered by day and night, and so many homicides were done that no one with a small company could pass through most parts without being taken and killed or spoiled of his goods.

A hundred marks were raised from the three counties to pay for hunting him, and the money went to Reginald de Grey, the constable of Nottingham, who had once served in the same castle garrison as Godberd. A local knight, Sir Richard Foliot, was found to have been sheltering the band and had to surrender his castle at Fenwick. Godberd was taken early in 1272. His lieutenants were beheaded that year.

Godberd himself spent about four years in prison, moved between Nottingham, Bridgnorth, and other castles, and at least one attempt was made to break him out. When he finally stood trial in 1276, he produced old charters of pardon from Henry III. Strictly, they covered only his first spell of outlawry. He walked free all the same, in the early years of Edward I when the quarrels of the previous reign were being buried.

He went home to his farm and seems to have died in the 1290s. An outlaw captain from Sherwood, hunted by the constable of Nottingham, sheltered by a friendly knight, accused of robbing monks, reconciled with the king at the end. More than one historian has looked at him and thought of a certain legend. The legal language of outlawry got into the stories too.

The tale of Gamelyn, a Middle English poem of around 1350, has a young man cheated of his inheritance by an elder brother who then becomes sheriff. The brother has him indicted, and the poem says that wolf’s head was cried on Gamelyn, the old formula from the law books turning up in a minstrel’s verse. Gamelyn takes to the forest and is made king of the outlaws. In the last scene, he walks into the court where his case is being heard, throws the judge over the bar so that his arm breaks, sits down in the judge’s seat, and has the judge, the sheriff, and all twelve jurors hanged.

The poem presents this as a happy ending, and the king makes Gamelyn a royal forester. The Robin Hood name itself had become a label for real fugitives. In 1262, a royal memoranda roll records a pardon to the prior of Sandleford for seizing without warrant the chattels of one William Robberhod, fugitive. The Berkshire court roll behind that entry survives, and in it the same man is called William, son of Robert the Smith.

Some clerk copying the case had turned an outlawed smith’s son into a robber hood. And in 1439, a petition to Parliament complained of a Derbyshire gentleman named Piers Venables who had rescued a prisoner from custody and then, with a crowd of other misdoers, gone into the woods of that country. The petition says, like as it had been Robin Hood and his company. That legend was already in wide circulation.

By the 1370s, Langland could have a lazy priest in Piers Plowman admit that he did not know his lord’s prayer properly, though he knew the rhymes of Robin Hood. The oldest ballads that survive were written down over the following century or so, and they are a good deal bloodier than their reputation. Robin Hood and the Monk, from a manuscript around 1450, has Robin recognized at prayer in a Nottingham church by a monk he once robbed, and the monk fetches the sheriff. Robin is taken.

Little John and Much the miller’s son set out to rescue him, and on the road they meet that same monk riding south with letters for the king, with a little page riding beside him. They fall in with them in a friendly way. Then John pulls the monk from his horse and cuts off his head, and Much does the same to the page. The ballad says, for fear that he would tell.

A child is killed at the roadside to keep him quiet, and the ballad moves to the next verse with no comment at all. In Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne, Robin meets a bounty hunter in the forest, a man dressed from head to foot in a horse’s hide with the mane and tail still on it. They fight for two hours of a summer’s day, and Robin kills him. He takes Guy’s head by the hair, sticks it on the end of his bow, draws an Irish knife, and cuts the dead face until, in the ballad’s words, no one born of woman could tell whose head it was.

He puts on the horsehide and carries the ruined head to the sheriff as proof that Robin Hood is dead. The audience for that song knew about heads carried in as proof. The hero’s own end is an outlaw’s end as well. In A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed around 1500, Robin falls ill and goes to Kirklees Priory in Yorkshire to be bled, the ordinary medieval treatment for almost anything.

The prioress is his own kinswoman. She has a lover, a knight named Roger of Doncaster, who wants Robin dead. She takes him to a private room, opens the vein in his arm, locks the door on him, and leaves. The ballad says the blood ran thick at first, and afterwards ran thin, and by then he understood.

He bled through the day, too weak to get out by the window. When Little John finally broke in, Robin asked for his bow, shot one arrow through the casement, and asked to be buried where it fell. The singers knew their subject. Their hero dies betrayed by a relative, of a wound nobody would treat.

