Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Calamities/Murder
Historians disagree about the frequency of violent disorder in seventeenth-century England.[1] The majority of murders in early modern England originated in domestic tensions and quarrels in alehouses and taverns.[2] Reasons for murder could range from deep-seated reasons such as greed and jealousy, to spur-of-the-moment reasons such as a bar fight gone wrong. One seventeenth-century woman murdered her husband because she could not love him and resented him for not being as rich as she thought he had been.[3] Reasons for murder could be more than just personal, domestic reasons. Murder could be used as a form of collective justice exacted upon an individual whom the community believed to have committed a crime and gone unpunished for it.[4] These kinds of murders are the vigilante murders of their day. Murder could also be used to make a political statement.[5] For example, John Lambe was murdered because of his association with the ever-unpopular Duke of Buckingham. By murdering Lambe, people believed they were making a statement about how much they disliked Buckingham. Furthermore, people believed that “individual corruption was at the root of national decay, and that the violence of elimination of transgressive individuals could restore national order.”[6] Therefore, the murder of corrupted individuals would benefit society. There was also the reason of people just did not get along.
A common method of murder appeared to be poison, particularly arsenic.[7] Poison seemed to have been particularly popular for domestic murders, espeically when the wife killed her husband. Likely this preference for poison was because it left little mess behind afterwards. Effects of poisons would likely not manifest themselves until after burial. A coroner’s inquest would only be held when there was very strong grounds to suspect murder, but many of the cases provided little to no concrete evidence, thus ensuring that coroners would not investigate the body for signs of poison.[8] Poison was by no means the only way to carry out a murder though. Any range of weapons could be used. In the murder of John Lambe, he was killed with stones and cudgels.[9]
Infanticide and Filicide
Infanticide is defined as the killing of a newborn infant. Although by no means a very frequent occurrence, it was employed for various reasons. Infanticide was enough of a worry for seventeenth-century Englishmen that James I issued the Infanticide Statute in 1624 making it illegal to murder a newborn child.[10] Prior to this, there had been no law restricting this.
It has been argued that infanticide was a way for the early modern English-woman “to resist or subvert subordination or confinement.”[11] With the death of the newborn, a woman would no longer be responsible for raising and caring for a child. Motherhood was perceived as another duty for a woman. Killing the newborn was a way for her to elude this duty. Resons for infanticide could also be a sort of escape route for an unmarried pregnant woman. It would have brought shame upon the woman to bear a child out of wedlock. Alternatively, the reason could be as pragmatic as the woman could find no way to feed an additional mouth. Economic circumstances played a large part in rates of infanticides.[12] Evidence that supports the hypothesis that many of the infanticides were carried out due to economic reasons is that many of the women accused of infanticide were middle- and lower-class women who worked for a living.[13] These woman were working what would be equivalent to miniumum wage or lower today. They decided they would not be able to afford to feed another mouth.
Filicide is similar to infanticide except for the child that dies is older than a newborn and is murdered by their own parents, typically the mother. In the seventeenth-century, mothers were starting to be thought of as important parts of the family unit and for the raising of children. She was no longer considered only a child-bearer.[14] Consequently, a mother who murders her child is perceived to be “forgetting maternal nature, domestic duty, and the expectations of male and female communities worked to destabilize...maternal agency.”[15] Because a mother’s duty was to her children, the breaching of this implied contract was not only seen as murder but also a breach of the social order.
- ↑ Alastair Bellany, "The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 39, http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ (accessed February 23, 2012).
- ↑ Bernard Capp, "Serial Killers in 17th-Century England," History Today 46, no. 3 (March 1996): 22, http://web.ebscohost.com/ (accessed February 23, 2012).
- ↑ Capp, "Serial Killers," 25.
- ↑ Bellany, "John Lambe," 44.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Bellany, "John Lambe," 72.
- ↑ Capp, "Serial Killers," 22-26.
- ↑ Capp, "Serial Killers," 22.
- ↑ Bellany, "John Lambe," 72.
- ↑ Keith M. Botelho, "Maternal Memory and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England," Studies in English Literature 48, no. 1 (2008): 111, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ (accessed February 23, 2012).
- ↑ Botelho, "Maternal Memory," 114.
- ↑ Laura Gowing, "Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present no. 156 (August 1997): 88, http://www.jstor.org/ (accessed February 23, 2012).
- ↑ Gowing, "Secret Births," 89.
- ↑ Botelho, "Maternal Memory," 113.
- ↑ Botelho, "Maternal Memory," 115.