Land of Thieves: Survival in the Middle Ages

The most commonly stolen items were humdrum: food or cooking pots, building materials, work equipment, clothing and coins. Hunger was a common motive. Houses were meagrely and functionally furnished without knickknacks, so a wool coat or a tin chamber pot was a prized possession. The heavy punishments for theft which included beheading, hanging and being burned to death, show just how important household objects were at the time.

Vignettes include a husband and wife stealing herrings from a barrel, a goldsmith seducing a miller’s wife with a stolen book, a medieval Bonnie & Clyde gatecrashing a wedding, and a servant eating his stepfather’s sheep. The stories are colourful and entertaining. How would one even go about stealing a herd of pigs? Or some bees? The accounts give insights into different lifestyles, like that of a marauding serial murderer, a member of a robber’s gang marking doors with a secret code, or a man sleeping in barns who grew attached to a small black cow.  

Coomans compares the old world she describes to life today and draws from it lessons on how we can better function as a society and rethink our relationship to material possessions.