For a real outlaw, the end was usually a good deal more public. The quickest death on offer was the one given on the spot, and a clear example comes from the sea, from a man who managed to be outlawed on both sides of the channel. Eustace the Monk was born near Boulogne around 1170, the younger son of a minor lord, and he had indeed been a monk at the abbey of Saint-Samère. He left the cloister after his father was murdered, entered the service of the Count of Boulogne, rose to be his steward, and fell out with him over the accounts.

Summoned to answer for it, he ran for the forest, and the count declared him an outlaw and burned his fields. From the forest, he went to sea. He set himself up in the Channel Islands with a fleet of ships and sold his services first to King John of England from about 1205, and then, after a quarrel in 1212, to the French. English coastal towns had cause to hate him in both roles.

In August 1217, he was carrying reinforcements across the channel for a French invasion when an English fleet came out to meet him. The commander on the English side was Hubert de Burgh, the same Hubert who would be starved out of a chapel in Essex fifteen years later. The English got up wind and threw powdered quicklime, which blew into the eyes of the French crews. On the twenty-fourth of August, Eustace’s ship was surrounded off Sandwich and boarded.

The knights aboard were taken for ransom, and the common soldiers were killed. Eustace was found hiding down in the bilge. He offered a huge sum for his life, and the accounts say it was refused on account of the hatred the English crews bore him. They gave him one choice: to have his head cut off on the ship’s rail or on the side of the siege engine the ship was carrying as deck cargo.

Matthew Paris records the beheading without saying which he picked. The head was set on a lance, taken to Canterbury, and then carried round the south of England so that people could see the monk was dead. Paris drew the scene in the margin of his chronicle: the headsman with his sword up, and Eustace bent over the gunwale. On land, the ordinary end for a captured outlaw was the rope, and medieval hanging was a slow business.

The gallows was two posts and a beam, often on a hill or at a crossroads on the boundary of the hundred. The condemned man climbed a ladder with the noose on and was turned off it, or stood in a cart that was driven out from under him. He fell a foot or two, too short a drop to break the neck, and he strangled. It could take a quarter of an hour or more, with the face swelling and darkening.

People did sometimes survive the rope. The patent rolls for 1264 record a pardon for a woman named Iveta de Balsham, who had been condemned for harboring thieves. She was hanged at the ninth hour on a Monday and left on the beam until sunrise on Tuesday. And when they took her down, she was still alive.

Henry III let her go. An outlaw caught far from home had no friends at the foot of the gallows and could expect no such luck. His body stayed on the beam until it came apart, as a notice to anyone passing. For those whose crimes touched the king, something far worse was devised, assembled piece by piece across the thirteenth century.

One of the first clear cases involves an outlaw on an island. William de Marisco was the son of a great Anglo-Irish baron. In 1235, a royal messenger was murdered at the gate of the palace of Westminster. William was blamed, and he fled.

He took over Lundy, the granite island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel with cliffs on every side and one landing place, and for some years he lived there by piracy, stopping ships and ransoming their merchants. In 1238, according to Matthew Paris, a man climbed through a window at the royal manor of Woodstock at night, carrying a knife, and made for the king’s bed. Henry III happened to be sleeping in the Queen’s chamber. One of the queen’s ladies, who was sitting up late over her psalter, heard the intruder and raised the house.

Under questioning, the man said William de Marisco had sent him. Paris says he was taken to Coventry, torn limb from limb by horses, then beheaded, and his body divided into three parts. It took four more years to get Marisco off his rock. In 1242, the king’s men took him there with sixteen of his followers.

Paris describes what was done to him in London. He was dragged from Westminster to the Tower and from there to the gibbet. He was hanged until he was dead, and the body had stiffened. Then it was let down and disemboweled, and the bowels were burned on the spot.

The body was divided into four quarters, and one was sent to each of four chief cities of the kingdom, to strike terror, Paris says, into all who saw it. The sixteen companions were dragged through the streets at the tails of horses and hanged. Paris adds that Marisco swore to his confessor at the last, on the peril of his soul, that he had had no part in the attempt at Woodstock. The family went down with him.

His father Jeffrey, once the king’s chief officer in Ireland, was driven out of one kingdom after another and died a few years later in France, in exile and in poverty. Forty-one years later, the punishment was given a fuller shape on a Welsh prince. Dafydd ap Gruffudd was the brother of the last native prince of Wales. He had spent years at the English court and been knighted by Edward I.

