Middle Ages: The Golden Age of Fraud
The Middle Ages were indisputably violent. Something like 10% of deaths were due to murder in London alone, and we get plenty of wild court cases of murders and kidnappings.
But that isn’t the only type of crime action available. It was stunningly easy for some folks to skim the money from the till. Theft by fraud was widespread.
Shepherd Fleece Their Masters
Shepherds were supposed to give their boss all the lambskins. They could make a bit of side money by taking the best skins and selling them. They then bought cheaper lambskins as a replacement for their boss.
They could also convince people to leave them the best sheepskin by putting it in hot water and then drying it immediately. It would look like the poor sheep had died of murrain, and the shepherd or reeve got to keep it.
Alternatively, some shepherds took sheep from their master’s flock and then borrowed some from a friend to make up the difference when it was time to count the sheep.
Reeves Cook the Books
Reeves were in charge of flocks of sheep, and they were in a position to lie about how many lambs had been born in a year to their bosses. They sometimes underreported the births and kept the extra lambs for their own sale.
Chambermaids pulled a similar stunt when doing the household marketing. They would claim that whatever they were buying cost more than it did and then keep the difference in price.
Legal Fraud
There are plenty of other records of employees embezzling and their bosses trying to stop them, but that isn’t the only arena for fraud. A big risk was faked or altered documents. It was so common for official papers to be altered that a text from the 1100’s written by the treasurer demanded that all royal accounts had to be written on sheepskin parchment. You see, sheepskin has a high fat content, which makes it peel if you try to alter the text written on it. Lawyers also preferred sheepskin parchment for this reason.
The corruption moved straight into the prisons, where a big concern was jailers who stole the alms intended for the prisoners, forced prisoners to pay for food, or who extorted their charges. Catalonia, Lyon, and Provence all had to increase regulations to control these abuses.
The Biggest Frauds
Of course, the reeves and the shepherds are small fry in a big pond. The major players in the defrauding game were clergy, and they always did it with style. As a 1919 book put it: “Forgery was special picadillo of the clerical class.”
We can start with the most foundational of frauds, the Constantine Donation. This treatise was supposedly written in 476 and asserted that Emperor Constantine donated the land that the Vatican is currently on to the Catholic Church when he was miraculously healed of Leprosy.
The earliest copy of the text was found in the middle of the 9th century, and the story about Emperor Constantine being cured first cropped up in the 6th century. Scholars proved it a fake by the 1400's.
Another massive, but typical, fraud is the Croyland Chronicle. The monks of the Croyland Abbey were in a protracted boundary dispute with Spalding Monastery. Their lands overlapped, and, in the 1300’s, the land under Croyland had become valuable. They brought the matter to trial and the monks of Croyland Abbey produced the ‘Chronicle of Ingulf.’ This chronicle allegedly was written by their founder, Ingulf, in 655. It recounted how it was founded by King Aethelbard, destroyed by Danes, and rebuilt all before 1117.
It also claimed that it was near a bridge that was known to not be in existence until some 200 years after this chronicle was supposed to have been written.
Both of these texts are in many ways typical. Abbeys and monasteries would be founded without much in the way of paperwork and then expand by increments until they ran into landowners that disputed their territory. At which point, deeds or chronicles would be drawn up and backdated to ‘prove’ what the monks and nuns owned what they wanted.
It would later be used to do all sorts of neat political tricks, like proving that Anglo-Saxon kings had the right to invest bishops before the Norman invasion. In the case of the Constantine Donation, it was the backbone of Papal authority for a while.
These cases of white-collar crime have long term effects, and they were a big focus of various municipalities trying to make their places good to work. Burghers leveled fines, audited measuring tools to make sure no one was shortchanged when they bought things, and set up courts specifically for markets. Scholars went over documents with a fine-tooth comb.
None of this stilled the beating heart of avarice and deception, and it probably never will. It makes for good reading though, and I will have to squeeze a bit of fraud into my stories next time.
Sources:
Wikipedia: The Croyland Chronicle
The Constant- It’s All a Lie, released 4/05/2021
Trevor Dean, “Crime in Medieval Europe” pg. 121
Medievalist.net “The Secrets of Defrauding Your Medieval Lord”
Medievalist.net “When Sheepskin Was An Anti-fraud Device”