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5 The lawes and statutes of God concerning the punishment to be inflicted upon wilfull murderers (London, 1646), 3Google Scholar, and [Kyd?, Thomas] The trueth of the most wicked and secret murthering of John Brewen (London, 1592) [STC 15095], 9.Google Scholar

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8 4 Hen. VII. c. 13 (1488–1489); 12 hen. VII. c. 7 (1496–1497); 4 Hen. VIII. c. 2 (1512); 4& 5 Ph. & Mar. c. 4 (1557–1558). Formerly, murderers could seek sanctuary in a church, and abjure the realm before a coroner before entering permanent exile. Murderers might also purge themselves by the favourable testimony of their neighbours (Hunnisett, R. F., The medieval coroner (Cambridge, 1961), ch. 3).Google Scholar

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17 From the 1560s JPs swore oaths of allegiance, and their work was scrutinized by the judiciary and Privy Council, especially where serious felonies were concerned. Constables and clerks of the peace were also encouraged to report unsatisfactory JPs; see Cockburn, J. S., A history of the English assizes 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), 90–1, 101–7, 126–7, 157–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, Reform in the provinces: the government of Stuart England (New Haven, 1986), 53–5Google Scholar; Sharpe, J. A., Crime in early modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1984), 28–9.Google Scholar

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20 Cooper, Thomas, The cry and revenge of blood: expressing the nature and haynousnesse of wilful murther (London, 1620) [STC 5698], 24.Google Scholar For examples of murderers being bailed, see PRO, STAC 8/54/8, m. 8 (1615); The manner of the cruell outragious murther of William Storre … committed by Francis Carrwright (Oxford, 1603) [STC 23295], sig. A4Google Scholar; Browning, A. ed., Memoirs of Sir John Reresby (Glasgow, 1936), 328Google Scholar; Cockburn, J. S. ed., Calendar of assize records: Essex indictments, Elizabeth I (London, 1978), no. 1633(1586)Google Scholar; Cockburn, ed., Western circuit assize orders, 15 (1630)Google Scholar; and Hardy, W. J. et al. eds., Hertford county records: notes and extracts from the sessions rolls, 10 vols. (Hertford, 1905–1957), vol. VI, 506 (1698).Google Scholar See also Herrup, , Common peace, 50.Google Scholar

21 A murderer was freed in 1589 because Hereford JPs had omitted from their presentment the county where the crime had been committed (Baker, J. H., ‘The refinement of English criminal jurisprudence, 1500–1848’, in Knafla, L. A. ed., Crime and criminal justice in Europe and Canada (Ontario, 1981), 20).Google Scholar For other cases, see ibid, 20–1. In 1609 a JP was accused of drafting a murder indictment in which the word ‘murder’ did not appear and the following year another was charged with suppressing a recognizance binding a suspected murderer (PRO, STAC 8/54/4, m. 2 8/95/8, m. 8).

22 Forma procedendi in placitis coronae regis (1194), cf. Maitland, F. W., The constitutional history of England (Cambridge, 1908), 43–4Google Scholar; 4 Edw. I. Offic. Coronatoris (1275–1276). For the early history of the coroner, see Hunnisett, Medieval coroner and Havard, Detection of secret homicide, ch. 2.

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24 Sharpe, Crime in early modern England, 60. The comparative rarity with which murderers seem to have committed suicide in seventeenth-century England may reflect a relatively high chance of the murderer escaping punishment (Sharpe, Crime in seventeenth-century England, 33). The nineteenth-century homicide rate was doubtless affected by an improved ability to identify unnatural deaths; see Gatrell, V. A. C., ‘Theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Gatrell, V. A. C. et al. eds., Crime and the law, 247.Google Scholar

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27 In 1610 an Essex coroner who initially told a jury that their case ‘was a very fearfull and the most cruell and apparant murder and the ugliest Corpes that ever he sawe’, was accused of subsequently concealing this by asserting that the deceased had been gored by a bull (PRO, STAC 8/18/13, mm. 1–2). For other Star Chamber cases where coroners were accused of corruption, see PRO, STAC 10/1/27 (1540s); 8/125/4, mm. 10, 12–14 (1606); 8/311/28, m. 3(1609); and 8/139/12, m. 70(1612). See also Acts of the Privy Council (hereafter APC) 1575–1577, 263, and 1588–1589, 64–5, 110–11, 394–5.