At Easter 1282, he launched a surprise attack on Hawarden Castle that began the final war of Welsh independence. His brother was killed that December. Dafydd held out into the following summer as a fugitive in the mountains of Snowdonia with his wife and children, until in June he was taken in a bog on the slopes of a mountain called Bera, badly wounded in the struggle. Men of his own nation handed him over.

Edward summoned a parliament to Shrewsbury to decide what to do with him, and the sentence it produced was built like a legal argument: one punishment for each offense. For betraying the king who had knighted him, he was to be dragged to the scaffold at a horse’s tail. For the killings he had caused, he was to be hanged. For having committed them at Easter, in the week of Christ’s passion, his entrails were to be torn out and burned.

And for plotting the king’s death, his body was to be cut into four and sent through the kingdom. It was carried out on the third of October 1283. The royal accounts record twenty shillings paid to a man named Jeffrey of Shrewsbury for doing the work. The quarters went to Bristol, Northampton, York, and Winchester, and the citizens of York and Winchester are said to have quarreled over which city should have the right shoulder.

His head went to the Tower of London and was set up beside his brother’s. William Wallace died in the same fashion twenty-two years later, and in his case outlawry decided the form of the trial and part of the sentence. English sources describe him as a robber from the start. One chronicle of the time introduces him as a man who was first a ruffian and a thief, and only afterwards a knight.

After his army was broken at Falkirk in 1298, he gave up the guardianship of Scotland, spent some years abroad, and by 1304 was back in his own country as a hunted man. When nearly all the Scottish nobles made their peace with Edward that year, the terms left Wallace out. Edward let it be known that Scots who wanted favor could earn it by bringing him in. Early in August 1305, he was seized at Robroyston, just outside Glasgow, by men working for Sir John Menteith, a Scot who held Dumbarton Castle for the English.

He was taken south under guard. A London chronicle gives the rest almost hour by hour. He arrived on the 22nd and was lodged overnight in a citizen’s house. The next morning, the eve of St.

Bartholomew, he was taken on horseback to Westminster, with the mayor, the sheriffs, and the aldermen riding in procession, and a great crowd following. In the great hall, he was put up on the south bench and crowned with laurel leaves, since he was commonly reported to have said that he ought to wear a crown in that hall. The charges were recited: treason, homicides, arson, the killing of the sheriff of Lanark, the burning of churches, the slaughter of men and women in religion. No plea was asked of him.

He was an outlaw, the judges held, put outside the law by the king’s own court and never restored to the king’s peace. And an outlaw had no right to answer. Sentence followed at once, and like Dafydd’s, it was itemized. For treason, he was to be drawn from Westminster to the Tower, from the Tower to Aldgate, and so through the city to the Elms at Smithfield.

For robberies and homicides, he was to be hanged and afterwards taken down. As an outlaw, he was to be beheaded. For the wrong done to God and the church in burning churches, his heart, liver, lungs, and all his inner parts were to be thrown into a fire. And for his treason against the king, his body was to be cut into four.

It was done that day. The English chronicle that called him a ruffian sets it out in order: he was first drawn as a traitor, then hanged as a thief, then, while still alive, cut down and beheaded as a banished man. After that, he was disemboweled, and his entrails were burned. Then the body was divided.

The head went onto London Bridge, the earliest that tradition records there, and later accounts have it dipped in tar to make it last. Within about a year, it had company: the head of Sir Simon Fraser, a Scottish knight who had fought beside Wallace and was hanged and beheaded in London in 1306. The same chronicle lists where the rest of Wallace went. The right hand to the bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne.

The right foot to Berwick. The left hand to Stirling, and the left foot to Perth. Once a man had been taken apart like that, the pieces went to work. Heads and quarters were parboiled in a kettle with salt and cumin seed before they went up, to slow the rot and discourage the birds.

Quarters traveled to their cities by cart and were hung from the gates, and they stayed up for years. The citizens of York walked in and out under Micklegate Bar beneath the blackening remains of men some of them had seen alive. The English had been putting heads on poles since long before the Conquest, and part of the evidence comes out of the ground. Anglo-Saxon land charters, when they describe the boundary of an estate, walk round it from landmark to landmark: to the old ditch, to the thorn tree, along the stream.

