Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

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Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England Sandra Clark

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

Also by Sandra Clark THE ATHLONE SHAKESPEARE DICTIONARIES (series editor) THE ELIZABETHAN PAMPHLETEERS: Elizabethan Moralistic Pamphlets, 1580–1640 THE PENGUIN SHAKESPEARE DICTIONARY THE PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: Sexual Themes and Dramatic Representation THE TEMPEST WEBSTER, THE WHITE DEVIL AND THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England Sandra Clark School of English and Humanities Birkbeck College, University of London

© Sandra Clark 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0212–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clark, Sandra, 1941– Women and crime in the street literature of early modern England / Sandra Clark. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0212–7 1. English literature–Early modern, 1500–1700–History and criticism. 2. Criminals in literature. 3. Women and literature–England–History–16th century. 4. Women and literature–England–History–17th century. 5. Street literature–England–History and criticism. 6. Women–England–History– Renaissance, 1450–1600. 7. Women–England–History–Modern period, 1600– 8. Crime–England–History–16th century. 9. Crime–England–History–17th century. 10. Female offenders in literature. 11. Crime in literature. 12. Women in literature. I. Title. PR428.C74C57 2003 820.9’35206927–dc21 2003051973

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

ix

1 Early Modern News and Crime Writing: Its Literary and Ideological Context

1

2 Women’s Crimes: Their Social Context and Their Representation

33

3 The Broadside Ballad

70

4 Domestic Plays

106

5 Crime News and the Pamphlet

145

Conclusion

180

Notes

185

Works Cited

211

Index

225

Acknowledgements I should like to thank Birkbeck College for granting me study leave to work on this book, and to colleagues in the School of English and Humanities for taking over my teaching and other duties while I did so. Constructive suggestions made by Elizabeth Maslen, Graham Handley and especially David Atkinson have done much to improve the chapters that they read, and I am grateful to them for their kindness. While writing this book I have given lectures about aspects of it to audiences in Japan, Canada, Tunisia and Spain, as well as in the UK, and have been encouraged by their responses: everyone, it seems, is fascinated by women’s crimes, whether committed last week or 400 years ago. Finally, my thanks to Oliver Clark for help through word processing traumas, and to Mike Holmes for all sorts of things which made life better while the book was being written.

vii

Judge you wanna hear my plea, before you open up your court, But I don’t want no sympathy, ’cause I done cut my good man’s throat I caught him with a trifling Jane, I warned him ’bout before, I had my knife and went insane, the rest you ought to know Judge, judge, please mister judge, send me to the ’lectric chair Judge, judge, good mister judge, let me go away from here I wanna take a journey, to the devil down below I done killed my man, I wanna reap just what I sow Oh judge, judge, lordy lordy judge, send me to the ’lectric chair Judge, judge, hear me judge, send me to the ’lectric chair. (From ‘Send me to the ’lectric chair’, by George Brooks, sung by Bessie Smith, 1927)

viii

Introduction The women whose crimes are at the heart of this book often went gladly to their deaths on the scaffold or at the stake, like the woman in Bessie Smith’s song, cited on p. viii, and did not ask to live longer. But in other ways they were quite unlike her: not only did their crimes never involve ‘trifling Janes’, but they nearly all expressed the deepest regret for what they had done and, helped by ministers of the Church, they tried their best to make peace with God before they died in the expectation of escaping eternal damnation. Or at least so the reports of their last days on earth would have it. Executions were public events in early modern England, and it was important to the state that they were conducted as spectacles of moral and social edification. The accounts I discuss here are literary representations and, although some of the writers take pains to stress the truthfulness of their version of events in contradistinction to others available, they are not necessarily factually accurate, since they are shaped by other concerns. Whether in the form of ballads, domestic plays or prose pamphlets, these are stories about sensational acts – predominantly murder or witchcraft – rendered the more scandalous because they are acts of deviancy committed by women. This is not a book about the history of women or of crime. My focus is not on the social reality of these crimes, how and why they were committed, or on women’s place within the penal system. It does not seek to measure the accounts against what ‘actually’ happened. What I hope to do is consider how, and with what interests in mind, crimes committed by women are shaped as subjects for representation in various forms within the developing marketplace of print. Only unusual crimes were saleable commodities: principally, murder and witchcraft. In a society which conceived of women’s roles in terms of their function within a patriarchal system, the woman who committed an act defined as criminal was doubly deviant, infringing the norms of gender and of social order which constructed woman as secondary, inferior and subject to male authority. One of the concerns of the book is to address the part played by considerations of gender in the telling of these stories of women’s acts of extreme disorder. Women as perpetrators of disorderly, evil or criminal acts go back to the very beginnings of Western mythologies, and still today the woman who commits a crime of violence is a figure of fascination, in tabloid terms an ‘Angel of Death’ perhaps, or a ‘Black Widow’. The continuing notoriety in Britain of such figures as Myra Hindley and Rosemary West who enter that exclusive category of serial killers, exemplifies the most extreme example of this; women who allegedly murder their children generate intense media ix

x Introduction

interest, as websites devoted to the recent British case of Angela Cannings, and in America of Susan Smith, illustrate. In these instances, pathological factors such as mental illness, depression and postpartum psychosis are drawn on to explain what seems otherwise so unnatural in the weaker sex. The extent of women’s participation in violent crime has always been a fraction of men’s, and is the more intriguing for being exceptional. In early modern England there were also totemic names – Alice Arden, Anne Sanders, Mrs Page of Plymouth, Margaret Vincent, Mrs Turner – evoked to call up that special frisson attached to women who kill. According to sociologists, serious research into female criminality is a comparatively recent development, with much progress still to make, although there is a considerable amount of low-grade popular commentary on the subject. It is also the case that the study of early modern popular literature and culture is a comparatively new area, developing concomitantly with the broadening of interest in non-canonical texts of the period and in history ‘from below’. The attitudes of both literary scholars and historians towards the value of exploring the lives, beliefs, work, recreational activities, textual traces and social identities of people who did not participate in the ‘grand tradition’ of Renaissance culture have changed markedly in the later decades of the twentieth century. Some forms of popular culture from the period, such as ballads and other folkloric forms, have been extensively studied since early in the century, but largely from an antiquarian stance. Scholars such as Hyder E. Rollins and C. J. Baskerville have done groundwork to which all who follow them must be indebted, though their sometimes de haut en bas perspectives on the cultural forms they examine qualify and date the aesthetic judgements they made. In the present climate, where boundaries between disciplines are breaking down, historians are becoming conscious of the contribution of popular writing to the study of mentalities to counter the hitherto prevailing bias towards materials relating only to the life and thought of an educated élite. I use the term ‘street literature’ to refer to broadside ballads and cheap pamphlets available in increasing quantities in this period to a wide audience in streets, markets and public places. An audience of listeners as well as readers is involved; ballads were initially delivered by public performance and circulated orally as much as if not more than through reading. And there is evidence that pamphlet texts, like other kinds of popular print such as jestbooks, were shared communally, or read aloud by a literate member of a group to others. I also include plays on subjects of topical news; although the printed texts of these would not have been available to a broad readership, their substance has a strong degree of overlap with that of ballads and pamphlets on topical news, and would have reached the same kinds of people. In particular, domestic plays served some of the same journalistic functions as ballads and pamphlets, and one of the concerns of my book is with forms of early modern news, produced x

Introduction

xi

and distributed at a time before the existence of newspapers as such. In this context, news does not necessarily mean, as nowadays, accounts of very recent events, but it does refer to events which actually occurred, many of them documented in records of court proceedings, and were regarded by those who read, listened to, sang or viewed their literary representations as contemporary. The events took place in England and were in that way domestic; and although the crimes recorded in these forms were sensational and exceptional, not typical or common, they were perpetrated by common people and thus bore some relation to the lives of their readers and audiences and the cultural formations in which they participated. Such people did not have access to many images of their own lives; but these texts constituted a resource on which they could draw in the construction of social and cultural identities. It is my hope that we can also find in the texts ways to extend our own understanding of those identities.

xi

1 Early Modern News and Crime Writing: Its Literary and Ideological Context

An interest in news is probably a feature of all societies since it constitutes a basic element in communication between individuals and groups and a footing for social intercourse. But news is not a neutral or objective concept, through whatever medium transmitted; it is a construction which exists in oblique relation to actual events. A modern sociologist refers to news as ‘the end-product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially constructed set of categories’,1 and this is a process which operates even in the most primitive form of news, that of orally transmitted gossip. In contemporary societies, the news media play an important, and often highly contested, ideological role in the existing structures of power. Raymond Williams calls newspapers ‘a signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’.2 The accounts of reality which newspapers put forward are shaped and constrained by the interests they represent. In the early modern period, before the systematic and professional production of news in the form of newsbooks, corantos and official newsletters, news writing, both scribal and printed, circulated in a variety of forms, many of them no longer in existence, in which the interaction of oral and written cultures was highly significant. It was occasional, random, regulated, but in less systematic and formal ways than now, sporadic and commonly unauthored, so that its relation to the power structure was very differently constituted. It was less likely to ‘reproduce symbolically the existing structure of power’,3 and in an era well before that of mass communications, it played a less important part in the formation of what we now call ‘public opinion’, although its role in the emergence of the public sphere, to use the term brought into circulation by Jürgen Habermas, has been recently much discussed.4 As I hope to show, early modern news, and perhaps especially crime news, performed a special sort of ideological function in the way in which it brought events into an already constituted ‘realm of meanings’5 in order to make them intelligible. 1

2 Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England

The news report is a response to something that has happened which must have some bearing on the lives and beliefs of those who receive it, yet in important ways it also stands outside those lives. The selection of items for report and the development of criteria for newsworthiness, or ‘news values’ are made on the basis of assumptions about these lives.6 Though crime itself is by no means an absolute conception, and is constructed in relation to the moral and social values of specific societies, the characteristic of crime news is that it depicts what society regards as the exceptional, the unexpected, the out-of-the-way; it stands in contradistinction to the everyday. In the early modern period, as now, only certain types of crime become news: the bias towards the crime of murder resulted in an over-representation, which still exists. In that period, the murder of spouses was disproportionately highly represented.7 Crime news typifies the preference of all news writing for the deviant over the normal; it rejoices in what is sensational, exploiting the elements of deviance in what is constructed as criminal behaviour. The news values inherent in the activities of ‘people who depart from expected roles’8 particularly apply to the subject of women who participate in criminal activity, especially so in early modern England when gender roles were narrowly prescribed. The murder of Thomas Arden by his wife Alice in 1551, described in prose accounts, chronicles, ballad and at least one play,9 is rightly said to have assumed ‘an almost totemic significance in early modern culture’,10 and Alice Arden continued to symbolise what in early modern England represented the most extreme form of domestic evil for nearly a hundred years. Lena Cowen Orlin has explored in impressive detail the meaning of the gap between the historical circumstances of the murder and its literary representations in the surviving play and ballad. One of the things illustrated by the size of this gap is the process by which events can be shaped into a news story. The emphases imparted to this particular story in the play and the ballad are, of course, conditioned by their socio-cultural context in late sixteenth-century England, and modern news stories of husband-murder are differently inflected. The Arden story and its history can be read as an affirmation of the way in which crime news is made a means by which a threat to society is confronted and eliminated, and thus the social consensus reaffirmed. It also demonstrates how criminal activity can be converted into discourse, what Stephen Foley calls ‘a discursive site for the negotiation of power relations’.11 The imaginative embodiment of the story in drama and verse makes cultural capital out of media which are no longer generally considered appropriate for the transmission of topical news in our times in the West, although it is worth noting that ballads about sensational crimes, such as those of the Yorkshire Ripper, continue to be written; and drama, on both stage and television, still has a role in commenting on and developing the implications of topical news stories. Many of the functions of news reporting remain constant, and it answers to many of the same needs today as it did in an age before the invention of the newspaper.

Early Modern News and Crime Writing 3

What I hope to do in this introductory chapter is locate early modern news and crime writing within the particular conditions of the literary marketplace of its time and to relate it to other kinds of ephemeral print, to suggest some of the features which distinguish crime writing from other kinds of news, and to describe something of its cultural role. How was news conceived in the period before the appearance of newspapers and professional journalists? How was news of sensational crime conceptualised, and what were the functions that the relating of it, in plays, prose, or verse, believed to perform? In the value-system on which the writing of such news is predicated, what is the role of truth? These are some of the questions I will address. The focus will not be on writing about women’s crimes as such; the role played by issues of gender in these texts will be explored in chapter 2. *** Histories of journalism or of the popular press in England commonly take the 1620s as a starting point because it was in this decade that the regular production of newsbooks and corantos began.12 As a result, modern accounts of the ‘news’ that was reported in the seventeenth century often have a strongly political bias and define it in relation to public events, to official attitudes towards the kind of information suitable for what Charles I called ‘popular view and discourse’,13 and especially to the events of the years from 1641 to 1660, when the newspaper in England is deemed to have been invented. But news writing in a broader sense had a longer history; the printing of occasional news had been going on for more than a century, almost since the appearance of the printing press in this country,14 and there is much evidence for the existence of efficient networks by which news could be spread orally during the sixteenth century.15 Although, as Adam Fox puts it, ‘the proliferation of written media was conspiring in the creation of a new world of information’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,16 the appetite of the populace for news and information about events in the world that had some bearing on their lives was already very great. Continued efforts by the state to control or even suppress this appetite, such as the Star Chamber decree of 1586 banning the publication of home news of a political nature, testify to this. A scribal culture, by which ‘private’ letters written by individuals could be utilised to communicate information more broadly, had existed for some time and continued to flourish well into the era of print. The broadside ballad, a form that mediates between the oral and the written, had been used as a medium of news, especially political news, from early in the period. There was, for instance, what has been described as a ‘flurry of ballads’17 on the fall of Thomas Cromwell in 1540, and many of the publications concerned with the rebellion of the Northern earls in 1569–70 took this form.18 The power


of rumour and word of mouth to spread panic and anxiety on a grand scale, evident from at least the mid-sixteenth century, continued unabated throughout the seventeenth century. Fox illustrates in detail how oral and literate cultures interacted in this period to stimulate the growth both of an appetite for news and current information and of media with which to satisfy it. There were several factors which defined the particular climate for the production and reception of news which then existed; the growth of the print industry, the regulation of that industry by the state, and the nature of the ‘marketplace of print’19 that centred on London were all significant, as well as the distribution networks which existed throughout the country. Most relevant to an account of popular news about crime, which is my concern here, is the marketplace of print, in which the writing and publication of popular news, in whatever form, occupied a significant but ambiguous place. Recently, historians such as Peter Lake and Alexandra Walsham have argued for the existence of a niche market for popular news of crime and the kind of providential journalism of which it forms part, together with accounts of prodigious events and strange happenings. Walsham, in fact, goes so far as to say that ‘providential journalism seems to have been a fiercely competitive branch of the monopolistic and increasingly specialized London book trade, nothing less than a recipe for professional success’, citing the publishing operations of men like John Danter or William Barley.20 What Lake calls ‘the raw material of domestic mishap, criminal enormity or local tragedy’ was transformed into a saleable commodity in the period, which formed a staple of the printing industry.21 Yet, like ephemeral writing of all kinds, such productions were held in low esteem, regarded as trivial, time-wasting and damaging to serious literature, in that they usurped the attention and consideration which, in a well-regulated economy of publication, belonged elsewhere. Elite writers at the end of the sixteenth century already perceived the marketplace of print as a highly competitive one, in which the apparent explosion of literary production from the non-élite threatened to oust the work of serious and learned authors from its rightful place. In 1580, William Lambarde, the Kentish historian and JP, citing ‘pamfletes, Poesies, ditties, songes’, drafted ‘an acte to restraine the licentious printing selling and vttering of unproffitable and hurtfull Inglishe bookes’ because their only purpose was ‘to let in a mayne Sea of wickednesse, and to set vp an arte of making lascivious ungodly love, to the highe displeasure of GOD, whose guiftes and graces bee pitiefully misused thereby to the manifest iniurie and offence of the godly learned, whose prayse woorthie endevours and wrytinges are thearfore the lesse read and regarded’.22 This same sense of direct competition for readers is regularly expressed, reinforced by reference to the dangers posed to learning and religion by irresponsible ephemeral writing. The preacher, Henry Crosse, in Vertues Common-wealth, reported that if any


godly writer ‘set forth any notable book of divinitie, humanitie or such like, they are in no request, but to stop mustert pots, & what is the reason but this, euery stationers shop, stal, & almost euery post, giues knowledge of a new toy, which many times intercepts the vertuous discipline of a willing buyer’ (sig. P1). Philip Barrough, in The Method of Phisicke (1590), points out the greater effort required of genuine writers to win acceptance: ‘We see it dayly; that ridiculous toyes and absurd pamphlets being put forth without anie colour, be neverthelesse plausibilie and pleasinglie accepted; whereas a man moved with an honest care to profite his countrie, being willing to leave a testimonie of the same behind him … if he hath not a delectable subject, it behoveth him to shew manie grave and substantiall reasons of his doing, or else they will not yeeld their hoped for benefit’ (sig. A4V). ‘Pamphlet’ in this context is not a term specific to prose; the word was commonly used for ephemeral publications generally, as when, in The Returne from Parnassus, which is a rich source of information about the popular literary scene of the 1590s, Luxurio (Harvey) accuses Ingenioso (Nashe) of peddling his own works: Were thy disapointed selfe possest with such a spirit as inhabiteth my face, thou wouldest neuer goe fidlinge thy pamphletes from doore to dore like a blinde harper for breade & cheese, presentinge thy poems like oulde broomes to euerie farmer.23 One of the few writers prepared to defend the right of the unlearned to a voice was the soldier-pamphleteer Barnaby Rich, who recognised the strong element of social snobbery in these attacks and the implicit desire to defend class interests: But such is the delicacie of our readers at this time, that there are none may be alowed of to write, but such as haue bene trained at schoole with Pallas, or at the lest haue bene fostered vp with the Muses, and for my parte (without vaunt be it spoken) I haue bene a trauayler, I haue sayled in Grauesend Barge as farre as Billings gate … No marueill then good reader, although I want such sugered sape, wherwith to sauce my sense, whereby it might seeme delightfull vnto thee; such curious Coxcombes therefore, which cannot daunce but after Apollos pype, I wish them to cease any further to reade what I haue written; but thou which canst endure to reade in homely style of matters, more behooueful and necessarie, then eyther curiouse or fyled, goe thou forward on Gods name. (Allarme to England (1578), sig. *iiiV) The desire of a non-élite audience for popular print, in such forms as chapbooks, news ballads and pamphlets, was generally constructed as diseased appetite, greedy, undiscriminating and insatiable, characteristic of


the unregulated body of the vulgar sort who were unable to recognise what was good for them. Rich claimed that ‘one of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books, they do so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter’. King James himself referred to the common desire for news as a disorder, an ‘itching in the tongues and pennes of most men, as nothing is unsearched to the bottom’.24 Chettle, in Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), wrote of the widespread desire both to write and to publish as ‘raging’ like the plague: For such is the folly of this age, so witlesse, so audacious, that there are scarce so manye pedlers brag themselues to be printers because they haue a bundel of ballads in their packe, as there be idiots that thinke themselues Artists, because they can English an obligation, or write a true staff to the tune of fortune. (p. 9)25 The brunt of the condemnation falls on ballads and ballad-writers who met with abuse from all sides.26 Hence it is that Nashe, who never let go by an opportunity to abuse unlearned writers, de haut en bas, ‘poore latinlesse Authors’, is particularly withering about ‘these rude Rithmours with their iarring verse’:27 Hough Thomas Delone, Philip Stubs, Robert Armin &c. Your father Elderton is abus’d. Reuenge, reuenge on course paper and want of matter, that hath most sacriligiously contaminated the diuine spirit & quintessence of a penny a quart. (Works, 1, 280) He censures the presumptuousness of those who write ballads in praise of topical heroes: ‘What politique Counsailour or valiant Souldier, will ioy or glorie of this, in that some stitcher, Weauer, spendthrift, or Fidler, hath shuffled or slubbered vp a few ragged Rimes, in the memoriall of ones prudence, or the others prowesse’ (Works, 1, 24). His dismissive remark, in a private letter to William Cotton, about the demand for news is often quoted: ‘& for the printers there is such gaping amongst them for the coppy of my L. of essex voyage, & the ballet of the threscore & foure knights’ (Works, V, 194–5). But Nashe did admit to lowering his own standards if needs were pressing: ‘Twise or thrise in a month, when res est angusta domi … I am faine to let my Plow stand still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of those new-fangled Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous Villannellas and Quipassas I prostitute my pen in hope of gaine’ (Works, 3, 30–1). He also, of course, participated, though pseudonymously, in the pamphleteering war initiated by ‘Martin Marprelate’. Harvey may have been pointing out an embarrassing truth when he accused Nashe of having written ‘filthy Rymes, in the nastiest kind’.28


Nashe’s admission, even if it does not refer to the composing of ballads, typifies the dilemma of the professional, or would-be professional, writer in this period. The implicit self-contradictoriness of his stance is symptomatic of the fluid and complex nature of the literary market where news-writing in its various forms was searching for a place. Kemp, Chettle, Dekker and John Taylor are other writers who abuse ballad-writers and the popular press in similar terms to Nashe, though perhaps from more socially marginalised positions. Kemp’s is the most direct and personal voice. In the dedication to Lady Anne Fitton of his pamphlet Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1600), he claimed to be setting the record straight against the many ‘abhominable ballads’ (p. 32) written by ‘lying fooles I neuer knew’ (p. 4) recording his dancing journey from London to Norwich: One hath written Kemps farewell to the tune of Kery, mery, Buffe: another his desperate daungers in his late trauaile; the third his entertainment to New-Market; which towne I came neuer neere by the length of halfe the heath. Some swear in a Trenchmore I haue trode a good way to winne the world; others that guesse righter, affirme, I haue without good help daunst my selfe out of the world; many say thinges that were neuer thought. (p. 3) Kemp’s attack on popular print, while operating within the same mode, might imply fear of competition as well as of traduction. His dismissal of other accounts of his journey as unauthorised and inauthentic confers a special status on his own. Yet Kemp was an unabashed self-publicist, whose role as a folk-hero was advanced rather than diminished by such notoriety, and hence he had an interest in creating a literary controversy. There is a clear relation here between the circulation of such publications and that of gossip. Chettle’s objections to ballad-writers come from a different position. He was a printer and stationer who had played a part in editing the text of Greenes Groatsworth,29 and he put out Kind-Harts Dreame as an insider’s intervention in the unregulated world of popular printing. Chettle positions himself at two removes from his discourse: the pamphlet is presented as the dream of Kind-Heart, supposedly a tooth-drawer venturing into print for the first time; Kind-Heart reports the contents of letters delivered to him while he slept by five apparitions. He disclaims responsibility for their content, but delivers a brief commentary on them in the ‘Conclusion of his Dreame’. The first apparition is Anthony Now now, a street-musician and ballad-singer, who sends a letter to ‘Mopo and Pickering, Arch-ouerseers of the Ballad singers, in London, or else-where’ urging tighter controls on the singers and distributors of unlicensed ballads and pamphlets.30 The objection is threefold: to the idle and vagrant lives led by these men, to the lewd and corrupting nature of their material, and to the ease with which they can distribute it throughout


the country. Anthony Now now traces the source of these abuses to the heart of the printing industry: Some as I haue heard say [are] taken to be apprentices by a worthlesse companion … being of a worshipfull trade, and yet no Stationer, who after a little bringing them vppe to singing brokerie, takes into his shop some fresh men, and trusts his olde searuantes of a two months standing with a dossen groates worth of ballads. In which if they prooue thrifty, hee makes them prety chapmen, able to spred more pamphlets by the state forbidden then all the Bookesellers in London, for onely in this Citie is straight search, abroad smal suspition, especially of such petty pedlers. Neither is he for these flies only in fault, but the Gouernors of cutpurse hall, finding that their company wounderfully increast, heweuer manye of their beste workemen monthly miscande [sic] at the three foot crosse, they tooke counsaile how they might find some new exercise to imploy their number. (p. 19) Chettle may have a specific target in mind as the ‘worthlesse companion’, but the practice he describes of giving to unpaid apprentices work that might otherwise have gone to journeymen was well known in the printing trade.31 He acknowledges that both these malpractices – the use, as it were, of non-union labour and large-scale circulation of unlicensed texts – are endorsed by the ‘Gouerners of cutpurse hall’ (the Stationers’ Company), looking for ways to ‘imploy their number’. Hence the printing trade is trapped in a vicious circle and the constant supply of ephemeral material, though unsanctioned by the state, is none the less essential to the functioning of the trade. Pamphleteers like Dekker and John Taylor, in their attitudes to the explosion of print, typically figure the ambiguous and insecure situation of the popular writer. Both had other trades, Dekker as a jobbing playwright, Taylor as a Thames waterman, and both were prolific in the production of pamphlets, constantly trying out new forms. Taylor, the author of at least 200 named publications, many of them pamphlets of news, embodies many of the paradoxes of the popular writer’s position. Emulating Ben Jonson, he collected his Works in a folio of 1630, and he regularly expressed scorn for non-élite readers: the ribble-rabble senseless crew, The Hydra-monster inconsiderate, Who scarce know P from G, or black from blue.32 ‘Not unto everyone can read, I write; / But only unto those that can read right,’ he asserted firmly. He abused the pamphleteer William Fennor, with whom he conducted a literary flyting – ‘Thou art the Rump, the tail,


or basest part / Of Poetry, thou art the dung of Art’ – in terms which, in the twentieth century, were applied equally to him.33 His reputation has always been fluid. In his own century educated men such as Richard Burton and John Hall collected his publications, and his recent biographer sees him as writing ‘primarily for the gentry and for urban, especially London, tradesmen’,34 but Jonson, whom he regarded as his friend, could refer scornfully to ‘the Water-rimers workes’, and he has usually been characterised in modern accounts as a catchpenny, hack-writer, a jack of all trades.35 The multiplicity of contradictions in the ways such men as Nashe, Dekker and Taylor situated themselves and others as writers testifies to the complexity of the contemporary marketplace of print. The narrowness of canonical definitions could not accommodate the range of literary forms being produced; the demands of new kinds of readers stimulated the market, but were not acknowledged as socially or morally valid. Sheavyn writes of ‘an instability of conflicting values’ manifested in writers’ attacks on one another and their abuse of their own readers. The ‘scribling traffique’ in which Harvey accuses Nashe of participating increased considerably with the appearance of corantos, and the language of critical abuse extended accordingly.36 *** In this unstable and contentious economy of print, news writing was only gradually finding forms and functions which gave it identity as a discursive category. The corantos of the 1620s formed a distinct and separate sub-group of news writing which, at least initially, had little in common with news of crime. The characteristic forms in which popular crime news appeared, the moralistic pamphlet and the broadside ballad, coexisted with the regular newsbooks, even when these developed into a major print form with the coming of the civil war. This sort of account of sensational crimes such as murder and witchcraft, along with confessions of malefactors, and descriptions of miraculous or prodigious events is sometimes characterised as ‘popular literature’,37 but it is misleading to differentiate functionally (or ideologically) between ‘literature’ and ‘news writing’. However different its modes and its place in early modern systems of the distribution of information, this writing has some of the basic features of journalism; in particular, it transforms real-life events (or what purport to be such) into narratives. But it is important to recognise here that the word ‘news’, though much bandied about, when used in a title often denotes content that is neither topical nor factual, and has little to do with the present-day usage of the word. It appears, for example, in Nashe’s Strange Newes, Of the Intercepting certaine Letters (1592), one of the salvoes in his paper-war with Harvey, in Dekker’s Newes from Hell; Brought by the Diuells Carrier (1606) and in Nicholas Breton’s Strange Newes out of Divers Countries (1622), none of which is concerned with topical events. As


Lennard J. Davis notices, the term could in the sixteenth century refer to fictional tales, just as the term ‘nouvelles’ was, in the fifteenth century, applied to collections of tales and jests.38 Another historian of the novel, Michael McKeon, relates the transformation he discerns in the attitudes to newness in the seventeenth century through the medium of print to the growth of journalism; print, he claims, enforced a sensitivity to, and an acceptance of, the undeniable newness that distinguished the present from the past. This transformation in attitudes towards the new is reflected in the seventeenth century development of ‘news’ as a significant if ambiguous conceptual category, and of journalism as a popular if eclectic professional activity.39 But although the word ‘news’ is often to be found on title-pages of works to which it has no claim,40 it is not in fact particularly common in the titles of pamphlets on recent events; instead ‘discourse’, ‘relation’, ‘report’ or ‘story’ appears, indicating a perspective in which the element of narrative is more significant than that of novelty or contemporaneity. The following examples are characteristic of the forms taken by pamphlet titles: A True Report of the Horrible Murther, which was Committed in the House of Sir Ierome Bowes (1607) The Most Wonderful and True Storie of a Certaine Witch, named Alyse Gooderige (1597) A Brief Discourse of Two most cruell and bloudie murthers, committed both in Worcestershire (1583) A True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604) A True Relation of the Arraignment of Eighteene witches … at St EdmundsBury in Suffolk (1645) The true narrative of the Execution of John Marketman (n.d.) A rehearsall, both straung and true, of hainous actes committed by E. Stile, Alias Rockingham (1597) A true and just Recorde of the Information, Examination, and Confession of all the Witches, taken at St. Oses (1582) As Natascha Würzbach says of ballads, ‘new’ is a relatively common term in titles largely irrespective of content, and such formulae as ‘true relation’ are ‘usually reserved for sensational and miraculous reports’.41 She gives the following examples of ballad titles: Miraculous Newes from the cittie of Holdt in Germany The Post of Ware: With a Packet full of strange Newes out of diuers Countries Strange Newes from Brotherton in Yorke-shire, being a true Relation of the Raining of Wheat on Easter Day last


A true description of two monsterous children A true reporte of the forme and shape of a monstrous Childe Youths Warning-peice. In a true Relation of the Woeful Death of William Rogers of Cranbroke, in Kent Bruce Smith, however, finds more insistence on the term ‘new’ in ballad titles, contributing to that ‘process of transforming everyday practices into commodities for consumption’, which he sees as essential to the ballad’s claims for attention, noting, for instance, how what he calls ‘the most famous of all Elizabethan broadsides’ first appears in print: ‘A new Courtly Sonet, of the Lady Green sleeues. To the new tune of Greensleeves’.42 Newness certainly matters, but its relation to the ‘news’ of journalism is not straightforward. Ephemeral printed material of this kind was produced in large quantities. Much of it has been lost, but enough has survived to give a representative impression of its quality and characteristics, and it has left abundant textual traces from which its role in the economy of print can be assessed. As is evident from the metaphorical language of the attacks on popular writing, with its references to swarms and drones and indigestible abundance, the sheer volume of popular news writing was a factor in itself. Again, it is ballads that furnish detractors with their ammunition. They were published in enormous numbers. They constituted the cheapest, most accessible, most widely available form of print from the mid-sixteenth century for about a hundred years. Tessa Watt estimates ‘an absolute minimum’ of 600,000 copies of ballads in circulation in the second half of the sixteenth century.43 Naturally, not all of them were ballads of news, though Hyder Rollins’ Analytical Index suggests that a high proportion was.44 Ballads were certainly regarded as an important medium for news in the seventeenth century, until after the Restoration: it is worth quoting Henry Peacham, writing in 1641, that ‘For a penny you may have all the Newes in England, of Murders, flouds, Witches, fires, Tempests, and what not, in one of Martin Parker’s Ballads’.45 Despite the efforts of the Stationers’ Company at control, unlicensed ballads circulated in large numbers: ‘of the estimated 15,000 broadside ballads published between 1557 and 1709, only 3081 were listed in the records of the Stationers’ Company’.46 It is not easy to amass the same sort of evidence for news pamphlets since they are a less homogeneous form and did not constitute a recognisable genre. By comparison with the sheer volume of ballads constantly being printed, the number of news pamphlets is much smaller, though there was a contemporary perception of ephemeral print being produced in massive quantities. Dekker uses another image of animal fecundity to characterise ‘this printing age of ours’, as one when pamphleteers ‘being free of Wits Merchant-venturers, do euery new moon (for gaine only) make 5. or 6.


