No one had ever understood this brutal murder in the street of May 4, 1337. As reported The Guardiana British historian managed to solve A Cold Case almost 700 years old thanks to private archives.
May 4, 1337 therefore, A priest named John Ford had been stabbed to death in the street of London by three men. The first had cut his throat to him with a 30 -centimeter dagger, while two others had sunk his knives into his stomach. Only one man had been convicted of murder, but no mobile had ever been revealed.
An “execution” in public to take revenge
Seven centuries later, Manuel Eisner, director of the University of Cambridge Criminology Institute, revealed behind the scenes of a much more sordid case. “The archives tell a story of blackmail, sex and revenge, which highlights the tensions between the church and the English elites,” explains the researcher at the Guardian.
Father John Ford was reportedly killed by “a gang of medieval hitmen” sponsored by a rich nobleman by the name of Ela Fitzpayne, whose husband had appointed the priest to the parish of their neighborhood. Except that Ela Fitzpayne had been denounced to the archbishop for multiple adultery … including with Father Ford.
The bourgeois then thought that it was Ford himself who had denounced him, and organized his revenge as “an execution”. According to the historian, Ela Fitzpayne claimed a brutal act led as much against Ford as against the ecclesiastical authority.
The Ford affair is one of the hundreds of murders of the 14th century in London, York and Oxford identified by Professor Manuel Eisner in an online database entitled Medieval Murder Maps. The researcher highlights the criminal areas at high risk at that time, far from the current results. While Current crime areas are generally located in disadvantaged districts, in the Middle Ages, it was the rich districts that knew the most violence.