In a number of them, one of the landmarks is called heafod stoccan, the head stakes. They were a fixed feature of the landscape, as familiar as a ford. At Walkington Wold in East Yorkshire, up on the chalk on the boundary between hundreds, a Bronze Age burial mound was used for centuries as an execution site. The excavators in the 1960s recovered twelve skeletons, ten of them without heads, and eleven loose skulls—the remains of at least thirteen people.

A re-examination of the bones in 2007 found all of the dead were men. The radiocarbon dates run from around 640 to around 1030. So this one hilltop was in use, off and on, for close to 400 years, and it is the only such cemetery yet identified in the north of England. The skulls carry the marks of the blade, and one man had needed several blows before his head came off.

Most of the loose skulls have no lower jaw. A head buried straight away keeps its jaw. A head set on a pole stays there while the flesh rots, and after some months the ligaments give way and the jawbone drops and is lost in the grass. Whoever eventually took those skulls down and threw them into the mound was handling heads that had spent a season or more looking out over the wolds.

Sutton Hoo, known for its ship burial, has the same thing at its edges. Around one of the mounds, the archaeologists found thirty-nine bodies preserved as crusts of dark sand, all that the acid soil had left of them. Some lay face down. Some had their wrists together behind them.

And some had been beheaded. These burials date from the centuries after the kings, when the old royal cemetery had become the place where the district killed its wolf’s heads. England then was thorough. But the barest form of outlawry, where a single hunted man can be followed through almost twenty years of it, comes from farther north, from an island that had no king, no sheriff, and no executioner at all.

Iceland was settled by Norse farmers from the 870s onward, and for its first four centuries it had a government that consisted almost entirely of law. Every June, the free men of the island rode to a rift valley in the southwest called Thingvellir for the Althing, the general assembly. A lawspeaker stood on the law rock and recited a third of the legal code from memory each year. Courts sat and gave judgments.

And when a judgment had been given, everybody packed up their booths and rode home, the state having nothing more to offer. It had no officers to carry out a sentence. Outlawry in a country like that was very nearly the whole of criminal law. The surviving law texts, known by the odd name of Grágás, the gray goose, set out two grades of it.

The milder was a three-year banishment. A man under that sentence was given three named farms where he was safe, each a day’s journey from the next, and he was safe on the road between them, so long as he stepped a bow shot aside when he met other travelers. If three summers passed and he was still in Iceland, he became the other thing. The other thing was called skóggangr, forest-going.

The word had come over from Norway with the settlers, to a country with hardly any forest, only birch scrub and lava. A full outlaw was an outlaw for life. The law’s phrase for him runs to a formula: he is not to be fed, not to be helped in any need. Anyone who gave him a meal could be prosecuted, and so could any ship’s master who carried him abroad.

Anybody could kill him anywhere, and a price was payable on his head. The law also called him vargr, a wolf, the same animal the English chose. His debts were paid off. His wife’s own property was set aside for her, and the remainder was divided between the man who had prosecuted him and the men of the district.

Any child he fathered from that day forward was barred from inheriting. When he died, his body could not lie in a churchyard. Then consider the country he was supposed to survive in. The middle of Iceland is a desert of black sand and old lava, ringed by glaciers, with nothing growing that a person can eat.

Every patch of decent grazing had a farm on it, and every farmer knew the faces in his quarter of the island. An Icelandic outlaw could steal sheep in the highlands in summer. In winter, he had to be under somebody’s roof, and whoever owned that roof was breaking the law for him. Most full outlaws seem to have got abroad or died within a few years.

The sagas remember a handful who lasted longer. Those sagas were written down in the 1200s and 1300s about people who lived around the year 1000, by authors working from family tradition, old verses, and their own sense of a good story. They have ghosts in them and witches. They also have an eye for legal procedure and physical detail that is often very exact.

Grettir Ásmundarson was born at a farm called Bjarg in the north of Iceland. The saga makes him a difficult child, big and sullen and clever. He killed his first man in a quarrel over a food bag at fourteen, by the saga’s reckoning, and was sent abroad for three years under the lesser outlawry. He came home and found a valley being haunted by its own dead shepherd.

The shepherd had been a big surly Swede named Glámr, who refused to fast on Christmas Eve, went out after the sheep in a snowstorm, and was found dead the next day, dark blue and swollen to the size of an ox. After that, Glámr walked. He rode the roofs of the farm at night, drumming his heels on the turf until the rafters cracked. He killed the next shepherd, broke the neck of a farmhand, and the valley began to empty.

