What was the importance of crime and punishment in medieval time?
The importance of punishment for crime in the Middle Ages was the same as it is nowadays: to promote public safety, to maintain public order, and to discourage behavior that was considered to be outside societal norms. In medieval times in western Europe, there were essentially two legal systems, the civil one and the ecclesiastical one. They flourished side by side. The civil system dealt with the sorts of things that the criminal justice system does today; they punished crimes such as murder, theft, and assault. The ecclesiastical (or church) courts handled matters such as annulment of marriages (there was no such thing as divorce; if a couple wanted to separate, they would look for some impediment that rendered the marriage null and void from the very start) and heresy. Now, the church courts would rule on whether or not a man or a woman was a heretic, one who espoused and/or (especially) taught doctrines that didn’t agree with hose of the established church. However, church courts
