> As for weapons, knives and swords of varying types were the ones most frequently used, accounting for 68 percent of all the murders. The greatest risk of violent death in London was on weekends
It’s pretty hard to overstate how relatively safe modern life is, even modern cities that are considered unsafe.
Heck, in Ancient Rome being out after night fall was considered a death sentence. Aside from the high murder rate, that’s when all the supply carts arrived. Being on foot surrounded by carts before the invention of consistent urban lighting was a very dicey proposition.
I stand corrected, medieval London was safer than Johannesburg. Current london has 18.4 murders per million residents, which gives us a range of 276 to 368 murders per million for medieval London (15-20x). Last year Johannesburg had 68.3 murders per 100,000, or 683 per million. So current Johannesburg is roughly twice as dangerous per capita than medieval London.
But worth knowing that the murder rate dropped, over centuries, to be extremely low around 1900 say. At this point medicine wasn't very useful at saving lives, and while guns (even machine-guns) existed, they weren't in the hands of every street-corner criminal.
So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. Trying to figure out the impact of modern medicine etc. is more relevant for trying to understand e.g. the rise & fall of crime since 1960.
I'm actually more fascinated by the map than the murders. It's cool to see St Giles-in-the-Fields church actually in the middle of fields. And Spitalfields was The Spital Fields, again, actual fields. You can also see Bedlam, the asylum, near Bishopsgate.
Not much has changed, then.