Medieval Studies

This graph compares modern city rates of violence with those of periods of Medieval Europe. The Medieval data is from here. I doubt its quality; the Thirty Years War, for example, should produce a very major spike that isn't evident. There may have been decisions taken to omit military conflicts, or the sources they used might not include that information. Nevertheless, the general picture of higher rates of interpersonal violence is probably broadly accurate. 

One thing I wanted to look at compared with the chart assembled was the rural rate in the US: "US cities avg." only captures cities, which are notably more prone to murders than the countryside. I found some statistics via the National Institute of Health. It's the bottom-most line we are interested in, because the top lines look at either suicide rates or combined murder/suicide rates.

That graph gives the 'most rural' rate as a little below half the 'most urban' rate. It looks like just about exactly half if we take one step back from the 'most rural' to include some slightly less-rual places in the average. If we do the same thing for the urban side, for the 2010s -- which is the era the Medieval map is using -- the figure doesn't change between most-urban and second-most-urban. 

Thus, we can reasonably multiply the 'US cities avg.' (10) rate by 0.5 to get a rough figure for 'US rural avg.' as an estimate of how country murders compare with the Medieval chart. That gives us a rough rate of 5, allegedly very slightly more dangerous than NYC but less than any of the other cities on the chart. 

I have some questions about that too; but the NYPD reports that period as having been the record-holder for fewest murders until this year, when they are claiming a new record low. Since we have to assume that all of these numbers are somewhat dodgy -- there's no way we have perfect statistics for the Medieval period, when no one was really collecting statistics as such -- we'll go with it as a rough estimate. 

Make of it what you will, I suppose.