¹ See, for example, Household and family in past time: comparative studies in the size and structure of the domestic group over the last three centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial north America, with further materials from western Europe, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1972).

² The best known of these are Edward Shorter, The making of the modern family (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Lawrence, Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977)Google Scholar; and Jean-Louis, Flandrin, Families in former times: kinship, household and sexuality (London, 1979).Google Scholar

³ So far those studying the history of the family have paid little attention to family violence. Margaret May, ‘Violence in the family: an historical perspective’, in Violence and the Family, ed. Martin, J. P. (London, 1978), is scholarly, but has little to say about developments before 1800. Nancy Tomes, ‘A “Torrent of Abuse’: Crimes of Violence between working-class men and women in London, 1840–1875’, Journal of Social History, xi, 3 (Spring 1978), 328–45 is based on limited evidence and is concerned mainly with wife-battering.Google Scholar

⁴ The ‘discovery’ of this problem has engendered a growing body of literature, little of it of value for our immediate purposes. Violence and the family, ed. Martin, is probably the best reader on the subject. Other general studies include M. D. A. Freeman, Violence in the home (Farnborough, Hants, 1979); and Renvoize, Jean, Web of violence (London, 1978).Google Scholar

⁵ Stone, Family, sex and marriage, pp. 95, 99.

⁶ Shorter, Making of the modern family, pp. 62–3, 170.

⁷ Flandrin, Families in former times, pp. 122–3, 128.

⁸ Quoted in Coser, Lewis A., The functions of social conflict (London, 1956), p. 63.Google Scholar

⁹ For a perceptive recent discussion of these conduct books, see Kathleen M. Davies, “The sacred condition of equality’-how original were Puritan doctrines of marriage?, Social History, v (May 1977), 563–80.

¹⁰ Whateley, William, A care-cloth: or, a treatise of the cumbers and troubles of marriage (London, 1624), Sig. A 2V.Google Scholar

¹¹ Depositions from the castle of York relating to offences committed in the northern counties in the seventeenth century, ed. James, Raine (Surtees Society, XL, 1861), p. 205.Google Scholar

¹² Sharpe, J. A., ‘Crime in the county of Essex 1620–1680: a study of offences and offenders at the assizes and quarter sessions’ (unpublished Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 1978), pp. 179–80.Google Scholar

¹³ Essex Record Office, Quarter Sessions bundles, Q/SBa 2/58.

¹⁴ Essex Record Office, Quarter Sessions rolls, Q/SR 432/63.

¹⁵ For examples of and comments on this practice, see Wiener, C. Z., ‘Sex roles and crime in late Elizabethan Hertfordshire’, Journal of Social History, VIII, 4 (Summer 1975), 43–4.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The observation of one writer on recent problems of family violence, that battered wives sometimes ‘sense that initiating police action is likely to cause them even greater distress: greater poverty, worse beatings-up, etc.’, is not irrelevant to the early modern situation: Freeman, Violence in the home, p. 184.

¹⁷ The diary of Thomas Isham of Lamport (1658–81), kept by him in Latin from 1671 to 1673 at his father's command, trans. Marland, Norman, ed. Gyles, Isham Sir (Farnborough, Hants, 1971), p.155.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York, Archbishop of York's Consistory Court papers, C.P. H/495.

¹⁹ See the comments of Cockburn, J. S., ‘The nature and incidence of crime in England 1559–1625: a preliminary survey’, in Crime in England 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, (London, 1977), p. 55.Google Scholar

²⁰ No detailed account of the work of the coroner in this period exists. For insights into the activities of this officer at a slightly earlier date, see Wellington, R. H., The king's coroner (2 vols., London, 1905–6)Google Scholar. For a more recent general history of the coroner, which raises some important points about the implications of greater efficiency in the detection of unnatural deaths from the nineteenth century onwards, see Havard, J. D. J., The detection of secret homicide (London, 1960).Google Scholar

²¹ For some general comments on neighbourly control and attitudes to privacy in this period see Thomas, Keith, Religion and the decline of magic (London, 1971), pp. 526–30.Google Scholar

²² These are held by the Public Record Office under the classification ASSI 35. Home circuit files for the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods are being published as a Calendar of assize records, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (London, in progress).Google Scholar

²³ For a description of the difficulties involved in using this type of document, see Cockburn, J. S., ‘Early modern Assize records as historical evidence’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, v (1975), 215–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁴ P.R.O. ASSI 35/2/3–149/10. This sample of homicides excludes infanticides.

