Prohibemus ne Christianus aliquis pro penitus parva re saltem ad mortem seducatur, id est condempnetur aut preiudicetur, sed exquivantur pro necessitate populi iusticia pacificans, nec pro levi re, dispereat opus mannum Dei et suum ipsius pretium, quod profund redemit.
Quadripartitus, collection of the laws of Canute the Great, Winchester Code 1020-1021,
"We forbid that any Christian man be led to death by someone, at least for small crimes, let him be judged and decided, but may peaceful justice be sought for the needs of the people, as not for trivial matters should the work of the hand of God, and his good, for which he has deeply paid, be destroyed.
(Translation my own)
Medieval. The very word conjures up images of violence and destruction. Today, the conduct of war criminals and authoritarians is commonly cast as "medieval behavior" and the Middle Ages are a stand in for brutality, arbitrary violence, and callous disregard for human life. Now in many ways there are elements of truth to this stereotype, but it is fundamentally just that, a stereotype. Even during the Middle Ages there was a great deal of concern over the proper application of violence, even in the punishment of crimes. The ability of Medieval authorities, be they "secular", ecclesiastical, or other forms of justice, were in fact constrained by beliefs and ideas about the proper conduct of authority that drew on a legal tradition that looked back to pre-Christianized law codes among the Germanic peoples as well as to the legal inheritance of the Roman Empire and the survival of Roman laws in the Church and the Byzantine Empire.
The role of violence in Medieval law is one of those tricky issues that are very hard to actually pin down and describe fully, especially early in the Middle Ages. Later Medieval practices are far better attested and documented due to the spread of literacy and the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the state. Violence in the judicial process of the early Middle Ages is a little more obscure to us, given the lack of the same factors that made its recording more prevalent in later centuries. In the Carolingian World and Anglo-Saxon England for instance, the role of violence in punishment for crimes is nebulous. Now to be sure, the Medieval world, and the Medieval systems of justice were still effused with violence from top to bottom, despite the attempts to restrain many of the worst impulses as seen in the opening quote.
I am going to focus on the Early Middle Ages as that is where my expertise lies, and the question here is to what degree was violence employed by the judicial system, such as it was, and what was the intent behind the use of violence.
I am going to broadly divide this into two topics, capital offenses and non capital offenses, because not every crime that was possible was remediated by the death of the criminal.
Capital Offenses
In most countries today the death penalty is not allowed, but there are some hold outs. Among developed countries, the United States and Japan both still carry out the death penalty. Now it is not my intent to argue the merits of the death penalty, but let it suffice to say that there are still places where it is used.
In the medieval world though the death penalty was rather ubiquitous, and for crimes that we would normally not believe it to be fitting. Today, the death penalty is reserved, usually, for the most severe crimes, murder is by far the most common in the US and Japan for example, though treason, espionage, and a select other few crimes can also result in it. (No one in the US has been executed for non-murder charges since its re-implementation in the 1970's) but in the Medieval world the death penalty was common. In Anglo-Saxon England for example the death penalty could, despite the beginning passage be implemented in cases of.... murders of course, threats against the king, violence in the king's presence, heresy (a secular charge ironically), witchcraft, heathenry, repeated theft, crimes against the body of a noble, rape (depending on the status of the offended woman), inability to pay the wergeld for an offense of a suitably high degree, and probably a few others that I am forgetting.
Violence was also of course instrumental in the process of investigation even before to the stage of sentencing. In Carolingian Francia for example the old Roman beliefs in the necessity of torture against unfree peoples, and really anyone who wasn't somebody, according to Patrick Geary was likely par for the course. Witnesses, suspects, and others might be subjected to physical abuse, and indeed perhaps even publicly,before there was even a sentence handed down! Robert Bartlett also argues that for the later Middle Ages, the ordeal, or physical trial that usually involves serious amounts of pain, was replaced by a more formalized system of torture and physical force in investigation and resolution for all manners of crimes. (It is worth noting that this is not a universally believed view, Peter Brown for example has argued that the ordeal was not a substitute for judicial violence, but a means of allowing for the Church to act as a mediating body between wronged parties, and evidence from law codes of the time would support this)
Now how would the sentence be carried out? Would it be public or private? What happened to the body afterwards? Those are significantly more difficult questions and its likely that for much of the early Middle Ages at least, there was no actual standardization.
Its likely that there were a variety of methods of execution could be carried out, and these range from the familiar, hanging, to the more...inventive like being run over by a carriage, or broken on the wheel. Many of the more outlandish, ostensibly medieval devices like the iron maiden were later creations though. The public and grotesque display of these executions was likely done for a variety of purposes, but the deterrent effect, and the power of the executing body that it portrayed were likely major reasons. In my area of expertise though, early Medieval England, the actual methods of execution are not clear. There are some cases that indicate strangulation or compression (crushed by weights) as well as hangings. Public burnings are also attested from at least the Roman period as a warning to other criminals. What Theodosius accomplished with the public burning of male prostitutes in Rome is up in the air, as the sex trade did not dissipate for centuries... but that's another matter.
It is also likely that most executions and other crimes that were committed against royal authority at the very least were conducted publicly. The affairs between nobles, freemen, and so on might have been handled somewhat out of sight, but given the situation in the later middle ages, where actions such as treason, and their punishment, became a public spectacle, its likely that similar, if less elaborate and ritualized actions such as "drawing and quartering" had their analogues in early Medieval England.
The bodies of executed criminals in the early Middle Ages were not given over to their families for proper burial, unless they had significant influence and leeway. Indeed in Anglo-Saxon England, there are a number of anomolous burials that Robin Fleming theorizes were the interred remains of convicted criminals of some type their crimes of course cannot be determined from their remains, but their place of burial, in marginal land, away from churches and settled lands, and often in sites that held importance to the non-Christian predecessors of the land, suggests that they were not allowed normal burial due to some form of pollution, and Fleming suggests that the pollution was likely some form of crime. Now this too was a form of deterrence. In an age where proper burial customs, location, and manner was of paramount importance for seeing off the dead, aberrations to this pattern indicate that a very particular message was being crafted, both to further punish the now deceased criminal of course, but also to send a message to others, do this wrong and your punishment won't just be on this Earth, but they would also seek to deny you the pleasures of the next by preventing your proper burial.
There is more to be said, particularly about the later Middle Ages where our records, both of the details of trials, investigations, and executions are better recorded, but that is a tale for someone else. Let us turn now to the other category that I mentioned.