Is there any place or books to see info on average crimes from before the 19th century?
Logs such as "John Smith committed forgery on July 9, 1305 and was sentenced to (whatever)" and maybe other information on the crime committed.
Or did they not document things that way back then?
You can look up old Dutch records from New York of civil cases. Also, St. Paul has a police record.
London had no local government until 1890 and america did a better job of preserving its records.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/criminal-trials-assize-courts-1559-1971/
You can look it up in the national archives but it's a extremely small number of cases.
Nothing happened back then.
I'd highly recommend "Crime in Medieval Europe
1200-1550" by Trevor Dean.
It is a whole book about like 5 sentences of primary sources.
Are you under the assumption that there's no primary sources from the late middle ages? I work in a archive where we have a whole building just dedicated to material from between 1100 and 1600. There's an incredible wealth of information about daily life available, a lot of it sadly still underutilized by academia.
That's not possible.
Say there were 1 million people in England and 1% of them wrote. Say 1 page per year.
That's 100,000 books over the entire Middle Ages.
For comparison the modern population is a thousand times larger and the world writes that many books in a year.
All the primary sources over the entire Middle Ages would fill a few shelves and a fraction of those would survive, and you can't possibly have millions of books from that period.
Even today the entire city of San Francisco has 1,000 criminal cases over the last 10 years you can look up online.
Good thing literate people wrote more than one page per year, wrote more than books and there's more to medieval Europe than just England.
England dominated the yarn industry and was the only industry worth studying, plus the tin mines if those existed.
That's a good question. What was the tin production of England in 1066? Or 1200? Guarantee nobody wrote it down.
Is this memes?
Your reply makes little sense, I asked you a question.
It's memes, got it.
Well done jidf.
During the High Middle Ages Europe peaked at around 75 million people. If you assume 1 page per 10% (still not enough due to city, parish, county etc records keeping track of pretty much everything - in reality it was probably more like a page per person per year), you get 750k pages per year. If we go by a low estimate of 300k per year average between 1000 and 1500 that's 150 million pages of material. And in reality that's not even close to enough.
That's still not much, like i said.
What was the tin production of England in 1200? That's a very basic thing they didn't record. There are some coal stats but no iron, lead, anything else. Even the oil production of China in 1970 is unknown. Fao collected calories on Somalia and threw that out. Even today nobody writes things down. How much light oil did america consume in 2000? How much condensate did Russia produce in 2011? It's all not written down.
A page per year is just a tax return, most people had nothing, the useful documents are like 1% of that.
Yeah, no shit they didn't record everything. But they recorded a lot. And they certainly recorded crimes.
British-history.ac.uk has a large collection of transcribed primary sources relating to governance and law, like this from medieval London: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/mayor-court-rolls/1298-1307/pp1-20
There's plenty more on there if you search for something like court rolls or go though the primary sources manually
Keep in mind for every case of something exciting like theft or murder there's probably 20 cases of people driving their pigs over someone's land or failing to maintain their dungheap.
There's only like a few hundred cases in the entire record.
The population was low back then, was recorded less, and it wasn't a long period.
>everything before the 19th century isn't a long period
Anon...
There's a YT channel called Brief Case. Most of the cases it covers are from c. 1800-1950 in English speaking countries, but it has some cases from pre 1800.