²⁵ Neuburg, Victor E., Popular literature: a history and guide (Harmondsworth, 1977)Google Scholar, contains a brief description of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century materials. For a work based on the type of popular literature used in the present study, see Joseph H. Marshburn, Murder & witchcraft in England, 1550–1640, as recounted in pamphlets, ballads, broadsides & plays (Norman, Oklahoma, 1971). Burke, Peter, Popular culture in early modern Europe (London, 1978), pp. 250–9, comments on the rise of popular literature as a European phenomenon.Google Scholar

²⁶ See, for example, the comments of Laslett, Peter, The world we have lost 2nd edn, London, 1971, PP. 2–3.Google Scholar

²⁷ Morris, Terence and Blom-Cooper, Louis, A calendar of murder: criminal homicide in England since1957 (London, 1964), p. 279. The sample upon which this study is based, involving 764 accused, effectively excludes infanticide.Google Scholar

²⁸ Sharpe, ‘Crime in the county of Essex’, pp. 199–204.

²⁹ Shorter, Making of the modern family, p. 3.

³⁰ Flandrin, Families in former times, pp. 48–9.

³¹ Gouge, William, ‘Of domestical duties, eight treatises’, in Workes (London, 1626), p. 203.Google Scholar

³² This conclusion is based on figures provided by Buchanan, Given James, Society and homicide in thirteenth century England (Stanford, California, 1977), table 6, p. 57Google Scholar; and Hanawalt, Westman Barbara, ‘The peasant family and crime in fourteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies, XIII, 2 (May, 1974), 4.Google Scholar

³³ Wolfgang, Marvin E., Patterns of criminal homicide (Science Editions Paperback edn, New York, 1966), p. 206.Google Scholar

³⁴ Nicole Castan, ‘La criminalité familiale dans le ressort du Parlement de Toulouse (1690–1730)’, in Crimes et criminalité en France sous l‘Ancien Régime17^e-18^e siècles (Cahiers des Annales, XXXIII, Paris, 1971), p. 105.

³⁵ Thus Renvoize, Web of violence, p. x, glosses the title of her book by explaining that ‘I have come to see violence more and more in terms of a gigantic web in which countless generations of people are caught’; cf. LetitiaJ. Allan, ‘Child abuse: a criticial review of the research and the theory’, in Violence and the family, ed. Martin, p. 43, where the author, although dissenting from the view, points out that ‘it has been argued that there is no necessity to make this a separate issue, that violence in the family may be treated as part of a more general study of violent behaviour’.

³⁶ Cf. Walker, N. D., Crime and punishment in Britain (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 21, where the comparative stability of the murder rate in modern Britain, a striking contrast to the rise in other types of crimes of violence, is explained by advances in medical techniques.Google Scholar

³⁷ This conclusion is in line with those of Wiener, ‘Sex roles and crime’, and John, Beattie, ‘The criminality of women in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Social History, VIII, 4 (Summer, 1975), 80–116.Google Scholar

³⁸ Given, Society and homicide, p. 141.

³⁹ Barbara Hanawalt, ‘The female felon in fourteenth-century England’, Viator, v (1974), especially pp. 254–6.

⁴⁰ Wolfgang, Patterns of criminal homicide, table 24, p. 207, shows that 51.9% of the female offenders in his sample killed persons with whom they had a family relationship. Evelyn Gibson and S. Klein, Murder, 1957 to 1968 (London, H.M.S.O. Research Studies, 1969), p. 31, also find that the victims of female killers in their sample were predominantly family members.

