Forgery in the Middle Ages

Criminals, like the poor, are always with us, but in the Middle Ages their number was legion. The two great classes of society that counted in the early Middle Ages were the warrior class, whose business was to fight, and the clerical class, whose function was to pray, and who had, besides, a monopoly of literacy. To the latter class, forgery was hardly a crime, since it was often undertaken from a sense of duty, for the benefit of society or in the interests of the monastic or religious house in which the forger lived. It was natural to close an eye to an offence to which so large a proportion of the educated were addicted. Few, except clerks, that is, clerics, had the technical or linguistic skill necessary to forge a document, and because of the ‘benefit of clergy’ forgers could with impunity commit, at least, their first offence. The church courts appear to have taken little notice of forgery as a crime and so the clerical forger in the Middle Ages had a double security to practise his art, for such it became, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—the spring and summertide of the forger, when written documents were still a rarity.