Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England

Randall Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415542562
• eBook ISBN: 9781135899448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents the first comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers. Individual cases are illuminated in relation to changing legal, religious, and political contexts, as well as the dynamic growth of commercial crime-news and readership.

1
Introduction

NEWS FOR THE PROSECUTION; READERS FOR THE DEFENSE

On 25 or 28 February 1608, Margaret Ferneseede was burnt to death in St. George’s Field, Southwark for allegedly killing her husband. She had refused to admit her guilt despite intense pressure during the trial and before her execution. Dressed in a “kirtle [i.e., gown] of Canuasse pitched cleane through, ouer which she did weare a white sheet,” she was escorted to the pyre by two women holding her hands. As she was being tied to the stake, a clergyman

admonished her that now in that minute she would confesse that fact for which she was now ready to suffer[;] which she denying, the reeds were planted aboute, vnto which fier being giuen[,] she was presently dead. Finis. (The Araignement & burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, B4v)

Only 6 weeks later on 11 April, Elizabeth Abbot was hanged for allegedly murdering her drunkard landlady, ironically named Elizabeth Killingworth. She too had refused to confess. A gibbet was purposefully erected close to the victim’s house near Aldgate, towards which Abbot was faced and “bad [to] let the sight of that where she had committed so foule a fact, be a remembrance to haue her cleare her soule.” When this arrangement failed to stir her conscience, Abbot was forced to her knees in the cart and made to pray “that [god] would be pleasd to open her harte, and make her fit for him in this her houre of death” (The Apprehension, Arraignement, and execution of Elizabeth Abbot, C3v). This too failed and led to an extraordinary scene. While one sheriff rode away to inform the Mayor of London “how she still persuered in pleading her innocency” (C4r), another hauled Abbot from the cart into nearby St. Katherine Cree Church where all the prosecution witnesses were summoned to reiterate their testimony against her. The writer’s account of this postverdict tribunal revealed that crucial allegations against Abbot had never been proved:

[They urged] that she wold yet tell whither shee knew Mistris Killingworth, or if she shamed to open that sinne, that she would but discover who was partaker with her in the roberie yt he might, be found, or what manner of man he was. (C4r)

Still unmoved, Abbot was quickly brought back to gallows and hanged. Her story ended as starkly as Ferneseede’s: “Finis.”

Though their crimes were unrelated, the women’s stories became intertwined by virtue of their legally questionable convictions and steadfast denials of guilt. These issues were opened to public debate when Henry Gosson published black-letter pamphlets about each crime, possibly written by the same anonymous author.¹ Unlike many seventeenth-century news writers, he was not primarily concerned with constructing homiletic biographies (in this case of extreme wickedness rather than pious repentance). Rather his (or their) main aim was to defend the integrity of officials who handled each case and to justify the legal verdicts. The narrative voice—more distinctly in the Abbot pamphlet—was that of an authoritative insider with privileged access to examination records, arraignment and trial testimony, and notes of the presiding assize judge, Sir Edward Coke.

Given these sources of information, it is not surprising that neither pamphlet judged the women’s protestations of innocence to be credible. Like most English news about women murderers published before the Restoration and much of it afterwards, the reports made no conscious effort to represent the defendant’s perspective or offer possible justifications for her actions. The narrative point of view was squarely that of the prosecution, epitomized during the trial by the allegations of the Crown indictment. Legitimate legal fictions at best, fictions toutes courtes at worst,² indictments were composed at the request of prosecutors based on pretrial examinations taken by local magistrates. The suspect was invariably charged with the maximum offence: wilful and malicious homicide.³ If grand jurors accepted the prosecutor’s arguments and sent the indictment forward (which they often refused to do), and if the prisoner pleaded not guilty (which she almost always did), the assize judge and petty jury questioned the prosecutor’s evidence and defendant’s testimony—including her public reputation—to determine if she or he had indeed acted with malice aforethought.

