Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Cultural Topics/Suicide
Suicide was a civil and religious crime in Stuart England. It was regarded as a heinous crime, a kind of murder committed at the instigation of the devil.[1] Suicides were tried posthumously and, if found to have been sane when they took their lives, were severely punished. The deceased’s moveable property was forfeited to the crown, and their bodies were buried profanely (interred in a public highway, pinioned in the grave with a wooden stake).[2]
The seriousness of suicide called for a just punishment. Suicides were denied funerals and burial in the churchyard, which were the rites that marked the transmigration[3] of Christian souls into the afterlife and membership in the community of the dead.[4] These penalties expressed a genuine belief that suicide was detestable. Desperate families were concerned to avoid the stigma that attached to suicide, as well as to escape financial hardship, and so they sometimes made attempts to conceal and deny the suicide of their loved ones.[5]
The law of self-murder was seldom used before 1500, in spite of the crown’s financial interest in the good of suicides and the theological disapproval of self-killing. After 1660, the law was increasingly evaded, and the extent of the insanity defense was gradually so broadened that eventually almost all suicides were acquitted as lunatics.[6]
Legal thought and popular belief believed suicide to be self-murder, a conscious and premeditated act committed by a fully rational criminal. Because suicide was a species of murder, the perpetrator was not guilty if he killed himself when he was too young or too mad to be aware that the act was wrong.[7] Culpable self-murder was distinguished from innocent suicide by the use of two different verdicts. The guilty were felones de se (felons of themselves), and the innocent were non compos mentis (lunatics).[8]
Few Stuart suicides left notes, as most people who killed themselves were poor and probably illiterate, and about half of them were propertyless peasants and labourers.[9]
- ↑ Rosenberg, Charles E., and Golden, Janet. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History. (New Jersey: Rutgers, The State University, 1992), 86.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ To pass from one body into another at death.
- ↑ MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth Century England. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Rosenberg, 86.
- ↑ MacDonald, 133.
- ↑ Rosenberg, 86.
- ↑ MacDonald, 133.