⁴¹ Given, Society and homicide, pp. 56–61.

⁴² The diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 111, 1976), p. 1.

⁴³ For problems caused by this practice in another county, see T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: a county's government during the ‘personal rule’ (London, 1961), pp. 184–7.

⁴⁴ A number of such cases from the materials upon which the present study is based are summarized in Emmison, F. G., Elizabethan life: disorder (Chelmsford, 1970), pp. 155–6.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the laws of England (4 vols., 4th edn, London, 1771), IV, 182.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Table 1.

⁴⁷ The first case really to catch the imagination of the English reading public was the murder of Arden of Faversham, a cause célèbre of 1550, which ‘set a pattern which was to be worked and re-worked’: Neuburg, Popular literature, pp. 83–7.

⁴⁸ Macfarlane, Alan, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1970), p. 851, reaches this conclusion when comparing pamphlets describing the witch trials of the period with contemporary court materials.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁹ E.g. the preface to one murder pamphlet claimed that the case had ‘put more Freaks and Crotchets into the Heads and Minds of the Common People, than any Story of that size perhaps ever did in this World before’, and hoped to correct false impressions by publishing ‘a Plain and Naked Narrative’: A hellish murder committed by a French midwife, on the body of her husband, Jan 27 1687/8 (London, 1688), sig. A 2.

⁵⁰ It is interesting to note in this connexion the observation of Davies, ‘Sacred condition of equality’, p. 566, that ‘the overwhelming preoccupation of the seventeenth-century writers of conduct books was with the relationship between husbands and wives’.

⁵¹ The Examination, confessions and condemnation of Henry Robson, fisherman of Rye, who poysoned his wife in the strangest manner that ever hitherto hath bin heard of (London, 1598). The ‘strange manner’ of poisoning consisted of filling his wife‘s genitals with a mixture of ratsbane and ground glass while she slept.

⁵² The complete Newgate calendar, eds. Rayner, J. L. and Crook, G. T. (5 vols., London, 1926), 11, 166–7.Google Scholar

⁵³ A number of contemporary pamphlets allude to the case: the fullest is The genuine history of the life of Gill Smith, late of Dartford, apothecary (London, 1738).

⁵⁴ A true relation of the most horrible murther committed by Thomas White of Lane Green in the parish of Aussley in the county of Salop, Gen, upon the body of his wife Mrs Dorothy White in the town of Kederminister in the county of Worcester, the 10th day of this instant May 1682 (London, 1682).

⁵⁵ A hellish murder committed by a French midwife, p. 30.

⁵⁶ Taylor, John, The unnatural father: or, the cruell murther committed by Iohn Rowse of the towne of Ewell, ten miles from London, in the county of Surry, upon two of his owne children (London, 1621), Sig. A3V.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ A full and true account of a most barbarous and bloudy murther committed by Esther Ives, with the assistance of John Noyse a cooper: on the body of William Ives her husband, at Rumsey in Hampshire, on the fifth day of February 1686 (London, 1687), p. 3.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Three inhumane murthers committed by one bloudy person upon his father, his mother and his wife at Cank in Staffordshire (London, 1675), p. 5.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Murther, murther. Or, a bloody relation of how Anne Hampton, dwelling in Westminster nigh London, by poyson murthered her deare husband (London, 1641), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ A compleat narrative of the tryal of Elizabeth Lillyman, found guilty of petty treason and condemned at the Sessions at the Old Bayly the 10th of this instant July 1675 (London, 1675), p. 2. As the title of this pamphlet reminds us, murder of a husband by a wife (or, indeed, of a master by a servant) was classified as petty treason and punished accordingly.