voiages to the Presse, and euery Term-time (vpon Booksellers Stalles) lay whole litters of blind inuention’.47 Alexandra Halasz has recently made the significant claim that the small size and indeterminate structure of the pamphlets enabled them to play a special and material part in the economy of print ‘because they so flexibly and efficiently utilise the productive capacity of the press’,48 an argument which applies just as well to almanacs, jestbooks, ballads and other small print forms. (It should perhaps be mentioned at this point that it does not apply to play-books, the other major genre with which I shall be concerned, which were published in negligible quantities compared with ballads and pamphlets, and made little impact on the book trade.)49 The printing industry in sixteenth-century England, though rapid in its growth and becoming firmly established, was not efficiently or equitably regulated. Some printers benefited from the system of monopolies and became wealthy, but more did not and became discontented. Unemployment was severe, and various forms of legislation were enacted in an attempt to deal with the situation, for example the 1587 regulation to limit the size of most editions of printed work to 1200 or 1500, after which the type had to be broken up and reset, in order to find work for the compositors.50 Few presses had enough work to keep them steadily employed throughout the year.51 Hence, what the letter-writer and newsgatherer John Chamberlain despised as ‘pedlarie pampflets and threehalfpenny ware’52 and Sir Thomas Bodley rejected from his library as ‘baggage books’53 came to play an essential role in the functioning of early modern printing houses. These operated, according to Halasz, ‘to two rhythms of production’.54 The complex and time-consuming operations involved in printing large and costly books, such as Bibles, commentaries and classical texts, which formed the main output of the first printing presses, required to be supplemented by a different style of production which could be conducted in a more cost-effective manner. This depended on a supply of short texts, which could be both printed and sold quickly. This summary of Halasz’s account simplifies a complex situation, and fails, among other things, to attend to differences in early modern working practices, but the ambivalent attitude of those involved in the printing trade towards the production of ephemeral material and small books for the non-élite, apparently so necessary for their commercial survival yet so lacking in cultural prestige, can be amply substantiated. Disputes arising from time to time within the Stationers’ Company indicate the commercial importance attached to the licence to print such texts. W. Greg notes the value of the Brislove-Wood-Symcock patent ‘for all things printed on one side only’, since it included ‘the right to all broadside ballads, the printing of which was the mainstay of the poorer sort’.55 In 1582, John Day, who had the monopoly to print the A.B.C. and the Catechism, took out an action in the Star Chamber against Roger Ward and William Holmes for infringing


his rights.56 Almanacs and prognostications, the prose equivalents of ballads in terms of perceived status and cultural value, were the subject of an outcry in 1588, when a monopoly on them was granted to Richard Watkins and J. Roberts.57 They required ‘few persons and small stock’ for their production, were in continuous demand and made ‘a prety commoditie toward an honest mans lyving’.58 Nashe, who was very conscious of the conditions of publication, mentions that to the publisher ‘prognosticating almanacs’ were ‘readier money than ale or cakes’. He was probably not exaggerating when he said that printers were glad to pay Greene dearly for the dregs of his wit.59 Like almanacs and prognostications, news pamphlets were ephemeral productions with a limited shelf-life. As Joad Raymond says, they were discredited ‘not for any intrinsic shortcomings, but through their association with the vulgar, who could afford them’.60 The important commodity function of such ‘pamflettes, trifles and vaine small toies’, as the report issued by the Commissioners of the Star Chamber in 1583 on the crisis in the printing trade calls them,61 combines with their low status to create a ‘split perception’, in which two opposed systems of value intersect: ‘though pamphlets bear no cultural value or authority they are the basis on which economic capital can be accumulated’.62 This contradiction is reflected in the way that even writers who produced pamphlets and other ephemeral texts shared in the rhetoric of abuse which styled the texts as degraded discourse; for writers of marginal status, it was essential to stake a claim to literary credibility by dissociating themselves from popular literature, its producers and its audience. The figure of the ballad-writer is the ultimate example of the debased paid scribbler. And just as the ballad itself, a production seen, especially by pamphleteers, as the lowest constituent of a hierarchy of print,63 seemed to infect all associated with it – writers, sellers, consumers – with its own taint, so newswriting was subjected to a similar rhetoric of vilification by contagion. In these cases, the consciousness of any stigma is not displayed by the writers, the majority of whom were anonymous, but rather by those who commented on their work and attempted to create its social identity. The defining of ballads in such terms as ‘trivial’, ‘scald’, ‘lying’, ‘foolish’, ‘lewd’, ‘filthy’, and so on, and ballad-makers as ‘rabble’, ‘base rhymers’, ‘unlearned sots’ or ‘rednose rhymesters’, stigmatises the product and its producers as insignificant, artless, potentially corrupting. Ballads, and those who performed and distributed them, are also associated with vagrancy, especially after the sixteenth century.64 Both writers and singers are regularly characterised as drunken and the singers often as physically deformed.65 These features form part of a discourse of disorderliness. News is also a medium which corrupts by the spreading of untruths; it caters to the credulity of the vulgar and undiscriminating. The dissemination of news-writing had long been subject to abuse, as in Hal’s reference to ‘smiling pickthanks and base newmongers’ (1 Henry IV), but with


the appearance of the corantos in the 1620s, vilification increased markedly as the new medium provided a new target. In 1620 or 1621 a ballad was published which has been taken to be parodying the coranto, in particular, its habit of designating what was already familiar as news.66 The ballad’s title is ‘The Post of Ware: With a Packet full of Strange Newes out of diuers Countries’, and it satirises the coranto by presenting as foreign news a series of satirical attacks on familiar aspects of life at home.67 In Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626, printed 1631) news is literally a commodity, with a market-value only for a greedy and credulous public. A countrywoman comes to the Staple to buy it by the quantity: ‘I would have, sir, / A groatsworth of any news, I care not what, / To carry down this Saturday to our vicar’ (I. iv). The demand for news on a regular basis seems to have come about very rapidly. The author of a 1622 coranto wrote that ‘Custom is so predominant in everything that both the Reader and the Printer agree in their expectation of a Weekly Newes, so that if the Printer have not the wherewithall to afford satisfaction, yet will the Reader come and aske evry day for new Newes; not out of curiosity or wantonness, but pretending a necessity either to please themselves or satisfie their Customers’.68 News-writers were probably driven to some extremes to satisfy this demand, and it is not surprising that they soon became characterised as cynical frauds of bogus inventiveness, whose anonymity permits them to lie with impunity. The Coranto-coiner, in Richard Brathwait’s Whimzies, or a New Cast of Characters (1631), has to devise techniques for authenticity: ‘To make his reports more credible (or which he and his Stationer onely aymes at) more vendible, in the relation of every occurrent: he renders you the day of the Month etc; and to approve himselfe a Scholler, he annexeth these Latine parcells, or parcell-gilt sentences, veteri Style, novo Style’ (p. 18). Lennard J. Davis sees ‘merchants, artisans, journeymen’ as ‘the prime consumers of the news/novels discourse’, and, as such, a social class whose very interest in this kind of writing contributed to its lack of status; but the rural readers, whom he omits to mention, constitute another factor, almost as important, in the rhetoric of its stigmatisation.69 The growth of a provincial network for the distribution by chapmen and pedlars of the publications produced in London enlarges the functions of popular news-writing in this period.70 *** This is perhaps the point at which to consider the particular place of criminal news-writing within the print culture of the period. For the most part, this, to restate the position, is anonymous, non-authored writing, produced in a situation of open access, where the forms in which news appeared were not distinguished from other narrative forms, and where anyone who chose to write a play, ballad or pamphlet about a crime could do so, without the need to exhibit particular credentials or authorisation. In the sixteenth and early


seventeenth centuries, although some writers found employment with printers, turning out such anonymous ephemera as might be called for at short notice,71 there were no professional news-writers. Some clerical or quasiclerical figures, often those associated with the London prisons such as Henry Goodcole or Gilbert Dugdale, wrote accounts of criminal careers of those known to them.72 The appearance of the corantos created a regular demand for topical matter to print, but journalism was yet to become a profession, and did not do so until after the Civil War years. The nature and, in the seventeenth century, increasing prominence of popular news in the literary marketplace raised questions about the claims of print to authority. According to Adam Fox, at this time ‘written sources were generally no more reliable than oral … [and] for the majority at this time the communication of information on current affairs was primarily an oral business’.73 News-writing in print was commonly regarded as inherently mendacious and the concept of true news as a paradox. Lupton’s character of ‘Currantoes or Weekly Newes’ in London and the Countrey Carbonadoed (1631) typically opens: ‘ordinarily they haue as many Leyes as Lines, they vse to lye (as weather-beaten Souldiers) vpon a Booke-binders stall, they are new and old in sixe dayes’ (pp. 140–1). The claims of news to topicality sometimes coexisted uneasily with claims to truth; and a contradiction was perceived in the very act of committing news to print. In Jonson’s The Staple of News Cymbal, the Master of the Staple, challenges the whole notion of news appearing in print: We not forbid that any news be made But that it be printed, for when news is printed It leaves, sir, to be news. (I. iv) Much news, and often, perhaps, that of sensational domestic crimes and prodigious events, seemed to belong so essentially to an earlier culture of orally communicated gossip that its translation into printed form required justification; writers had to make a case for the medium by stressing its advantages. In doing so, they acknowledged that alternative versions of the same event might be in circulation and that one of the aims of publication was to establish the best possible account, which meant the most timely, the most authentic, the most validated from personal testimony, from authoritative witnesses, or even from participants. It was on such criteria that the account was valued; the skills of the writer performing in the medium were not at issue, as they might be in present-day crime reporting. Although several ballad-writers were known by name, there was no writer in the period who had a reputation for prose news. Wendy Wall, in an examination of early modern preliminary textual apparatus such as prefaces, has asserted the existence of ‘a pervasive cultural phenomenon in which writers and publishers ushered printed texts into the public eye by naming that entrance as a titillating and transgressive act’.74


This view of publication concurs strikingly with criticism often levelled at present-day crime writing, seen, in Wall’s words, as ‘an act of trespass’.75 Although the writers of crime pamphlets do not present their texts in quite this way, their prefatory matter, where it exists, and the preambles which introduce their subjects, suggest a desire to create an acceptable space for their writing, testifying to an awareness that it may be perceived as impertinent or intrusive. A common tactic is to begin by locating the text within a tradition of moralistic commentary. The author of The Apprehension, Araignment, and execution of Elizabeth Abbot (1608) opens with the claim that ‘the calamity of this age wherein we liue, and the cruelty of vs, who professe our selues Christians one to another … hath made me find time to set pen to this discourse’ (sig. A2). The sermon mode may be invoked as a context for the account; A true relation of a barbarous and most cruell Murther, committed by one Enoch ap Evan (1633) opens with a portentous generalisation: ‘How Execrable a thing, the vnnaturall and inhumane sinne of Murther is in the sight of God, is made apparent unto vs by many Texts in the Sacred Scriptures wee reade Gen.9.5’ (sig. A2). In this pamphlet the facts of crime are much less significant than the meaning that the writer draws from them as a warning against religious fanaticism. But presenting the crime as an exemplum is only one way of strategically managing the entry of the crime writer into print. Other writers offer their texts in the spirit of public service. For example, Henry Goodcole prefaces Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry sent after Lust and Murther (1635), his third pamphlet, with a statement that he had intended to write no more ‘in this nature’ but has been incited to do so for ‘the Common good, and the preservation of my Countries welfare’; the author of An Exact Relation Of The Bloody and Barbarous Murder, committed by Miles Lewis, and his Wife (1646) maintains that in making his account available, he is catering to a perceived need: ‘for the satisfaction of all people, that desires to have this sad and lamentable story communicated to them’. The author of The Araignment, Iudgement, Confession, and Execution of Humfrey Stafford Gentleman (1607) prefaces his report with an address ‘To the World. Some special reasons for the publication hereof’, pointing out in particular his wish to demonstrate ‘the worthie example of impartiall Iustice in Dooming to death so haynous an offender’, because of Humphrey Stafford’s high social standing (he was a member of a noble family). The sometimes defensive tone of these prefaces and preambles is interestingly counteracted by the confident and assertive messages implied in the wording and design of the title-pages, often elaborate in typography, and decorated with eye-catching woodcuts so as to attract the attention of those browsing at the booksellers’ stall: The horrible murther of a young boy. of three yeres of age, and how it pleased God to reveale the offendors (Mother Dell and her sonne), dwelling at Hatfield in Hartfordshire (1606)


Conceiled Murther Reveiled. Being a Strange Discovery of a most Horrid and Barbarous Murther … by Mary Anderson, alias Farrel, on the Body of Hannah Jones an Infant (1699) Blood for Blood; OR Murthers Revenged. Briefly, yet Lively set forth in Thirty Tragical Histories. To which are added Five more, Being the sad Product of our own Times (1661) The Cry and Reuenge of Blood. Expressing the Nature and haynousnesse of wilful Murther. Exemplified in a most lamentable History thereof, committed at Halsworth in High Suffolk, and Lately Convicted at Bury Assize (1620) The designers of such title-pages and headlines clearly sensed the existence of a ready public with a taste for such reading matter, for whose appearance in the market no apology was needed. Vestiges of a different, and more conservative, mode of presenting a printed work to the public survive. A brief and plainly written account of witchcraft, The Diuels Delusions. Or A faithfull relation of John Palmer and Elizabeth Knott …, is headed ‘A Letter sent from S. Albans to a friend in the Country …’ and signed ‘B. Misodaimon’; the writer claims to be satisfying the desire of an unnamed friend for information about the case. In another pamphlet presented as a letter, A Strange and true Relation Of a Young Woman possest with the devill. By name Joyce Dovey (1647), both writer and recipient of the letter are named, and the writer ends by promising further news of the suspected woman, and sending his wife’s best wishes. Pamphlets with named dedicatees, such as Thomas Cooper’s The Cry and Reuenge of Blood, may draw on the conventional rhetoric of self-deprecation, and refer to the importunities of friends as an incitement to publication. Cooper, in fact a well-educated London divine and author of several works, calls his pamphlet ‘this poor Infant’, given life by the ‘gratious breath’ of Henry Montague, Lord Chief Justice, who had presided at the trial of the murderer. He claimed to have been ‘solicited by some worthies of the Shire’ to publish in order to ‘preuent such flying and suspitious pamphlets, wherwith the world in such cases, is too much abused’ (sig. A7). The pamphlet is unusually long (63 pages) and presented with self-conscious formality, divided into eight titled chapters and prefaced by two dedications. Cooper does not conceal the real motivation of his work: ‘Long haue I bene desirous to approue my selfe vnto your honour, in what poore measure I haue bene able’ (sig. A2). The message implied in the dedication to Anthony Munday’s A View of Sundrye Examples (1580) to ‘the worshipfull Maister William Waters and Maister George Baker, gentlemen attendaunt on the Right Honourable, his singuler good Lord and Maister, the Earle of Oxenford’ and signed ‘A. Munday, seruaunt to the Right Honorable the Earle of Oxenford’ is probably not dissimilar.


Sensational crime-writing of this sort has connection with that ‘estateless’ pamphleteering described by Laurence Manley, as devoted to ‘the ephemera of gossip and controversy, to the London demimonde and criminal underworld, to the exchanges and combinations of the marketplace, to the monstrous portents of social crisis and disaster’,76 though it is not so London-centred in content as the writing Manley describes. Crime-writing too emerges from the literary profession in a transitional phase of its development; the residual world of élite manuscript culture still existed in which news-writing was the prerogative of gentlemen and their employees, intelligencers or news-gatherers such as John Chamberlain or the traveller and geographer John Pory, paid to collect privileged information conveyed in personal letters to a patron,77 and some exercises in print might serve to win office or at least the favourable attention of someone in high office. But crime-writing coexisted with the emerging world of news-writing as part of a commercial enterprise, a commodity available to anyone who could pay for it. Printed news in its emergent form is credited by numerous cultural historians with involvement in the formation of an early modern public sphere,78 and even with what has been termed ‘the frightening transformation of individual consumers into a mass audience seeking the same trivial, emotionally engaging news’,79 though it is not easy to see in what respect readers and audiences for news in all its forms before the time of the corantos might qualify as ‘individual consumers’. Raymond dates the formation of the public sphere in England from the closure of the theatres when ‘once and for all another medium supplanted the public stage, which was more influential than, perhaps even preceded the distribution of news and construction of public reputation by playwrights and poets’ – the newsbook.80 An early recognition of the news-writer as a social type appears in the character of the ‘Pot-poet’, number 25 in Earle’s Microcosmographie (1628). Earle was a university-educated gentleman who moved in aristocratic circles and was known as a poet and a wit; he circulated his earlier work in manuscript and, according to his publisher, Edward Blount, only allowed the essays in Microcosmographie to appear as a group in print for fear that an unauthorised collection of the ‘unperfect and surreptitious’ transcripts then in circulation might be published first. His account of the pot-poet is suffused with the amateur’s disdain for the man who writes for money, for the tastes to which he caters, and for the economy of print which supports him. Ale serves him in place of poetic inspiration and he will write indiscriminately on anything: The death of a great man or the burning of a house furnish him with an Argument, and the Nine Muses are out strait in mourning gownes, and Melpomene cryes out, Fire, Fire. His other Poems are but Briefs in Rime, and like the poore Greekes collections to redeeme from captiuity. He is a man now much imploy’d in commendations of our Nauy, and a bitter


inueigher against the Spaniard. His frequent’st works go out in single sheets, and are chanted from market to market, to a vile tune and a worse throat; whilst the poor Country wench melts like her butter to heare them. And these are the Stories of some men of Tyburne, or a strange Monster out of Germany: or sitting in a Bawdy-house, hee writes Gods iudgments. Earle’s description of the pot-poet’s death recalls the legend of Robert Greene, the drunken bohemian and endlessly prolific hack, as created by Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe: Hee ends at last in some obscure painted Cloth, to which himself made the Verses, and his life like a Canne too full spills vpon the bench. He leaues twenty shillings on the score, which my Hostesse looses. Earle’s acute summary draws attention to several important aspects of early modern news: its commodity status, the spurious value conferred by its ‘pretty title[s]’, which appeal to the unsophisticated, the identification of the story-forms – ballads and pamphlets – as commercially indistinguishable, and the connection between phenomena, crime and monsters. It is particularly this premodern mode of categorisation, part of what Foucault might call the episteme of its period,81 which differentiates popular early modern accounts of crime from the crime-writing of the eighteenth century onwards. There is a considerable mass of ballads on prodigies, miracles and monsters, but because of the general tendency of ballads to concern themselves with a single subject, they do not commonly make links with incidents of crime. There are some exceptions, usually of ballads, which collect together a number of separate events, to make a call for repentance.82 They have titles like ‘A Lamentable List, of certaine Hidious, Frightfull, and Prodigious Signes, which have bin seene in the Aire, Earth, and Waters, at severall times for these 18. yeares last past’ (The Pack of Autolycus, no. 4), or ‘Miraculous Newes from the cittie of Holdt in Germany’ (The Shirburn Ballads, no. 16). They represent the same mode of what Alexandra Walsham would regard as providentialist discourse as pamphlets with titles like Looke Up and see Wonders. A Miraculous Apparition in the Ayre, seen in Barke-shire (1628), Strange fearful & true newes, which hapned at Carlstadt in the Kingdome of Croatia (1606), Gods handy-Worke in Wonders. Miraculously shewen upon two Women, lately deliuered of two monsters (1615) and A World of Wonders. A Masse of Murthers. A Couie of Cosonages (1595). The last named pamphlet, like the ballads, is a compilation of sensational news items, and there are other examples, like Munday’s A View of Sundry Examples. Reporting many straunge murthers, sundry persons periured, signs and tokens of Gods anger towards us (1580), or the anonymous A Miracle, of Miracles, As fearefull as euer was seene or heard of in the memorie of Man, or


Thomas Churchyard’s The Wonders of the Ayre, the trembling of the earth, and the warnings of the world before the iudgment day (1602) which similarly set out accounts of violent crimes, witchcraft, monstrous births, prodigious apparitions, diabolic manifestations, as events of the same kind, with the same meanings. Nashe succinctly characterised such works as ‘waste paper … fraught with nought els save dogge daies effects’.83 They relate, not so distantly, to the corpus of ‘great published compilations of judgments and providences’ which Keith Thomas traced back to Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes (written in the 1430s) and forward to the end of the seventeenth century. As central examples of this genre, he cites Stephen Batman, The Doome warning all men to the Iudgemente (1581), and Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Iudgments (1597), lengthy works which bring together providential narratives from classical and Biblical sources as well as from contemporary events.84 The ballads and pamphlets deliver a similar sort of material in forms available to a larger section of the public. Walsham describes, excitingly, the characteristics shared by large compilations and the pamphlets: ‘Both intermingled gratuitous circumstantial detail with stern spiritual admonition: both enclosed a ghoulish and prurient fascination with all manner of medical, sexual, and excremental excess within a homiletic shell. Each contained a quotient of violence certain to send a shiver down the spine and admitted semi-pornographic vignettes of rape, incest, and adultery guaranteed to create an erotic frisson.’85 Increasingly in the seventeenth century, such writing is co-opted into the service of Puritan ideology. That religious beliefs might be central to the ideology behind the reporting of crime in this period is undeniable, at a time when the detection of a crime was not necessarily a secular activity. As Malcolm Gaskill points out, the belief that God would reveal and punish murder was universal, and it served the purposes of the law as well as those of religion: ‘It promoted the inevitability of criminal justice, even though most murders were performed secretly … [and] true stories about the undoing of murderers provided graphic exempla of the supreme power of divine providence’.86 The activities of a criminal were offensive first to God and then to the common law, and rendered him or her subject equally to the realms of divine judgment and of secular punishment. In many accounts, a criminal is betrayed by supernatural manifestations or coincidences interpreted as such. A typical example from Deeds against Nature is the discovery of an infant’s corpse which has been thrown into a privy and is found when the barking of a dog trapped in the same place alerts neighbours; this is taken as evidence that ‘God, either by beasts of the field, foules of the ayre, fishes in the seas, wormes in the ground, or thinges bearing neither sence nor life will by one meanes or other make deedes of darknes cleare as day’ (sig. A4V). The defining of a violent crime as a monstrous event is a procedure that makes sense, not only epistemologically within the belief systems of early modern


England, but also in terms of current thinking on crime reporting. If, as modern analysts of the press suggest, crime reporting ‘marks out the transgression of normative boundaries’87 and functions to bring the news of violent and abnormal events ‘within the horizon of the meaningful’,88 the logic of categorising news of murders in this way becomes evident. In a religious culture, the occurrence of murder is treated as a horrific phenomenon which can be accounted for by the intervention into human life of supernatural forces too strong for normal human resistance; it displays an extreme form of the common human condition, weak and constantly subject to diabolic temptation, but spiritually redeemable through religious faith.89 Accordingly, accounts of violent crime are shaped by the compulsion to turn them into ‘deterrent fables’ which, as Gaskill says, ‘put symbolic content before precision of reporting’.90 Not all crime reports were stories of murder, of course, even if, then as now, actual instances of murder were over-reported;91 and in the restricted range of crimes committed by women which were the subject of reporting in ballads, plays or pamphlets, murder, especially of husbands and of children, was, with witchcraft, the most prominent. Earle mentions the deaths of great men, the burning of houses and military events, along with foreign monsters, as other characteristic subjects for the pot-poet. The confessions of the ‘men of Tyburne’ might be of highway robbery or other kinds of theft, which were also capital offences. However, all sensational newswriting, whatever the event described, had in common a didactic element; the writer’s aim was balanced to differing degrees between offering information and offering instruction, but the latter element was always, explicitly, present. Sometimes, as Lake and Walsham would certainly claim, it is virtually the raison d’être of the work.92 Shaaber, in his standard account, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, suggests that the moralising is a kind of addition to early modern news, inserted because of the climate of censorship and ‘the suspicious attitude of the authorities of church and state’,93 implying the existence of an underlying desire for unmediated information. But as modern media analysts insist, a completely neutral or objective presentation does not exist in the world of news provision. Shaaber makes an unproblematic distinction between ‘serious and sober’ news and popular or ‘sensational’ news, on analogy with one between the present-day serious press and ‘yellow journalism’,94 but in both cases it is misleading to draw the line too firmly, given that both kinds of news are produced within the same commercial and institutional contexts; in the instance of early modern news there is plenty of evidence that the readership of ballads and sensational news pamphlets was not limited to the uneducated, and also that readers did not always make the same kinds of moral distinction as Shaaber does.95 Stephens questions the existence of precise boundaries between popular and serious journalism on the grounds that news itself is a hybrid: ‘news is a coarse, unrefined


substance, made up of events selected for their strangeness as much as their significance, their emotional appeal as much as their import’.96 *** Concluding her account of popular fiction in the seventeenth century, Margaret Spufford stresses continuity as ‘one of the most interesting and striking characteristics’ of popular writing or literature for the ‘unlearned’ from medieval times to the seventeenth century and onwards;97 sensational news-writing in pamphlets and ballads, though apparently a phenomenon of the age of printing, has origins that pre-date this period. As all new news media attach themselves to systems of dissemination already in place,98 so early printed news built on, and extended, existing forms outside print culture such as the manuscript letter and the orally transmitted ballad. Its voice as well as its forms had medieval antecedents, and it also drew, like most social criticism of the period, on medieval complaint writing, that ‘literature of reproof’ which John Peter, in Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature, relates to sermon and homily and distinguishes from satire.99 Complaint is conceptual where satire is concrete, its voice is impersonal and general, it conforms to a rigid moral system and it assumes a power to correct. The writers of complaint, who include Langland and Gower, interpret contemporary moral deviance by means of traditional formulae such as the seven deadly sins or the satire of estates; they regard instances of sinful conduct such as violent crime as exemplars of the innate depravity of a society doomed for God’s punishment. Medieval sermons and homilies participate in the same discourse. Laurence Manley lists numerous ballads on the sins of London, which compare them to the sins of fallen Biblical cities such as Babylon and Jerusalem, and draw on prodigious events like fires and earthquakes to prophesy imminent destruction. Titles such as ‘A warninge or Lamentation to London of the Dolefull destruccion of Fayre Ierusalem’ are typical.100 Pamphlets commonly open in a familiar homiletic mode, generalising on the wickedness of the times: ‘Is it not a maruell, that fire fals not from heauen to consume an infinite number of worse then sauage natur’d people in this land, when vile wretches, whom God hath markt with his secret brand of secret purpose, so impiously attempt things against nature’.101 Crime is cognate with sin; in this discourse, it is a moral not a legal construction. The crime which is to be the focus of the text is used as evidence of ‘the declining age of the world’102 and of the fact that ‘the dayes of daunger and iniquitie are as now’.103 Miscellaneous sins are grouped together with crimes as parallel acts of impiety to enhance the notion of an all-embracing wickedness; the compiler of A World of Wonders (possibly the stationer John Trundle, well known to the point of notoriety for his involvement in the world of cheap print) lists ‘Carnall and most unnatural murthers, detestable periuries, cankerd couetousness, incestious


adultreie, hardnes of hart, peeuish extortion, exactious usury and diuers most horrible and abhominable practices’ (sig. A2).104 The special heinousness of murder is often pointed out and sometimes amplified with biblical citations. God’s abhorrence of the crime inclines him to ensure that it is always detected: ‘We shall find that it hath pleased God oftentime & in a miraculous manner to make discoveries of Murders committed, sometimes by Birds, sometimes by Beasts, and sometimes by the apparition of the Person murdered, of which Histories can furnish us with aboundant examples.’105 A prominent feature borrowed from the homiletic mode and from oral tradition is the hortatory opening sentence: ‘Hearken unto me you that be wives, and give attendance you which are as yet unmarried.’106 In this way, specific groups of readers can be targeted, in a style common to the first line or refrain of broadside ballads – ‘List Christians all unto my song’ or ‘Oh women, / Murderous women, / whereon are your minds’. Laurence Price, ballad-writer turned pamphleteer, begins with the statement ‘Men may take a speciall care by these Examples, that through the Temptations of the Divell, they fall not into the like relapse’ and addresses himself to ‘all degenerate, Dangerous, and Hasty spirited Men’ in particular (Bloody Actions Performed, 1653, sig. A2). Sensational pamphlets and ballads are typically framed by such instructional devices, the model for which was the sermon; and they draw on the stance and authority of the preacher to validate their texts. The situation in the early modern marketplace of print has been characterised as a competition for discursive authority and contemporaries perceived sermons and religious publications outdone in popular esteem by pamphlets, ballads and news. William Harrison typically remarks on the preference of the vulgar sort for news over godly matters: ‘report to them an humane historie, tell them some strange newes, or a tale for their worldly profit, or cor-porall health, they will keepe it well enough, and at any time, and in any company will relate it very readily’.107 But in fact the relationship between the pulpit and the popular press can be seen as mutually supportive, rather than oppositional. The strongly shaping force of didacticism that controls the form as well as the rhetoric of pamphlets in particular, but also ballads and plays, reinforces the voice of the preachers. Taking a different perspective, Lake sees ‘the denizens of Grub Street’ continuing in the seventeenth century ‘to appropriate, mimic and develop central elements and techniques in the sermons for their own festively popular and commercial purposes’ (The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 361). But it is debatable how appropriate the term ‘festive’ is for pamphlets of criminal news. A number of recent social historians have been especially attentive to the ideological functions of what J. A. Sharpe calls ‘gallows literature’108 and its role in strengthening the authority of the state to punish criminals as exercised within a traditional model of Christian narrative: sin is followed by discovery and penitence, and culminates in salvation. The stories are always