Grettir went to the farm and lay down in the hall one night, wrapped in a fur cloak, and waited. Glámr came in. They wrestled the length of the hall, tearing up the benches, and crashed together out through the doorway into the yard, with Glámr underneath. At that moment, the clouds drew off the moon, and Glámr rolled his eyes up toward it, and Grettir saw them.

The saga calls it the only sight that ever frightened him. His strength drained away, and he lay across the dead man, unable to draw his sword. And Glámr spoke. He said that Grettir had reached only half the strength he might have grown into and would never gain the rest.

He said that from now on his deeds would turn to bad luck and killings and outlawry. And this, he said, is my curse on you: that these eyes of mine will always be before your sight, and you will find it hard to be alone, and that will drag you to your death. Then the weakness passed, and Grettir cut off Glámr’s head and laid it against the thighs, the old way of stopping the dead from walking, and they burned the corpse to ash. From that night on, the saga says plainly, the strongest man in Iceland was afraid of the dark.

He saw shapes once the daylight went, and he could not bear to be by himself after nightfall. And this was a man who was about to spend nineteen years as an outlaw, much of it alone, in a country where a winter night lasts twenty hours. The sentence came about through an accident. In Norway on a freezing night, Grettir swam a sound to fetch fire from a hut where some travelers were sheltering.

He burst in through the door caked in ice, and the men inside, who were drunk, took him for a troll and went for him with burning brands. In the scuffle, the straw on the floor caught. Grettir got out with his fire. The hut burned down with everyone in it, and the dead included the sons of a powerful Icelander named Thorkel of Gjá.

The father rode to the next Althing and had Grettir declared a full outlaw in his absence, with no one there to speak for him. When Grettir’s ship reached Iceland, he was told three things at once: his father had died, his brother Atli had been killed, and he himself was an outlaw throughout the land. By the saga’s own count, he was twenty-five, and he would be an outlaw until he died at forty-four. He spent those years moving around the rim of the island, staying with kinsmen until they grew nervous, robbing farmers for food, and living for long stretches alone in the interior at a lake on the high moor called Ánavatn, where he built a hut and lived on netted fish.

Other outlaws came to him there. The first was a man named Grímr, who asked to share the hut, and Grettir, who dreaded the nights alone, let him stay. Grímr had been hired by Grettir’s enemies with the promise of a pardon and a purse. He waited for weeks until he thought Grettir was asleep and went for him with a short sword, and Grettir, who had been lying awake, killed him.

The following year, a second man came, Þórir Redbeard, with the same story and the same employers. He stayed two whole winters working and fishing alongside Grettir before he made his attempt while Grettir was swimming out to the nets, and Grettir killed him as well. After that, says the saga, Grettir would never again take in an outlaw, and yet he could hardly bear to be alone. The saga has one episode that shows how an ordinary district dealt with a full outlaw when it got the chance.

Grettir had been robbing farms round Eyjafjörður in the northwest. One day, a crowd of about thirty farmers caught him asleep in a wood, exhausted, and managed to bind him. Then came an argument. Nobody wanted to be the one to keep him until the chieftain came home, since guarding Grettir meant feeding him and watching him, and each farmer found a reason why his own house would not do.

In the end, they agreed it was simplest to hang him on the spot, and they were putting up the gallows when the chieftain’s wife rode up with her men. She asked what Grettir had done to deserve it, told them they had no standing to kill a man of his family, and made him swear to leave the district in peace. He swore, and she had him cut loose. The saga says he counted it the greatest test of his temper that he did not hit a single one of them as he walked away.

With his enemies closing in and every refuge worn out, he went to the last place left. Drangey is an island in Skagafjörður, a block of rock with cliffs close to 600 feet high on every side, flat and grassy on top. The only way up was by ladders, and with the top ladder pulled up, nobody could follow. He took two people with him.

One was his youngest brother, Illugi, fifteen years old, who insisted on coming. Their mother, Ásdís, saying goodbye to them at Bjarg, told them she knew she would never see either of them again, and that they would die together by weapons, and she warned them above all to beware of sorcery. The other companion was a vagrant called Glaumr, a lazy, talkative man they picked up on the way, taken along mainly for company. The farmers of the fjord kept about eighty sheep on Drangey.

