Among my collection of medieval reference books are two large tomes that weigh heavier on me than they do the shelves they sit on. I refer to Suicide in the Middle Ages by Alexander Murray. These books are magisterial in their comprehensive approach to the subject of suicide in the middle ages: it reads like Murray himself has read every obscure source court document in England, France, Germany between 1000 and 1400.
If anyone of the 7+ billion people on planet earth could calculate the self annihilation of peasants in the middle ages it would be Murray. He cannot, and in his books he details not just acts of suicide but the mores of the societies where he finds and, importantly, doesn't find records to aid such a terrible calculus.
From his introduction to the first book we meet the Premonstratension canon Prior Henry, one of 6 canons sent into the 'wild country between Derby and Nottingham [England]' to aid in the realignment and reinvestment of a struggling monastery. Over the next few years the canons find themselves in equal dire straights: it's impossible to support the number of people there....legally. So, Henry, in the wilderness far from authority and scrutiny, turns to counterfeit coining. No one knew outside the walls of the monastery. No one knew as well that Henry had begun to see a local girl. Except once the canons were recalled - all except Prior Henry who elected to stay behind - the local priest who knew of these affairs reported Henry to his abbot. And the mother-house recalled Henry. When he didn't return as ordered they sent out men to retrieve him and he was brought back by force to the mother abbey.
Our account ends: 'Henry's heart was smitten by melancholy. Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and in this way of his own free will, nay free folly, ended his life'.
This account comes from Thomas of Muskham in a chronicle of local abbeys in the early 13th century. Murray continues:
Thomas bestows on Henry's death seven contemptuous words: 'spontanea quin potius stulta morte vitam finivit' (literally: 'by a spontaneous or rather, foolish, death he put an end to his life'). These words were almost certainly the only epitaph Henry had in his own generation or any other. His body, found dead in the bath, would normally have been disposed of in an unmarked grave without ceremony or public prayer, outside any churchyard.
The lovelorn, the heartsick, the failures, the criminals. Shame for the community and shame for the family are for Murray the reasons why records are often mute on the subject of suicides, often in ambivalent language.
In Dante's suicide canto in Inferno, the poet ends by referring to a Florentine suicide whom Dante keeps studiously anonymous. The anonymity puzzled commentators, and Boccaccio, commenting on the passage in c.1370, suggests one reason why Dante kept the name quiet may have been 'through regard for surviving relations, who may perhaps be men of honour; and therefore Dante does not wish to stain them with the disgrace of such a shameful death.'
And although Murray finds many records, for all classes in society, they date by and large from after 1300 when we see the hitherto development of comprehensive law and the rule of scribes and legal paper begin to tally souls. The peasant ranks low on the tally sheets, making rarer appearances. And Murray affords them tremendous space for their stories to be told when he finds them. But we can only guess at the numbers and sources of their shame.
Reading:
Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 1: The Violent Against Themselves, Alexander Murray (Oxford, 1998)
Suicide in the Middle Ages: Volume 2: The Curse on Self-Murder, Alexander Murray (Oxford, 2000)