of crime revealed; unsolved murders are never reported. The typical pattern, in plays as well as pamphlets and ballads, is shaped by confidence in the providential revelation of the truth; it includes the crime and its discovery, the disclosure of the perpetrator’s identity, and ends in repentance and confession. Much has also been written on the subject of the scaffold speech as a means of ideological control, and on the manner in which condemned criminals often allowed themselves to become ‘the willing central participants in a theatre of punishment’,109 where officers of the state and church, such as judges and clergymen, played an active part in bringing about the necessary condition of penitence.110 The ‘bravura performance’ put on by Elizabeth Caldwell111 before she was executed for murdering a neighbour’s child in a failed attempt to poison her husband is a case in point, and so too the extensive penitence of Anne Sanders, documented in both Arthur Golding’s pamphlet and in the play A Warning for Fair Women.112 The structuring of the stories of violent crimes highlights the providential revelation of the perpetrator’s identity, often by supernatural portents and tokens, and his or her penitent acceptance of the rightness of capital punishment. Hence, a distinction is drawn between the illegitimate violence of the criminal and the legitimate violence of the law. An account of crime reporting in present-day secular society applies well in some ways to the conditions of early modern England: ‘the state, and the state only, has the monopoly of legitimate violence, and this “violence” is used to safeguard society against “illegitimate” acts’.113 But this formulation needs to be supplemented by a fuller definition of the state, which in early modern times is still a religious conception. The operations of state power, as constructed in popular crime reports, are dependent upon those of divine providence. For cultural materialists this would be a naive or unacceptable position, since they tend to see the efforts of Elizabethan writers to account for secular events in terms of religious causes as mystification, an attempt to occlude the reality of state power by ascribing it second-order status. But in these popular accounts the belief in the reality of divine power is undeniable; the world, as Peter Lake puts it, ‘was dominated by the providence of God working usually with and through, but sometimes cutting across, second order causes to bring about God’s secret purposes; purposes which in the case of the murder pamphlets involve the disclosure, punishment, and sometimes the repentance and, it is often implied, the ultimate salvation of hardened sinners and murderers’.114 The expression of such a view in popular crime reports affirms its function as ‘didactic and normative’.115 It aims to promote social consensus, to slot invisibly into the framework of values and concepts that creates the prevalent ideology. It is hardly necessary to mention that the events described in these texts (though not, of course, their meaning) would have had little direct bearing on the lives (as distinct from the belief systems) of those who read them; the nature and incidence of violent crime in reality was quite unlike its textual representation,116 and however devout the public belief in


prodigies and monsters, few could ever have claimed an encounter with them. The texts manipulated images of a world that was horrifying, but ultimately also reassuring, and in this it was a model for the world of the readers’ experience. Crime pamphlets, like those for most categories of news in this period, regularly advertise themselves with emotive title-page adjectives that draw attention to the sensational aspects of the story – ‘wonderful’, ‘horrible’, ‘strange’, ‘barbarous’ – but just as often with ‘true’, for example, Bloody Newes from Dover. Being A True Relation of the great and bloudy Murder, committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) who cut off her Childs head, The most wonderfull and true storie, of a certain witch, named Alyse Gooderige of Stapenhill, Newes from the Dead. Or, A True and Exact Narration of the Miraculous Deliverance of Anne Greene. Würzbach cites a number of ballads whose titles contain the word ‘true’, and mentions ‘true relation’ as a particularly prominent formula. She identifies the ‘speaker’s and the storyteller’s act of maintaining that he is speaking the truth’ as a ‘traditional topos’, a primary function of which is to personalise the ballad’s message.117 But truth claims have other work to do. A claim to veracity of some kind was clearly a selling point, even if that claim was problematic, as is obviously the case in ballads purporting to relate the actual words of an executed criminal and, in a different way, in pamphlets describing monsters and prodigious apparitions. But the boundary between fiction and what can be variously characterised as truth or news or report has always been fluid. As a writer who has exploited this condition of fluidity, Hunter S. Thompson calls the distinction between fiction and journalism merely a matter of practice: ‘both rely on the use of narrative to articulate their truths, and their segregation is maintained by the customs and fashions of the society in which they participate’.118 As Natalie Z. Davis has shown so persuasively in her account of pleas for remission in the courtrooms of early modern France, fiction can operate as shaping, as creating meaning, rather than as feigning.119 Early news-writing in ballads and pamphlets does not define truth in relation to a distinction between fact and fiction. Truth signifies something other, and perhaps more, than accuracy or correspondence to fact. Not yet defined in contradistinction to legend or myth, it is, rather, a moral concept even in this context. In the words of Lennard J. Davis, ‘Histories, stories, and news accounts, then, were important to the sixteenth century only insofar as they clearly taught lessons and offered interpretations. If they were not new, if they were not accurate, or even if they were completely fabricated, they could still serve this purpose.’120 Davis cites Foucault’s The Order of Things on how it was a characteristic of the mental operations of the pre-Classical period ‘to search for the sign beneath the event’, before a time when ‘analysis based on identity and difference’ became the basis for a new categorisation of knowledge.121 The relationship between fact and fiction in news-writing is negotiated in a unique way in the category of writing known as the occasionel which


appears in early modern France, and has some tantalising connections with English pamphlets of sensational crime and prodigies. The occasionel is a small pamphlet, developed for the taste of a similar market to the English one, and in all probability occupying a similar place in the printing-house economy. It purports to be a form of news. Roger Chartier describes the occasionel as follows: ‘Set in a real place, made concrete by details that seem to be true because they could be verified … the story seems authentic and appears to be a true story.’122 In reality, the account is a fiction, created for the purpose of exemplifying a religious truth, an expanded, and literary, form of the oral exemplum as developed in medieval sermons, and produced to meet the conditions of the marketplace of print, in which the print medium invests such stories with a new authority. In the Catholic culture of France, where such pamphlets were extremely popular and achieved large print-runs,123 the story material often consisted of a miraculous tale (Chartier uses as his example the Miraculous and true discourse … of … Anne Belthumier, falsely accused of infanticide, but revealed by a miracle to be innocent), but could also concern a sensational or violent crime, among other topics. The miracle-stories, though apparently arising out of events taking place in sixteenth-century France, can sometimes be traced back to hagiographic sources such as the Golden Legend of Jacob de Voragine.124 The events reported in occasionels were authenticated with lists of witnesses and assertions of truth. Their titles featured phrases like ‘Discours veritable, Histoire veritable, Discours très veritable, le vray discours’, and ‘ils abondent aussi en details sur les noms, les lieux et les dates, soulignant la précision des informations’.125 But the proportion of moralising to reportage was often conspicuously high, and Chartier notes ‘a strong contrast between the repeated doctrinal statements that frame the text and drive it forward and the imprecision and haziness of the story itself, which is shot with ellipses and short cuts’.126 There is clearly much to relate this material to English popular news, and the list of titles given by Seguin includes several that might have direct English equivalents. In fact, Chartier’s own example is itself closely related to a miraculous event in England in 1650, when Anne Green, hanged for infanticide, subsequently revived and was discovered to be innocent of the crime. The story is recounted in four publications, including the newsbook Mercurius Politicus, two short pamphlets, and what Joad Raymond calls a ‘serious scientific publication’ entitled Newes from the Dead.127 In this instance, as in the case of Anne Belthumier, the woman’s survival is constructed as evidence for the working of God’s providence, as Newes from the Dead puts it, ‘a means to vindicate her from that foul stain of Murder which, in most mens judgments (and, perhaps, Heaven it selfe also bearing witnesse) was so harshly charged upon her’ (p. 8). Newes from the Dead is not an occasionel as such in that it is comparatively long and written (purportedly by a ‘scholler in Oxford’) for readers who could appreciate donnish verses in Latin and it


also appears to be based on an actual event; but the structuring of its story has origins in materials which are traditional and probably oral; the pamphlet (along with other reports of Anne Green’s miraculous return to life) testifies to the hybrid nature of ‘news’ and different meanings of truth claims in early modern England. Number 69 in Seguin’s list of titles, ‘Histoire admirable et prodigieuse, d’un Pere et d’une Mere qui ont assassine leur propre fils sans le cognoistre. Arrive en la ville de Nismes en Languedoc, au mois d’Octobre dernier, 1618’, also has an English equivalent, much closer to the occasionel in style, a pamphlet of the same year, entitled Newes from Perin in Cornwall: of A most Bloody and vnexampled Murther very lately committed by a Father on his Sonne (who was lately returned from the Indyes) at the Instigation of a mercilesse Step-mother.128 This is the tragic tale of a young man who returns home late at night after many years of wandering abroad and is not recognised by his father’s second wife; she persuades the father to kill the stranger in the dark for his money, and in the morning his sister reveals his identity. The story is also the subject of George Lillo’s play, Fatal Curiosity (1736), and turns up again in various forms in much later texts, including Camus’ L’Etranger.129 Newes from Perin seems initially little different from other sensational news pamphlets and is presented as a factual report. The author states that ‘At the entreaty of divers Gentlemen in the Countrey, It is as neere the life as Pen and Incke could draw it out, thus put in Print’. But on examination the elements of romance emerge: the son’s exotic travels in remote countries, the mysterious homecoming, the recognition by a birthmark, the wicked stepmother, the tragic coincidence. They may claim a place in what Seguin calls ‘un repertoire, un stock d’histoires bien typiques’ which ‘se pretant comme les bois d’imagerie a tous les avateurs, a tous les truquages en conservant neanmoins une eternelle jeunesse’.130 The existence of such a repertoire may have been a more significant factor in the composition of early modern news-writing in France than in England, but its presence here is evident. Alexandra Walsham gives numerous examples of similar storymaterial presented as topical news in her section on ‘cautionary tales’.131 It bears witness to the importance of the kind of pre-modern categorisation of knowledge that Davis and Foucault describe. None the less, there is clear evidence in English news-writing that a shift was taking place towards a concept of truth in terms of actuality, truth as established fact, of distinguishing between different versions of the same event according to criteria of authenticity, such as the testimony of authoritative witnesses or the timeliness of the account. Lennard J. Davis points to the efforts to prove the truthfulness of ballads, by providing lists of witnesses or affidavits, as a ‘remarkable tribute to the fact that the news/novels discourse was reaching towards the possibility that printed narrative could perhaps carry the burden of truth’.132 It may be the case that the news ballad was generally ‘not so much a record of events as a commentary upon


them’,133 but their format was such that they could be produced extremely rapidly in response to sensational events, and this often happened. Entries of ballad titles relating to public events were commonly made in the Stationers’ Register before the event they described had taken place;134 for example, in the case of the burning of the Globe theatre on 29 June 1613, an event which could hardly have been foreseen, two ballads were entered in the Stationers’ Register the following day. News pamphlets could be equally timely, and crime reports might be written up and even published in advance of the execution; this was the case in the accounts of the crimes of the murderers Charles Courtney and Arnold Cosbye. In Murther, Murther (1641) and Murther will out (1675) the women criminals were in prison when the accounts were published. Many accounts were produced by people who had contact with the offenders at the trial or, as in the case of Henry Goodcole, as visitors to them in prison. Such writers lay stress on their insider knowledge, and sometimes on their efforts to be as accurate as possible. In the address to the reader at the beginning of A True Report of the Horrible Murther, which was committed in the house of Sir Ierome Bowes (1607) the author describes himself as ‘one that was present at the death of the murtherers, And heard their confession of the murther by them done, [and] hath set it downe in writing, as fully for the matter, as directly for the manner, as his memorie could afterwards serue him to record it’ (sig. A2). The author of The Witch of Wapping (1652), like other authors of witchcraft pamphlets, had taken part in collecting evidence and in questioning witnesses. He insists on a strictly selective approach to his material: ‘Now concerning her evil actions I shall relate only such as were clearly proved against her, by very credible witnesses at the Old-Bayly on the 7 of April’ (p. 4). The factual aspect of such accounts, their nature as reportage, emerges clearly in detailed descriptions of investigative procedures, of trials and of the events leading up to the execution.135 The legal historian J. H. Langbein notes the usefulness of what he calls ‘Jacobean chapbooks’ for their descriptions of the methods of the prosecuting J.P., and suggests that some of them may have been written by men with legal expertise.136 But the status and meaning of ‘truth’ in news-writing remain contestable; the authors refer to eyewitness testimony or other authoritative sources to support their stories, even in accounts which are clearly, and confidently, fictionalised. Henry Goodcole’s excitingly entitled tract, The Adultresses Funerall Day: In flaming, Scorching, and consuming fire, includes a passage of dialogue exchanged between husband and wife in the last moments of his life, where the writer, conscious of the need for some validation of these words, adds: ‘this Relation I receiued from those of credite, who were well acquainted with the conditions of them both’ (sig. B2). The capturing of what appears to be the protagonist’s authentic speech is obviously an important narrative technique, and one that further enhances the claim to authenticity. The author of A Brief discourse of two most cruell and bloudie


murthers (1583) concludes: ‘Thus my freendes, haue you heard the true discourse of this most bloody & monstrous act, according as in great greefe, with like sorrowe for the deed, him selfe dyd utter it, both unto me, and diuers other being present, Preachers, and Gentlemen’ (sig. B1v). The elements of this sentence typify early modern news-writing: the co-opting of the readers into direct relationship with the writer as his ‘freendes’, the conjunction of fact (‘true discourse’) and horror (‘this most bloody & monstrous act’), the direct access of the writer to the criminal’s words and feelings, and the impressive social standing of the witnesses (‘Preachers, and Gentlemen’). The inclusion of the protagonist’s own words is particularly common. This can take apparently authentic forms such as written testimony, for example, in Gilbert Dugdale, A True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Dugdale (1604), or Fair Warning to the Murderers of Infants: being an Account of the Tryal Codemnation [sic] and Execution of Mary Goodenough (1691), or speeches made during interrogation at the trial, sometimes summarised. Elsewhere, direct speech is included in forms closer to those of fiction, such as dialogue between the participants or the expression of inner feelings, as in a soliloquy. There is sometimes an acknowledgement of the approximate nature of the reporting of such speech: ‘[He] would use these, or the like wordes’ (Two horrible and inhumaine Murthers done in Lincolneshire, by two Husbands upon their Wiues (1604), p. 5). Edmond Bower, however, in Doctor Lamb revived, or, Witchcraft condemn’d in Anne Bodenham (1653), states in his conclusion that ‘I obliged my self in my undertakings to use the same words and expressions as both the Witch and Maid used, and have not made them speak my words in this relation’ (p. 43). But more commonly invented speech is presented quite directly, and even elaborated in a quasi-dramatic manner. It is easy enough to see the dramatic potential in the dialogue created by many writers of pamphlets. In the instances of Golding’s A Briefe Discourse, Goodcole’s pamphlet on Elizabeth Sawyer, Munday’s A View of Sundry Examples, and Sundrye Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, among others, the narrative material of the prose was translated into dramatic form.137 These extremes in the handling of speech demonstrate the wide discursive range of crime news pamphlets. It would be tempting to construct a spectrum of reporting techniques, which locates the factual account of the crime, its investigation, the trial and the outcome, at one end, and the moralised exemplum, with its demonstration of divine intervention in human affairs, at the other. But such a schematisation would be misleading, for two reasons. The factual and the exemplary/didactic can, as demonstrated, coexist within a single narrative, and there is a third component which enters into, and complicates, both modes. Peter Lake has pointed out in these accounts an element of sensationalism that seems to feature more often in the exemplary/didactic than in the factual mode, though it is not absent from the latter; it makes an appeal to the reader


which is all the stronger and more subversive because it cannot be openly admitted. He describes this element as follows: The relationship of the pamphlets to their subject-matter was not merely edificational or admonitory, it was rather exploitative, indeed, in some sense, pornographic. Examples of extreme violence, sexual license, outlandish and disgusting acts were presented to the reader, ostensibly for his or her moral instruction, but, in fact, in order not merely to edify but also to shock, titillate and engender that frisson of horror laced with disapproval which allows both pleasure and excitement at the enormities described to be combined with a reconfirmed sense of the reader’s own moral superiority. This was true even of some of the most heavily moralised pamphlets – like Goodcole’s – as well as of the more straightforward narratives of enormity, like those written by Kyd or Taylor.138 That the pamphlet by John Taylor to which Lake refers, The Unnatural Father (1621), an unusual account of child-murder committed by the father, is not particularly ‘straightforward’ in its exploration of the mental state of the reprobate ‘tormented and lost with restless imaginations’ (p. 7) does not negate the force of his argument. Lake also applies it, consistently, to the plays of domestic murder related to the pamphlets,139 and it is equally appropriate to ballads, where the often-expressed fear in the period of being ’balladed’ by ‘scald rhymers’ suggests a widespread sense of the ballad’s exploitative and revelatory possibilities, particularly through the wide-scale exposure their extensive distribution could create and their long-established function in the circulation of libels. The ‘exploitative … pornographic’ dimension of the pamphlets is probably an integral aspect of what is most novel about them – that they offer news as exposure, as revelation, as a vision of the dark side of human nature. On this point, however, I would modify Lake’s view that the sensational pamphlets function socially in a way analogous to the popular rituals of inversion such as the skimmington or charivari; he claims that they show glimpses of ‘a nightmare world turned upside-down in which basic human impulses – lust, greed, revenge – having broken free from the normal social and religious moorings which otherwise contained their destructive potential, threatened to plunge the world into chaos and disorder’.140 Such glimpses, and consequently any sense of inversion, are momentary. The narrative, especially in murder pamphlets, is invariably shaped towards a providential conclusion and the assault on moral and social order contained.141 The accounts of the confession, and in many cases of the execution itself, are vital elements in the narrative and didactic structuring and in creating a role for the pamphlets that has something in common with the domestic handbook. Of course, many crime pamphlets, and most ballads, do include specific moral injunctions, and even advice to the reader or listener on how


to live better, to obey one’s husband, to avoid drunkenness, to curb one’s temper, to exercise tolerance, and so forth. But what I have in mind here is rather the intimate domestic detail which this writing provides, affording accounts of how people live from day to day, which are both totally unlike the experience of the reader in their violent outcomes, and at the same time insidiously familiar. At this time there were comparatively few images or cultural models for the lives of ordinary people, in which they might view reflections or constructions of their own way of life; this is something that popular crime and news-writing could offer, and one reason for its popularity. A single example of this point will suffice. The story of the murder of Page of Plymouth, which took place in 1591, was one that obviously fired the public imagination. It inspired at least four ballads, a play by Dekker and Jonson, now lost, and a prose account in the compilation Sundrye strange and inhumaine Murthers (1591), which advertises this story, among others, on its title-page.142 The prose account is brief, only two signatures, but bristles with representative features. The situation of young Mistress Page, married against her wishes to a rich, elderly husband when she has already formed a liaison elsewhere, is mundane and familiar. In the pamphlet, it is filled out with domestic detail. Mistress Page’s father has a shop in which she makes the acquaintance of her lover, George Strangwich, who is a trusted employee there. There are many references to sums of money (paid to hire assassins) and dates and times. The murder of Page takes place on Wednesday, 11 February, a convenient date because Mistress Page is sleeping alone, having recently given birth to a dead baby. The method of the killing of Page is carefully described. He is beaten and strangled by the two hired assassins, and then ‘they laid him ouerthwart ye bed, and against the bed side broke his neck, and when they sawe he was surelye dead, they stretched him and layde him in his bed again, spreading the clothes in ordinary sort, as though no such act had been attempted’ (sigs. B3–3v). Mistress Page, characterised as possessed ‘of an ungodly minde’ because of having caused the deaths of two of her own infants, in a manner unspecified, acts coolly, feigning surprise and summoning her sister-in-law. The sister-in-law notices signs of struggle on the corpse and soon discovers that its neck is broken. There is no mystery and no complication. The murder is discovered on the same night, and Mistress Page, who is the focus of the narrative though not the actual murderer, denies nothing. She says that ‘she had rather dye with Strangwich, then to liue with Padge’. All concerned, the lovers, and the two hired assassins, are executed nine days later. The bald brutality of the killing, and the exciting figure of the young, unrepentant murderess who did all for love, give the story its attraction and, in modern terms, its news value. By comparison with many accounts it is only mildly exploitative, but it has that important combination of the everyday and mundane with the horrific which is integral to this writing.


Critics have drawn attention to the relationship between early modern news-writing of this sort and the beginnings of the novel in criminal biography.143 Both modes mediate between fact and fiction, and between didacticism and titillation. Defoe in the Author’s Preface to Moll Flanders satirically justifies the publication of criminal biography in a fulsome statement of its ethical elegance: ‘There is not a wicked action … but is first or last rendered unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor a virtuous, just thing but it carries its praise along with it.’ Allowing for Defoe’s secular and ironic slant, the early news and crime writers might have claimed the same balance for their work. Although it was unwelcome to those who saw it as competing with, and even ousting, authentic literature and history, its didacticism, its adherence to conservative modes of constructing and interpreting human deviance, its basis in traditional and oral forms, all assisted its passage into the literary marketplace, where its role in underpinning the print economy secured its place.

2 Women’s Crimes: Their Social Context and Their Representation

The aim of this chapter is to address two questions: the first is, what crimes did women commit in early modern England, and which of these were represented in popular literature? This question can be answered directly, with recourse to fact and evidence. The second is more complex: how did contemporary constructions of gender as expressed in social institutions such as law and the family condition that representation? My method here is to work within a certain broad focus on the issues and the texts that illustrate them; in consequence, detailed discussion of some issues which arise, will be deferred to subsequent chapters. I am not concerned to sift fact from fiction, to assess the accuracy of popular accounts of women’s crimes, but to use cultural evidence of one kind (legislation, some documented evidence, prescriptive handbooks) to interpret another (sensational accounts of women’s crimes). In this context, discussion of gender issues in early modern law broadens out in two directions: first, into consideration of a particular aspect of it which relates especially to women and is reflected in various kinds of social practice: its peculiarly communal nature. The second issue that arises from consideration of legal theory and practice is that of agency: the extent to which women can be regarded in law as responsible for their actions, how the woman who commits crimes can be explained. I examine, with some examples, the question of how crime writing can function to shape a subjectivity for women and the extent to which it is differentiated from men’s. Women’s crimes take place largely within, and on the margins of, the family; the chapter concludes with a discussion of the variety of roles within and around the family taken by women in accounts of crime, and how these relate to the early modern notion of the family as a model for the state. *** In the early modern period, as in modern times, women committed fewer crimes in general than did men. In particular, they were less likely to be 33


involved in what were then the most serious forms of crime – heresy or high treason – and they were also less involved in crimes of violence, major felonies or, as Martin Ingram summarises it, ‘activities that required a high degree of initiative and self-assertion’.1 Typically, women who came before the courts did so in relation to property crimes such as grand and petty larceny, crimes of the tongue such as scolding, slander, swearing or blasphemy, sexual misdemeanours such as fornication, adultery, prostitution or bastard-bearing, or vagrancy. They might be involved in various other public order offences such as rioting or arson, though not commonly, or recusancy or failing to attend church. There were two offences which stand outside these generalisations, but which serve as exceptions to prove the rule: witchcraft, a crimen exceptum, and infanticide, perhaps more properly termed child-murder.2 By modern standards, the conviction rate in early modern England seems extraordinarily high. It has been calculated that in England and Wales during the reigns of Elizabeth and James at least one person went to the gallows for every day of the year.3 Yet although reliable statistics are hard to come by, it is generally accepted that crime of all kinds was underreported, and then, no doubt as now, there existed a ‘dark figure’ of unknown criminal activity.4 In a letter to Lord Burghley of 1596, Edward Hext, a sixteenth-century Somerset magistrate, expressed the view, perhaps not entirely an objective one, that a very high proportion of all criminals never came to trial and that the ‘rapynes and theftes Comytted within this Countye … multiplye daylye to the utter impoverysshinge of the poore husbandmen’.5 Historians have taken the view that the extent of women’s crimes in particular was misrepresented by statistical evidence,6 and this hypothesis may be supported by the fact that juries seem to have shown a reluctance to find women guilty, and when they did so, often found ways of treating them leniently.7 Domestic violence too was underreported in relation to what can reasonably be supposed to have been its actual occurrence,8 although it is important to acknowledge here that concepts of what constitute violence are by no means absolute. Crime in itself is a historically relative concept, and the law functions differently in different periods to criminalise certain forms of behaviour. Crime is not just an act in itself, but a consequence of the application of rules and sanctions to behaviour so as to classify some forms of it as deviant. The creation of witchcraft as a crime is evidence for this point. Early modern English society can be said to be deeply concerned, even obsessed, with law and order; many recent historians have identified what they call a crisis of order in the period, sometimes extended to the area of gender relationships. Indeed, the period from 1590 to 1630 has been claimed as ‘one of special ferment in the ordering of relations between the sexes’.9 The extension of state authority then taking place manifests itself in new legislation to cover such public order offences as vagrancy and

Social Context and Representation 35

bastard-bearing; witchcraft was the subject of new laws in 1563, 1580–1 and 160410 and of periods of intense prosecution, especially in the 1590s, the early years of James I and the 1640s. The Civil War years saw the enactment of further social order legislation, such as the statute that made adultery by wives a capital offence.11 There was also much legislation to do with sexual conduct and the control of public behaviour, and evidence to show that some offences which come under these headings, such as slander and defamation, were on the increase.12 Women’s involvement in public order offences was much higher than in serious crime, and in some areas higher than men’s. These facts form part of the context in which the literary representation of crimes can be explored, though not all of them are directly manifested in it. This representation stands in oblique relationship to the actuality of the crimes, and, partly for reasons considered in the account of early modern news in Chapter 1, only a very small, and atypical, selection of real criminal activity by either sex ever featured in pamphlets, ballads or plays. Of these literary accounts, the number which featured women’s crimes is disproportionately high in relation to all the statistical evidence about the balance between the criminal activity of the sexes. Even then, only sensational crimes are the subjects of such representation. Murder is the most important woman’s crime to be written about, followed by witchcraft and, in a minor way, prostitution, though prostitution does not generate its own narrative structures in the way that the crimes of witchcraft and murder do, probably because it does not lead to a conclusion on the scaffold. There are a few accounts of women’s participation in robbery, but almost always in the company of men. There is one ‘life’ of a criminal woman in the period, The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith (1662). Accounts of murders by women fall mainly but not exclusively into two categories: husband-murder and child-murder. This partly accords with J. A. Sharpe’s statistics for Assize records in Essex 1560–1709, which show that ‘women constituted 7% of those accused of non-domestic killing, as opposed to 42% of those accused of killing a relative’,13 but does not reflect the fact that women also constituted 41 per cent of those killing domestic servants or apprentices. A few of the latter type of killings do feature in pamphlet accounts and newsbooks, particularly from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, but never form a large part of the popular literature of murder. As has been observed, the most visible forms of early modern violence are those regarded as transgressive, particularly acts of violence by social inferiors, women or servants, against their superiors.14 This literature reflects several other kinds of bias. For instance, although by far the main type of family homicide recorded in the evidence of assizes is the killing of offspring, in popular literature the killing of spouses predominates.15 In accounts of spousal killings it has been noticed that a change of focus took place in the middle of the seventeenth century, before which time representations of husband-murder predominated over those of wife-


murder, whereas afterwards the reverse was the case. Yet, as Frances Dolan puts it, ‘murderous husbands remained two to three more times more common than murderous wives throughout the century’.16 Child-killing took on a different meaning after the Act of 1624, which criminalised unmarried women whose infants died, if they could not definitively prove that the child was still-born.17 Indictments for infanticide, which Sharpe has called a ‘new offence’, were high and supported the association between women, bastardy and poverty.18 But there is little reflection of this new form of crime in news pamphlet writing, where the acts of childmurder depicted are those of married mothers often killing children several years old. A ballad by Martin Parker, ‘No Natural Mother, but a Monster’, relates what must have been one of the commonest stories, that of an unmarried servant-girl who in desperation kills her newborn baby and is soon found out; but this narrative, all too mundane, perhaps, does not form the subject of most pamphlet accounts. *** It is clear that the popular representations of women’s crimes in the period do not in any sense reflect the actuality of either the gender balance in real criminal activity or the multifarious, mostly unsensational, ways in which women infringed the law. What is harder to assess is the role played by contemporary constructions of gender in shaping these representations. But it is, I think, possible to see that two institutions, the law and the family, in their contemporary forms, not only condition the ways in which women’s crimes were perceived and defined specific to their gender, but also inform the ways in which these accounts were written. There are relevant points to make about the perception of crime in general in the early modern period. The first is that, as many historians agree, this was perhaps ‘the first period in English history when crime becomes classified as a major problem’, a problem to be dealt with, that is, in distinction to an ‘inescapable consequence of man’s corrupt nature’.19 Historians have debated the extent of violent crime in early modern England relative to that in the late twentieth century, and continue to maintain opposed positions here, some believing not only that modern society is, statistically speaking, more violent, but also that in early modern England ‘there is little evidence that contemporaries were particularly aware of violence as a problem’,20 but as J. S. Cockburn notes, there is a clear discrepancy between statistics and at least one kind of contemporary viewpoint: ‘the pattern of homicide indictments conflicts with the impression conveyed by those contemporary writers who claimed to have detected a trend of growing violence and brutality in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century crime’.21 Many writers of sensational pamphlets, some of whom Cockburn cites, assume as a starting point that their own society


is one of exceptional wickedness; the author of A World of wonders. A Masse of Murthers. A Covie of cosenages (1595) remarks on the variety of present evil including ‘carnall and most unnaturall murthers, detestable periuries, cankered couetousnes, incestious adulterie, hardnes of hart, peeuish extortion, exactious extortion, exactious usury and diuers most horrible and abhominable practices’ (sig. A2).22 The proliferation of witches was thought to be symptomatic of this climate of depravity: ‘Among the punishmentes which the Lorde GOD hath laied uppon us, for the manifest impietie and carelesse contempt of his woorde aboundyng in these our desperate daies, the swarmes of Witches, and Inchaunters are not the laste nor the least’ (sig. A2). Many such writers felt that the age was outstanding for its violent murders in particular; the author of The Crying Murther: Contayning the cruell and most horrible Butchery of Mr Trat, Curate of olde Cleaue (1624) writes that ‘our modern murders, which are the most raging where other sins are most reigning, seem equal, though not for the number, yet for the manner unto those of the Mahometan assassins … or to the Italian banditos’.23 The author of The Apprehension, Arraignement, and Execution of Elizabeth Abbot (1608) in his opening paragraph mentions ‘the calamity of this age wherein we liue, and the cruelty of vs, who professe ourselues christian one to another’ (sig. A2). Obviously, such writers had a vested interest in creating as sensational a context as possible for their stories, and their views owe nothing to statistical evidence or, probably, to the reality of violent crime; but they are representative of a popular way of seeing contemporary society.24 As Timothy Curtis says, the large volume of contemporary comment on crime by preachers and state officials, which he calls ‘a source so voluminous as to be embarrassing’, is not so much a reflection of the real state of affairs as an expression ‘of current ideologies and social tensions’.25 Comment of this kind also demonstrates another significant aspect of current thinking on the subject which was by no means restricted to non-élite culture: that crime was not differentiated from sin, which meant that there was little recognition of it as a social construction or understanding of the relationship between deviant or antisocial behaviour and economic conditions. The Calvinistic climate of thought, with its strong emphasis on human weakness and propensity to sin, coupled with a sense of the imminence and terror of God’s judgment on a fallen world, encouraged the view that magistrates and the elect needed desperately to find ways of controlling the unruly populace. Their unruliness offended God as much as it did their fellows, and testified to the increase in depravity in a declining world rapidly moving towards the day of doom. Men’s laws reflected those of God. The definition of murder in Thomas Cooper’s The Cry and Reuenge of Blood, Expressing the Nature and haynousnesse of wilful Murther (1620) is that it is an act of treason first against God, then against King and country. The murderer is also a hypocrite, an atheist and an idolater. Cooper, a preacher,


