Banishment for crime was an important part of the coercive and punitive repertoire of medieval criminal jurisdictions. Yet, unlike exile for political offences, it has remained rather understudied in historical scholarship. Hanna Zaremska’s monograph of 1996 (Les bannis au Moyen Âge) is the previous major treatment, ranging across the medieval period and across Europe. Frankot’s study, though limited to a small town in the second half of the fifteenth century, makes an important contribution to the topic by looking at the process of readmission as well as that of expulsion, building on the limited discussion of this by Zaremska. The material derives from the small town of Kampen in Overijssel – with a population in the fifteenth century of 6000 to 8500 people – which was a member of the Hanseatic League and handled trade between the Baltic and the Rhine. The book’s introduction defines the focus and sets the research questions: how did the practices of banishment and readmission operate? Did they target specific groups? Did they change during the fifteenth century?

The second chapter describes the legal context, one in which the aldermen and councillors held full criminal jurisdiction by grant of the bishop of Utrecht and dealt directly with crimes. For the fifteenth century, their activities produced a variety of extant judicial records: registers of ‘fugitives and banished’, registers of oaths, registers of fines, registers of cases, and collections of ordinances. Frankot also examines here the conceptual and legal distinctions between fugitives from justice and banished exiles – this becomes important later on – but notes that in practice the terms were used with some overlap. Chapter 3 describes the economy of punishment in later medieval Kampen: as everywhere, fines were the most common, but there was a range of other punishments, with banishment being among the more common, and corporal punishment and imprisonment being rare. Frankot reports that Kampen did have its own executioner, and did sentence convicts to death, though how many sentences were actually implemented is not clear in the records.

Chapter 4 is the main analytical chapter. This examines the 1,446 people banished from the town between 1447 and 1500; most of these names come from the banishment registers, with about 160 additions from other registers (the ‘oerveden’, a Digestum vetus and a Liber causarum). Frankot uses the following lines of analysis: the processual reasons for banishment, the type of offence, the distance and duration of banishment, the sex and class of exiles. The findings show that banishment was a highly flexible instrument. Some people (a small minority) were banished as an immediate punishment, some fled and were sentenced in absentia, and some were banished for failing to pay the fine imposed for their offence. So banishment was used both coercively and punitively. It was also imposed for a variety of offences, mainly violence but also sexual offences (though women comprised only ten per cent of the banished offenders, more women than men were banished for sexual offences). Distance could vary from just outside the town to across the Alps, and duration could be long, short or permanent.

Chapter 5 then looks at how many exiles were readmitted to Kampen, who they were, and the terms on which they were allowed to return. Only a minority – under a third – of exiles seem to have been readmitted, and Frankot thinks it likely that these were the exiles with ties of family, property and business in the town, and with supporters willing to act as suretors – they guaranteed the instalment plan for the offender to pay their fine. This of course raises the question of what became of the other two-thirds of exiles, and one of the virtues of this book is that Frankot thinks about the broader functions and consequences of banishment. In the introduction, it is suggested that banishment may not only have displaced problems, but also made them worse, by pushing people into errancy, vagabondage and crime. On the other hand, it is later suggested that those banished were itinerant workers anyway, and that they may simply have moved on to other opportunities elsewhere. There were newcomers in every town – in Kampen, Frankot calculates, over 50 per annum – and banishment perhaps just fed mobility of labour. Finally, Frankot looks for change over time, and finds this in an increase in banishments for sexual and moral offences, generated by Observant preaching campaigns and by the encouragement of complaints by neighbours. A harsher attitude to exiles is also evident in the ordinances: Frankot notes that rewards were instituted in 1439 for arresting exiles found in the town, and fines for helping fugitives by taking their goods out of town, in 1470.

Two other strengths of this book are worth noting. One is the command of the secondary literature, allowing the author to make comparisons with other cities, for example, Valenciennes or Konstanz. This comparative approach is most evident in the contrast between Kampen and many other European cities in the ritual that usually accompanied the physical expulsion of exiles; in Kampen there seems no ritual, no parade, no noise, no set route. The other strength is the attention given to readmission (‘redemption’) and to the terms agreed for the payment of fines. My only more critical comment is that there seems to remain some uncertainty about the scale of banishment in Kampen: Frankot estimates that on average twenty-six people every year were banished, but is this a large number? Some comparisons are made with other cities, but these remain inconclusive. This uncertainty aside, this is a well-written, clear and thoughtful study of an under-researched aspect of medieval criminal justice.