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30 Herrup, , Common peace, 70–2.Google Scholar For two good examples of descriptions given in the hue and cry, see Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone NR /JQp 1/34 (New Romney, 1621), and Q/SB 27, fos. 90, 111(1704). On constables, see Kent, Joan R., The English village constable 1580–1642: a social and administrative study (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Wrightson, , ‘Two concepts of order’, esp. pp. 27–9, 39Google Scholar; and Sharpe, , Crime in early modern England, 76–7.Google Scholar Raising the hue and cry was a statutory obligation under 27 Eliz. c. 13 (1585). In cases of infanticide, churchwardens and overseers of the poor also led searches see, for example, Proceedings … in the Old-Bayly, the 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, and 28th days of February, 1697 (London, 1698), 3–4Google Scholar, and PRO, DURH 17/1, Part II Assizes 1719 (unnumbered fos., evidence against Mary Hudson, Durham).

31 Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), EDR E14 1653, and E15 Aug. 1654 (unnumbered fos., evidence against John Bemrose).

32 CSPD, 1649–50, 81. For another example, see Hardy, et al. eds., Hertford … sessions rolls, vol. 1, 287.Google Scholar In 1596 Sir Edward Hext partly blamed a low rate of reported crime on ‘the negligence of constables in taking offenders’ (quoted in Wrightson, Keith, English society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), 156).Google Scholar On negligence and corruption, see also Kent, , English village constable, 206–7, 211–16, 225.Google Scholar

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46 PRO, SP 35/49/244–6.

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49 In 1707 a detailed description of a silver tobacco box taken from a Middlesex murdered man was printed. In addition to a reward offered by the victim's widow, subsequent issues carried a government notice offering a pardon for accomplices, see London Gazette (30 Oct.–3 Nov. 1707), 2, (27 Nov.–Dec. 1707), 2; (3–6 Feb. 1701), 2.

50 London Gazette (30 Oct.–3 Nov. 1707), 2; (27 Nov.–Dec. 1707), 2; (3–6 Feb. 1701), 2.

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59 Gent. Mag. (Jan. 1733), 43; (Feb. 1733), 99; (Mar. 1733), 154. In 1727 a newspaper described how word quickly reached London about a Staffordshire woman who fled to London after burying her illegitimate child, and how she was at once returned to Stafford where her mother was already held as an accomplice (British Spy: or, Derby Post-Man (15 Jun. 1727), 4).

60 For example, after a London tripe-man was murdered in 1695, his sister advertised a reward ‘that the same may come to light’ (London Gazette (26–30 Sept. 1695), 2).

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70 ibid, 380–6, 397. See also Hay, Douglas, ‘The class composition of the palladium of liberty: trial jurors in the eighteenth century’, in Cockburn, J. S. and Green, Thomas A. eds., Twelve good men and true: the criminal trial jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton, 1988), 305–57.Google Scholar

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77 For a rare exception where an accused murderer was acquitted by a London jury in 1736 after successfully performing the ordeal, see Weekly Miscellany, vol. CLXXI (27 Mar. 1736), 3.

78 Legal medicine was not taught at a British university until 1821, and the first significant original textbook in English – George Male's Epitome of juridical or forensic medicine – did not appear until 1816. Ambroise Paré's work of 1575 on the subject had been translated as How to make reports, and to embalme the dead in 1634, but this did not have a significant impact. On these developments and the early history of forensic medicine in general, see Forbes, Thomas Rogers, Surgeons at the Bailey: English forensic medicine to 1878 (New Haven, 1985), esp. ch. IGoogle Scholar his Crowner's quest, 42–3.