anatomises murder as a sin, outlining in turn ‘the Progeny and heynousnesse of this sinne’, the causes and occasions of it, the ‘dangerous effects, and consequences’, and finally ways to prevent it. God was believed to intervene in the detection of crimes and the unmasking of criminals, just as the devil was always at work to tempt the weak into wicked conduct. Women’s weakness and susceptibility to temptation was an accepted aspect of their inferior spiritual constitution, which explained their readiness to submit to diabolic suggestions when offered. Accounts of the devil’s role in infanticide right up to the end of the century show that this was by no means simply a conventional formula. The conflation of sin and crime resulted in conflicting constructions of the criminal. In one account, he or she is not abnormal or deviant, but rather a peculiarly enhanced example of the universal human condition of depravity, essentially someone who reached the summit of a criminal career by following a progressive course in wrong behaviour. Such a career might stem from extremely modest beginnings, from failing to go to church, for example, or the refusing of charity to a neighbour, and then develop, stage by stage, to ultimate corruption and depravity. The formal confession of a convicted criminal, in which the moral meaning of the criminal life is defined, is often the place where such a pattern is traced, and by a strange paradox, such a figure may even become through contrition the ‘ideal type or symbol for the spiritual condition of the averagely sinful and secure Christian’.26 Margaret Clark, a servant convicted of arson, recounts the misdemeanours and failings of her earlier life, including thefts of ‘a little Tape, Lace, and other frivolous things’, and insists that ‘Pride and Sabbath breaking hath been my downfall’, bringing about the state of mind in which she was induced to make an attempt on her master’s life by setting fire to his house.27 The career of Elizabeth Evans, known as Canberry Bess, who became accomplice in robbery and murder to Thomas Sherwood, is seen as almost inevitable after her seduction when young; coming up from the country, ‘shee grew acquainted with a young man in London, who tempted her unto folly, and by that ungodly act her suddaine ruine insued’.28 As the author of Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers (1605) summarises: ‘mischiefe is of that nature, that it cannot stand, but by strengthening of one euill with an other, and so multiply in it selfe vntil it come vnto the highest, and then falles with his own weight’.29 But a contrasting conception of the criminal draws the story into the discourse of prodigies and the monstrous. The focus here is less on the career than on the deviant nature of the individual, who, far from typifying the fallen lifestyle of the man or woman who refuses to listen to God, is so extraordinary in his or her wickedness as to be explicable only as a monster. Husbands who kill wives and women who kill children are sometimes described in this way. Walter Calverley in Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers, who kills two of his children and tries to kill his wife,


behaves like a man possessed. The pamphleteer describes him through an elaborate simile of cosmic force: ‘As the sea, being hurled into hideous billowes by the fury of the winde, hideth both heauen and earth from the eye of man, so he, being ouerwhelmed by the violence of his passion, all naturall loue was forgot in his remembraunce.’30 He is apprehended by the magistrate who asks him ‘the cause that made him so monstrous’. The writer gives his answer in the following way: ‘he, being like a strumpet made impudent by her continuance in sinne, made this answere: I haue done that, sir, I reioyce at.’31 The strumpet hardened in her sin is a common figure for the female monster of depravity whose role is to bring about the ruin of men. The two images, of a stormy sea and a strumpet, convey the unmanly and inhuman condition of the murderer, avoiding the more common image of diabolic takeover, although this is a factor in the motivation of the husband in the play based on this story, A Yorkshire Tragedy.32 John Dilworth, in Two Horrible and inhumane Murders done in Lincolneshire (1604), kills his wife after a domestic row, and is moved to further violence: hauing thus cruelly taken from her, her deare life, and his hellish rage and ire beeing not as yet satisfied (he striuing (as it seemed) to make himselfe a true picture or patterne of the very Diuell) hee went strattwayes and made a very great fire with wood and with turffes, and the sooner to encrease the rage of it, hee tooke a great many of chippes, which (his trade being a wheele-wright) did very easily afforde him. (sig. B4) He burns his wife’s body, pacing up and down in front of the flames ‘reioycing at that his most hatefull, horrible, and hellish fact … like a terrible, torturing tyrant’ (sig. B4). The tyrant figures irrational rage and the devil the acme of evil; significantly, the devil appears not in his more common role as instigator of crime, but as a type of criminal behaviour. In such accounts, the behaviour of the husband seems so grotesque that, as Frances Dolan says, ‘the text sidesteps the issue of the husband’s responsibility’ (p. 104). They have been, as it were, beside themselves when committing the crimes, taken over by some exterior dehumanising force which has transformed them temporarily into monsters. In some narratives of childkilling, something of the same happens. In Henry Goodcole’s Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637) Elizabeth Barnes, who kills her eight-year-old daughter, does so after a period of what is represented as a kind of demonic possession: ‘A whole moneth, as shee confest in the publike hearing of divers persons of good repute, this savage continued with the hellish fire kindled in her brest, violently at the last breaking forth into the unnatural deprivation of the life of the fruits of her own wombe’ (p. 1). Images of wild animals and terms like barbarous and savage are applied to women who commit this act; it is the act of someone who has abnegated humanity.


Thomas Brewer in The Bloudy Mother describes Jane Hattersley as both savagely violent – ‘more then Tygerlike’ – and also completely without feelings: ‘this wretch had a heart of steele, and eies of marble, so indurate, that no notion of heaven, or sparke of humaine pitty, could be seene or perceived in them’ (sigs. B–B1v). An active role is ascribed to the devil in several childkilling narratives; he may be, conventionally, the instigator of behaviour defined as inhumanly wicked, typically inciting a young unmarried woman to kill her newborn infant so that she ‘not like a mother, but a monster threw it downe into a lothsome priuy’ (Deeds Against Nature, sig. A4). Accounting for criminal activity in terms of diabolic intervention is sometimes quite formulaic and there is some evidence to suggest that the writers, and perhaps the women themselves, were able to acknowledge this, although it would not be fair to say that diabolic intervention was consciously regarded as a pretext or excuse. Rather, it was one explanation which could be readily drawn on in popular crime-writing because it was generally accepted without question, to account for actions and behaviours which otherwise seemed far outside the normal. For example, in Natures Cruell Step-Dames, Elizabeth Barnes’s story is headed ‘A Narration of the Diabolicall seduction of Elizabeth Barnes, late of Battersea in the County of Surrey widdow, mercilessly to murder Susan Barnes her own naturall Child’; the account seems to follow the common pattern whereby the woman is acting on the suggestions of ‘the subtill seruant Satan’ in ridding herself of the child. But when Goodcole, Chaplain of Newgate, visits Elizabeth Barnes in prison, she counters the narrative of diabolical seduction with one of human motivation, in which she has spent all her money on a faithless lover who has made her pregnant and deserted her. In other pamphlets of child-killing, however, the devil’s role is internalised in a way strongly suggestive of the Puritan idea of spiritual combat. In Murther will out (1675), an account of a young woman who has been widowed when her child is six months old, the devil is dramatised as the voice of inner temptation who comes to the woman when she is at her most vulnerable, when the child is ‘visited by the hand of Almighty God with a lingering distemper’ which makes it cry continuously so that neither of them can sleep. The devil badgers her with temptations: ‘for now says he you are unhappy onely in this child of yours, which as it lives you will never enjoy a good day; and besides it hinders your preferment; you are young and handsome, and might have a husband or two more if this childs head was but laid’ (p. 3). The woman here is not a tigerish monster but rather a ‘weak Vessel’ (p. 2), who can muster no defences against her cunning adversary. Underlying this vision of diabolical power, but never quite surfacing, is a humanitarian narrative of human pain and emotional isolation. The devil’s persuasions are plausible because they address the social reality of the woman’s predicament. Yet she is still a criminal, and deserving of capital punishment. As Malcolm Gaskill puts it, ‘natural and


supernatural causes should be seen as belonging to a common intellectual system rather than as alternative modes of explanation, and it seems likely that in most people’s minds the agency of God or the devil was always in some way the cause of the fatal losses of reason, drunkenness and insanity’.33 Thus, although in this case the killing was concealed for thirty years, the woman, sick of a fever and expecting to die, confessed it; as in several instances documented by Gaskill, the pricking of a guilty conscience was a reality. The pamphlet concludes with her being taken to trial where she is told, in the author’s brutally jocular words, ‘that she cannot nor shall not dye till she be hanged’ (p. 6).

Women’s crime and the law The link between women’s gender-based weakness, their inherently greater sinfulness and their susceptibility to diabolic temptation also evident in witchcraft persecutions, makes them, at least in the eyes of moralists, more, not less, criminally culpable. Certain aspects of legislation in the period, too, criminalised the behaviour of women differently from that of men.34 This is not to say that, in general terms, women were always treated more harshly by the law than men; there were gender-based distinctions in legislation, for instance privileges only available to one sex, such as benefit of clergy which until 1624 was only available to men, and pleading the belly, which won a stay of execution, and in some instances possibly even a reprieve, for women. All juries and all court officials were men, but historians believe for a variety of reasons that they often treated women plaintiffs more leniently. Cynthia Herrup makes the point that the rigidity of English law, a reflection of its ‘moral underpinnings’ in Puritanism,35 combined with the limited range of options and punishments available, created difficulties for juries faced with women accused of felonies: ‘Even after 1624 [when they were first allowed to plead benefit of clergy in small felonies] no woman accused of the theft of goods valued at more than ten shillings could ask benefit of clergy, so that for many alleged crimes, and especially for allegations of violence, juries still had no easy way to punish a woman without putting her life at risk’. She continues: ‘In felonies juries hesitated over convicting females more than over convicting males. They hesitated most regularly of all in accusations such as murder and burglary where deliberation rather than passion was considered crucial to a defendant’s motivation.’36 Notions of gender difference come into play here. Women’s lesser access to rationality and intellect, their greater propensity to behaviour dictated by passion and ‘will’, made them less liable for criminal responsibility. But the literature of crime that has come down to us consists of narratives where the woman concerned is demonstrably (in the eyes of the writer) guilty. Given that the ‘rate of conviction for women was lower than that for most men’,37 these cases were obviously exceptional. In many


accounts of husband-murder the element of pre-planning is treated as crucial, particularly where the wife has plotted with one or more coconspirators, where she has used poison, or where she has made more than one attempt. The story of Alice Arden is a prime example here. Perhaps the fact that many women in real life escaped conviction for major felonies, or, if they did not, at least had their sentences commuted, in part accounts for the strong insistence in some accounts of criminal women on their extreme wickedness. Women’s secondary status in relation to an ultimately patriarchal institution like the law might work in their favour, not only giving them the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, but in some instances lessening their criminal liability.38 According to William Lambarde, in cases of larceny, ‘if the husband and the wife, doe commit a Larceny together, it shalbe imputed to the husband onely . . . Neither is she chargeable if the Husband compell her to commit the larceny alone’.39 Such a view stems from the patriarchal definition of the married woman as a ‘feme covert’ whose legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband. Coverture, it has been said, put the wife in the same category as ‘children wards, lunatics, idiots, and outlaws’.40 At another point Lambarde brackets women with minors as incapable of criminal liability in actions of riotous assembly, ‘unlesse a man of discretion moued them to assemble for the doing of some unlawfull act’.41 But elsewhere the law came down much harder on women. Egregious is the differentiation in culpability between husbandmurder and wife-murder; the Statute of Treasons, brought in in 1532, accorded a special status to the former, as Lambarde explains: ‘if a Clarke doe maliciously kill his Prelate (or superior) to whom he oweth obedience; or a wife, her husband; or a seruant the master or mistresse (who haue a ciuile souereignitie ouer them) this will be Petite Treason’.42 Matthew Dalton, in The Countrey Justice, defines the difference in gravity between the two crimes: The wife maliciously killeth her husband, this is petty treason. 25. Ed. 3. Cap. 2. The husband maliciously killeth his wife, this is but murder. The reason of this difference, is, for that the one is in subiection and oweth obedience, and not the other.43 Lambarde goes on to envisage various comparable scenarios in which social inferiors do away with their superiors, distinguishing where relevant between the severity of the punishment: if the wife & a stranger do ioine in killing, or poisoning the husband: or a seruant and a stranger in destroying the Master or mistresse of that seruant: this is petite treason in the wife and seruant, and Murder in the


stranger. And (by the way) that wife may for the poisoning either be touched with petite treason at the common law, or with Murder by the new Statute, 1. Ed. 6. Cp. 12. Dalyson. But if the wife and seruant does conspire to kil the husband, appointing the time and place therefore, & the seruant doth execute the same accordingly in the absence of the wife: then is it petite Treason in them both: whereas if it had beene done by a stranger, she should onely haue beene accessorie to it, as to a Murder.44 No such detail is given in relation to the position of husbands who kill wives. Husband-murder was clearly a crime that called for special attention, not only in sensational pamphlets and ballads, but in contemporary legal texts. Its treasonable aspect was paramount. Yet pamphlets describing husbandmurder do not draw attention to the wife’s crime specifically in these terms. Title-page woodcuts often depict the woman burning at the stake, for example, The Adultresses Funerall Day, but the legal justification for this form of execution seems to be assumed rather than made explicit. Presentday discussions of the popular literature of crime make much of the difference between the husband’s status and the wife’s; but it seems to have been accepted without comment in the early modern period. Only in a late pamphlet dealing not with husband-murder, but with the murder by two women household employees of the mistress of the house, is the concept of petty treason directly addressed. Ann Evans, an apprentice, colludes with Phillipa Cary, a nurse, in the poisoning of Mrs Wicks in whose house they both live; their aim was to poison the whole family. The narrator sees a need to distinguish between their offences: ‘they were found Guilty viz Ann Evans of Murther and petty-Treason, Phillipa Cary of willful Murther only; and the reason of this distinction was, that the said Evans was a Covenanted Servant, and had more immediately the Lives of the Family in her power; so that she received Sentence, to be drawn upon a Hurdle to the place of Execution, and the other to be hanged only’ (pp. 9–10).45 The other outstanding example of discriminatory legislation is the Statute of 1624, 21 James cap. 27, ‘An Act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, which stated, in Dalton’s words, that if any woman should be deliuered of any issue of her body, male or female, which if it were borne aliue, should be the lawes of this Realme be a bastard, and that shee endeuour (priuately, eyther by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way) so as to conceale the death thereof, that it may not come to light, whether it were borne aliue, or not, but be concealed; in euery such case the said mother so offending shall suffer death as in case of murther, except she can proue that the childe was borne dead.46


This legislation is conditioned by ideas of social class as well as those of gender; it discriminated particularly against poor unmarried women. It forms part of a series of measures put in place by the Protestant state in Tudor and early Stuart times to control the rate of illegitimate births, which was perceived by contemporaries to be a considerable problem of social order, although modern historians debate how high it actually was.47 Even if, as Martin Ingram suggests, English society was not, by continental standards ‘organised towards a rigorous control of social relations between the sexes’,48 it was one in which sexual discipline was fairly strict.49 It was also one in which, as has been recently demonstrated, the responsibility for certain social standards, particularly those of sexual behaviour, fell on women. In her study of the language of women and defamation, Laura Gowing provides abundant evidence to show that the most common kind of sexual insults not only made women ‘the focus of sexual guilt and responsibility’ (p. 63), but also ‘displaced the blame for men’s adultery onto women, reinforcing a system in which, inside or outside marriage, women carried the weight of sexual culpability’ (p. 92). These observations, though made in another context, are completely appropriate to the application of the bastardy laws. Witchcraft legislation, like the 1624 bastardy law, represented a new tendency to criminalise women, and in these cases to assume their accountability for their actions.50

Law and the neighbour There has been a recent increase of interest in the forms that early modern women’s involvement in the law might take, with studies of the active roles they played in church courts51 and in courts of chancery,52 an account of the role of the jury of matrons,53 and debate about the significance of scolding persecutions in the period in relation to the notion of a contemporary crisis in gender relations.54 But what is perhaps more relevant to the popular literature of women’s crime is a particular feature of the operation of the law – what might be termed its neighbourhood aspect. Cynthia Herrup expresses this idea strongly: ‘Despite the complaints of contemporaries such as Sir Francis Bacon about popular apathy, to modern eyes the most striking feature of the system used in early modern England to identify, capture and secure suspects is its broad participatory base. The private individual was the most important law-enforcing officer in the community.’55 Malcolm Gaskill argues that, unlike the present day when the state of ‘conditioned passivity’ assures that individuals in contact with crimes of blood usually withdraw to allow professional authorities to take charge, ‘early modern murder investigations tended to be far more public affairs in which ordinary people fully engaged themselves with alacrity’.56 Before an individual could be prosecuted for felony, an indictment, that is, ‘an accusation made by twelve or more laymen sworn to inquire in the King’s


behalf and recorded before a court of record’,57 had to be presented, which meant in practice that ‘in matters of life and limb there existed between the Crown and the subject a shield borne by his neighbours’.58 Neighbours had a number of roles to play which demonstrate the operation of communal or consent law. These were partly procedural, in that, because of the absence of any real police force, prosecutions were commonly brought by someone involved in the case – a victim or a neighbour – and partly also due to aspects of the prevalent ideology according to which ‘enforcing the law against the malefactor in this period was an essentially personal process’.59 In cases of sexual and public order offences tried at church courts they might act as compurgators, that is, representatives of respectable society prepared to guarantee the innocence of the accused. According to F. G. Emmison, this procedure, which was ended in 1660, was often quite farcical; up to eight persons (in some courts of both sexes)60 might be involved, and ‘provided the full contingent supported the accused party, it mattered little how strong the suspicion amounted to’.61 Women might act as witnesses, at trials and to the truth of published accounts; many pamphlets conclude with lists of names. The involvement of neighbours and the whole issue of neighbourhood relationships have a particular significance in relation to witchcraft trials. An influential view of the origins of early modern witchcraft in England traces its rise as a response to the breakdown of traditional forms of neighbourly behaviour; according to A. D. J. Macfarlane, ‘it appears as if it was those who offended against the ideals of a co-operative society by refusing to help their neighbours who found themselves bewitched’.62 Macfarlane suggests also that, in a conflict between an old value system predicated on the exchange of neighbourly charity and an emergent one which tended to scapegoat the poor and indigent who could not provide for themselves effectively, witchcraft could be used as a convenient pretext for excluding someone from acts of charity by defining them as socially undesirable. There are, of course, alternative models for the origins and social significance of the phenomenon of witchcraft,63 but they do not negate the importance of the community aspect of the legal process in its prosecution. Given its nature as an often invisible and scarcely provable crime, normal rules of evidence at trial were often set aside; in particular, suspicion, largely on the part of the neighbours of the accused, could be allowed as grounds for accusation, and children’s testimony would often provide a major part of the evidence. In this instance, community participation in the prosecution of crime was as much from women as from men, sometimes more. They were heavily involved in making accusations and in providing evidence,64 and they were regularly employed as searchers, to find the devil’s secret mark on the body of the accused, a vital aspect in proving guilt. As Barbara Rosen puts it, in trials of witchcraft, ‘the law was almost fatally responsive to the common opinion of its time in the interpretation of its provisions’.65


How far is this communal aspect of the law reflected in the handling of women’s crimes in popular writing? In most accounts of crime, whether committed by men or women, the testimony of neighbours is a highly important factor. It is neither easy nor helpful to separate the legal aspects of early notions of social community from the role of neighbours and neighbourliness in social life more generally. Both are relevant to accounts of crime, particularly domestic crime, and perhaps particularly women’s crimes. Early modern England life, whether in rural or urban environments, had a more strongly communal quality than was the case after industrialisation. Even in what have been characterised as ‘the uniquely large social spheres of the city’ of London,66 most people’s lives were geographically centred on their own parish, and within that parish the importance of communal relationships was strong. Recent work on women’s social history has explored the ways in which their interactions were shaped by the nature of their communities. The structure of domestic architecture was such that ‘living literally on top of each other, female neighbours carried on conversations and disputes, or observed others do so, while remaining inside their own houses or shops’.67 The fact that such housing made privacy difficult to obtain, and thus possibly suspicious, is part of a culture that encouraged neighbourly surveillance to a much greater extent than today.68 Mendelson and Crawford document what they call ‘women’s habit of treating each other’s dwellings and possessions as common property’, and the extension of this habit into a ‘collective regime’ of female neighbourliness whereby women might share or barter goods.69 For women the neighbourhood community could function as a support system and also as a moral forum for establishing and maintaining reputation. Joy Wiltenberg cites Martin Parker’s ballad, ‘Have among you! Good women’ (RB 1, 434–40), in which men gossip about the local scolds, to illustrate the role of the local community in regulating the balance of marital power within an especially fraught relationship.70 Martin Ingram’s work on popular rituals such as skimmingtons and ‘rough music’ designed to express communal disapproval of certain kinds of marital behaviour illustrates the function of the neighbourhood in the same way. Crime literature, particularly pamphlets, but also some ballads and plays, depicts a world in which it is hardly possible to imagine crimes ever being uncovered without the vigilance of neighbours. As Michael Macdonald puts it, in a society without a regular police force, ‘the enforcement of all social regulations still depended greatly upon the willingness of members of local communities to assume personal responsibility to uphold them’.71 So neighbours take on the roles of witnesses and moral authorities, testifying to the good (and sometimes bad) character of suspects; they watch in doorways and listen at doors, windows and keyholes, and report what they have seen and heard to the authorities; they intervene to prevent marital violence or to save children threatened by parents, and sometimes they are


found culpable for not intervening when they should have. In many instances their testimony provides the crucial evidence on which to convict. Their suspicions alone could send an unmarried woman for trial for murdering a newborn infant, without any other evidence.72 In witchcraft depositions even the hearsay testimony of neighbours is critical.73 In The Trueth of the most wicked and secret murthering of John Brewen, Goldsmith of London (1592), Anne Brewen, who has become pregnant by her lover John Parker after her husband’s death, dare ‘not goe forth of her doores for feare her neighbours should perceiue her great bellie’ (p. 13), but her secret (and the truth of the crime which has been concealed for two years) comes out when neighbours overhear the couple disputing ‘in vehemencie of spirite’ (p. 14) and report it to the magistrate. In the case of Margaret Fernseede, burnt at the stake for murdering her husband despite denying it to the last, the only evidence against her was the bad reputation she had among her neighbours for taking a young lover and keeping a brothel, and the witness of two lodgers in her house who overhear through the wall a conversation in which her husband tries in vain to persuade her to a better course of life. Neighbours routinely take on the role of moral guardians, noticing, for instance, that Mrs Beast has taken her husband’s handsome young servant Christopher Tomson as a lover (A Briefe Discourse), viewing with disapproval the behaviour of John Rowse who keeps a ‘lewd trull’ in his house and lives prodigally (Taylor, p. 3), intervening, providentially, to prevent Charity Philpot, a servant who has just cut the throat of her mistress’s child, from killing her mistress and burning down the house. They also intervene, to different effect, in an argument between James Lawson, ‘a person of an indifferent estate, and a good neighbour’, and his wife. Neighbourly testimony is crucial in shaping the dynamic of this particular account, which is told as the story of a woman who, after an argument with her husband, drowns herself and two of her children.74 On the day in question the husband comes home drunk, which, the narrator asserts, is unusual, ‘a thing he was very seldom addicted to by the observations of the Neighbourhood’ which is ready to attest that they have ‘seldom or never seen him disguised [that is, drunk]’ (p. 2). Jane Lawson, less forgiving than the neighbours, is angry and ‘began to School him at an extraordinary rate, insomuch that the neighbours came in to pacifie her, imagining the words she gave him would not be put up without blows from her Husband, which was a thing to which he was never inclined’ (p. 2). The neighbours, who have overheard the couple, form an opinion on the situation and act as the arbiters of reason; such behaviour from a wife is guaranteed to provoke even a husband who is not an habitual drunk. Violence is assumed to be ‘the natural and expected response to female scolding’.75 She, however, continues in her ‘unreasonable womanish Fury’; two of the neighbours, more stout of heart than the rest who have gone home, persist in their


attempts to pacify her, but when she abuses them ‘in an extraordinary manner’ they leave. Even Jane’s mother cannot calm her, attempting to urge (in an appealing malapropism) the duty of a wife to ‘divulge her Husbands infirmity, especially when it is so seldom’. Jane reacts antagonistically to her mother’s advice: ‘Mother, replies this unnatural Daughter, you may preach at home as long as you will, but in my house you shall not’ (p. 4). James Lawson, after suffering further verbal abuse from his wife, ‘gave her two or three good cuffs on the Ear’ (p. 5), which makes her leave the house, taking two of the children. An hour later the three of them are found dead. This story could have taken other directions; it might, like other narratives of child-killing, have been one of a sad and desperate woman driven to the extremes of violence; it might have been one of diabolical temptation (as the ballad on the same subject, ‘The Unnatural Mother’, is).76 But largely because of the role of the neighbours in implicitly defining a style of marital relationship by ensuring the good moral character of the husband within a normative climate of social conduct, it becomes an exemplum of the fate of a wife who is not properly submissive. The function of neighbours as agents of law and moral order is explored in different ways in two accounts of child-killing. In Deeds Against Nature, a London woman, Martha Scambler, having spent her youth ‘in lasciuious pleasures, as many a one doth about this Citty’ (sig. A4v), becomes pregnant. She fails in her attempt to abort the child and when it is born she does away with it in a manner that seems to have been common, tossing it into a privy. The corpse is discovered when a dog, trapped in the privy, which ‘ascended up into the next neighbours house’, alerts the neighbour with its barking. Neighbours have been absent from the story up to this point; Scambler’s skill in concealing her pregnancy from them is considered amazing, perhaps the result of diabolical assistance, and because of her strong constitution, ‘her lusty body [and] strong nature’ she ‘required in her agony no helpe of a midwife which among women seemeth a thing very strange’ (sig. A4). The absence of neighbours where they ought to have been present is further evidence of Scambler’s monstrous wickedness. But they come on the scene later, in the form of ‘a certain number of substantiall woemen’ who search possible suspects to find the child’s mother and soon light on Scambler, who confesses and is hanged. The functioning of the community as a regulatory system is revealed here in both positive and negative terms. In a much later pamphlet, Fair Warning to the Murderers of Infants (1691), the narrative of the community’s role in a case of concealed pregnancy and infanticide is very differently handled. Mary Goodenough, a poor widow with a family to support, is made pregnant by a married baker who offers her money to sleep with him. She hides her pregnancy and gives birth in secret. The infant is found dead by neighbours, who then play the part accorded to them by the Act of 1624 as witnesses for the prosecution. At


the Oxford assizes, ‘They declar’d; and she acknowledg’d the Purport of it, and particularly that she call’d not out for Help, as also with relation to the Child afterwards, That it perish’d for want of suitable Help and due Attendance’ (p. 1). The fact that she has given birth in secret, apparently without attempting to safeguard the child’s survival by involving others, is sufficient to convict her. But the writer of this account has a further story to tell concerning neighbourly involvement; although neighbours have been present at one crucial moment, their absence at other times has been equally significant. Mary Goodenough has previously enjoyed a good reputation, created for her by neighbourly approval: ‘her Character amongst her neighbours, was Quiet, Honest, Civil, Harmless, Poor Woman; yea, Religious too, before this Fact’ (p. 3). This should have been sufficient to earn her support from her community in her time of need, but, as the writer points out, the community failed her: Who knows how far your Uncharitableness hiding your selves from your own flesh, from this poor Womans Wants, contributed to the strength of that Temptation which brought her to that Sin and Punishment which have left those Children Motherless. It was for want of Bread she said. If her Modesty did make her asham’d to beg, did not her meagre Look, her starved Children, her meanly furnish’d House and Table beg from you? (p. 4) This unusual humanitarian perspective on the role of the community, which is expressed in the prefatory address to the reader, counteracts the more legalistic account of the crime itself. The assumption that the community has responsibilities to its members involving support as well as surveillance is rarely so directly acknowledged and reflects a change in attitudes towards newborn infanticide taking place at this late date. The guilt of the woman here is a function of her neighbours’ neglect. More commonly neighbours are depicted as highly vigilant in their watch on one another’s activities, particularly those of women. The fact that murder and other secret crimes can take place almost under their noses is not so much down to a failure of their policing as to the unconquerable wickedness of the human heart. In Thomas Brewer’s The Bloudy Mother (1609), the author observes that although the well-to-do Adam Adamson, who turns out to be an adulterer and a murderer, ‘was in good account and recconing amongst his neighbours’ (sig. A3v), ‘men can but see as men’, and Adamson was evil enough to conceal his ‘dishonest and putrified cogitations’ from all around.77 Yet his story is peopled by a host of watchful neighbours, in the forms of ‘Good-man King and his wife’ with whom Jane Hattersley, Adamson’s servant and lover, takes lodgings, a neighbour’s wife who finds Jane in labour, other neighbours who behold this baby ‘suddainly dead’, women who search Jane when she


falls pregnant again, and especially ‘Fraunces Foord, the wife of one John Foord’ who visits Adamson’s house to buy bread and hears ‘low deprest cryes and grones’ coming from upstairs. Frances Ford’s behaviour typifies day-to-day neighbourly interaction. Entering Adamson’s house unheralded, she hears sounds of distress coming from Jane and goes upstairs to investigate. Jane sends Frances downstairs to the parlour to fetch a handkerchief; obviously her presence in the house is in no way irregular or, in normal circumstances, intrusive. But ‘ere she could get to the top of the stairs’ with the handkerchief, Jane has shut the chamber door. Frances, ‘thus withstood in her kindnesse’, becomes suspicious and peers through the keyhole where she sees Jane ‘(very warme wrapped) set in a wicker chaire by her beds side, with looks bewraying very great debility and faintnes of body’. After a little time she hears the ‘weake shrike’ of a newborn infant, and, her eye to the keyhole again, sees ‘in the hands of the keeper, a bole-dish, in which was the after birth of a child, and other perspicuous and evident tokens of a child borne at that instant’ (sig. B2v). Mrs Ford is obviously familiar with this sort of scene; assistance at childbirth was one of a woman neighbour’s regular duties. She does not leave the house, but goes downstairs to keep watch and, hearing the chamber door open, goes up again ‘and suddainly (to preuent another preuention) into her chamber’, where she keeps Jane talking half an hour in order to get a good look round. But Jane has anticipated this and hidden all the signs, so that when, as is implied, Mrs Ford openly accuses her of infanticide, there are only ‘the weake words of Foords wife’ against the testimony of Jane, supported by Adamson. Jane soon becomes pregnant by Adamson again, but this time the community is better prepared for the situation, ‘which with a greater circumspection, then before was looked into. Many eies attended it to see the euent, and finde the euents of the former’ (sig. B3). To escape scrutiny, Jane takes refuge at the house of her brother-inlaw, ‘one Crab a Tailor’, and the baby, born safely, is ‘put to nurse to one Thomas Ellis, who tenderly tended it’. But neighbourhood scrutiny then seems to break down and, although Jane has several further pregnancies over a period of ten or twelve years, no babies, living or dead, are ever seen. Eventually, according to the familiar pattern, the couple betray themselves. They are overheard arguing, ‘in which windie battaile, Jane cald her maister murderer, in the hearing of many neighbours, and that not once or twice … and to this added, that there was that yet hidden, that would hang him’ (sig. B4). The neighbours, forewarned by Edward Duffell to whom Adamson had sold his orchard, go there to dig and unearth many small bones. The couple are arrested, but Adamson, ‘upon bonds and good security’, is quickly released to appear at the assizes. Despite all the neighbours’ suspicions, Adamson’s good reckoning and his fortune in possessing ‘mony and freindes’ seem to stand him in good stead and he is acquitted, though Jane is found guilty. Adamson denies everything and persuades Jane to retract


her earlier confession. She goes to the gallows believing to the last that, if she keeps silent, Adamson will procure her a pardon. The evidence against both is largely circumstantial or based on hearsay testimony; once again, the case demonstrates how the power that neighbours could exercise in acting as moral guardians to the community shaped a narrative role for them in crime writing. The Bloudy Mother might in another context have been, if not The Bloody Father, then at least an account of child-killing for which both parents are responsible. It is not, after all, the typical infanticide narrative of the unmarried and unsupported servant who kills her child alone to preserve her secret; Jane Hattersley is Adam Adamson’s mistress over many years and he never deserts her. But the focus of the writer, and of the neighbours, is on Jane Hattersley. She is the object of surveillance, whose body, with its all too frequent swelling, will betray her if watched closely enough, and she is the chief target of Brewer’s outrage: ‘O cruell mother, O griefe to mothers, O wretch most wicked, unworthy the name of mother’ (sig. B). Her sin against the community, and its standards, is more outrageous than his, and the wording of the title of the pamphlet duly gives her priority. But Adamson’s fate is not forgotten. The title-page is divided vertically; the left-hand side depicts the crime in an illustration of an orchard where a woman tenders an infant towards a man who is digging a grave, to the side of which lie a skull and some small bones. In contrast to this busy scene, the right-hand side shows a bedroom where a man lies dying in a high bed. In a separate section at the end of the pamphlet, set in larger size type, Brewer describes how Adamson lay for six months in bed while his body was literally devoured by lice and worms, which ‘no shift in linnen, nor other costly shift in trimming, picking & annointing’ could destroy; neighbours who came to view this spectacle of punishment were so repelled by the smell that they ‘could not stand to giue their eyes satisfaction’ and had to take their leave ‘ere they could well look on him’ (sig. C). Adamson is shown in a carefully depicted bedroom, with a lattice window, a tiled floor, a high carved bed and a panelled door; prominent on the right-hand side of the door is a well-shaped keyhole, suggesting both the one through which Frances Ford tried so hard to observe Jane Hattersley and the surveillance of God, whose divine sight, like the sun, penetrated ‘the foggs and cloudes of [Adamson’s] dissembling and priuie contriuing, to shew the world that he was not the innocent man he would haue seemd to be’ (sig. C1v).

