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The word 'murder' derives from the word 'murdrum.' Murdrum was a fine imposed by the first Norman king of England, Guillaume I, shortly after the conquest of 1066, and it was designed to protect the Normans who had come to England with him. If a Norman was found killed and the killer was not known, the murdrum fine was levied on the inhabitants of the entire area in which the body was found. The murdrum fine did not apply to English corpses, however.
Why would a law like this be needed? Presumably because a lot of Normans were turning up dead in mysterious circumstances. Many would have been victims of the people the Normans called the 'Silvatici' – the men of the woods, who were known to the English as 'green men'. The Silvatici was an underground resistance movement comparable to the French Resistance or the Viet Cong, and it flourished for a decade after the Conquest. It was mass resistance from the Silvatici that led to the Harrying of the North in 1069 – the land was stripped bare to leave them no hiding places – and to numerous other risings and rebellions which left a lot of Normans dead and made Guillaume's throne less secure than we might now assume. In fen, forest and field, it seems that a substantial proportion of the English population were prepared to resist their new masters.