⁶¹ For a typical illustration of this premise, see Poor Robin's true character of a scold: Or, the shrews’ looking glass. Dedicated to domineering dames, wives rampant, cuckolds couchant, and hen pecked sneaks in city or country (London, 1678).Google Scholar

⁶² ‘A briefe and true report of two most cruel, unnaturall, and inhumane murders, don in Lincolneshire, by twoo husbands upon their wives’, in Murder narratives, ed. Halliwell, J. O. (London, 1860), pp. 45, 47, 52. The pamphlet was originally published in 1607.Google Scholar

⁶³ A true relation of the…murther committed by Thomas White, p. 2.

⁶⁴ The sufferer's legacy to surviving sinners: or, Edmund Kirk's dying advice to young men (London, 1684).Google Scholar

⁶⁵ ‘A briefe and true report’, p. 45.

⁶⁶ ‘A warning for wives’, in A Pepysian garland: black letter broadside ballads of the years 1595–1639: chiefly from the collection of Samuel Pepys, ed. Rollins, Hyder (Cambridge, 1922), p. 301.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Dreadful news from Southwark: or, a true account of the most horrid murder committed by Margaret Osgood on her husband Walter Osgood a hatmaker, on Saturday the 31 of July 1680 (London, 1680), p. 2.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ A warning for bad wives: or, the manner of the burning of Sara Elston. who was burnt to death at a stake in Kennington Common near Southwark, on Wednesday the 24th of April 1678 for murdering her husband Thomas Elston the 25th of September last (London, 1678), p. 11.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Even modern studies comment on how the lack of alternative means of support to those provided by marriage puts pressure on battered wives to stay with brutal husbands: e.g. Freeman, Violence in the home, p. 172.

⁷⁰ Quoted in Morris and Blom-Cooper, A calendar of murder, p. 280.

⁷¹ Ibid., loc. cit.

⁷² See Macfarlane's review of Stone, Family, sex and marriage, in History and Theory, XVIII, 1 (1979), 103–26.

⁷³ The arraignment & burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, for the murther of her late husband Anthony Feme-seede, found deade in Peckham Field neere Lambeth, having once before attempted to poyson him with broth, being executed in S. Georges-field the last of Februarie 1608 (London, 1608), Sig. A 4V.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ ‘A briefe and true report’, pp. 46, 50.

⁷⁵ E.g. Cockburn, ‘Nature and incidence of crime’, p. 57, finds differences between domestic homicide in Essex, 1559–1625, and the other two counties he studies, Sussex and Hertfordshire. Moreover, preliminary analysis of Western Circuit Assize Gaol Delivery Books dealing with Cornwall, 1700–49, indicates that domestic homicide constituted a smaller proportion of all homicides in that county than it did in Essex, 1560–1709: P.R.O., ASSI 23/4–6, passim.

⁷⁶ Gatrell, V. A. C. and Hadden, T. B., ‘Nineteenth-century criminal statistics and their interpretation’, in Nineteenth century society, ed. Wrigley, E. A. (Cambridge, 1972), p. 370Google Scholar; Gatrell, V. A. C., ‘The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B., and Parker, G. (eds.), Crime and the law: the social history of crime in western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980), pp. 284–300.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ West, D. J., Murder followed by suicide (London, 1965).Google Scholar

⁷⁸ P.R.O. ASSI 35/146/2/9, 11. One other case was found while searching the King's Bench Ancient Indictments for Essex cases, 1620–1680. The incident occurred in 1631, and prompted a jury verdict of non compos mentis: P.R.O., K.B.9/794/253–4.

⁷⁹ Taylor, Unnatural father, sig. B 1 v. The pamphlet tells us, ibid., sig. B 2, that after the murder, ‘though there was time and opportunity enough for him to flye, & to seeke for safety: yet the burthern and guilt of his conscience was so heavy to him, and his desparate case was so extreme, that hee never offered to depart; but, as a man weary of his life, would, and did stay, till such time as hee was apprehended and sent to prison’.

⁸⁰ P.R.O., ASSI 45/8/1/61.

⁸¹ Shorter, Making of the modern family, p. 55.