The woman as criminal Jane Hattersley’s crimes were an affront to the community and to the values that it invested in the ideas of womanly conduct, especially motherhood; the neighbours believed it was their duty to keep a constant watch


over her conduct as a servant, a woman of dubious moral character and a suspected infanticide, and in the end their efforts paid off. Adam Adamson, on the other hand, had the power of money, social standing and gender, which put him beyond the reach of neighbourhood surveillance as well as of the law. He was judged, though not as a negligent father, yet as a sinner in the eyes of God, and his fate evolved as one peculiarly suited to his status as a prosperous man: during the last months of his life he spent all he had in a hopeless attempt to find a cure for his mysterious condition: ‘all his meanes were wast and consumed; for he neuer left consuming till he was consumed to skinne & bone, and so lamentably ended his dayes’ (sig. C1v). How far does this distinction between the ways in which the joint criminal actions of Jane Hattersley and Adam Adamson were represented reflect the general difference in the representation of men’s and women’s crimes? And to what extent is the woman as a criminal a distinct conception defined according to gender-based notions of moral behaviour? Modern sociologists of crime make the point that criminality is regularly assumed to be a masculine attribute, and therefore women who break the law ‘are perceived to be either “not women” or “not criminals”’.78 The view that criminal activity by men is ‘normative, explicable, or rational’ and by women is the result of ‘pathological or irrational reasons’79 is widely held and, although it has been challenged, there exists a tradition in criminology of drawing on ideas of sexual maladjustment to account for women’s criminality.80 Deprived of their identity as women, such women may be redefined as lacking appropriate gender characteristics and thus masculine, or monstrous, or demonic – in different ways unnatural. These days, women in the dock are said to ‘offend both against society’s behavioural rules about property, drinking, or violence, and also against the more fundamental notions which govern sex-role behaviour’.81 Underlying society’s attitude to them is ‘the implicit assumption that female offenders are less reclaimable, more vile, more “unnatural” than male’.82 This vocabulary is not so different from that of the pamphleteers. So deeply rooted is the construction of femininity as conformity to male-devised social and ethical codes that the ability to reject such codes is regarded as alarming in the extreme: ‘when a woman has thrown aside the virtuous restraints of society, and is enlisted on the side of evil, she is far more dangerous to society than the other sex’.83 A continuing belief in women’s weaker moral nature, and, in Christian terms, greater inclination to behaviour ungoverned by reason, underlies such attitudes. The author of A True relation of the most Horrid and Barbarous murders committed by Abigall Hill (1658) draws on this familiar misogynist ideology to blame women both for their own crimes and those committed by men: ‘It is an antient Proverb in this Nation, That seldome any notorious Murder is committed, but a Woman hath a hand in it. To this the seuerall Jailes in this land and places of Execution have given


many testimonies … Had not the Complexions of some Women been so tempting, and their Inclinations so tender by Nature, It is likely that they had never been such devils as they are’ (pp. 9–10). Ulinka Rublack, in The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany, rightly notes that women were perceived to exist in a special relation to disorder, though her assertion that in Germany ’sixteenth- and seventeenth-century trials clearly turned on the view that women’s weaker moral nature and stronger sexual desire were the principal causes of social disorder’ seems a little too broadly worded to be appropriate to early modern England.84 But it is certainly the case that models were prescribed for acceptably womanly behaviour in a way that did not exist for men, and that the limits for such behaviour were quite narrowly defined. It was not difficult for a woman to transgress the boundaries; and such transgressions, if violating the norms for sexual behaviour or domestic roles, were particularly threatening. It is these, not criminal activity such as taking part in riots, picking pockets or receiving stolen goods, that make up the substance of pamphlets, ballads and plays on women’s crime. Of course, with the exception of witchcraft literature, a similar point could be made about the popular literature of men’s crime; it was only violent or sensational crime that generated literary accounts. But several points are worth making here: first, that although in incidents of spouse-murder husbands were far more often the perpetrators, there was a far higher proportion of accounts of murders by wives, especially in the period before 1650;85 second, that the literature of child-killing is almost entirely a literature of women’s crime, though, as in The Bloudy Mother, men were sometimes equally involved. And of course the extensive literature of witchcraft is in multiple ways a literature of women, in which they figure pre-eminently as perpetrators, prominently as accusers and victims, and also, it has been suggested, in part as authors.86 The woman criminal was positioned as a freak of nature, an aberration different from other women. When a woman is apprehended (the wrong one, it turns out) for the murder of Mistress Killingworth in Creechurch parish near Aldgate, a huge crowd gathers to witness her journey to prison: ‘such was the desire of all eyes to see her, that their eyes might beare witnesse if women could bring forth a woman so detestable, as she was’ (The Apprehension … of Elizabeth Abbot, 1608, sig. B2). Expressions like ‘this monster of nature’ (Deeds against nature, 1614, sig. A3v), ‘a woman, nay a deuill’ (A Briefe Discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers, 1583, sig. B3), ‘not a woman, but a beast’ (The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by … Annis Dell, 1606, sig. A3), ‘Matchless Monsters of the Female Sex’ (Henry Goodcole, Natures Cruell Step-Dames: or, Matchless Monsters of the Female Sex, 1637) are common in the rhetoric of moral indignation. Violence perpetrated by women is deeply unnatural: ‘let all forests wherin fierce lions are contained be joined in one, and privy search be made, to know if ever the female did the male destroy’ (Murther, Murther. Or, A


Bloody relation, 1641, p. 2). In an account of a robbery that ends in murder by a gang of thieves including one woman, the woman’s role in committing one of the murders is singled out: ‘o act too terrible to report, but the most damnablest that euer was heard of, executed by a woman’ (The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by … Annis Dell, sig. A3v). Male violence and criminality are not generally represented in terms of alienation from humanity. In specific instances it is, of course, deplored, but it never achieves the emblematic status accorded, for example, to women who kill. In one instance, John Taylor’s story of a father who kills his children, The Unnatural Father (1621), the pamphlet concludes with the comforting thought that murder is always discovered, citing as examples the two most notorious instances of husband-murder in the period: ‘Arden of Feversham, and Page of Plymouth, both their Murders are fresh in memory, and the fearful ends of their wives and Aiders in those bloody actions will never be forgotten’ (p. 17). Clearly, though this is an account of a father’s acts of infanticide, John Taylor implicitly associates killings within the family with women. He proceeds to stress the unusual nature of this case: ‘It is too manifestly known, what a number of Stepmothers and Strumpets have most inhumanly murdered their Children … But in the memory of man (nor scarcely in any History) it is not to be found, that a Father did ever take two innocent Children out of their beds … to drown them’ (p. 17). It is interesting that he does not recall the story of Walter Calverley in Two Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers. I want to introduce the question of the relationship between agency and gender which arises here by making two preliminary points. First, in many instances, when the focus of an account is almost entirely on the providential wisdom of God in revealing the truth of secret crimes, the issue of human agency, whether male or female, is decidedly secondary, even irrelevant, and the narrative is structured as a divine revelation. Second, the representation of agency is in part modified by conventions of form and genre; it is handled differently in plays, where there is in place a variety of stage conventions by which to explore the processes of human decisionmaking and its impact on the state of the soul, and in ballads, where the criminal woman is given, in some sense, a voice. Techniques for dealing with female agency in these forms will be discussed in later chapters. Here, I focus on prose pamphlets. In view of the ideology of gender distinction promoted by church and state, particularly the law, according to which a woman’s responsibility for her actions is in many ways limited, how far can a woman who commits a crime be held accountable? In what terms can her role as perpetrator be represented? Frances Dolan comes to the conclusion, hardly surprising in this cultural context, that the subjectivity of such women is represented in crime literature in predominantly negative terms, although she does make the very valid point that representations of murderous wives often ‘present


violence as one means by which women could be constituted and recognized as subjects in the early modern period’.87 She argues that ‘when [the texts] represent those perpetrators sympathetically, it is at the cost of ascribing them any agency. When they represent such persons as subjects and agents, they show them as violent transgressors whose interiorities and voices are disruptive and destructive, prior to and apart from the actions to which they are shown to lead’.88 In broad terms, this is not untrue, but it simplifies the variety of ways in which women’s relationship to crimes they have committed can be represented. There certainly are representations of women’s crimes which could be termed ‘sympathetic’ where the writer achieves this position by drawing on particular kinds of extenuating circumstances that in effect limit or remove the woman’s responsibility. Unorthodox religious convictions are often cited as the motivation. For example, Margaret Vincent, who killed two of her children, has been ‘converted to a blinde beliefe of bewitching heresie’, which convinces her that ‘it was meritorious, yea and pardonable, to take away the lives of any opposing Protestants’ (sig. A3). Margaret Clark, a servant who sets fire to her master’s house, has been bribed by a man identified as a Papist; the pamphlet describing her crime is entitled Warning for servants: And a Caution to Protestants. The author of Bloody newes from Dover (1647), which describes how Mary Champion, an Anabaptist, decapitated her seven-weekold child and offered the head to her husband to baptise, also cites a case of a Catholic mother who murders her child to prevent her husband from bringing him up as a Protestant. But religious propaganda of this kind is not purely focused on women criminals; Enoch Ap Evan, who killed his mother and brother and then decapitated them, acted under the influence of a nonconformist sect, which caused him to detest his family’s form of worship. ‘It was for no other reason, but because according to the Churches iniunction, and all due Canonicall obedience, they receuied the Holy Sacrament kneeling’ (sig. A3v). Diabolical temptation is probably the commonest way of suppressing agency, whether male or female, in crime. As seen in the account of the infanticidal widow in Murther Will Out, discussed earlier, this is not necessarily to be dismissed as a rhetorical pretext, although in some texts it is possible to read the woman’s reference to the devil as a consciously chosen stratagem to exploit her own lack of responsibility. In A True and Wonderful Relation of a Murther Committed in the Parish of Newington (1681) Charity Philpot, having killed a child and threatened other violence, claims that ‘a Man in a High-crownd Hat bid her do it … and that he had wheted the knife and put it into her hand’ (p. 2). The perfunctory style of reference to the devil seems to suggest a lack of conviction in his reality (though, of course, Charity Philpots speaks the words given her by the male writer). At the end of a brief and baldly told account of infanticide by a woman, identified only as a Dutch maid in the house of ‘Arnold a Cobler’, the


writer adds: ‘But this one thing is to be noted that being demaunded of the wiues who gaue her that unnatural minde & mischieuious help, so to kill the Childe, [she] aunswered that the diuell was with her and helped her to dispatch it in that manner’ (A World of Wonders, sig. F2v). The extent of the maid’s belief in this supernatural assistance cannot be gauged from this account; but the insertion of the devil into the narrative serves the purpose of a writer whose stated aim is to expose the wickedness of his own society. But in other late accounts of child-killing, such as Blood for Blood, or Justice executed (1670) by Partridge and Sharpe, or Concealed Murther reveiled (1699), individual stories of maternal misery are supplemented with the familiar narrative of diabolical persuasion to quite different effect. Mary Cook, in Blood for Blood, is the mother of eight children whose melancholy disposition makes her easy prey for the devil, who leads her to extremes of self-pity and attempts at suicide. This in itself does not permit of a sympathetic representation of mental breakdown. So distraught is Mary that she even tries to cut her own throat; this is ascribed to an impulse of outrageous wickedness: ‘at the last the habit of wicked devices had so taken root in her, that she thirsted, and as it were was impatient, til some way or other her own life was broughte to an end’ (p. 13). One day she goes into her children’s room, and is tempted by the devil to speculate on what might happen to her favourite child if she were to die. She is described here as making a decision, that ‘she had better rid that of life first, and then all her fears and cares for it would be at an end, and so she should put an end unto her own miserably life, which was so burdensome to her’ (p. 15). The writers here allow Mary Cook an interiority, a subjectivity; the account reads in several places like the transcription of speech and indeed it is stated of the actual murder that ‘This relation she gave herself but the day before her execution’ (p. 16). Having killed the child by cutting its throat, Mary Cook, horrified by the sight of her own bloody hands, is rendered ‘exceeding stupid’ (p. 17). When asked why she has taken the life of her favourite child, she replied that ‘she was discontented, and thought her Husband and relations did not love her’ (p. 19). The writers imply an emotional distance between the intense horror of the crime and the woman’s stupefied reaction to it, which is explicable to them in terms of her diabolically induced melancholy and despair; but her subsequent behaviour betokens a spiritual awakening. During the trial she is so stricken with remorse that she ‘became the pity of all or most spectators’ (p. 20) and she spends her time in prison making devout preparations for death. Her death displays her as an exemplum of the penitent sinner, a spectacle for ‘thousands of spectators beholding her with a general compassion’ as she ascends the gallows ‘not in the least terrified, nor changed in her countenance’ (p. 47). Confession and penitence figure strongly in the sympathetic accounts of criminal women. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, the scaffold speech in which the condemned prisoner accepted the justness of his or her fate at the


moment of death constituted an important means of ideological control. A period of devout repentance in prison, such as Mary Cook served, confirmed the rightness, in the eyes of God and of man, of the law’s dealings with the criminal. Lincoln B. Faller, in his exploration of the genre of criminal biography, cites the pamphlet The Penitent Prisoner (1675), a ‘character’ (in the Theophrastan sense) which defines the ideal conduct for the convicted criminal: ‘The Penitent Prisoner … is one, who although he confess himself to have been seduc’t by evil company, yet being under restraint … he makes a Pulpit of his Prison to Preach to him Repentance; a Sermon of his Shackles to teach him his Service’.89 Penitence can be not merely a spiritual condition, but also a public spectacle, a display. In A Warning for Bad Wives (1678), Sarah Elston, condemned to be burnt for murdering her husband, preaches a sermon of wifely obedience: ‘clothed all in White, with a vast multitude of people attending her’, she addresses herself to women, telling them ‘they should remember that their Husband is their Head, and that the Apostle requires them to be obedient to them in everything’ (p. 6). Sarah Elston’s cooperation with the ideology of state punishment enables her crime to be represented in the pamphlet in a way that is near to being morally neutral. The first account of the crime is that during a domestic row in which her husband ‘beat her very severely’ she retaliated, and ‘with a pair of Sizzars gave him a wound on the left part of the breast, whereof, without speaking one word, he dies’ (p. 2). In her confession, as summarised by the writer, she claimed that she had no intention of killing him, but that it was ‘an unfortunate accident’ possibly caused by ‘his violent running upon the point of the Sizzars as she held them out to defend her self’ (p. 7). Dolan sees this presentation of the crime as compromised to comic effect, because ‘pamphleteers who wish to portray murderous wives as penitent and pitiful must awkwardly scramble to shield them from the imputation of intending to kill, just as they are presented as shielding themselves from blows’.90 ‘Awkward scrambling’ may be one perspective on Sarah Elston’s story; but one could counter this conception of narrative difficulty with one of representational difficulty. In such crimes questions of responsibility or agency are genuinely difficult to decide and, although the law may not acknowledge this, a woman’s response to her husband’s violence (over the permissible extent of which both the law and popular opinion were in this period ambivalent) might take ambiguous forms to be construed as either aggressive or reactive. In any case, the penitence of such wives – and there are several of them, including Elizabeth Caldwell, Alice Clarke and Mary Aubrey (in A Hellish Murder, 1688) – is no different in effect from the penitence of women who have committed other sorts of crime, such as Margaret Clark the arsonist, Mary Goodenough, who killed her children, or Ann Evans (in The Poysoners Rewarded, 1687), who poisoned her mistress, or indeed from the penitence of male criminals whose agency in the committing of crime is not denied or seen as compromised.


Some of the women are undoubtedly ‘violent transgressors’, whose agency is achieved at the expense of any possible sympathy, and who fit Dolan’s stereotype – for instance, Margaret Fernseede, Mistress Browne (in Two Most Unnatural and bloodie Murthers, 1605) and Mistress Beast (A Briefe Discourse, 1583) who killed their husbands, and Mary Compton and Abigail Hill who killed children in their care. It is undeniable that these accounts are not structured primarily to explore the subjectivity of the woman criminal, or, put another way, to achieve a psychologically plausible narrative of the crime. But writers do manage to nuance their texts in sometimes unexpected ways. Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, Natures Cruell Step-dames: or, Matchless monsters of the Female sex (1637), contains two accounts of child-killing, the first of which is headed ‘A Narration of the Diabolicall seduction of Elizabeth Barnes, late of Battersay in the County of Surrey widdow, mercilessly to murder Susan Barnes her own naturall Child’. The title suggests that Elizabeth Barnes will be represented as inhuman (and therefore inscrutable) in her wickedness; the heading explains the origin of this wickedness in a way that lessens Elizabeth Barnes’ responsibility for her deed, although the terms ‘widow’ and ‘natural child’, recalling the 1624 ‘Act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, imply the possibility of a social dimension to the crime. The crime is initially ascribed to irresistible diabolical impulses; but after Barnes has ‘inticed’ her daughter to a picnic in the countryside, then cut the sleeping child’s throat, she starts to take charge of her own actions. ‘Her eyes were opened, that she beheld her miserable condition’ (p. 30), and she resists the devil’s temptation to suicide. She flees the wood, ‘even unto the gates of justice’ and is found (perhaps, it is implied, allows herself to be found) and taken into custody. Questioned by Goodcole, she says at first that the devil tempted her, but subsequently admits to a human motivation in the desperation resulting from desertion by a faithless lover who makes her pregnant and abandons her. It could be argued that this detail robs her of agency in the interest of arousing pathos. But perhaps more relevant is the interweaving of explanations for the crime, the humanitarian counteracting the supernatural. Elizabeth Barnes is not simply an instrument of the devil, but a woman in need of help and support. If, in his emphasis on the power of prayer as protection against the devil and the readiness of the minister to discover the sin of his flock ‘to save that way their soules’ (p. 15), Goodcole is using Elizabeth Barnes to make propaganda for his church as the true faith, it is not to deny that she is an unfortunate and socially powerless woman trying to assert some measure of control over her circumstances. The account of The trueth of the most wicked & secret murthering of John Brewen (1592) also depicts a woman disempowered through subjection to a lover. Anne Welles loves John Parker, but marries his friend John Brewen. Parker is not ‘in estate to marrie’ whereas Brewen woos her with gold and


jewels. Parker who has already made Anne pregnant persuades her to undertake Brewen’s murder and obtains ‘strong deadly poison’ for her to use. This poison is specially selected to work without producing visible signs on the body. Poison, often associated with female murder attempts because it does not involve violence or confrontation and typifies the stealth and insidiousness thought to characterise the methods of the murderous woman, is not here ascribed to the woman’s choice.91 Anne’s behaviour mingles self-assertion (towards Brewen) with abjection (towards Parker). She refuses to take Brewen’s name as his wife and will not sleep with him after the wedding night or even stay in his house. After a first murder attempt miscarries, she tries again, manipulating the deceived husband into going out to buy her a ‘pennyworth of red herrings’ while she makes a further ‘messe of suger soppes’ with poison in it for the second attempt. Though Parker supplies the poison, Anne Welles is not without ability to act on her own initiative. Brewen dies and is buried, without any suspicions being raised. Anne’s life is now taken over by Parker: ‘to such slauerie and subiection did he bring her, that she must runne or goe wheresoeuer he pleased to appoint her, held he vp but his finger at any time’ (p. 13). In a violent argument he reneges on an earlier promise to marry her, citing her sexual reputation: ‘if I were so minded (quoth he), I would be twise aduised how I did wed with such a strumpet as thyself’ (p. 14). The row is vividly presented, in direct speech without narrative commentary. (One can see the justification for Collier’s ascription of the pamphlet to Kyd.) Anne turns Parker’s accusation back on himself: ‘Why, thou arrant beast (quoth shee), what did I then, which thou didst not prouoke me to doo? If my husband were poysoned (shameles as thou art) it had neuer been done but for thee: thou gauest me the poyson, and after thy direction I did minister it vnto him.’ (p. 14) Dolan, analysing the dynamics of the exchange, suggests that ‘by contrasting Welles’s and her lover’s responses to one another after the murder, the text demonstrates that the violence by which wives assert themselves marks them as threatening, unwomanly, and unmarriageable’.92 But this is not the whole story, because the impact of Anne Welles’s utterances is conditioned by those of John Parker. His refusal to marry her is not just a function of her own unmarriageability as a murderous wife, but also of his own brutality and ‘graceles’ condition. He is as guilty of the murder as she and is also executed, though, of course, ‘she had iudgment to be burned in Smythfield’ and he ‘to be hanged in the same place before her eyes’ (p. 15). The summary of the fates of the two is terse and not misogynistic. Anne Welles is not more guilty than John Parker, and although as the title-page states, she acted through the ‘provocation’ of Parker, this neither robs her of agency nor victimises her. Clearly, the case was sensational; a further


pamphlet and four ballads about it, all lost, were entered in the Stationers’ Register within a month after the Page of Plymouth murder, also commemorated in several printed texts, and of even more totemic status as a husband-murder. This pamphlet rode the wave of anxiety and perhaps cashed in on the notoriety of the Page case. But in comparison with the prose accounts of Page the John Brewen pamphlet is distinctly more evenhanded, and allows Anne Welles a considerable element of agency without demonising her. It lacks the exploitative quality that might in the circumstances have been expected. A much later pamphlet on an even more sensational case of husbandkilling, A Hellish Murder Committed by a French Midwife on the Body of her Husband (1688), goes a great deal further than The trueth of the most wicked & secret murthering of Iohn Brewen in the direction of creating a subjectivity for the wife, also admitting a degree of complexity in its representation of the dynamics of this particular marriage. 93 The subjectivity of Mary Aubrey (or Hobry) the midwife is, as Dolan says, ‘constructed as violent, as a choice of her life over her husband’s life’, 94 but this violence comes about not as an act of gratuitous rebellion, but in response to her wretched circumstances, married to a drunken brutal husband who rapes (or perhaps sodomises) her. The very acknowledgement of his acts of sexual brutality is rare in this period when rape, even outside marriage, was largely discounted as a crime. 95 More than once, she refuses to ‘submit to a compliance with him in Villanies contrary to nature’ (p. 30), until ultimately he ‘acted with such a Violence upon her Body in despite of all the Opposition she could make, as forc’d from her a great deal of Blood’ (p. 33). But Mary Aubrey is not simply a victim figure. Witnesses, many of them her fellow-countrymen, testify to hearing her ‘menacing and reviling’ her husband ‘more than Forty several times’, and expressing a wish for his death. He tries but fails to reform, and a pattern of marital misuse, followed by separation, followed by reunion, emerges. Mary Aubrey fears for her life. She carries a knife with the intention of killing her husband, but does not use it. After she has strangled him while he is sleeping she tries to revive him with brandy. Failing to do so, she cuts his body into many pieces, wraps each separately, and, assisted by her teenage son, distributes them in various parts of London. It is a violent and alarming account, and clearly the grotesque aftermath of the murder increases the element of horror. Mary Aubrey, depicted as ‘thinking with her self’ how to resolve her terrible dilemma, is a figure with an interior life and a consciousness of her own accountability. Although these may emerge, in Dolan’s words, as ‘disruptive and destructive’, Aubrey is also a tragic figure, a woman trapped in an unendurable situation who comes to regard murder as her only option. This is a distinctive and humane view of the woman criminal, pitiable, unfortunate, but also capable of horrific violence.96


Crime and the family Susan Amussen used reports of this case to illustrate the ambivalent attitude to domestic violence in the period: ‘the battered-wife syndrome was simultaneously recognized and dismissed’.97 Marriage and family constitute the other major social institution of the period, after the law, within the context of which women’s crimes need to be situated. As the discussion of neighbours and neighbourhood values has indicated, the household was not then a private sphere in the modern sense; it was, both literally and conceptually, ‘always open to public scrutiny’.98 Recent work by social historians has explored the implications of this in a variety of ways, demonstrating, for example, how infringements of the accepted hierarchy of gender roles within marriage were a matter for the community to evaluate, and often to punish.99 People accepted this scrutiny, especially if carried out in the name of religious values, where in more recent times, when boundaries are differently drawn, it would be found intrusive. Physical privacy within the home was rare, even among the upper classes, and, as scholars exploring the development of notions of selfhood show, there was a perceived continuity, rather than a disjunction, between public and private life.100 This can be demonstrated at a very practical level. As William Le Hardy says from evidence of the Middlesex Sessions, the powers of search allowed to constables ‘were of so wide a nature that cases of unseemly conduct even in private houses were brought to the notice of the court’.101 F. G. Emmison gives examples from the records of Essex church courts of such regulatory activity carried out by constables entering houses at night to investigate possible sexual misconduct, even reproving spouses for ‘immodest’ behaviour towards one another.102 The early modern family, in both ideology and practice, was a public institution, a ‘model of social order’, but also a place where ‘power is exercised privately in the interests of public order’.103 Marriage within society operated at the shifting boundary between the private and the public, and the accepted hierarchies within household relationships were analogous to those within political life, with the husband as head, the wife as the body, the husband as ruler, the household as commonwealth, and so on. Lena Cowen Orlin cogently summarises the dynamic of power in Arden Of Faversham in these terms: ‘Arden’s house is a commonwealth; he is its sovereign; Franklin is his councillor; his wife Alice and his servant Michael are rebels against his authority; Mosby is an intended usurper; and the domestic language derives from the political discourse.’104 Hence, the justification for conceiving of the murder of a man by his wife or servant as an act of petty treason; a wife who is simply undutiful is ‘a home-rebell, a housetraitor’.105 In early modern Protestant societies, marriage became not just a public good, but ‘the axis of early modern identity, personal and societal’.106 This latter phrase comes from Lyndal Roper’s account of urban


society in sixteenth-century Germany, where she describes the formation of social status amongst craft workers, but it applies almost as well to England, especially to women, where, in law, all women were ‘understood either married or to be married’.107 Laura Gowing too stresses the importance of marriage in early modern society, but she differentiates between its meaning for men and for women: It was in the relations of marriage that the implications of gender difference were most fully put into practice: in economic relations, in the judgment of sexual conduct, and in the balance of power. The experience of marriage, like that of courtship, meant different things for men and women … through the rhetoric and practice of marriage, the conventions of gender difference were inscribed not just upon gender relations, but into social relations, social order, and individual identity.108 These distinctions are particularly relevant to popular accounts of women’s crime, since most of it takes place within, or at the margins of, the family, and the way in which ideas about a woman’s identity shift radically according to her marital status. As the Duke in Measure for Measure concludes, having interrogated Mariana who answers all his questions in the negative: ‘Why, you are nothing then – neither maid, widow, nor wife’ (V.i.202). She has no personal identity conceivable outside of her married status. This highlights the significance of the monologue put into the mouth of poor Mary Aubrey as she prepares to commit the terrible act of murdering her violent husband: ‘What will become of me? What am I to do? Here am I Threatened to be Murder’d, and I have no way in the World to Deliver my self, but by beginning with him’. For Aubrey it is both a social and an existential dilemma: who will she be, if she destroys her husband? Marriage was often conceptualised in conflicting terms: as a hierarchical relationship, but also, according particularly to Puritan-influenced manuals and conduct books, as one of partnership.109 This contradiction compromised women’s authority within the household and raised the question of how the balance, or imbalance, of power within the relationship was to be determined. Marriage was a situation with clear inbuilt potential for abuse. As Mary Aubrey’s case so vividly shows, violence within marriage might be offered by either partner, but it was differently evaluated for husband and for wife. A degree of male violence was deemed acceptable, and wifebeating condoned in certain circumstances; there was no law which disallowed it. Joy Wiltenberg claims that while depictions of wife-beating in early modern England, in the shrew-taming tradition, can be presented as comic, ‘the humor of wife-beating belongs to a transitional stage in which violent marital discipline is no longer an unquestioned procedure, but has not yet come to arouse revulsion among its potential practitioners’.110 Yet


