Have been thinking about Dave Grossman's ON KILLING and how reluctant soldiers were in years past to shoot at enemy soldiers and how they'd often aim to miss. And also that there is a powerful human aversion to stabbing someone, that bayonets were used almost never.
And it got me thinking: would there be less taboo attached to a bladed attack, less revulsion, in a culture where bladed weapons were the norm?
If I were a twenty-five year old English dude in 1350, what are the chances that I've seen with my own eyes someone have their arms hacked off or their head caved in asymmetrically or their throats slit or etc?
I'm talking in day-to-day life, not in battle or other special circumstances . . .
1350 is an odd year to choose, since that would be a plague year in many places. Depending on just where you were, you'd have seen a lot of dead people -- but they'd have been far more likely to be victims of plague than violence.
Speaking more generally, social scientists have worked to try to judge the frequency of death by violence, but it gets hard as you move back in time. The most comprehensive source I've seen is:Eisner, Manuel. “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime.” Crime and Justice, vol. 30, 2003, pp. 83–142.
Eisner goes through the evidence that we can access, and gives a very good review of the work that's been done by various investigators -- and he's talking here about criminal violence, not warfare, an important distinction.
Eisner estimates homicide rates in England for the 13th and 14th centuries as 27 per 100,000 (per year). Today's rate is roughly 1 per 100,000. The rate in the US is roughly 5 per 100,000. To find a place that's roughly comparable in the frequency of violence to 13th/14th century England -- Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico would all be roughly comparable.
The caveat is, of course, that the data are not that solid. Eisner does the best job that I've seen, but he's pulling together a lot of sources, and you get very different different numbers from different sources:
Evidence based on coroners' rolls in fourteenth-century Oxford and London result in estimates in the order of twenty-five to 110 homicides per 100,000
So take that as a "very ballpark" estimate. Thinking about, say, Guatemala -- depending on just who you are and where you live, you might see a lot of violence and be terrorized by it, or be relatively safe and see little. Lawless crime is like that, pools of anarchy, gangs, vengeance . . . and other places would be "OK". It's hard enough to understand these things in contemporary Mexico -- notice how many people are "missing" -- dial back the clock 700 years and it's really hard.