79 In general, surgeons and apothecaries gravitated towards better learning as the demand for their services increased; see Holmes, Geoffrey, Augustan England: professions, state and society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982), chs. 6–7Google Scholar, and Burnby, Juanita G. L., A study of the English apothecary from 1660 to 1760 (Medical History, Supplement III; London, 1983).Google ScholarPubMed

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81 Holdsworth, , History of English law, vol. III, 650Google Scholar; Herrup, , Common peace, 160Google Scholar; Howell, ed., State trials, vol. VI, 770.Google Scholar

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88 Howell, ed., State trials, vol. II, 1031.Google Scholar Murder indictments were often insufficient at law because they ‘contained too little of the kinds of fact upon which legal distinctions rest’ (Baker, ‘Refinement of English criminal jurisprudence’, 23).

89 Medical advances also meant that the lives of the victims might be saved, preventing the charge being murder, and enabling them to testify and, similarly, suicidal murderers might be revived to stand trial (Beattie, , Crime and the courts, 111n.).Google Scholar In 1731 a woman who cut the throats of her children and then herself was saved by the skill of a surgeon (British Spy (8 Apr. 1731), 3).Google Scholar

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93 PRO, SP 36/30/53–4, 82–3, 92–3. For a similar case from the Buckingham assizes in 1728, where the judge stated that although ‘the Statute makes the concealment of the Death evidence of the Murder’, he conceded that concealment did not carry the same degree of guilt as wilful murder (SP 36/5/86 36/6/94–6).

94 This is not to say that midwives were never learned in such matters, only that they held the lowest status among medical practitioners, especially when ‘man-midwives’ began to compete in the eighteenth century. In this case, the midwife applied medical reasoning of her own, arguing that ‘if the Child had been born dead the Vessells of Life which she Explained to be the Navel string would have been perished whereas they were firm’ (PRO, SP 36/30/54). On midwives, see Pelling, Margaret and Webster, Charles, ‘Medical practitioners’, in Webster, Charles ed., Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 179–80Google Scholar; Forbes, T. R., The midwfe and the witch (New Haven, 1966), esp. pp. 112–13, 139, 155Google Scholar; Harley, David, ‘Ignorant midwives–a persistent stereotype’, The Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 28 (1981), 6–9Google Scholar; Holmes, , Augustan England, 82.Google Scholar

95 In one of the earliest homicide trials at which professional medical testimony was formally used as evidence – the trial of the early of Pembroke in 1678 – the jury rejected the surgeon's opinion that the victim's death had been caused by drinking and in 1734 a judge rejected a Huntingdon jury's guilty verdict on a woman for poisoning her husband, arguing that the surgeon's toxicological analysis was entirely negative, see Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, 46–7Google Scholar, PRO, SP 36/32/29. For other cases where judges and juries clashed over verdicts in homicide trials see PRO, SP 35/11/39(1718) and 36/35/30 (1735).

96 Shapiro, , Probability and certainty, 177, 183.Google Scholar See Bushell 's Case (1670); see Howell, ed., State trials, vol. VI, 1011–12.Google Scholar

97 PRO, PL 27/2, part II (unnumbered fos., 1691–1750, Deposition of Charles Leigh, 1695).

98 Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, 3.Google Scholar As Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy have written of suicide inquests, ‘a verdict based on forensic evidence was a conjecture’ (Sleepless souls, 227). In the 1740s a Lancashire doctor was embarrassed to learn that a woman he had recently diagnosed as suffering from ‘the Gravel’ – a urinary complaint – had in fact been pregnant and was charged with infanticide; see Brockbank, W. and Kenworthy, F. eds., The diary of Richard Kay, 1716–51 of Baldingstone (Chetham Society, 16 Manchester, 1968), 121–2, 125.Google Scholar In 1721 a Durham woman, having disposed of her illegitimate child, pretended to neighbours that she had ‘an Ill ffitt of ye Gravell & Ague’ (PRO, DURH 17/2, Assizes 1721 (unnumbered fos., Evidence against Anne Thompson)).

