In the summer of 1679 a pamphlet was printed in London relating the sordid life of a Dorset bricklayer named James Robinson. Despite being born of ‘good Parents’ and ‘well Educated in consideration of such an Employ’, Robinson developed from an early age a ‘head-strong humour’, which led him into the debauched company of ‘leud and wicked women’. At length his parents persuaded him to marry a ‘beautiful and civil Maiden’, hoping that her virtuous entreaties and the duties of conjugal fidelity would ‘wean him from his darling vice’. But Robinson was soon led astray ‘by the Devil’ and by ‘the insnaring delusions of a wicked Harlot’. Together the ‘Secret Caball contrived between himself, his Mistris and Infernal Friend’ plotted the murder of his wife by breaking her neck. Disguising the killing in such away as to make it look as though his wife had died accidentally by falling out of bed, Robinson ‘passed free from Justice’. But his success was short lived. Debating with his ‘Gang’ of alehouse companions one evening the various merits of rival ways to silence a scolding wife's tongue and put her ‘to eternal silence’, ‘his own tongue betrayed his life, for says he, Turn but a Scolding Wives Neck round, and her Continual Clapper will no more allarm you, tho’ it be placed right again; and to secure yourselves from the suspicion of the people, you may give out that she Dyed of sudden Fits.