women were also expected to tolerate disruptive behaviour from their husbands, which might or might not extend to violence, and offering resistance to this which could be construed as verbal violence on their part was not acceptable, as the story of Jane Lawson showed. The maintenance of order within the household relates to a certain view of the significance of violence: ‘Male violence was sanctioned to uphold social order within the household; female violence within the household was contrarily a subversion of that order.’111 As was also the case outside the household, male violence was not necessarily perceived as threatening, whereas female violence was. Catherine Belsey, in her influential account of Alice Arden’s crime, suggests that the anxiety that was circulating around the notion of husband-murder in the late sixteenth century derives from a perception of marriage as an institution in a state of crisis.112 At one level, social disapproval of a wife’s dominance in the house is expressed through cultural practices such as the skimmington ride and other shaming rituals directed against both unfaithful and dominant wives, and the various punishments for disorderly female speech. At the same time, such practices may implicitly acknowledge the fact that ‘women could never be dominated to the degree implied in the patriarchal ideal’.113 Fears about the sexual assertiveness of married women were heightened by the readily made connection between free speech and free sexuality; both features of wives’ behaviour undermined the masculinity of their husbands and disrupted the household economy. Laura Gowing refers to the ‘most well-rehearsed scenario of adultery’ as the most disruptive: the sexual relationship between wife and servant or husband’s employee, which features in many accounts of husband-murder, for example, the stories of Alice Arden, Mrs Beast and Mrs Browne (in Two most vnnatural and bloodie Murthers). The ‘ambitious, frustrated servant’114 joins forces with the insubordinate wife to create and then exploit a crisis of authority within the household.115 The situation of the older husband murdered by the wife and her lover, as in the Page of Plymouth case, functions similarly. The propensity of wives to commit murder either by poison or by the use of a household implement such as a kitchen knife or scissors (as Alice Davis and Katherine Francis do in the ballads ‘The unnatural wife’, ‘A warning for all desperate women’ and ‘A warning for wives’) confirms the notion of the household as a site of potential danger, a volatile environment, especially for men.116 While men’s crimes of violence were usually perpetrated against outsiders, women’s were (and still are) far more likely to be against members of their own family.117 In this respect, early modern crime writing is reflective of actual trends in the society it represents; though it is the case, at least in the evidence from assize records, that the main type of family homicide by far was child-killing, not, as in crime writing, murders of spouses. At least one historian of early modern crime believes the level of domestic homicide (including wife-murder) in the period to have been relatively


high, and not less than in present-day society in England.118 It was indeed the case that significant changes were then taking place within the structure of the family, and that the construction of domesticity had important implications for women. The nuclear family was replacing the extended family, which removed a wife from the contact, and potential protection and support, of her ‘natural’ family, replacing these with a greater reliance on her husband.119 At the middle to upper levels of society, women’s economic role within the family seems to have been in decline from the midsixteenth century, and this in itself may impact on the meaning of the family.120 It has been suggested that women’s power was then ‘redefined and assigned to the private sphere’ in a quite narrowly binary sense, and that ‘in England the erosion of women’s economic role paralleled a growing literary emphasis on their power in the realm of interpersonal relations’.121 This latter claim needs to be treated with circumspection. Pamphlets and ballads of the seventeenth century depict women in a number of economic roles, many socially acceptable, such as household servants, midwives and wet-nurses, foster-mothers, sempstresses, innkeepers and landladies, and others such as brothel-keepers, cunning women and prostitutes less so. In ballads especially, much stress is placed on the active participation of the wife within the domestic economy as manager of the household finances, as well as baker, spinner, washerwoman, and so on. But it may well be the case that at lower social levels, and in rural areas, women enjoyed freedoms denied to the better-off and to city wives.122 The enclosing of wives within the household, which was in the process of becoming a feminised space, began in upper-class society and filtered down. It was a process which, Lena Cowen Orlin argues, took place in society before it was accepted or represented in popular cultural forms. Describing A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) she writes: ‘the culture had not yet processed or acknowledged the feminization of the domestic sphere, and the domestic tragedies of fifteen and twenty years later were to resist the notion strenuously, struggling to recover the integrated house of sixteenthcentury political theory’.123 Maybe this feminisation is not directly represented in any of the texts I am concerned with, but its connection with changes in the conceptualisation of women’s domestic roles is significant. The definition of the perfect wife in the seventeenth-century literature of marital conduct was as one whose role was to supplement her husband: ‘What is a wife but a woman given unto a man?’ asks Thomas Gataker.124 ‘A wife is a woman joined to a man to be a help unto him.’ While wifehood is seen as the destined role for a woman to fulfil, it is always a restricted and secondary one; and even in a text by a woman, projected as a counter to misogynistic denunciations of women, Rachel Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), a wife’s part is that of helper to her stronger and more responsible husband.125 The wife’s one unique achievement is motherhood, which also locates her ‘in


the private sphere and under the jurisdiction of men’,126 and again, in the view of recent scholarship, is a compromised ideal. According to Deborah Willis, ‘a growing body of research suggests that in sixteenth-century England ambivalence about mothers, maternal power, and the maternal function was intense and becoming more so as the century wore on’.127 Some of this relates to women of the upper and middling classes who might be in a position to exercise control over their children’s inheritance; as Lisa Jardine shows, the inheritance system enshrined in the law of early modern Europe permitted the intervention of women into what was basically a patrilinear system and gave them ‘economic leverage’ out of proportion to their real power, but enough to create anxiety.128 But changes taking place in the ideological constructions of the ‘good mother’ have broader implications. Willis claims that concomitant with the greater significance attached to the wife’s maternal role, at the expense of other more executive duties such as managing the household, there developed a new and alarming sense of women’s potential for what she calls ‘malevolent nurture’.129 This means not only that excessive maternal care might result in ‘spoiling’ children, in various ways, but also that hostility towards figurative mothers, such as rulers, patrons or household managers, might be displaced onto less powerful but still maternal female figures, such as witches. Some infanticide pamphlets do represent the mothers as killing their children for perversely idealistic reasons, especially to save them from the snares of false religion (Margaret Vincent) or to ensure that they will not suffer should the mother die (Mary Cook). As Dolan says in her excellent account of the ‘altruistic’ infanticide pamphlets, ‘such violence represents maternal solicitude at its most extreme’.130 The child here has become an extension of the mother, and the mother’s distorted perception of what is the right course of action for herself is tragically applied to the child. Usually, these accounts do not feature newborn infants, but children old enough to be capable of an active relationship with their mother. But there is also a good body of pamphlets and some ballads on child-killing which handle the subject quite differently, and in ways probably more representative of the social reality of this crime, where the mother, or sometimes the mother-substitute, kills the child to rid herself of an encumbrance. Here, the child is other, not self, and the woman acts out of expediency, often constructed as barbarity, like Martha Scambler (in Deeds against Nature) or the unnamed maid in A World of Wonders, who throw their infants’ bodies into privies at the behest of the devil. It would be misleading to assume that the particular attitudes to the mother’s role in the upbringing of children and the divisions of labour between husband and wife, such as ‘to promote identification between mother and child’,131 existed only in this period, although that may have been when they developed; ‘altruistic’ child-killing followed by maternal suicide is still a recognised form of disturbed behaviour.132


The family as a context for representations of women’s crime is also relevant in defining those women who existed either at its margins or in indirect relation to it as well as within it. These include unmarried women who are sexually active, such as servants who sleep with their masters, bastard-bearers and prostitutes, but also widows and witches who may be associated with any of these groups. Some of them, like the unmarried servant-girls made pregnant by their employers, play secret parts within the family structure in addition to their legitimate roles; others, like the widows and older women so often on hand to urge discontented wives to make away with their husbands, act directly to subvert this structure. In Murther, Murther (1641), Anne Hamton, the wife, lives in the house of Margaret Harwood; the frivolous Anne’s dissatisfaction with her kind, hardworking husband, who reproves her prodigality, is exacerbated by the provocation of her landlady; ‘for she hearing her Ningles unjust complaint, she cried out that it was her own fault, for letting such an abject villain to live’ (p. 14). The use of the term ‘ningle’, more commonly applied to a male homosexual lover, implies a sexually unnatural alliance between the women or perhaps even a diabolic pact. When Anne has poisoned her husband, she goes immediately to Margaret Harwood to obtain approbation for the deed. Harwood asks the strength of the dose (five drams, enough ‘to have destroyed ten men’), and responds with approbation: ‘well done, said she, if fiue will not be enough, ten shall’ (p. 5). Apart from diabolic instigation, Margaret Harwood is given no direct motivation for her part in this domestic crime; elsewhere widows act in alliance with men from outside the family to persuade the wife to accept the man as a lover. Anne Drury in Golding’s A Briefe discourse (1573), and more emphatically in the play based on this story, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), behaves like this, assuring the reluctant wife Anne Sanders that destiny has decreed that she will marry twice. There is a similar scenario in Gilbert Dugdale’s A True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604). Elizabeth Caldwell, neglected by her husband who spends much time travelling, is long resistant to the overtures of her neighbour Jeffery Bownd, but persuaded to accept him as a lover when the widow Isabel Hall, ‘an ancient motherly woman’, intervenes on Bownd’s behalf. In this case, Hall is very much the driving figure, first getting Bownd to pay her needy brother George £5 to murder Elizabeth’s husband, and then when he delays too long, urging Bownd to procure poison. Anne Turner, confidante to Frances Howard in the Overbury murder case, whose story is told in pamphlets and ballads, epitomises the evil widow, an experienced woman associated with dubious forms of knowledge and magical practices, who involves herself in the marital affairs of someone younger out of greed and vicarious sexual pleasure. Widows were culturally equivocal figures in various ways.133 In some accounts they hover on the edges of respectable society, involving themselves in crime sometimes through intemperate behaviour, like


Mistress Killingworth in The Apprehension of … Elizabeth Abbot (1608), an habitual drunk, often found ‘wallowing unseemly on the ground in her owne soyle’ (sig. A2v), who is murdered by her lodger, Elizabeth Abbot, or through cold-hearted avarice. Annis Dell, the innkeeper in The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther Committed by an Innkeepers Wife, called Annis Dell, and her Sonne George Dell (1606), who is party to killing one child and mutilating another, is referred to as Dell’s wife, but in the other pamphlet on the case, The Horrible Murther of a young Boy (1606), she is called ‘an old widow’. In contrast, the widows who feature in infanticide pamphlets, such as Elizabeth Barnes in Goodcole’s Natures Cruell Step-Dames and Mary Goodenough in Fair Warning, both widows who become pregnant after seduction by unworthy men, appear as socially vulnerable. These widows are not the predatory figures who intervene so fatally in other people’s marriages, but rather victims, excluded by circumstances from normal family life, but doubly estranged by permitting themselves a sexual life which was socially unacceptable. The status of witches is commonly defined in terms of their marginal relationship to the family. Though the idea of them as powerless, outcast figures has been convincingly challenged from several quarters, they none the less hover on the edge of communal normality, inflicting mysterious misfortunes and ailments on their neighbours, disrupting the common peace. Their characteristic activities, and their identity, are integrally related to the family. They may, like the accused women in the Flowers case, be literally servants to the family positioned as the victims of their witchcraft,134 or they may be social outcasts because of their sexually irregular behaviour. Often they are unmarried mothers, like the suggestively named witch in The Apprehension and confession of three notorious Witches. Arreigned … at Chelmes-forde (1589); ‘This Joane Cunny, liuing very lewdly, hauing two lewde Daughters, no better than naughty packs, [who] had two Bastard Children: beeing both boyes, these two Children were cheefe witnesses, and gaue in great euidence against their Grandam and mothers’ (sig. A4). The fact of the children being used to testify against their mother and grandmother further suggests the inversion of the family represented by the figure of the witch, the anti-mother with her displaced teats, or witch’s marks, sucked by her brood of familiars, by which her demonic identity is confirmed.135 Servants, such significant figures in the structure of early modern English society, feature in crime writing as threats to the family stability.136 The apprentice or male servant, taken as a lover by his master’s wife, such as Mosby in Arden of Faversham, Christopher Tomson in A Briefe Discourse of Two Most Cruell and bloudie murthers (1583), Peter Golding in Two most vnnatural and bloodie Murthers (1605), or the curate Lowe in A True Relation of the most Inhumane and bloody Murther, of Master James Minister and Preacher (1609), is probably the most common, but the woman servant who


schemes to replace her master’s wife features regularly in crime stories, though I know of no account in which she successfully achieves her aim. Jane Hattersley, in The Bloudy Mother, is encouraged by Adam Adamson to believe that he will marry her when his wife dies; to expedite this, she buys poison and carries it in her purse for six weeks, but never gets her mistress to take it and never becomes Adamson’s wife. Anne Potts encourages the discontent of her employer, Thomas Cash, with his ailing wife: ‘The woman waxeth euery day more troublesome than other, and therefore I thinke it were well, both for her selfe and others, if she were out of this world’ (Two horrible and inhumane Murders done in Lincolneshire, 1607, sig. A2v). Cash does kill his wife and remarries, but not to Anne Potts, who has to wait for her revenge on this, but gets it by confessing all on her deathbed. The ballad of ‘The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband’, although relating a joint conspiracy by the servant Judith Brown and the husband John Copper, her lover, to poison Mistress Copper in childbed, focuses on Judith Brown, who narrates the story, regrets her fall ‘into this base debauchery’ and warns young maidens to avoid a similar career. Servants conspire against their employers, like Joane Barrs in Natures Cruell Step-Dames, and Ann Evans and Phillipa Cary in The Poysoners Rewarded, and they kill their employer’s children, like Charity Philpot in A True and Wonderful Relation and Mary Anderson in Concealed Murther Reveild. Outside the family home, but as adjuncts to the family situation, childminders, midwives and foster-mothers also kill their employers’ children. But in these curious and chilling accounts, such as the story of Abigail Hill, indicted for the murder of four children, though there may have been others, Mary Compton, in whose cellar innumerable small corpses were found, and Anne Atkins (or Atkinson), also responsible for the deaths of several infants whose bones were discovered under her floorboards, family grief and parental bereavement are absent elements. The infants, it is implied, died of neglect rather than violence, and their loss is discovered only by accident, figured in the ballads about Anne Atkins and Mary Compton as unquiet ghosts. A report of the case in Paris, The Murderous Midwife, with her Roasted Punishment (1673), relates the discovery of more than 60 infant corpses in the house of a well-respected midwife; this comes about only when a neighbour has bad dreams about her and decides to investigate. These are not narratives in which parents or family play any active part; but the evidence, however exaggerated, of widescale rejection of children, initially by their families, latterly by those put in charge of them, has disturbing implications for the construction of the family as a model state. Employers for their part exploit, and sometimes kill, their servants, though sensational accounts of this form of household violence are less common. There is a grim narrative of how Miles Lewis and his wife, a pinmaker, beat, starve and torture an apprentice to death, and often stories of


employers’ exploitation of their servants are briefly recounted or subsumed into some larger narrative. Anthony Munday, in A View of Sundry Examples (1580), mentions how Amy Harrison, a gentlewoman, but ‘a very wicked liuer’, killed her maidservant ‘by such excess of correction’ (p. 88), but does not develop the story, as he does others in the same pamphlet. Munday’s focus is on events, some recent, others not, which exemplify the sinful condition of contemporary society; the gender-basis is not significant to him. Indeed, his final account is not of crime at all but of the recent earthquake felt in London in April 1580, regarded, like the discovery of the crimes, as a certain ‘token of the indignation of God against our wicked liuing’ (p. 97). Women’s crimes were often more sensational than men’s, and thus more newsworthy, but in the end they were no more, nor less, exemplary, and the significance of gender in assessing the degree of assault on social order attributed to the crime in question should not be exaggerated.137 Acknowledging the status of these accounts, in pamphlets, ballads and plays, as representations of a certain kind of social interaction between women, men and children in early modern life is helpful in recognising the special contribution of the material to an understanding of contemporary mentalities. Lena Cowen Orlin says of the play Arden of Faversham that ‘in its richness [it] was capable of nourishing complexities and contradictions and that by its nature [it] could anatomise contemporary ideology as the prescriptive vehicles of ideology could not’. Orlin is writing here specifically of the ‘new medium’ of domestic drama, but her claim for its achievement may well be extended to writing about women’s crime in other forms.138

3 The Broadside Ballad

I open this chapter with a statement of limitation: of all the broadside ballads extant from the years 1575–1700 only about 30 actually deal with the subject of crimes committed by women. A larger number are concerned with crimes committed by men, which necessarily form part, perhaps the most immediate part, of the context for my main subject. Of course, a high proportion of those ballads we know, mainly through entries in the registers of the Stationers’ Company, to have been written in the period have perished, and some of these were certainly about women’s crimes. It is particularly regrettable, for my purposes, that the four ballads registered on the subject of Anne Brewen’s murder of her husband, recorded in the pamphlet, The trueth of the most wicked & secret murthering of Iohn Brewen, Goldsmith of London (1592), have all disappeared;1 so too other ballads linked with extant pamphlets about women’s crimes, such as the ballad of ‘the woman that was Lately burnt in Saint Georges feildes’,2 probably about Margaret Fernseede; ‘Two unnaturall Mothers’,3 probably about the infanticidal women described by Henry Goodcole as Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637); the ‘sorrowful ballad made by Mistris Browne … consentinge to the killinge of her husband’;4 and five ballads including the ‘pitiful lamentacon of Rachell Merrye’,5 related to one of the cases dramatised in Robert Yarrington’s play, Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601).6 Ballads, though formally restricted, could deal with a wide, to contemporaries seemingly inexhaustible, range of subjects, as this piece of dialogue from Middleton’s The World Tost at Tennis (1620) illustrates: Scholar: I could make ballads for a need. Soldier: Very well, sir, and I’ll warrant thee thou shalt never want subject to write of; one hangs himself today, another drowns himself tomorrow; a sargeant stabbed next day, here a pettifogger at the pillory, a bawd on the cart’s nose, and a pandar in the tail; hic mulier, haec vir, fashions, fictions, felonies, fooleries: a hundred havens has the balladmonger to traffic at, and new ones still daily discovered.7 70

The Broadside Ballad 71

Crime by either sex was only one subject, albeit a popular one, of many.8 Nevertheless, the broadside ballad is an essential component of any account of early modern news and crime writing. It played a unique role in the information explosion, which Adam Fox in his work on the interpenetration of oral and literate cultures sees as characteristic of the period. The fact that broadside ballads cover some of the same story-material as pamphlets and plays about domestic crime highlights the contribution of this genre to the representation of such aspects of domestic life as the meaning of gender roles within marriage and female subjectivity. Most significantly, broadside ballads have a particular relationship with women’s culture that is distinct from that of pamphlets and plays, and may influence their handling of the crimes of women. *** The broadside ballad occupied a distinctive position within the culture of early modern England. It was a decidedly liminal form, operating at the boundaries between the oral and the written, between commercial transaction and free circulation, linking élite and popular culture. Bruce Smith calls its status ambiguous, ‘written and yet sung, seen and yet heard’.9 Delivered initially by a professional performer in a public space to a selfselected audience, freely assembled, its method of dissemination could take several forms. It might be circulated entirely by oral means, without textual intervention, in the way that sung folk-ballads have been traditionally handed down within families or close communities for centuries; the printed text, which cost only a penny or less,10 might be purchased by a single individual who would then share it with others, perhaps as part of a spontaneous performance or communal celebration, as happens in The Winter’s Tale; equally, the printed text, designed, at least in the seventeenth century, for visual appeal with its illustrative woodcuts, became an object of interest in its own right, and was commonly preserved for decoration by being pasted up on walls and chimney-pieces. Although the term regularly used in modern accounts of the street ballad to describe these woodcuts is ‘crude’, contemporary taste clearly operated by other canons of value.11 In the second half of the seventeenth century, the printed texts began to appeal to cultured collectors and men of letters, such as the antiquarian Anthony Wood, the diarist Pepys and the scholar and jurist John Selden, who amassed large quantities of these ephemeral productions and so preserved a significant cultural resource which would otherwise have vanished. The function of the ballad as a widespread disseminator of news and information to the non-élite and the speed and ease of its production contributed to its developing into a focus of cultural anxiety, which is reflected in the legislative efforts to control its proliferation and the low reputation


of the form and all those associated with it. Although a high proportion of all ballads reached print without registration by the Stationers’ Company, the state had made efforts to control the broadside press from early days. In times of major religious ferment in England, when the authority of the monarch depended heavily on the suppression of heterodox beliefs and practices, the power of the ballad and other forms of cheap print to influence popular opinion was well understood. In Henry VIII’s reign, ‘An Acte for thadvauncement of true Religion and for thabbolisshment of the contrarie’ (34 and 35 Henry VIII. c. 1, 1542–3) was directed against those who used ‘printed bokes printed balades playes rymes songes and other fantasies’ to instruct the people, especially the young, in false doctrine.12 The inclusion of such a variety of media demonstrates that no distinction was made between serious publications and informal or irregular types of text, scribally produced work, even orally circulated material (as implied in ‘rymes songes and other fantasies’) in terms of their capacity to stir up sedition. The wording of a later proclamation put out in the reign of Philip and Mary, ‘An Acte against sedityous Woordes and Rumours’ (1 and 2 Philip and Mary c. 3, 1554–5), is devised to comprehend the range of diverse forms that mass publication then might take; it aims to punish those who have ‘devised made written printed publyshed and set forthe dyvers heynous sedicious and sclanderous Writinges Rimes Ballades Letters Papers and Bookes’.13 Further legislation in the time of Elizabeth I was directed against ‘fonde and phantasticall Prophesyes’ (5 Elizabeth c. 15, 1563), and against ‘sedicious Wordes and Rumors uttered againste the Queenes most excellent Majestie’ (23 Elizabeth c. 2, 1581). It alludes to material delivered ‘by Writing Prynting Synging’ and ‘Booke Ryme Ballade Letter or Writing’.14 Conversely, of course, ballads could be employed in the interests of state-sanctioned propaganda, as they were by Thomas Cromwell, whom John Foxe admired for employing ‘divers fresh and quick wits’ to produce ‘excellent ballads and books … contrived and set abroad concerning the suppression of the Pope and all Popish idolatry’.15 The power of the ballad to spread without regulation throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or to evade the eye of those (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and their deputies) on the lookout for unsuitable content, seems to have preoccupied the authorities more than its potential to support their policies. Stationers were regularly fined for printing ballads without licence, and also for printing those found to be unsuitable. Abel Jeffes was fined in December 1595 for printing ‘a lewde book called the most strange prophecie of Don Cipriano &c and diuerse other lewde ballades and things very offensive’, and was punished by having his ‘printinge stuffe’ seized and ‘certen fourms of letters’ defaced and made unusable.16 In 1631–2 Henry Gosson was punished for publishing a ballad ‘wherin all the histories of the bible were scurrilously abused’; his defence was that he was only reprinting an old ballad which to his


knowledge had never been banned before.17 In 1612 the Stationers’ Company restricted the right to print ballads to five printers in order to curb the ‘diverse greate abuses … practised aswell in printinge of many lewde ballades, offensiue bothe to god [sic], the Churche and the state’, though the order was rescinded in 1620. The anxieties generated by the ballad undoubtedly represent the fear of the spread of information, especially in printed form, to teach and empower the traditionally underprivileged. Of this the ballad was peculiarly capable, because of the fluidity of its medium, its ability to communicate to the poor and unlettered by word of mouth, its openness to customisation and adaptation, and the additional qualities of memorability and auditory appeal conferred by the setting of words to well-known popular tunes. The tunes themselves could become an extra component of meaning, in that particular ones became conventionally attached to particular kinds of text.18 The socalled ‘hanging tune’, ‘Fortune my Foe’, was regularly used for ‘goodnights’ and lamentations,19 but its familiarity might open up possibilities for parody and subversion. These features relate in interesting ways to the ballad’s role as a vehicle for news. Early modern news, as I have shown in Chapter 1, drew different boundaries between fact and fiction from those in operation in the modern world, and treated the conception of truth-value very differently. None the less, the role of the news ballad in disseminating information about current affairs, affairs of politics and state, should not be underestimated. Rollins calls broadside ballads ‘far more trustworthy and far less absurd than pamphlets exclusively devoted to news that sprang up in the last years of James I’.20 Tessa Watt, however, connects ballads with news only in passing, under the heading ‘Doctor Faustus and other strange histories’: ‘There was a broad cross-section of “news” ballads: miraculous happenings, monstrous births, floods, and fires, which sometimes made use of religious judgements.’21 Indeed, there are many news ballads which deal in a discourse of the strange and prodigious in just this way, but news content in ballads could also take secular and mundane forms. In Natascha Würzbach’s division of the narrative content of the news ballad, miraculous happenings comprise the third category, the others being political events of far-reaching importance, and significant topical events such as processions, sieges or fire disasters.22 As the legislative anxieties about ballads, sedition and propaganda suggest, the ballad was perceived as capable of performing a significant part in the dissemination of news and information, which it did from the earliest times. A. B. Friedman notes that of the few broadside ballads extant from before the reign of Elizabeth I, a number had political content; amongst several competitors for the place of the first extant broadside ballad is one entitled by Percy, who included it in his Reliques, ‘A Ballad of Luther, the Pope, a Cardinal, and a Husbandman’, which can be dated at around 1530.23 What is generally regarded as the earliest ballad controversy took place in 1540, in an exchange of ballads and treatises on the arrest of Thomas


Cromwell.24 Oral songs and ballads had been used as vehicles of news and political propaganda amongst the unlettered for several centuries, some of which survived to find their way into print later, but it was only in the reign of Henry VIII that their circulation by word of mouth was reinforced by print, now a means of putting out the new doctrines of the Reformation and suppressing Catholic beliefs and practices.25 Legislation was soon brought in to restrict the use of printed ballads to the promulgation of authorised propaganda; as Fox says, ‘Governments made ever greater use of the printed broadside as a vehicle for their self-presentation and the transmission of carefully selected news, while the laws of censorship, tightened by the monopoly of licensing granted to the Company of Stationers in 1557, ensured that oppositional verse was confined to a thriving and ubiquitous manuscript culture’.26 Seditious works managed to emerge in printed form none the less, and although libellous verses and ballads were more likely to exist in oral or scribal forms than as printed texts, the street ballad inherited the oral ballad’s association with libel. Selden’s comment in Table Talk is well known: Though some make light of libels, yet you shall see by them how the wind sits: as, take a straw and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. Solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.27 Sometimes ballads with potentially controversial subject-matter got into print and were subsequently suppressed. No ballads on the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh were entered for 1618 (though at least one was printed and has survived).28 John Chamberlain knew of ‘diverse ballets, wherof some are called in’ on the subject.29 Such ballad production carried its risks; one on the assassination of Dr Lamb, Buckingham’s favourite, sent printer, seller, and singer to Newgate.30 The ballad’s role as purveyor of news was in part a function of its capacity to report almost immediately on current events. Newness, as many have noticed, was one of the ballad’s chief claims to attention. They are, in Smith’s phrase, ‘insistently topical’.31 Because ballads were printed only on one side of a sheet they could be run off more rapidly than conventional publications. Entries in the Stationers’ Register demonstrate that printers were quick off the mark to commission ballads on any significant event. In fact, they did not necessarily wait for the event to take place, but registered a ballad title in anticipation of it.32 In the case of capital crimes, a ballad might be registered (and often written) before the execution of the criminal, as happens with the Mary Compton ballads in 1693. News travelled fast. ‘The lamentable complaint of France’, a ballad on the assassination of Henry IV by François Ravaillac, was registered on 15 May 1610, the day after the event took place; Ravaillac was executed on 27 May. ‘Murder


upon Murder, Committed by Thomas Sherwood, alias, Countrey Tom: and Elizabeth Evans, alias, Canbrye Besse …’ (PG 76) seems to have been issued between the executions of the two felons, which took place on 14 and 17 April 1635, respectively.33 It anticipated by a few days the publication of Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet on the subject, Heauens Speedie Hue and Cry sent after Lust and Murther, licensed on 22 April. No date is known for the publication of ‘Anne Wallens Lamentation’ (PG 14), but it may well have been very timely. The burning of Anne Wallen for husbandmurder took place on 1 July 1616, and John Chamberlain’s reference to the case in his letter to Dudley Carleton of 6 July seems as if it may have been based on information given in the ballad: There was a seminary priest hanged at Tyburn on Monday … That morning early there was a joiner’s wife burnt in Smithfield for killing her husband. If the case were no otherwise than I can learn it, she had summum jus; for her husband having brawled and beaten her, she took up a chisel, or some such other instrument, and flung at him, which cut him into the belly, whereof he died.34 The two forms of print, ballad and pamphlet, often worked together, the same printer commonly responsible for both, presumably assuming a somewhat different market for each. It wasn’t necessarily the case that the ballad was secondary to the pamphlet, or that, as M. A. Shaaber says, it functioned ‘not as a harbinger of news but as a follower in its wake’.35 Goodcole, in his pamphlet The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch (1621), mentions the ‘most base and false Ballets, which were sung at the time of our returning from the Witches execution’, and worries that ‘such lewde Balletmakers should be suffered to creepe into the Printers presses and peoples eares’ (sig. A3v). No such ballads on Elizabeth Sawyer are registered or extant, though Goodcole’s words imply that they did exist in print. Kemp, in Kemps nine daies wonder (1600), protests to his dedicatee about the lying ballads made and published during his journey: A sort of mad fellows seeing me merrily dispos’d in a Morrice, haue so bepainted mee in print since my gambols began from London to Norwich, that (hauing but an ill face before) I shall appeare to the world without a face, if your fayre hand wipe not away their foule colours.36 Shaaber is right, of course, in his general emphasis on the function of the news ballad as an expression of popular opinion: Unlike a true report of news, it is derived not from the circumstances of outward occurrences, but from the impression they make on the popular mind. As contemporary historical documents these ballads are highly


unsatisfactory, but as revelations of the majority opinion on passing events they are perfect.37 They are not ‘perfect’ in the sense of being completely transparent or unmediated, since censorship of political material attempted to ensure that heterodox opinion was suppressed. But they give access to communal values, the values of the non-élite, in a way unique in the period, and historians are increasingly drawing on them to supplement, and often modify, evidence on cultural attitudes derived from élite sources.38 It is particularly relevant at this point to note that ballads had the potential to appeal to female audiences denied to other print media. Child believed that the traditional or folk-ballad was passed on mainly through the female members of a family or community, and in the early modern period the broadside and the folk-ballad cannot be said to have separate identities. The association between women and ballad-singing, at least in a domestic context, is strong and enduring. Jacques in Aston Cokain’s The Obstinate Lady (1658) claims: ‘I learnt a song / of my old grannam, many a good ballad she / would have sung me by the fire side ore a black pot’ (III. i). In the mid-seventeenth century Izaak Walton and Dorothy Osborne relate anecdotes about country girls singing ballads as an accompaniment to their work. 39 Earle, in his Character of a ‘pot-poet’, uses the figure of the ‘poor country wench [who] melts like her butter’ as she listens to ballads as a satirical trope to illustrate the trivial appeal of the ballad to an illiterate and uncritical audience, an audience such as Mopsa and Dorcas in The Winter’s Tale. Autolycus commends the ballad of ‘Two maids wooing a man’ to them by claiming that ‘there’s scarce a maid westward but she sings it’ (IV.4). They know the tune already, and join in enthusiastically with him. In Walton’s account, a milkmaid mother and her daughter sing in turn Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me’ and Ralegh’s reply to it to entertain the anglers. Of the texts themselves, Friedman says that while we cannot be certain that the milkmaids learned their words from a broadside, ‘there is little doubt that Walton refurbished his text from one’. 40 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries professional ballad singers were generally men, though women singers became more prominent, according to Rollins, from the Civil War onwards, and according to him singers in the eighteenth century were predominantly women. 41 Only two women singers are known by name before that: in Norwich, ‘William Nynges his wife was Commaunded thay neyther he nor his wife shall singe nor sell any ballettes within this Cytty after this day [16 November 1605] upon payne of whippynge’, and Nan Sharpe is mentioned as a London ballad-singer in the gazette Merlinus Anonymous (1653). 42 The involvement of women in public entertainment with music and dancing, such as the woman fiddler who was put in the stocks at Merriot in Somerset in 1637, and the


