SUBJECTIVE SIGNS OF THE COMPOSITION OF CRIMES IN THE LAWS OF THE STATES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE
Authors: Molchanov B. A. , Novikov M. V. 
Published: December 2018

The paper discusses formation and development of criminal legislation on the subject and subjective signs of the crime in the countries of medieval Europe within the comparative jurisprudence. The authors note that the level of culture and statehood in any society and its government bodies as a whole depends on the attitude of the society and the state to those who committed unlawful, criminally punishable acts. On the materials of criminal law in the Ancient World and the Middle Ages (Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, etc.) a strict liability was in law-enforcement practice. New states were formed during the Middle Ages. That led to the need of strengthening their authority of state power and statehood. Consequently, the state got the right to protect the interests of the individual and society, and the right to creation a new criminal legislation and its institutions. The church survived after liquidation of many public and state institutions. On the one hand, it contributed to the preservation of scientific achievements of the Ancient World. On the other hand, the church deprived science of free critical attitude to the issues under study. Philosophy and jurisprudence were based on theology. Criminal-legal institutions could be developed only in the direction, which had been approved by the church. Clearly, the idea of protecting the rights of the individual, strict liability and conditions of sanity could not be widely applied. As soon as the states were originated, strict liability was necessary to stop the blood feud and delegation of the judiciary from the society to the state. The obtained knowledge about the world and deeper understanding of the causality of what is happening facilitated the process. From the political point of view, theology (a Christian doctrine) influenced the criminal law policy in Medieval Time. The legislator regulated a range of subjects of the crime. In X - XI centuries, ancient ideas of strict liability were accepted in Europe. Crimes were divided into willful and not deliberate. The principle of the personal guilty is directly related to the subject of the crime. Murderers, rapists, thieves, swindlers and others were declared criminals. Judicial practice of many times and peoples gives us numerous examples confirming the existence of views on the animal as a subject of crime. Age limits of legal responsibility were defined as the minority, which is different from the social maturity, and sometimes old age, were considered the reason for the undisputed crime blamed of a crime to a subject. People under 14 years old could not be subjected to the death penalty, except when "malice can make up for the lack of age". The authors pay attention to the fact that the interests of healthy individuals guided medieval jurisprudence and medicine. They also regulated peculiarities of the healthy individuals’ legal capacity, presence of dementia and mental illnesses, etc. The mitigation of punishment in some cases when the fault of the subject of the crime was absent, fixing the criminal-legal significance of the motive of the crime, intent and some other subjective features in the legislation were a progress. Studies of the Medieval European States shows that the legislator at that time did not formulate general signs of the subject of the crime and did not know the criminal legal concept of strict liability. However, there was a need to solve the problem. Thus, the paper discusses the essence of the criminal legal significance of the сorpus delicti, its place in the criminal law and law enforcement practiceю. The authors used scientific literature of both foreign and Russian