Ferneseede’s and Abbot’s denials of guilt meant that the outcome of their trials hinged on their personal characters and competing interpretations of the victims’ deaths. As W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman have shown in their seminal study of trial narratives, the rhetorical structures of prosecutors and defendants differ in their persuasive aims. The prosecution strives for a logically consistent interpretation of the accused’s actions as well as congruency with the materially discovered facts of the case. In other words, the assertions of the prosecution’s story must match preconceived assumptions about the defendant’s social identity, temperament, and motives.⁴ In early modern assize trials, such preconceptions were constituted by a traditionally gendered repertoire of criminal types and behavioral habits. The colloquially fictionalized details of The Araignement & burning of Margaret Ferne-seede presented early modern readers with familiar images of the shrewish, sexually disordered, and therefore incipiently murderous wife, interwoven with narrative manipulations to compensate for an absence of directly incriminating evidence.⁵ Early modern readers with knowledge of classical rhetoric could have regarded these as valid forensic techniques.⁶ Other readers might have understood their paramount significance to be an allegorized justification of the story’s moral lessons and the symbolic restoration of social order. But in a period when traditional forms of knowledge based on similitude and correspondence were being challenged by emerging empirical and skeptical methodologies,⁷ their mythologizing constructions probably spurred some Jacobean readers to question their truth claims and to reconstruct more legally consistent or rational versions of the crime that queried the prosecution-oriented narrative.

In contrast to modern English-speaking trials, the accused was not allowed the benefit of defense counsel, nor was she or he presumed to be innocent of the charges.⁸ Indeed the opposite was true. During the arraignment, the grand jury heard evidence only for the prosecution before deciding whether to find a true bill (i.e., accept the prosecutor’s evidence supporting the indictment). During the main trial, the judge was, in theory, the only possible counsellor for the defendant, in so far as he decided whether to accept the prosecutor’s evidence or challenge it.⁹ Sir Edward Coke’s extensively reported charge to the jury at Elizabeth Abbot’s trial accurately conveyed the more familiar pattern of Crown arguments being positively reinforced by the authority of the bench (The Apprehension, Arraignement, and execution of Elizabeth Abbot, C2r–C3r).

It was this version of the crime, obtained either first-or second hand from magistrates’ examinations, indictments, and assize proceedings that constituted one of two main sources of information about condemned murderers in early modern printed news, beyond local rumor and hearsay. (I shall discuss the second source in the next section of this introduction.) News titles later in the century made this perspective explicit; for example: A True Account of the Proceedings on the Crown-Side at this Lent Assize Held for the County of Surrey … Thursday the 13th of March, 1683, and ending on Saturday the 15th (1684). The Ferneseede and Abbot crime narratives were remarkable for their density of circumstantial detail and lengthy report of the Crown’s arguments, but not for their prosecution bias. As we shall see, these salient features betrayed official anxiety about how the public would judge the trial and outcome of each case.

It was up to the accused persons to find the right words, if any, to defend themselves. In theory, as Bennett and Feldman also explain, defense strategies might take several routes. The defendant could question the internal consistency of the prosecution’s narrative by highlighting missing facts or evidence, logical weaknesses, or semantic ambiguities. With the help of friends and neighbors as witnesses, they might try to reinterpret the prosecutor’s account of their actions in the light of their individual circumstances and good character. Or they could try to reconstruct the indictment’s allegations of wilful malice in exculpatory ways.¹⁰ In the pressured and estranging atmosphere of early modern assize trials, however, few commoner defendants—who were often famished and sick after languishing for months in foetid county jails—managed any kind of cross-examination or rebuttal of the prosecutor’s arguments. Most could utter only the briefest denial of the formal charges. As J. M. Beattie has shown, even on the infrequent occasions when the prisoner managed to organize witnesses, his or her defense “might well remain seriously limited.”¹¹ The whole legal mechanism of early modern assizes put defendants charged with murder at serious disadvantages.