woman who performed ‘rare feates of Actiuity with Dauncinge on the Ropes’ in Norwich before the Mayor in 1616, suggests that the public were not unaccustomed to the sight of female performers.43 John Rhodes in 1602 was displeased to see ‘certaine women Brokers and Peddlers (as of late in Staffordshire there was) … with baskets on their arms’ selling Catholic ballads and pamphlets, 44 and women seem regularly to have accompanied their husbands as peddlers and distributors of cheap print. Since ballads were sold by being performed, it is not difficult to imagine such women assisting in the performance. The association between women and ballad-singing is significant for several reasons: it modifies the view commonly taken that the main appeal of ballads was to a young male audience,45 and allows for a broader notion of the ‘receptive impression’ (Würzbach’s phrase) created by this genre. This is particularly relevant to the large group of ballads on subjects like courtship, marriage and relations between the sexes, the sort of ‘merry ballads’ called for by Mopsa and Dorcas. It may also cast a different light on the impersonation of the woman’s voice by a male singer, often a satirical device and used to distancing effect; as Wiltenberg says, the adoption of this voice none the less ‘required from male authors a more vivid conception of femaleness than other forms of characterisation. They attempted, if only in play or parody, to imagine what it was like to be a woman, so as to cast in her own words their, and her, message to the public.’46 One might argue that the same thing happens in the theatre, but during the performance of the broadside the woman’s voice stands alone, its message not counteracted by those of men. As Smith says, the subject-position of the criminal woman seems to be a double one: ‘the singer gets to be the criminal, but she also gets to be the criminal’s judge’.47 However, her transformation in the moments before death from a demonised and deviant figure to a model of Christian penitence could be an ambiguous one, as I shall later illustrate. The performative dimension of the street ballad, coupled with its common tendency to target particular groups within the audience, allows for the text to be inflected in specific ways. Factors such as the brevity of the ballad form, the advantage to the seller in delivering his material so as to highlight its variety, the self-selected nature of the audience, free to come and go at will, allow the ballad to reach out quite directly to sections of the community not always seen as significant consumers of literary culture, and to cater for perceived minority interests, for example, those of women. The relationship of the street ballad to the folk ballad may also bear on questions of gender. As a consequence of nineteenth-century criticism influenced by ‘Romantic medievalism’, 48 these came to be regarded as distinct and antithetical modes, with the street ballad always an inferior and degraded offshoot of an older, more authentic, purer tradition corrupted by the advent of print. But since the


mid-twentieth century this hierarchy has been deconstructed; in the introduction to that important anthology, The Common Muse. Popular British Ballad Poetry from the 15 th to the 20 th Century it is exposed as the product of cultural attitudes which are ahistorical, elitist and sentimental. This is not to deny that there are differences, deriving from the street ballad’s urban origins, its function as a vehicle of mass opinion (even in its early and perhaps pre-print forms),49 and its identity as a production of print; but in the early modern period there existed what has been characterised as a ceaseless interchange between street ballads and more canonical poetic forms, including the folk ballad, as illustrated in the anecdote from Walton cited earlier, an interchange that comprehended not only metrical forms and diction, but also narrative content. It might appear that one element less likely to form part of this exchange is the representation of social institutions in their contemporary context. But I want to suggest at least the possibility that some aspects of gender relations as depicted in the broadside are influenced by folk ballads, and that this influence emerges in the broadside handling of some women’s crimes. But before coming to this very specific point, it is necessary to look first at crime ballads more generally. *** There’s nothing beats a stunning good murder after all. (Experience of a Running Patterer) They usually deal in murders, seductions, crim-cons, explosions, alarming accidents, ‘assassinations’, deaths of public characters, duels and love letters. But popular or notorious murders are the ‘great goes’. (Mayhew, London Labour, 1861, 1, 223) Victorian street songs, to which Mayhew refers, were probably more explicitly interested in details of blood and violence than their early modern equivalents. But the popularity of the type of criminal ballad known as the ‘goodnight’, in which the condemned expresses in his or her own person contrition for the deed, gives details of it and makes spiritual preparations for death, was continuous from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. 50 One attraction of the form may have been, as Lennard Davis claims, that it conferred on the text an effect of authenticity, and in combination with the fact that (in early modern times, at any rate) such ballads were sung at the actual execution or soon afterwards it allows the audience an experience of ‘metonymic contiguity with the work of the criminal’. 51 Such an effect of contiguity can be enhanced when the narrator is made to describe events taking place in the present tense, such as her own death in flames. The final stanzas of


‘The Unfaithful Servant; and The Cruel Husband … 1684’ (PB 2, 151) are as follows: Alas! You may behold, my sad and dismal doom, Both hands & heart, and e’ry part in flames you’l see consume. … In this deuouring flame, my life must now expire, Alas my sins I needs must blam [sic] I end my days in fire. To you that comes to see, a wofull sinners fall, O let those cruel flames now be, a warning to you all. The singer’s audience is invited by Judith Brown, the servant, to imagine itself in the role of the crowd at the execution witnessing her burning; the murderous woman displays her dying, moment by moment. This depiction of the criminal woman’s punishment at the hands of the state exemplifies well what Foucault has to say about the function of public execution: ‘The function of the public torture and execution was to reveal the truth … It added to the conviction the signature of the convicted man. A successful public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed.’52 Immediacy was not the only appeal; the printed ballads were intended to be circulated widely and to be available for some time after the execution had taken place. The balance between elements of narrative and of lyric, which define the moral and emotional context, varies; it is probably true to say that ballads in the voice of a woman contain more of the latter, but considering the contribution of the performative dimension the initial reception of the ballad would not necessarily be the more sympathetic on that account. There was a contemporary perception that such ballads could confer a notoriety, even a posthumous fame, on their subjects, as the following exchange from Henry Glapthorne’s play, The Ladies Privilege (1640), makes clear. Here, Frangipan is a naïve young man, and Adorni a satirical humorist. Frangipan: Adorni:

I love a man that cares not for hanging. Then to their further glory, which takes off All the disgrace of halter, they are sure Ere they be scarce cold, to be Chronicled


Frangipan:

Adorni:

In excellent new Ballads, which being sung I’ th’ streets ’mongst boyes and girles, Colliers and Carmen, Are brought as great memorialls of their fames, Which to perpetuate, they are commonly stuck up With as great triumph in the tipling houses, As they were scutchions. Better: yet Ide give A hundred Ducats to be chronicled In such a historicall Canto: who composes them? They have their speciall Poets for that purpose, Such as still drinke small Beere, and so are apt To spit out lamentable stuffe. (sig. E4)53

But the general attitude to the ballad as a vehicle for personal libel was one of fear, and this is justified, for instance by the series of ballads on the case of Mary Compton, the ‘murderous midwife’ of Poplar, who was judged guilty well before her trial, and whose crimes are not in the least extenuated even in the first person voice. The first-person goodnight may be the most typical form of the crime ballad, but there were plenty written in the third person about murder, and also treason, witchcraft, and other sensational crimes. These are quite various in their forms and effects. At one end of a wide affective spectrum is ‘The Araignment of John Flodder and his wife … for burning the Towne of Windham in Norfolke, upon the xi. day of Iune last 1615’ (PG, no. 9), which describes how three members of what may have been a Catholic conspiracy set fire to the thatch of a house which then spread, causing damage somewhat overestimated by the ballad-writer:54 Three hundred dwelling Houses of account, Which did to fourtie thousand pounds amount, Are all consumd and wasted quite away, And nothing left, but ruine and decay. The ballad warns against both the Catholic menace and vagrants, Flodder and his companions having apparently lived by begging, but its main purpose is fund-raising. At the end the presenter appeals to his audience: Yet in your hearts let Charitie remain, And freely giue, to buyld this Towne againe. A list is then given of the names of those entitled to collect on behalf of the restoration fund, and of the towns and districts in southern England where this can be done. Among those that survive, such a distinctively pragmatic


ballad is a rarity; it testifies to the belief of the authorities in the appeal of the medium as an instrument of publicity and propaganda. At the opposite end of the spectrum is another ballad about an unusual crime, this time high treason, ‘A Lementable New Ballad upon the Earle of Essex Death’ (1601).55 This commemoration of the life and death of a popular figure of national importance draws upon a series of devices for arousing emotion; at the start the presenter urges audience participation in an expression of communal grief: All yow that crye O hone! O hone! come now and sing O lord! With me For why? our Jewell is from us gonne, the valient Knight of Chivalrye. He stresses his own involvement in this emotion: … the teares my cheekes downe runne when I thinke of his last good-night. Each stanza culminates in a slightly varied refrain line, ending on the word ‘goodnight’. Most effective, the last five stanzas are written in Essex’s own voice. This redirection enables him to accept his fate as just (‘It’s that I have deserved to dy, / and yeeldes my self unto the blowe’), to present himself as a husband, father, and, especially, an orthodox Protestant, and to draw attention to the shape of his life in a way that recreates for the ballad audience the moment of his death on the scaffold. He appeals to the executioner: Dericke! Thow knowst, at statelye cales I savde thy lyfe, lost for a rape there done, Which thow thyself canst testifye – thy owne hand three and twenty hung. But now, thow seest, my tyme is come: by chaunce into thy hands I light. Stricke out the blow, that I maye know thow Essex lovedst at his good-night. This cleverly constructed ballad negotiates between the orthodox position on Essex’s fall and the popular sense of outrage, constructing the earl as a hero and patriot even when put to death as a traitor.56 The crimes committed by men and celebrated in ballads are varied, including arson, treason, bribery and corruption, political assassination, domestic murder, robbery with violence, and conjuring. As in the Essex ballad, the man may emerge in a heroic rather than a criminal light, and


the ballad laments his fall rather than using him as an exemplum of conduct to be avoided. ‘Luke Hutton’s Lamentation; Which he wrote the day before his Death …’ (RB VIII, 54–8) manages partly through the adoption of folkloric motifs to make a hero out of a much less deserving character. Hutton, probably the pamphleteer and a younger son of Matthew, Archbishop of York, was hanged for highway robbery.57 Although his ballad, which perhaps he really did write, begins in the penitential mode conventional in first person goodnights – I am a poor Prisoner condemned to die, Ah; wo is me! wo is me! For my great folly – it rapidly modulates into a celebration of the highwayman as folk-hero. Hutton relates how he had twelve ‘yeomen tall’ to assist him, known as his apostles; how he robbed the rich and celebrated his nineteenth birthday by robbing ‘in bravery nineteen men’; how he was once made jailor and let all the prisoners out; and how, when a prisoner himself, he called for ‘Wine, for Beer, and Ale’ to toast all his friends. Although my Keeper was gentle and kind; Yet was he not so kind as I, To let me go at liberty. Hutton’s jocular tone is preserved to the last, when in the final stanza he bids farewell to his friends and reminds them: When on the ladder you do me view, Think I am nearer Heaven than you. The pious commonplace is ironically modified by the way the body of the ballad has constructed Hutton as a hero. The highwayman has traditionally stood for a type of manliness – bold, daring, supported by loyal comrades, and populist in his ethics.58 A more ambiguous ballad, ‘John Spenser a Chesshire gallant, his life and repentance, who for killing of one Randall Gam: was lately executed at Burford a mile from Nantwich’ (PG 45), also draws on folkloric motifs. In its opening stanza, which celebrates Spenser as a type of popular hero; the presenter summons his hearers to listen to the story of the fall of a good man: Kind hearted men, a while geue eare and plainly Ile unfold The saddest tale that euer yet, by mortall man was told. One Spenser braue, of Chesire chiefe,


for men of braue regard: Yet hee unto his Countries griefe did good with ill reward. But although Spenser is skilled in masculine pursuits such as leaping, ‘dauncing and beating of the war-like Drumme’ he is a flawed hero. Though a good shot, he ‘could not hit the white’, and this imperfection is metaphorical of his moral failing: his pursuit of ‘lustfull Queanes’ and the neglect of his wife. In the end, he causes the death of a drunken man in a quarrel and is hanged in chains. However, his reputation as ‘a Cheshire gallant’ allows the ballad-writer Thomas Dickerson to present this dishonourable death as undeserved: He that was kild, had many friends, the other few or none, Therefore the Law, on that side went, and the other was orethrone. The folk-ballad is ransacked for the symbolism of innocence to support this interpretation; after Spenser’s death two white doves hover for three hours over the corpse, and two white butterflies alight on it. His wronged but faithful wife steals away the body and buries it by night. In the second part Spenser is given voice to make his confession and express repentance, drawing lessons for young men against brawling and the company of whores. The ballad ends: Example truly take of me all vitious Courses shunne: For onely by bad company, poore Spenser is undone. Thus the uncomfortable story of an unfaithful, violent and probably drunken brawler who kills a man is transformed into a narrative that hints strongly at a miscarriage of justice and becomes in the end a gendered warning to men against unscrupulous women. Twin forces are at work here, a certain primitive populist morality which privileges masculine ‘gallantry’ and owes something to the folk-ballad, and a more bourgeois domestic morality which fears the inability of men to resist the lure of unregulated female sexuality. I have dwelt on these contrasting ballads about men who commit crimes to illustrate one way in which gender can operate as a shaping force on the goodnight. The political career and downfall of Essex, ‘the valient Knight of Chivalrye’, is a story of masculine heroism conducted in the male world of military action; the women involved in it, the Queen and Essex’s wife,


are secondary figures, whose role is to reinforce aspects of Essex’s masculinity. The opposed female figures in John Spenser’s story, the wife and the whores, although their narrative functions are different, and larger, serve the same purpose in defining how peculiarly masculine a predicament Spenser’s is. In both cases, and that of Luke Hutton, folkloric morality inflects the representation of masculinity and crime. *** In turning to ballads about women criminals one becomes aware at once of a narrowing of range. Not only are the kinds of crimes they commit fewer, but the roles available to the women are more restricted. Ballad subjects are chosen for their fame or notoriety; a male subject may, like Essex or Ralegh, be a public figure of national importance, appropriately described as ‘our Jewell’, someone who commits ‘heroic’ crimes like Hutton, or a regional hero like Spenser, but this can never be the case for a woman, who has no public career and wins only notoriety by her crimes. Women’s crimes in ballads are, predominantly, murder; there are few on witchcraft and some in which whores or prostitutes appear as minor figures. Two ballads deal with women who committed highway robbery, ‘Murder upon Murder, Committed by Thomas Sherwood, alias Country Tom: and Elizabeth Evans, alias, Canbrye Bess’ (PG 76) and ‘A true relation of one Susan Higges …’ (RB 2, 632–8). The first of these not only treats the woman criminal (along with the man) as vile and bestial, but also blames Evans for bringing Sherwood to his downfall: For by alluring tempting bates, she sotted so his minde That unto any villany, fierce Sherwood was inclin’d, His coyne all spent he must haue more, for to content his filthy (whoore) The subtext is of susceptible manliness corrupted by predatory female sexuality, which is the commonest narrative line in any popular handling of prostitution in this period. ‘A true Relation of one Susan Higges’ has initially something of the boastful note found in ballads of male criminals like Luke Hutton. It is a first person account in which Susan Higges, although conventionally repentant, none the less describes her exploits of highway robbery, conducted without an accomplice, as acts of gallantry: My weapon by the highway side hath me much money won; In men’s attire I oft have rode upon a gelding stout,


And done great robberies valiantly the countries round about. Her victims are farmers and merchants, social types not traditionally accorded much sympathy in populist discourse; she addresses herself, in the spirit of Moll Frith or Mary Ambree, the women-warriors of the day, to men, as an example of female boldness: You ruffling roysters, every one in my defence say then, Wee woman still for gallant minds may well compare with men. But retribution comes when she betrays her own sex and robs another woman, who calls her by name; she stabs the woman, who in dying spits three drops of blood at Higges’s face, which cannot be washed off. This introduction of a motif from the traditional folklore of blood-guilt reshapes the ballad towards its necessary moral conclusion.59 Susan Higges is overcome by guilt and confesses to her servants. But the didactic element in this ballad is extremely perfunctory and gender plays no part in it. Higges’s career of crime is celebrated like that of Hutton; the quasi-supernatural account of her downfall gestures to the cliché that murder will out, and indicates the inevitability for all of punishment for crime.60 The part played by gender in these ballads often seems very straightforward. Titles direct themselves specifically to women: ‘A Warning for all desperate women’, ‘Mistress Turners Farewell to all women’, ‘A warning for wives’, and one can imagine various possibilities for the ballad-singer here, perhaps satirically singling out members of his audience as a preliminary to a misogynistically inflected rendition, or perhaps adopting the admonitory tone of the marketplace preacher and offering the ballad as a cautionary exemplum. Gender, in the sense of the imagining of femaleness, in these ballads of criminal women is directed not so much towards explaining their fates or accounting for their crimes, as towards self-presentation. Most are written in the first person mode, so that the woman, often addressing herself to a community of other women, displays her own situation: Good wiues and bad, example take, at this my cursed fall. And Maidens that shall husbands haue, I warning am to all. (‘A Warning for all desperate women’, PG 50) The ballads are in general strongly hortatory, and the message specific to the situation, usually inculcating domestic morality of a conventional kind.


Anne Wallen, preparing to burn at the stake for murdering her husband, has a lesson for wives on appropriate conduct: Let not our tongus oresway true reasons bounds Which in your rage your vtmost rancour sounds: A woman that is wise should seldome speake, Unlesse discreetly she her words repeat (‘Anne Wallens Lamentation’, PG 14) The nameless protagonist of ‘No naturall mother, but a Monster’ (PG 75) has particular advice for women like herself, pregnant and unmarried: Sweet maidens, all take heed, heedfully, heedfully, Adde not vnto the deed of fornication, Murder which of all things, The soule and conscience stings, Which God to light still brings, though done in priuate. … Let not the feare of shame, so preuaile, so preuaile, As to win you the name of cruell Mother. This kind of moralising illustrates very clearly the exemplary function of such ballads; the act of murder itself is not the main issue, and though the deed itself is sometimes described, it is not until later that the sensationalism of which ballads are often accused is actually displayed. Sometimes the advice is distinctly pragmatic rather than moral: the presenter of the story of ‘The Injured Children, or, The Bloudy Midwife’ uses it to advocate certain standards of child-care: You mothers that have Children sure, you nere will Money give, That you for that may never more your Child see while you live, For ’tis a comfort for to see, the Mother Nurse its Child, And then no Midwives Cruelty can ever you beguile. (‘The Injured Children’)61


The concern here is not with the guilt of Mary Compton, the midwife, which is assumed without question, or with the suffering of the children, though this is the pretext for the narration, but with the use to which the story can be put. In some of the ballads of husband-murder the didacticism is rigidly enforced; the speaker is merely a puppet who condemns herself out of her own mouth in the interests of teaching wives how to treat (or not treat) their husbands. The simplicity of the form and the drive of the broadside towards a clearly focused summary of the event and its meaning (in a way that would not be so applicable to the traditional folk ballad) result in a narrative that allows no space for ambiguity or uncertainty. In the ballads on the crimes of Anne Wallen (‘Anne Wallens Lamentation’, PG 14), Alice Davis (‘The unnatural wife’, PG 49, and ‘A warning for all desperate Women’, PG 50), and Alice Arden (‘The Complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent’, RB 1, 49–53) the murderous wife presents the dynamic between herself and her husband in terms of unreasonable virago and wronged spouse. The common scenario is that of predominantly happy marriage wrecked by the wife’s self-assertion. Alice Arden describes herself initially as wedded ‘with ioy and great content’; ‘In loue we liu’d, and great tranquility’. Alice Davis too lived ‘in good repute and state … well knowne by many friends’; she and her husband enjoyed ‘diuers merry days … not feeling cause of woe’. If the husband exhibits some fault, such as drunkenness, it is sure to be a small one, not outside the bounds of acceptability for masculine behaviour, and the wife is made to excuse and take all the blame for any marital discord upon herself. In the second part of her lamentation, Anne Wallen narrates the incident in which she killed the man she describes in the first part as ‘my dearest husband’ and ‘my louing husband’: My husband hauing beene about the towne, And coming home, he on his bed lay downe: To rest himselfe, which when I did espie, I fell to rayling most outragiously. I cald him Rogue, and slaue, and all to naught, Repeating the worst language might be thought Thou drunken knaue I said, and arrant sot, Thy minde is set on nothing but the pot. Sweet heart he said I pray thee hold thy tongue, And if thou dost not, I shall doe thee wrong, At which straight way I grew in worser rage, That he by no meanes could my tongue asswage.


He then arose and strooke me on the eare, I did at him begin to curse and sweare: Then presently one of his tooles I got, And on his body gaue a wicked stroake. The meaning of Anne Wallen’s crime as the act of a violent and unruly woman is compounded by her inability to curb her tongue; the representation of the marital argument in direct speech, a device that could allow for dramatic, perhaps comic, emphasis in the delivery, contributes a certain characterisation of Anne, but not a sympathetic one, despite the first person mode. The two ballads about Alice Davis’s murder of her husband in 1628 both record its origins in a dispute about money. In ‘A Warning for all desperate women’, Alice refuses what seems a reasonable request, and murder becomes the immediate consequence; like Anne Wallen, she speaks too much: He askt what monies I had left, and some he needes would haue, But I a penny would not giue, though he did seeme to craue, But wordes betwixt vs then did passe, as words to harsh I gaue, And as the Diuell would as then, I did both sweare and raue. And then I tooke a little knife, and stab’d him to the heart. Whose Soule from Body instantly my bloody hand did part. But cursed hand, and fatall knife and wicked was that houre, Whenas my God did giue me ore vnto his hellish power. (‘A warning for all desperate Women’, PG 50) The wife’s crime seems, in broadside ballad mode, to take place independent of motivation; motivation is redundant, or, as Kathleen McLuskie puts it, ‘motivation is not offered as justification. The framework of morality and expected conjugal relations is so firmly in place that there is no need to offer complex accounts of the women’s feeling.’62 The similarity between these ballads and also the third person ‘A Warning for wives’ (PG 52), which describes how Katherine Francis in 1629 stabbed her husband to death with a pair of shears or scissors, suggest that they draw on the accepted image of the violent and murderous wife as a strong and real


source of masculine anxiety. The crimes of Wallen, Davis and Francis occurred comparatively close in time (1616, 1628, 1629). Rollins, in his note to ‘A Warning for wives’, mentions contemporary references to two other husband-murders taking place in London in 1632 and 1634.63 Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet The Adultresses Funerall Day records the career of Alice Clarke who killed her husband with poison in 1635. All these women were burned in Smithfield (with the exception of Francis, who was burned at Clerkenwell Green, not far away). Alice Davis, in ‘A warning for all desperate Women’, draws attention to this location, the setting for her lamentation, and also to ‘the woman which heere last did lye / and was consum’d with fire’. Even taking into account recorded ballads on husband-murder which have not survived, there appears to be no other such cluster of husband-murders in the seventeenth century. A third quarto of Arden of Faversham was published in 1633, and this is also the date of the ballad. Though Frances Dolan in Dangerous Familiars does not use this evidence specifically, it supports her view that petty treason was viewed as particularly threatening to the social order in the first part of the seventeenth century.64 Potentially the most alarming image of the murderous wife is created by Martin Parker, in ‘A Warning for wives’, which also seems, as one might expect from a professional writer and balladist of considerable versatility, to be a more assured and finished production.65 It may be that the third person mode, delivered by means of a histrionic and self-consciously authorial presenter, allows more scope for details of the violence and a distanced and unified perspective on the perpetrator. The murder is contextualised with reference to a contemporary world of horrific crime in which the devil is an effective presence, giving scope to women ‘that in blood delight’ to the extent of killing their husbands or children. ‘Alas what wretched bloody times / doe we vile sinners liue in’ are the ballad’s opening lines. Katherine Francis is the devil’s creature who has thirsted for her husband’s blood so long that eventually ‘heauen gaue permission / To Satan, who then lent her power / And strength to do’t that bloody hour’. The murder is an event destined to happen. Despite a long history of violent abuse from his wife Robert Francis does not desert her: ‘to stay ill fate would haue him’ until the day and hour of his death, specified by Parker in his dramatic build-up to the crucial moment: This was about the houre of tenne or rather more that night, When this was done, whereof my Pen in tragicke stile doth write. The murder scene is chillingly domestic; a visiting neighbour is sent out for a pot of beer, and before she gets back the deed is done:


It seemes that he his head did leane to th’Chimney, which she spide, And straight she tooke, (O bloody queane) her Sisers from her side, And hit him therewith such a stroake ith necke, that (some thinke) he nere spoke. The very banality of the crime makes it the more monstrous and the more exemplary. Katherine Francis commits a ‘barbarous murder’, yet as the ballad’s refrain, repeated in the same form after each of the fifteen stanzas, indicates, she behaves as many women might: ‘Oh women, / Murderous women, / whereon are your minds?’ This strongly rhythmic refrain (Rollins calls it ‘taking’) might well tempt audience participation, which was certainly solicited in refrains. The tune, ‘Bragandary’, unfortunately lost, was evidently popular,66 and there is a panache about Parker’s exploitation of its metric form, a six-line stanza rhyming ababcc which allows for resolution in an emphatic concluding couplet. This liveliness, along with the presenter’s involved participation in his narrative, signalled by self-reference and exclamatory parentheses such as ‘O bloody Queane’ and ‘woe worth her for her labour’ confers on the ballad’s grim subject a kind of jaunty distance less common in the more self-absorbed first person goodnights. The wives in all these ballads, though reviewing their situation from a necessarily penitent standpoint, are threatening and aggressive women who have chosen to assert themselves at the expense of their marriages and husbands. In domestic disagreements they refuse to adopt the wife’s properly submissive role, but instead resolve the issue by seizing on domestic implements – knives, scissors and chisels – violating the marital home with bloodshed. ‘The pressures of early modern life which might lead to murder’67 are tantalisingly glimpsed, but the ballad offers no space to explore them. But this role, although the commonest, is not the only one available in ballads to murderous wives. In ballads on two wellknown cases of husband-murder, those of George Sanders (or Saunders) and Page of Plymouth, the wives are allotted significantly different parts. To be sure, these murders are unlike those of Wallen, Davis and Francis (though not of Alice Arden) in that they were actually carried out not by the wife herself, but by accomplices; also, they were murders combined with adultery, since both Anne Sanders and Eulalia Page had lovers who instigated the murder. They took place in the previous century (1578 and 1591 respectively), and it may be the case that the moral panic about murderous wives that seems rife in the mid-seventeenth century had not yet caught hold. Significantly, the ballad of the earlier murder by Alice Arden of her husband Thomas in 1551, also a murder-with-adultery which circumstantially has aspects in common with the Sanders and Page cases, but almost certainly written in 1633 when it was printed, shares


the same perspective on the murderous wife as the seventeenth-century ballads.68 Only one ballad on the Sanders case is known, but three are extant on Page of Plymouth and there were possibly others.69 All take the form of lamentations rather than warnings, and the different moral and emotional tone is marked. Although they contain didactic and admonitory aspects these are ballads intended above all to communicate an emotion to the audience, and to invite a sharing of the speaker’s suffering more than a condemnation of her crime. This is especially marked in ‘The wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders, which she wrote with her own hand, being prisoner in newgate, Justly condemned to death’.70 This is a highly charged ballad which seems to demand a considerable degree of impersonation for an effective delivery. Anne Sanders begins by addressing herself to ‘highe and mighty god’ and evoking her emotional agony in images of physical distress: With wofull broken hart With swolne and blobbed face, I wayle my wanton lyfe long spent, Which had noe better grace. … I make my mone to the With sighes and sobbing teares. The memory of her children causes the bitterest anguish: To lose then thus, o gryping griefe, can intrelles sease to throbbe. She denounces the other participants in the crime, especially Anne Drury for her ‘bloudy mynde’ and ‘flattering wordes which made / my doting hart to blynde’, and the serving man, Roger, whose duty it should have been ‘to stay Browne’s handes from slaughter of my deare / and vs from this decaye’. In her figure as a type of penitent Magdalene, Anne Sanders is constructed as a victim, easily swayed, not responsible for her actions. Browne, her lover, who actually committed the murder, is a shadowy figure, mentioned only once. In contrast with the situation in ‘The Complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham’, the wife’s extramarital relationship is here completely elided, and nothing is included which would detract from Anne Sanders’s image of remorseful piety. In particular, there is no reference to George Mell, the minister who apparently fell in love with her in prison and tried to persuade her to plead innocent. According to Golding’s account, he was pilloried ‘for practising to colour the detestable factes of George Saunders wife’.71 The narrative element here is minimal. The ballad-writer assumes an existing knowledge of the crime in


his audience, and uses it as the basis for his impersonation of the grieving widow. In the concluding stanzas Anne addresses Christ, and the last stanza expresses her hope of meeting him in heaven: In this my very fleshe to se christe with myne eyes, And sould and body dwell with him aboue the christall skyes. For whome my freindes prepare, and so I yow commend To Jesus Christ, who shall ye kep,– and thus I make an end. Rollins comments wryly that ‘the theological views expressed in the ballad are, to say the least, dubious’,72 but presumably they were not perceived as heterodox by its first audiences, who are invited to believe that the strength of Anne Sanders’s penitence is sufficient to redeem her soul from damnation, although it did not, of course, save her from the gallows. She was not executed as a petty traitor by burning at the stake, but hanged, along with her confidante Anne Drury, and Drury’s servant Roger, as accomplices. The exemplary function of the ballad is subordinate to its emotional appeal, and a reference in Lodge’s pamphlet, Wits Miserie (1596), suggests that it became known for this; he says of the sin Cosenage: ‘Shee will reckon you vp the storie of Mistris SANDERS, and weepe at it, and turne you to the Ballad ouer her chimney, and bid you looke there, there is a goodly sample’ (sig. F3v). In this ballad the wife’s agency is deliberately suppressed so that she can command sympathy as a penitent and a victim. In the three surviving ballads on the Page of Plymouth murder the guilty wife is again given a sympathetic representation, though within a different scenario. The most considerable of the three, ‘The Lamentation of Master Page’s wife of Plimmouth’ seems to have been unusually popular; according to the note in The Roxburghe Ballads it was in print from 1591 until the mid-eighteenth century, and exists in several copies.73 The ascription to Deloney is now in doubt.74 Once again, the mode is lyrical rather than narrative. Several formal factors enhance this, particularly the long, five-beat lines characteristic of ballads set to the ‘hanging tune’, ‘Fortune my Foe’, and the consciously rhetorical style which draws on a range of schemes and tropes such as alliteration, anaphora, antithesis, and various kinds of wordplay. The opening stanzas illustrate the style: Unhappy she whom fortune hath forlorne! Despis’d of grace, that proffered grace did scorne! My lawlesse love hath lucklesse wrought my woe; My discontent content did overthrow.


