I, by chance, come across the following interesting translation of the crime inquiry record from late medieval England:
'Inquisition held before Thomas Camoys, knight......justices of the peace of the lord king in the county of Sussex at Eastbourne on Wednesday in the week of Pentecost in the years of the reign of King Henry IV [17 May 1402] on the oath of twelve named jurors.
Who said on oath that Edward the Hermit plotting how he could rob Johanna lately wife of John Coggere by pretending to be a prophet on Friday the feast of St. Matthias in the third year of the reign of King Henry IV [24 February 1402] feloniously broke and entered the close and house of the same Johanna at Mayfield speaking to the same Johanna these words: "Unless divine grace and my intervention help you the whole house and all your goods and chattels will be consumed by fire and you will be blind before the third day of this coming May." The said Johanna fearing the said words asked him to help her in this matter. And the said Edward told the same Johanna, "Collect all your goods and chattels before me as I am able to conjure away all malign spirits." So Johanna by his command collected all her goods and chattels and thus by the said false machinations the said Johanna the day, year and place aforesaid was feloniously robbed of a bowl (worth 20s), six silver spoons (worth 12s), six gold rings (worth 20s), three pairs of beads of jet and amber with a silver gilt crucifix (worth 12s), two gowns with silver fastenings (worth 10s) and 6s in cash of the same Johanna found there and he is a common thief' (Musson ed. & trans. 2009: 98 (Doc. 3.13)).
Another inquiry record in Musson's collection (Doc. 3.8, in: Musson ed. & trans. 2009: 94) states that this 'Edward the Hermit' was in fact a moniker used by the highwayman, Robert Berkworth/ Bekworth who committed robbery on the roads between Tottenham and London in April of the same year (1402 CE).
In other words, Robert-Edward's fraudulence against Johanna presupposes that the popularity of such a kind of prediction was to some extent commonplace among the lay people in late medieval England. Otherwise, a common highwayman/thief didn't make believe to be a hermit to 'persuade' her to bring her chattels.
Perhaps on contrary to the general assumption, the millenarian expectations among the lay people got popular rather in the 13th and 14th centuries than in earlier Middle Ages, especially thank for the influential work by Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). Sometimes scholars regard the incessant burst of the popular religious movements like the Flagellant in 1260 and Hussite extremists in the early 15th century as a kind of an indirect successors of his thoughts (Swanson 1994: 203f.).
As I also mentioned a bit before in: In Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain there is a large section of prophecies attributed to Merlin. Would readers of the time have understood these prophecies to be legitimate and accurate, or would they have believed them to be a literary invention?, political prophesy still sometimes played an important role in later medieval Europe. Famous Jeanne d'Arc was not the sole female French prophetess appeared in the Hundred Years War.
So, I suppose at least some people in 14th and 15th century England were still worry about prophecies and predictions at least enough to distract themselves for a while, as suggested in the first cited documentary record.
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