Medieval law today: modern mayhem? 2025 Youard Annual Lecture in Legal History, University of Oxford

Mayhem (or ‘maim’) was an offence in medieval English common law, involving serious, but non-fatal, physical injury. Practically obsolete as a ‘cause of action’, mayhem has had an afterlife in considerations of consent to medical treatment or other physical injuries, especially, in and following the judgments in R v Brown [1994] 1 A.C. 212. Commonly explained as an offence focused on injuries to a man’s ‘members’ which would diminish his capacity to defend the realm, and at times overlaid with assumptions about the brutality of medieval life, study of the records of the common law shows that mayhem was both wider in scope and more intellectually complex than has been supposed. This lecture will look at the history of mayhem as an end in itself, and also as part of a consideration of the modern tendency to over-simplify, caricature or misuse the doctrine and sources of the medieval common law. It will end by asking what (short of requiring all law students to study medieval legal history) can be done to improve lawyers’ use of historical evidence.