The three of them ate the sheep, all but one old ram they grew fond of, which used to come and butt at the hut door in the evenings. They climbed down the cliffs for seabirds and eggs. Once Glaumr let the fire go out, and Grettir, who had no boat, swam several miles of cold sea to the mainland to fetch fire, and soaked for hours afterwards in a hot spring there that still carries his name. The farmers, unable to get at him, sold their shares in the island cheap to a hard, ambitious man named Þorbjörn, known as Öngull the Hook.

Öngull tried bribes and threats and got nowhere, and the seasons went by. Then he went to his old foster mother. Her name was Þuríðr. She was very old, and the saga says that in her youth, when the country was still heathen, she had known a great deal of the old craft.

She herself rode out under the cliffs and called a curse up at Grettir, and he threw a rock down into the boat that broke her thigh. When she could walk again, she went along the shore until she found a tree stump washed up with its roots on, as much as a man could carry. She had a flat place scraped on it, cut runes into the wood, reddened them with her own blood, and walked backwards round it against the sun, speaking. Then she had it pushed into the sea, and the saga says it drifted out toward Drangey against the wind.

Grettir found it on the beach the next day and kicked it away, saying it was an evil tree sent by evil. It came back the following day, and he refused it again. On the third day, the weather was foul, and they needed firewood, and Glaumr dragged the stump up to the hut, grumbling. Grettir was in a bad temper.

He took his axe in both hands and swung at it without looking closely, and the blade skidded off the wood and went into his right leg above the knee, down to the bone. Illugi bound it up. It bled very little, and for three nights it looked clean and seemed to be closing. On the third night, Grettir woke in such pain that he could not lie still.

They unwrapped the leg. The whole limb was swollen and had turned dark blue, coal black in places. The wound had burst open again and looked far worse than when it was fresh. From then on, he got no rest.

The flesh of the thigh began to fester up toward the hip and down toward the foot, and matter ran from it, and he lay in the hut in a fever, while Illugi sat by him day and night. After about two weeks of that, Öngull came out in a storm with a boatload of men. Glaumr had been told to pull up the ladder. He had not bothered, and he was asleep at the top of it.

They beat him awake and went onto the hut and broke down the door. Grettir could not stand. He fought them from his knees with a short sword, and the saga says he cut one man in two, and the body fell across him and pinned his arm. And in that moment, Öngull drove a spear into his back between the shoulders.

Illugi threw his shield over his brother and stood across him and defended him so fiercely that in the end they had to trap him between beams and shields to take him alive. Grettir was dead when they turned back to him, or so near it that the saga hardly distinguishes. The leg had killed him as much as the spear. They wanted his sword.

His fingers were locked round the hilt, and they could not prize them loose. So they laid his wrist over a beam and hacked the hand off. Then Öngull took that same short sword in both hands and chopped at Grettir’s neck. It took more than one blow, and on one of them a piece broke out of the edge of the blade.

When the head was off, he held it up. They offered Illugi his life if he would swear never to take revenge. He said he would think of nothing else for as long as he lived. At sunrise, they took him to the eastern edge of the island and beheaded him.

He had gone out to Drangey at fifteen and cannot have been more than eighteen or so. Glaumr they took into the boat, and he wept and wailed so loudly on the crossing that they killed him once they landed, to be rid of the noise. Öngull packed the head in salt and kept it over the winter in a storehouse on his farm. In spring, he rode with it to Bjarg, walked into the hall where Ásdís was sitting, and had the head set down on the floor in front of her.

She looked at it and spoke a verse to the effect that these men would have run from him like sheep from a fox had he been well. Then Öngull went to the Althing to collect the price on Grettir’s head and found the mood had turned against him. The assembly held that he had used witchcraft, a thing the law forbade, and that killing a man already on his deathbed was shameful. He got no reward and was banished from Iceland himself.

He went out to Constantinople and took service in the emperor’s guard, and Grettir’s half-brother, Þorsteinn, followed him there. According to the saga, Öngull was showing off the short sword one day, pointing out the notch it had taken on Grettir’s neck, when Þorsteinn asked to see it, took it in his hand, and split Öngull’s skull with it. The saga adds that the lawmen had discussed Grettir’s case the summer before and agreed that no one ought to remain an outlaw longer than twenty years. He had served nineteen.

For most families of real outlaws, nothing came home at all. The wife of an outlaw was trapped in a way the law did not trouble itself to think about. Her husband was dead in law. He could own nothing and inherit nothing.

