A brutal cold case from 1337 solved, thanks to a database

The motive was revenge, and the person who commissioned the brutal murder of the priest John Forde was Ela Fitzpayne, a noblewoman who lived in the 14th century: this cold case was solved thanks to the digitization of hundreds of documents collected by the Medieval Murder Maps project, an archive of murders recorded in England during the medieval period. The case was solved by a research team led by Manuel Eisner of the University of Cambridge, who reported the story in the magazine Criminal Law Forum. The solved murder dates back to 1337 , when John Forde, a priest who until a few years earlier had served in a country chapel in the residence of the noble Fitzpayne family, was brutally killed in one of the most populous and dangerous squares in London , a few steps from St. Paul's Cathedral. After being lured there by deception, the priest was attacked by three men who slit his throat and stabbed him several times in the chest. By analyzing those documents today and combining them with other archived documents, including those relating to illnesses , accidents , and prisons , researchers have reconstructed the story , hypothesizing the motive for the murder and identifying the instigator. It has emerged that the motive for the murder was revenge , stemming from a history that began several years earlier, when Forde served the Fitzpayne family, and in particular the widowed noblewoman Ela, violently oppressing the local communities. The priest, historians reconstruct, attempted to avoid accusations of mistreatment and extortion denounced by the peasant communities by placing all responsibility on the woman, who was then sentenced by the ecclesiastical court to a series of humiliating penances, including carrying offerings barefoot to church every year. The noblewoman harbored a vendetta and five years later commissioned the crime. It was a dramatic settling of scores, also intended to publicly demonstrate her family's superiority over the clergy.

The Forde Murder is one of many stories that have emerged in recent years with the digitization of hundreds of medieval documents through the Medieval Murder Map project, which allows you to navigate city streets and see documents associated with places. These stories are also told in a podcast series.