99 Select trials, vol. I, 57–9 vol. IV, 96.Google Scholar Jonathan Barry has argued that the history of medicine cannot be understood in terms of science displacing quackery and magic, but rather in terms of patients' needs, choices and expectations; see his ‘Piety and the patient: medicine and religion in eighteenth-century Bristol’, in Porter, Roy ed., Patients and practitioners: lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society (Cambridge, 1985), 145–75.Google Scholar

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101 The first original work in English on forensic medicine Hunter's, William ‘On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children’ (1783)Google Scholar, discussed the increasing difficulty of proving infanticide; see Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, 3, 97.Google Scholar

102 Proceedings … in the Old Bayly the 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th of January (London, 1735), 24–5.Google Scholar For another case of a woman who threw her baby from a window immediately after birth, see Cockburn, J. S. ed., Calendar of assize records: Kent indictments, Elizabeth I (London, 1979), no. 11.Google Scholar

103 Gent. Mag. (Nov. 1774), 511.Google Scholar On such tests in general, see Brittain, R. P., ‘The hydrostatic and similar tests of live birth: a historical review’, Medical-Legal Journal 31 (1963), 189–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, ch. 6.Google Scholar One objection to the hydrostatic test was that the lungs of the corpse could also be inflated naturally with the gases produced by decomposition (Forbes, , ‘Crowner's quest’, 45–7).Google Scholar

104 See Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, ch. 8.Google Scholar Murder using overdoses of medicine was especially hard to prove, for example, laudanum as a sedative for children; see Havard, , Detection of secret homicide, 53–64.Google Scholar The first English work on poisoning, Mead's, RichardA mechanical account of poisons in several essays, appeared in 1702Google Scholar; it is significant that a full third of Male's Epitome of juridicial or forensic medicine (1816) dealt with poisonsGoogle Scholar; see Forbes, , Surgeons at the Bailey, 4, 124–5.Google Scholar

105 Derby Mercury (6–27 Apr. 1732).Google Scholar In 1720 a Middlesex woman was convicted of murdering of her father-in-law after a post-mortem revealed that the inside of his stomach was blackened and corroded, and the stomach contents were fed to a dog which vomited; see Proceedings … in the Old Bayly the 27th, 28th and 29th of April, 1720 (London, 1720), 5.Google Scholar For two earlier examples of skilful dissections which proved poisoning, see PRO, ASSI 45/6/2/51 (1662), Three inhumane murthers committted by one bloudy person upon his father, his mother, and his wife, at Cank in Staffordshire (London, 1675), 6.Google Scholar

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109 Historians disagree as to levels of harmony in early modern English communities. David Underdown detects ‘the essentially co-operative nature of the village community’ in the earlier seventeenth century, where Lawrence Stone sees a picture of endemic malice; see Underdown, , Revel, riot and rebellion, 13n., and Stone, The fan7ily, sex and marriage in England (London, 1977), 95–9.Google Scholar For the most elegant and balanced impression, see Wrightson, , English society, ch. 2.Google Scholar For a dated but still useful basic outline of the structure of government and administration in local communities, see Trotter, Eleanor, Seventeenth century life in the country parish (Cambridge, 1919).Google Scholar

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114 Thomas, , Religion and the decline of magic, 93, 128–9.Google Scholar For treatises which discuss nature in specifically providential terms, see Ray, John, The wisdom of God manifested in the works of the creation (London, 1691)Google Scholar, Derham, William, Physico-theology: or a demonstration of the being and attributes of God from his works of creation (London, 1713).Google Scholar Both are reprinted in Goodman, D. C. ed., Science and religious belief 1600–1900 (Milton Keynes, 1973), 181–219, 229–41.Google Scholar The theme of the relationship between God's agency and the natural world recurs throughout this anthology; Ray, for example, suggested that God used plagues of insects to punish sinful nations (ibid., 219). In the nineteenth century, a distinction was still made between direct providences which governed the mechanisms of the universe and the more specific warnings and punishments of special providences; the Irish famine of 1845–1847 was, in the eyes of many, an example of the latter; see Hilton, Boyd, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), 109–12, 210–11 and passim.Google Scholar

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