Land of Thieves: Survival in the Middle Ages
Brilliantly-researched, groundbreaking reconstruction of daily life in the fifteenth century
Drawing on newly-unearthed criminal registers, court records, and city archives, Coomans paints a vivid picture of the lives of commoners in the late Middle Ages. Her research is uniquely centred around thieves: 158 of them, arrested and tried between 1470 and 1510 in the Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). Most of these criminals were men, only six were women, all of them confessed in surprising detail to their crimes.
Marijke Nagtegaal
Bee Rights
m.nagtegaal@debezigebij.nl
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.
2025 Libris History Prize shortlist, 2025 Boekenbon Literary Prize longlist
Outstanding research is made tangible to the reader using details from well-known engravings and paintings from the period
Comparable to Emmanuel Le Roy’s Montaillou and Francis Pryor’s Britain in the Middle Ages
Those medieval folks weren’t actually that medieval: there was hardly any torture, beheadings or racks, as Janna Coomans demonstrates in Land of Thieves, penned with obvious pleasure.
de Volkskrant
Juicy and colourful […] The historian paints a vivid picture of the exploits of both small-time and major medieval crooks, thanks to excellent detective work in 500-600 year-old criminal registers, lists of court verdicts, and thieves’ confessions in real finds with titles like the liber filorium perdicionis – The Book of Lost Sons'
Trouw