In the eyes of the church, though, he was alive, so she was still married. She could not take another husband while he lived, and she might never learn whether he lived or not. A widow in medieval England had a right to dower, a share of her husband’s lands for her lifetime, and that was what kept widows fed. The wife of a felon had no such claim on lands that were forfeit.

Any land she had inherited from her own family had passed under her husband’s control when she married, and the crown could take his interest in it, along with everything else, so that her own father’s fields might sit in the king’s hands for as long as her husband was presumed to be breathing somewhere. Petitions survive from women caught like this, written for them by a clerk in stiff law French, asking the king and his council for something to live on out of what had been theirs. The children carried it forward. A son of an outlawed felon could not inherit from his father, and the corrupted blood cut him off from inheriting through his father as well.

Such children went into service in other people’s houses or onto the roads. Rank made no difference here either. When Dafydd ap Gruffudd was run down in Snowdonia in 1283, his wife and children were taken with him. His two small sons were sent to Bristol Castle and never came out.

One died there within five years. The other was still a prisoner more than twenty years later, a grown man who had been a captive since childhood, when Edward I sent an order that a strong cage of timber bound with iron be made for him to be shut in at night. He was still alive in Bristol Castle in 1325. One road back did exist, and it ran through the king’s wars.

A royal pardon was a sheet of parchment with the great seal hanging from it. It wiped out the outlawry and gave the man back his standing in law, though only from that day forward. One legal authority says an outlaw restored to the king’s peace is like a newborn child, a new man who recovers none of what he lost while he was outside the law. Pardons could be bought for a fee to the chancery and suitable presents to whoever had the king’s ear, and the Folvilles and Coterels of the world treated them as a business expense.

For a poor man, the only currency was his body. From the 1290s onward, when an English king needed infantry, he offered pardons to felons and outlaws who would serve a campaign. Edward III did it on a grand scale. After the campaign of Crécy and the long siege of Calais in 1346 and 47, the chancery issued well over a thousand more.

Some of the archers who brought down the French cavalry at Crécy had been outlaws the year before, with a price on them, and were standing in that line to earn the right to go home. Those who lived went home, and that brought its own troubles. The pardon had to be proclaimed in the county court, and the man had to find neighbors willing to stand surety for his future behavior. It covered the king’s claim against him and nobody else’s, so the family of his victim could still bring their own prosecution.

His cow and his land stayed gone, long since sold. What came back to the village was a man with a season of killing and looting behind him, no property, and old scores on every side. The commons in Parliament complained about it for decades. The kings agreed each time, and at the next campaign the pardons flowed as before, the need for archers being what it was.

The majority neither hanged nor came home with a charter. They went somewhere else. England had no identity papers and no portraits, and a man who walked eighty miles was a stranger with whatever name he chose to give. He could hire himself out at harvest in another county.

He could go to London and carry sacks on the wharves, or take ship with an army and stay in Gascony. The county court had called his name five times and written it on a roll, and the roll went into a chest at Westminster, and the man himself lived on for a year or for thirty under some other name, and died in a place where nobody knew what he had been. We have the names of thousands of them, and for nearly everyone, the name is all we have. One of those names has had more attention than the rest.

In July 1225, the king’s justices held an assize at York. The plea roll of that session has not survived, so whatever was said in court is lost. What survives is a line in the great annual account of the Exchequer, the pipe roll for the following year. Under Yorkshire, among the sums the sheriff had not yet paid in, a clerk wrote that the sheriff owes 32 shillings and sixpence from the chattels of Robert Hod, fugitive.

32 shillings and sixpence is a coroner’s valuation added up—a horse perhaps, and a couple of cows, some sheep, a cart, corn in the barn. It is the property of a working farmer of modest means. He had been summoned for something, and the roll does not say what. He had not come.

His goods had been seized and sold, and the sheriff was slow handing over the proceeds. The Exchequer carried unpaid debts forward from roll to roll, and this one appears in nine successive pipe rolls, from 1226 to 1234. Six times the name is written Robert Hod, once Robert Hood, and twice the clerk uses a familiar form and writes Hobbihod. Each year, the same sum is copied out against it by men sitting at a checkered table in Westminster who had never seen him.

In the roll for 1234, a small cross has been drawn beside his name, and historians are unsure whether it means the debt was paid or written off. In the roll for the following year, the entry is gone. And that is as far as the parchment goes.