A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman

In England coroners' rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections.  If life was filled with bodily harm, literature reflected it.  One of La Tour Landry's cautionary tales for his daughters tells of a lady who ran off with a monk and, upon being found in bed with him by her brothers, they 'took a knife and cut away the monk's stones and threw them in the lady's face and made her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.'  Another tale is of a husband to fetched his wife back from her parents' house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel.  While lodged overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by 'a great number of young people wild and infect with lechery' who 'ravished her villainously,' causing her to die of shame and sorrow.  The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away of her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers.  The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.