Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial

Abstract

The written record begins with the discovery of a body and the supposition of an unsolved crime. “It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner's inquest, “that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain.” The murder had occurred the night before, on August 26, 1379, in St. Nicholas Acton Lane, before Imperial's London residence. Arriving to view the body, the coroner and sheriffs gathered a jury from among men of Langbourne and adjacent wards and set about to determine how and in what way this foreign merchant met his death.The jury's inquest was only the first step in an inquiry that would ultimately involve the mayor of London, the court of the king's bench, a second jury, the king and his council, and Parliament itself. So, too, did questions of motive and interest spool out from this seemingly random act to embrace the ambitions of London's mercantile elite, vicissitudes of royal finance, and the future and locus of the international wool trade. Starting with an apparent insufficiency of evidence, this investigation eventually found itself knee-deep in pertinent information, plausible motives, and likely suspects. Although it finally stumbled to a sort of stopping point, it never really achieved a satisfactory end.The original investigation offers suggestive analogies to the task of historical reconstruction. The would-be historian is, like the crime's contemporaries, challenged to arrange known details into a coherent narration—and, as new elements emerge, into revised renarrations. The historian's location outside the crime's own participatory pattern is one of weakness and strength.