[7sidedmarble]

I don't really think so. In the middle ages, punishments for all sorts of crimes were pretty severe--but partly because the vast majority of crime would go unsolved. If you're a peasant in the middle ages and some valuables go missing, who's going to track that down for you? It's not happening unless you know for sure it was your neighbor or something.

So yeah, when they would catch a thief they would receive some pretty harsh punishment. But it didn't stop much. Theft in the middle ages was rampant.

Humans are pretty bad at making calculations involving a really bad outcome at a 5% chance of happening, or those sorts of things. Theft persists today as it did then, just because it's really hard to investigate and so generally goes unpunished.

[gcr]

Another point is that inequality also drives petty theft, especially in the Middle Ages. People don’t tend to commit petty theft because they want to. For a modern example, see https://jacobin.com/2022/02/mainstream-media-news-shopliftin...