Women faced additional technical and cultural obstacles that affected verdicts, sentencing, and the news stories that followed. In the absence of legal counsel or customary courtroom strategies, early modern defenses had to be invented which would mitigate the gravity of the offense and neutralize the prisoner’s culpability. In homicide trials, the aim was to persuade the jury to bring in a reduced conviction of manslaughter, or excusable killing in self-defense or by accident. These lesser degrees of homicide allowed men to avoid execution by claiming benefit of clergy. If they demonstrated their claim, they were branded on the thumb or palm of the left hand.¹² Women, however, were ineligible for clergy for any serious felonies.¹³ Garthine Walker has also shown that they derived no benefit from a lesser charge of manslaughter or excusable homicide since these were capital offenses and they would still face execution if convicted.¹⁴ Walker and Susan Dwyer Amussen have further argued that female defendants faced profound cultural diffculties in justifying any kind of physical retaliation or self-defense because these categories of behavior were regarded as proper only to male temperaments and masculine roles.¹⁵ Homicides by men often took place either in public spaces such as alehouses where certain levels of violence were tolerated and killings could be rationalized as temporary drunken lapses or hot-bloodedness, or in private quarrels where principles of masculine honor were at stake. By contrast, the author of The Apprehension, Arraignement, and execution of Elizabeth Abbot treated Mistress Killingworth’s addiction to drink as self-incriminating, while also avoiding any possible justification for Abbot’s allegedly murderous reactions to her abuse. Both women were morally culpable, though Abbot’s alleged violence transgressed obvious legal as well as social boundaries.

The absence of procedural and rhetorical strategies for constructing legal defenses for women did not lead to any weakened ability to avoid prosecution, conviction, or execution, however. In fact county records show that the courts treated early modern female defendants more leniently than their male counterparts, and that they were discharged or acquitted in greater proportions than men.¹⁶ The origins of these benevolent discrepancies appear to be cultural as well as jurisprudential, and are a main focus of this book. Joining recent scholarly interest in the material production of early modern texts and reader-generated interpretation, I argue that the growth of printed murder news and diversity of public reception nurtured discourses of social and legal equity towards female homicide, while at the same time reproducing traditional negative images of murderous women.¹⁷ Contentious responses to topical news in periods such as the 1650s and 1680s demonstrated that readers could challenge reports on any subject according to their political interests. Readers of news stories about female killers in these and other periods were no less capable of questioning prosecution evidence or imaginatively constructing counter-arguments that mitigated the defendant’s moral or legal culpability, whatever the trial’s decision. Such readers included people at all levels of the community who participated in the discovery and arraignment of local suspects: neighbors, officers magistrates, sheriffs, clergymen, jurors, and judges. Their recollection of ambiguous or mitigating perspectives shaped their responses to later cases in which they became involved directly or read about. For their part, news writers often invoked readers’ memories of notorious but controversial murderesses such as Anne Saunders, Alice Arden, and Anne Turner to analogize present-day cases. Popular murder news thus became a significant form of preknowledge, to borrow Roger Chartier’s term, that determined readers’ understanding of future crimes as recurring events, “but not necessarily in conformity with [the meanings] desired” either by prosecuting officials or by similarly positioned writers.¹⁸ Legal records of the period confirm that in cases of women accused of homicide or infanticide, individual or collective reactions were often divided and/or effectually mitigating.

Alternative possibilities of interpretation were enabled by long-established and widely diffused concepts of equity. Equity was (and is) the legal principle by which formal application of written statutes and absolute legal principles is mitigated or remedied by extenuating individual circumstances and humane considerations.¹⁹ Aristotle originally defined equity’s modifying impulses as imaginatively expansive and temporally progressive since they spring from suppositions about what past framers of the law would decide at the present moment if the unforeseen complicating details of a particular case came before them.²⁰ In Thomas Aquinas’s adaptations of Aristotle, which provided the basis for early modern theories of equity, the harshness of strict applications of the law and judicial power was ameliorated by the moral virtues of fairness, mercy, and compassion as authorized by natural law and Christian precept. The gallows contrivances used to pressure Elizabeth Abbot into confessin...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Equity and Self-Defense in Female Homicide News
• 3 Confession, Conversion, and Tactical Resistance
• 4 Women and Poison
• 5 Changing Representations of Infanticide and Child Murder
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index