My loathed life too late I doe lament; My hatefull deed with heart I doe repent; A wife I was that wilfull went awry, And for that fault am here prepar’d to die. The emotional situation is initially defined through a series of starkly presented antitheses: loathing and liking, child and parent, youth and age, body and mind, money and love. The speaker, Eulalia Page, stresses one fact continuously; that she was forced by her parents to marry a man whom she did not love. None the less, she does not present herself consistently as a passive victim to her ‘fathers greedy mind’; there is a second role for her as an active woman who has made her own choice and will not give it up. She has chosen love over money, and this enables her to present her situation not in terms of criminal wilfulness but of romantic fidelity: I was their child, and bound for to obey, Yet not to wed where I no love could lay: I married was to muck and endlesse strife, But faith before had made me Strangwidge wife. She does not attempt to deny her complicity in the murder: I, that became his discontented wife, Contented was he should be rid of life. She even accepts at one point that ‘for that deed hell fier is my due’; but theologically the ballad is entirely inconsistent, and towards the end she imagines that her soul and her lover’s ‘in heaven shall ever dwell’, urging Christ to receive her soul, just as Anne Sanders does. The ballad says nothing of the murder itself, with its attendant sordid and violent circumstances – the hiring of the assassins, the brutal death, the attempted cover-up – and it is referred to only abstractly as ‘my fact’ or ‘this monstrous act’; Mrs Page’s guilt becomes unimportant in relation to her real predicament: that of forced and unwilling bride. Here, it seems to me, the ballad perhaps owes something of its long-lasting appeal to the influence of the folk-ballad tradition with its familiar theme of ‘family opposition to lovers’,75 and its regular prioritisation of the values of youth over age and fidelity in love over the requirements of social convention. Put another way, Eulalia Page resists her categorisation as a woman in terms of property, to be passed through economic negotiation between men from father to husband, but instead asserts her right to live by a different code of values which enable her to operate as a free agent. She can always claim a prior identity which transcends even that of


husband-murderer, although it was this latter that accounts for her contemporary notoriety: that of faithful lover. In stanza 3 she first makes this claim: Great wealth there was, yea, gold and silver store, But yet my heart had chosen long before. This is the ballad’s real theme, stressed consistently to the last stanza, which ends on a didactic note but still manages to shift the blame for the murder from the guilty lovers to the oppressive parents: Lord, blesse our Queene with long and happy life And send true love betwixt each Man and Wife; And give all Parents wisedom to foresee, The match is marr’d wher minds doe not agree. The other two Page ballads, both quite short, printed at least in three known copies as companion pieces on the same sheet,76 share the same tune and metre. ‘The Lamentation of George Strangwidge’ and ‘The Sorrowful Complaint of Mistris Page’ present the case in the same way. In the former, George Strangwidge, the speaker, directly names Eulalia’s father in the second stanza as responsible: O Glandfield! Cause of my committed crime, Snared in wealth, as Birds in bush of lime, What cause hadst thou to beare such wicked spight Against my Love, and eke my hart’s delight? Strangwidge is given a responsible, manly voice; by contrast with Eulalia in the first ballad he takes more of the blame upon himself, particularly for agreeing to the murder. He too is a lover faithful to death, and his lamentation is not for his part in the crime so much as for the loss of love and beauty: Farewell, my love, whose loyall heart was seene: Would God thou hadst not halfe so constant beene! Farewell, my Love, the pride of Plimmouth Towne! Farewell the flower, whose beauty is cut downe! The simple, direct style and the marked employment of parallelism of phrase and expression here recall the style of the folk-ballad. ‘The Sorrowful Complaint of Mistris Page’ might in performance achieve some poignant effects through such simplicity; the modest alliteration combines with the plain diction and syntax to allow a performer at least


the possibility of characterising Eulalia’s voice as young and uncompromising: Great were the guifts that proffered to my sight; With wealth they thought to win me to delight; But gold nor guift could not my heart remove, For I was linkt whereas I could not love. Again, the ballad dwells on the love-pact between Eulalia and George Strangwidge, and takes the position that it was Strangwidge rather than Page who was wronged. When Eulalia asks Christ for forgiveness, it is not for her part in the murder (and on this point the full title is misleading) but for abandoning her lover by marrying. She accepts responsibility not only for undertaking the marriage – there is less emphasis on parental compulsion here – but also for bringing about Page’s death: But, wanting grace, I sought my own decay, And was the cause to cast my friend away: And he in whom my earthly joyes did lie, Through my amisse, a shamefull death must die. The final stanza enacts the last moments of Eulalia’s life; the writer manages this more gracefully than is done in the Alice Davis ballads, which also seek to raise the emotional temperature by dramatising the wife’s experience of execution and dying. In keeping with the brevity and spare style of this ballad, the writer neither gives details of the judicial process nor attempts to locate the action at the scaffold, but signals the closing of Eulalia’s life in the closure of the final stanza, with its deictic ‘now’ in her last address to Christ: And now, O Christ! to thee I yeeld my breath: Strengthen my faith in bitter pangs of death: Forgive my faults and follies, I thee pray, And with thy blood wash thou my sinnes away. The Page of Plymouth ballads demonstrate that it was possible to represent a husband-murderer sympathetically without at the same time depriving her of agency in the crime. In this respect they differ strikingly from the prose account of the crime given in the compilation pamphlet, Sundrye strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed (1591), as I shall later discuss. Evident popular interest in forced marriage reflected in its presence as a subject in folk-ballads is probably one factor which enables this representation; another is the handling of the voice. In both ‘The Lamentation of Master Page’s wife of Plimmouth’ and ‘The Sorrowful Complaint of


Mistris Page’, voiced by Eulalia, a female subjectivity can be read; Eulalia is allowed a consistent subject-position from which to present what becomes in essence a case for the defence, and features such as the metrical form, the plain diction, and rhetorical style characterised by spareness work together to create a cogent expression of a clear theme. Although goodnights and lamentations are generally written in the first person, little attention has been paid to the subject of the voice or its gendering. The long accepted view of the ballads’ negligible aesthetic value has resulted in a neglect of any aspects that might contribute to aesthetic effect, though the role of the first person mode in authenticating the ballad as a form of news and creating an illusion of ‘immediacy and recentness’ has been acknowledged.77 It would not in truth be possible to mount much of a case for the importance of a gendered voice, at least from purely textual evidence; the contribution of the performer, in an age when virtuoso playing from cross-dressed actors was common, is another matter, but unfortunately mainly for speculation. None the less, it is worth recalling that in its original form the ballad was delivered orally, in this case by a performer in the role of penitent criminal making a final statement just before death, and the immediacy of effect would be enhanced by the degree of impersonation. In one or two instances, as with the Page ballads, the ballad-writer gives his speaker’s voice characteristics which can be decoded in a gendered way, the emotional abandon of Anne Sanders, for instance, or the bravura of Luke Hutton. In one interesting and apparently unusual example, the writer may be seen to attempt a considerable degree of gendered impersonation. ‘No naturall Mother, but a Monster. Or, the exact relation of one, who for making away her owne new borne childe, about Brainford neere London, was hang’d at Teybourne, on Wednesday the 11. Of December, 1633’ (PG 75) is by Martin Parker. It is a first-person lamentation by an unmarried maidservant who becomes pregnant and secretly kills her infant at birth, subsequently confesses to her mistress and is hanged, according to the provisions of the 1624 infanticide Act. Its tune is ‘Welladay’, commonly used for goodnights. The full title of the ballad contains the usual sort of information about the place of the crime and the date and place of the execution but fails to give the perpetrator’s name; nor is she identified in the text. Rollins in A Pepysian Garland says of it that ‘A better example of a goodnight, or last farewell, could hardly be found, though many of the stanzas have a naïveté that is a bit startling and that is somewhat unusual in so sophisticated a balladist as Parker’.78 Parker is one of the few known ballad writers with sufficient examples of his work extant from which assumptions about his characteristic handling of the genre can appropriately be made.79 The stylistic qualities, which Rollins elsewhere attributes to him, include a lyrical tone, skill in satire and innuendo, a gift for rhythm, and, significantly, an ability to write ballads from opposing points of view. His other exercise in the ballad of female crime is ‘A warning for wives’.


Although infanticide was not an uncommon subject for pamphlets, it was not popular in broadside ballads, and this seems to be a unique example of a poem on the common, but by contemporary standards unsensational form of the crime at which the 1624 Act was directed: the murdering of bastard neonates. There is plenty of evidence that this crime took place, and although there are a number of references to it in pamphlets it does not seem to have provided the narrative satisfaction to be derived from other kinds of infanticide stories.80 ‘No naturall mother’ opens in the lyrical and elegiac manner to which the tune ‘Welladay’ lends itself: Like to a dying Swan pensiuely, pensiuely (With mourning) I looke wan, for my life passed; I am exceeding sad, For my misdeeds too bad, O that before I had better forecasted. Though the circumstances of the crime are mundane enough, the speaker modulates between a stark simplicity that could, for a sympathetic audience, create a poignant appeal, and a more impersonal and even ‘literary’ didacticism. She describes the moments preceding the birth: When the full time drew nigh, woe is me, woe is me, Of my delivery, unhappy labour, Into the yard I ran, Where sudden pangs began, There was no woman than, neere to assist me. The lack of female assistance is a key point in law; if a woman could not be shown to have made any preparations for the birth, this was read as evidence of guilty intention. In the penultimate two stanzas she signifies the monstrosity of her crime by drawing on examples of savage creatures who care better for their young than she has, the snake and the tiger, the latter though by kind truculent, truculent, As nature doth her binde, is wondrous tender, And louing to her young.


Evidently this ballad is strongly didactic – it could hardly be otherwise, given its cultural circumstances. The subject-position is not represented with complete consistency in that in stanza 14 the speaker is made to relate how she was taken to Newgate: And at the Sessions last, For my offences past, I was condemned and cast, and hanged at Teyburne. But the naïveté which surprised Rollins is both internal and external, a part of the speaker’s subjectivity as well as of the ballad-writer’s construction of her story. The absence of a personal name, even the confusion as to the cause of the infant’s death, smothered in stanza 9, strangled in stanza 13, typifies this as the serving maid’s tale, an apparently artless female narrative of a female predicament sadly familiar to too many women from the non-élite classes, women to whom the broadside ballad offered a unique window onto their own world. Parker’s skill in this medium may be read in his gendered choice of subject and his handling of it. There may be a relevant relationship between the treatment of illegitimate pregnancy in this ballad and in folkballads, where it is a more common subject. In traditional ballads such as ‘Tam Lin’, ‘Lady Maisry’ or ‘The Cruel Mother’, which tell stories of illegitimate pregnancy from a woman’s viewpoint (though not in the first person) the moral perspective tends to be neutral rather than condemnatory, and there is no overt moralising. It has been suggested, perhaps debatably, that such ballads ‘articulate conflicts that arise from unshared values … suggest solutions, air grievances and perhaps defuse or detonate these conflicts by changing them from reality to representation’.81 One could not easily make such an argument in relation to Parker’s ballad, which is strongly expressive of ‘normative community values’82 in its cautionary tone and in the way that the infanticidal mother is made to condemn herself out of her own mouth; but we need to recognise that it does exist within a context that includes such ballads as those named and the hauntingly cryptic ‘The Cruel Mother’ which acknowledges both the mother’s guilt and her suffering, and others which depict illegitimate pregnancy as an act of rebellion by the woman against the constraints of family and society.83 Parker’s audience, particularly its female members, might have measured ‘No naturall mother’ against them. *** It was often the case that ballads were written about news stories which were also explored at greater length in pamphlets or plays; the ballad might well be the first account to appear. Needless to say, not many such ballads on women’s crimes have survived. Those that do mostly relate to particularly sensational crimes, like those of husband-murderers Alice Arden, Anne


Sanders and Eulalia Page, all commemorated in plays as well as ballads and pamphlets, and also Elizabeth Evans (Canberry Bess), the Lincolnshire witches, Joan Flower and her two daughters, Anne Turner, confidante to Frances Howard, and Mary Compton; Jane Lawson, whose drowning of herself and two of her children in a well was described in a ballad and a pamphlet in 1680, was probably the least known of these women. In some instances the ballad handling of the story differs from the pamphlet only in the most obvious generic ways: it is terser, capable of rendering only selective details, tending to represent only a single perspective on the event and to narrow the meaning of the narrative to a didactic, usually cautionary point. The ballad on the ‘Damnable Practises Of three Lincoln-shire Witches’ (PG 16) is one such, distilling from a long, complex and highly wrought account, The Wonderful discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillippa Flower (1619), a simple unquestioning story of the ‘damned deeds and deadly dole’ of three malicious women who committed acts of spite and maleficium against the ‘noble minded Earle’ and his virtuous family. It ends with a tritely generalised invocation: Haue mercy Heauen, on sinners all, and grant that neuer like Be in this nation knowne or done, but Lord in vengeance strike: Or else conuert their wicked liues which in bad wayes are spent: The feares of God and loue of heauen, such courses will preuent. The ballad is probably based on the pamphlet (both use the same woodcut), which it advertises after the conclusion of the verses, for the benefit of those who could read the printed text and wanted to know more: ‘There is a booke printed of these Witches, wherein you shall know all their examinations and confessions at large’. Witchcraft ballads seem not to have been common; perhaps the attraction of witchcraft narratives was essentially in the detail of the ‘examinations and confessions’ which it was impossible to render in ballad form.84 Where, by contrast, the pamphlet narrative of a crime is brief and simple, as in A True and Sad Relation of Two Wicked and Bloody Murthers (1680), which describes how Jane Lawson came to commit child-murder and suicide, the similarity between this and the ballad account, ‘The unnatural mother … ’ is striking. Both account for the origins of the crime in the same way: the husband’s unusual state of drunkenness provokes his wife to anger, so that neighbours and the wife’s mother intervene to counsel her to show wifely restraint; in both, the furious wife resists her mother’s advice. In both this is rendered in direct speech: ‘Mother, replies this unnatural Daughter, you may preach at home


as long as you will, but in my house you shall not’ (A True and Sad Relation, p. 4). In the ballad, the wife bids her mother ‘no sermon for to make / but go and Preach at home’ (‘The Unnatural Mother’, PB 2, 191). The marital dynamic is the same in both accounts: a good husband is abused by an unreasonable wife (who is unnatural both as a wife and as a daughter) dominated by her passions to the extent of murder and self-destruction. The pamphlet records that James Lawson ‘gave [his wife] two or three good cuffs on the Ear’ after which she left home never to return. It relates, finally, that after discovering the bodies in the well, ‘the Man run quite Distracted, and it is thought will continue so to his Dying day’. The neutral tone and absence of moralising contrasts pointedly with the ballad, which has the following final stanza: And then he did her give A Box upon the ear, Long after that she did not live, nor her poor Children dear: Two of them she caught, As seuerall neighbours tell; These Babes destruction then she wrought With her own, in a well. This is concluded by the refrain, addressed to ‘Englishwomen’, repeated after each verse: Take pattern now by me, I did into temptation fall, Thus lost the lives of three. Although by 1680 the balance between information and explicit moralising in criminal news had shifted markedly towards the former, the broadside ballad retained its cautionary quality, which seems if anything to become more evident. But in this instance both ballad and pamphlet teach the same lesson to unruly wives. The ballad is mainly voiced by the wife, occasionally deviating artlessly into the third person mode in response to some narrative exigency, but not in such a way that she speaks for herself; she offers herself, as in the refrain, purely as an exemplum. Elsewhere the first person goodnight can be used to constitute a plea in mitigation on the wife’s behalf. In ‘The wofull lamentation of Mrs Anne Saunders’ and the Page of Plymouth ballads the balladwriters have elected a non-narrative style which enables them to omit all the details of the crime, as described in the pamphlet accounts, and also, in Anne Sanders’s case, in the play based on her story, A Warning for Fair Women, and to focus exclusively on constructing a voice for the wife. Although, in the main prose account of the case, Golding’s pamphlet, A


brief discourse of the late murther of master George Sanders (1573), Anne Sanders is distinctly at the centre of the narrative, displacing George Browne who actually committed the crime, Golding’s concern is not in representing her motivation or her subjectivity. Golding, like his patron the Earl of Leicester, was a Puritan, and the shaping of the narrative reflects this. He does not describe Anne’s feelings towards her husband, her lover Browne, or towards any of the events; his aim is to trace the workings of ‘Gods wonderful providence’85 through Anne’s eventual repentance and confession, produced only after considerable resistance, when she realises that her accomplice, Anne Drury, will no longer uphold her plea of innocence. By contrast, Munday’s very short account of the case in A View of Sundrye Examples (1580) barely mentions Anne Sanders; here, the focus is on George Browne. But Munday too writes in a didactic mode, making Browne, the murderer and adulterer, exemplary of the depraved condition of society, ‘addicted to the voluptuousnesse of this vaine worlde, to unlawfull lyking, to runne at his libertie in all kinde of lewde behaviour’.86 Browne’s crime, committed seven years earlier, is assumed by Munday to be so familiar to his readers as to need no recounting. The pious ballad voiced by Anne also takes it for granted that the audience does not need to be told the story. She presents herself as a grieving widow, utterly remorseful and the model of the sinner complete in her spiritual readiness for death on the scaffold. Her crime needs neither description nor analysis. What matters is her new role as penitent. In the Page of Plymouth ballads a more radical refashioning takes place whereby not only the figure of the murderous wife, but the very nature of the crime itself, are transformed from the prose representation. In Sundrye Strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed (1591), an anonymous compilation describing in varying degrees of detail a number of recent murders, Eulalia Page, despite her unhappy marriage, is an evil and calculating woman. She has tried several times to poison her husband; she has, in some unspecified way, caused the deaths of two children by Page, and the still birth of a third baby shortly before the murder is further evidence of her hatred for him. When Page’s brutalised corpse is discovered, she feigns surprise, acts calmly and shows no emotion. She even sends for her father and her husband’s sister ‘willing her to make haste if ever she would see her brother aliue, for he was taken with a disease called the pull, as they term it in the country’.87 The writer reports as defiance her statement that ‘she had rather dye with Strangwidge, then to liue with Padge’.88 This is clearly the story of a coldhearted scheming adulteress after the style of Alice Arden, who tries to take control of her own life and co-opts accomplices to help her in the project. But in the ballads, the story is one of thwarted love; Anne is a young and tragic victim of her parents’ greed, driven to commit a terrible crime because she lives by values that transcend the mundane and expedient. Only in the broadside ballad with its generic propensity to privilege the murderer’s voice at the moment of death, and its ability to co-opt the alternative values of


the folk-ballad, could the criminal identities of murderous women be so transformed. In the Page ballads, the singular viewpoint is adopted not to retell the story of the crime as such from the woman’s perspective, but to suggest an alternative reading, perhaps a creative misreading, of it. A series of ballads inspired by a gruesome crime of the 1690s provide a postscript to this comparison of ballad renderings of crime stories with other forms of narrative. There were four of them: ‘The Injured Children, OR, The Bloudy Midwife’, ‘The Bloody minded Midwife’, ‘The Midwife’s Maid’s Lamentation, in NEWGATE’ and ‘The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate’, all written between August and October 1693, when the events they describe were discovered.89 In this instance, the prose account of the case, The Cruel Midwife (1693), not only gives a factual and journalistic account of the events, but also locates them within the contemporary discourse of infanticide as barbarous and inhuman:90 Everything is carried on by a natural Instinct, to the Preservation of it self in its own Being: And by the same Law of nature even the most brutish among the Bruits themselves may be observed to retain a special Kind of Indulgence and tenderness towards the young. The Monsters of the Sea draw out their Breasts, and give Suck to their Young ones. The barbarous Cruelties of some Midwives, Nurses, and even Parents to young Children, may assure us, That there are greater Monsters upon the Land than are to be fund in the Bottom of the Deep; and if some of these may extenuate their Inhumanities, by I know not what vertuous Pretences, yet the barbarities of the rest must be wholly imputable to their savage nature, and the bloodiness of their Disposition. (p. 2) Mary Compton (or Crompton – the pamphlet uses both names), though known as a midwife was probably what would now be called a child-minder, or foster-mother, assisted by a maid who the pamphlet assumes was her accomplice.91 She took infants and small children to live in her house, and, it appears, allowed them to die of neglect and concealed their deaths. This had carried on, unsuspected, over a long period until three living children were accidentally discovered left alone in the house, and this led to the discovery of the corpses and skeletons of several more. After the first paragraph of essayistic generalisation, the prose account modulates into suggestive gossip: The Midwife herself was scarce ever seen in the Neighbourhood, not so much as to stand at the Door, but steping into the Coach early in the morning, and coming home in a Coach in the Night, and seldom or never were any Visitants seen to come thither, but only some Gentlemen and others often in the Evening or Night … (p. 3)


Mary Compton is a mysterious figure, strangely absent from her story; she is not the monstrous and inhuman child-killer created in the preamble. The narrator relates his story laconically: a description of two children’s carcasses found in a hand-basket, ‘liker the Carkasses of catts or doggs than Humane Creatures, all their skin being off, as likewise their Eyes and part of their flesh eat with Vermin, stinking in a lamentable manner’ (p. 6), is given without comment. He introduces speculation on the circumstances in which the crime came about in the manner of a reporter giving a piece of news which is not yet in itself complete; he is temperate, sticking to facts – ‘Who were the Parents of these Children … is not certainly known’ – but he lets his readers into the latest theories on the subject: ‘It’s generally conjectured, and that not without a great deal of Reason, that these were those commonly called By-blows, or Bastards, which she undertook, for a certain Sum of Money agreed on, to ease the Parents of, as long as they lived’ (p. 7). The tone (‘to ease the parents of’) is sophisticated and ironic. He appends a dated ‘postscript’ informing the readers of the progress of events, the adjourning of the inquest, and the arrest and pre-trial examination of the accused. This style of news writing is noticeably different from that in pre-Civil War pamphlets; largely separating the elements of moralising and reportage, it relates an ordered, sequential narrative, and it presents events as ongoing. This is topical news, taking place moment by moment, written while the events are actually happening; it is not an account of a completed crime whose meaning is already known and can be summarised. The writer stands in a provisional relationship to his material, relating it as it seems at the time, without shaping it into significance, conscious that its meaning will shift as more facts emerge. His claims to recentness and veracity are self-evident. The ballads on Mary Compton consist of two pairs, all to the same tune, quite probably put out by rival publishers, in each pair a narration by a presenter followed by a first person account in the voice of one of the participants. ‘The Injured Children’ and ‘The Bloody minded Midwife’ narrate events in the third person, using the story as a domestic cautionary tale, warning mothers against farming out their children: You mothers that have Children sure, you nere will Money give, That you for that may never more your Child see while you live, For ’tis a comfort for to see, the Mother Nurse its Child, And then no Midwives Cruelty can ever you beguile. (‘The Injured Children’)


The larger dimension of social scandal implied in the prose narrative is modified; the unidentified ‘gentlemen’ who frequented Mary Compton’s house late at night do not figure here, and the subtext becomes one of simple maternal neglect. Though macabre details about the starvation of the children, the verminous condition of the corpses, and the buried bones are given, these are horror stories to chill the blood, not information. Mary Compton, whose name is not given, is assumed monstrously guilty, even though when these ballads were written her trial had not taken place. In the second pair, ‘The Midwife’s Maid’s Lamentation’ and ‘The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession’, the women are given voices in which to present themselves as cautionary exempla: O let my wretched, wretched days to all a warning be, That they use no such evil ways, To cause their misery, But you that undertake to keep Small children while they live, Oh do not let them cry and weep, In hunger Victuals give. (‘The Midwife’s Maid’s Lamentation’) Thus the maid is used as a voice to plead for a more responsible attitude on the part of child-minders. The midwife’s confession, a first-person reworking of ‘The Bloody minded Midwife’, represents an expedient economy on the part of J. Bissel, the printer. Between the writing of the two ballads, Compton’s execution had taken place, so the narration of the first ballad is turned into a ‘confession and lamentation’ by changing the pronouns and making Compton proclaim and repent her malefactions. She begins: I am the worst of Women-kind, Compton it is my name, I was to Cruelty inclin’d and do repent the same, But Oh! I wish I ne’re had done that wicked deed, for why, My Thread of Life is almost spun, now I’m Condemn’d to dye. Unlike the husband-murderers Anne Sanders and Eulalia Page, Mary Compton is not given a direct address to God or expectation of heaven; a middle-aged woman who made an independent living for herself with some success, if the prose account is to be believed, she cannot be recuperated as a


victim or a romantic heroine. In the final stanza she can only acknowledge the justice of her punishment at the hands of the state: And I Account e’re long must give of my Offences here, Vnto that great and mighty Iudge, who will e’re long appear, How shall I look him in the face, or from his presence fly, I have quite spent my day of Grace, who am Condemn’d to dye. Because of its availability, cheapness and broad cultural appeal the broadside ballad played a key role in the information explosion of early modern England. Ballads of crime not only conveyed information about current events taking place all over the country but they also reflected and shaped popular attitudes towards different kinds of criminal behaviour. Their performative mode and, especially, their confessional structure enabled a different kind of representation of the criminal from that in pamphlets and plays, sometimes creating an illusion of direct and immediate communication with the criminal that was not available through any other textual means. They could reach a female audience, particularly one of non-élite or illiterate women, readily, and because of the traditional association between ballad-singing and women might more easily address women’s interests. Giving a voice to the woman criminal did not necessarily mean that her actions were sympathetically imagined or her story told from a female viewpoint, though it could on occasion achieve these results. Although the broadside is often regarded as culturally conservative, or at least normative, in its representation of gender roles within society, domestic life and marriage, the alternative values often embodied in traditional ballads, for example in relation to criminal behaviour such as highway robbery or to family opposition to lovers, make their way into broadside ballads. In consequence, the broadside representation of the female criminal has the potential to be less morally orthodox than that of the crime pamphlet, which is always male-authored and male-centred. The ballad’s associations with libel and sedition, its unique discursive status as low, unregulated, appealing only to the most vulgar and least discriminating tastes and still retaining something of the dangerously uncontrollable quality of orally spread gossip and rumour, diminish in the later seventeenth century; but in its heyday as a vehicle for the spread of popular news, it represented women and their crimes in ways that marked it off significantly from other textual forms.

4 Domestic Plays

Although plays were not the most obvious medium for handling news stories, the early modern theatre in England did play a significant role in relation to news and current events. Compared with the broadside ballad or the prose pamphlet, which could be composed and printed with great rapidity, a play was less likely to be a disseminator of news, given the more complex processes involved in its production and delivery to an audience, though the speed with which a topical subject could be dramatised and staged should not be underestimated. But the theatre’s capacity for the complex representation of a topical event, for commentary on it, even for making an intervention in a topical debate, and above all for arousing an emotional response to current events, far exceeds those of ballads and pamphlets. There is plenty of evidence that plays that performed any of these functions could create a scandal and sometimes trouble for those involved in the performance. The lost play The Isle of Dogs (1597), by Nashe and Jonson, ‘a lewde plaie … contanynge very seditious and sclanderous matter’,1 possibly to do with trade to Poland,2 and what was perhaps a follow-up, The Isle of Gulls (1606), a political satire aimed at James I’s favourite, Robert Carr, probably caused the imprisonment of at least some of the playwrights.3 Gowrie, another lost play almost certainly dramatising the attempted assassination of the king in Scotland in 1600, performed at court in 1606, offended ‘some great Councellors’;4 and the king was so angered by a lost play, known only through references in official correspondence as the play about ‘the matter of the Mynes’, that he vowed that the performers, the Children of Blackfriars, ‘should never play more, but should first beg their bread’.5 The Tragedy of Sir John van Oldenbarnevelt (1619), dramatising very recent events in the Netherlands and the execution only a few months earlier of Barnavelt, an opponent of James’s ally, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, was heavily censored and efforts made by the Bishop of London to prevent its performance.6 Not surprisingly, it attracted large audiences, as did Middleton’s A Game at Chesse (1624), a huge success for its bold satirical treatment of Anglo-Spanish rela106

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tions and reference to the failure of the Spanish marriage negotiations of the previous year. All these plays relate to political news and issues of statecraft and have attracted attention because of the light they throw on the processes of censorship and state control of the theatre. Plays on domestic news did not incur censorship in the same way, although they might dramatise very recent events, such as The Witch of Edmonton (1621), performed at court eight months after the witch’s execution, and probably before that at the Cockpit theatre, and most especially Brome and Heywood’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), performed while the witches were still awaiting their fate in the Fleet prison and on show for the public to gaze at. But Dekker’s part in the lost play Keep the Widow Waking (1624) did result in his appearance before the court of Star Chamber, at the behest of one of the protagonists, the widow Anne Elsden, who (quite rightly) regarded the play as a libel, contributing to her ‘great scandall & disgrace’.7 Not all plays of domestic news were written immediately, or even soon, after the events concerned; the first quarto of Arden of Faversham, which dramatises a murder committed in 1551, is dated 1592, and although the play may have been written a few years earlier, it cannot have been before the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1587, on which it is dependent. Similarly, A Warning for Fair Women, printed in 1599, perhaps written in the mid-1580s, is about a murder committed in 1573 and described in a pamphlet of the same year.8 Robert Yarrington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies, printed in 1601, is partly about a murder of 1594, which was probably also the subject of a lost play, The Tragedy of Merry, for which Henslowe paid William Haughton and John Day in 1599.9 That year saw a little flurry of plays in the genre of domestic crime, most of which have not survived: not only A Warning for Fair Women, but also the second quarto of Arden of Faversham, Page of Plymouth by Jonson and Dekker (based on the murder of 1591), Cox of Collumpton (or The Tragedy of John Cox) by Haughton and Day, The Stepmother’s Tragedy by Chettle and perhaps Dekker, as well as The Tragedy of Merry and maybe Chettle’s The Orphan’s Tragedy.10 It may well be that in these instances the news-value of the plays is as much a function of their proximity to one another as of their closeness to the events they depict. Henslowe paid what Adams calls an ‘unusually high price’ for Page of Plymouth, spending £8 on the ‘book’ and £10 for women’s costumes, which suggests that he expected to do well out of it.11 In general, as Knutson notes, the Admiral’s Men’s playlists featured fewer tragedies than comedies.12 The conjunction at this point of the second quarto of Arden of Faversham, the publication of A Warning for Fair Women, and (one assumes) the performance of Page of Plymouth is particularly tantalising, since these plays dramatised the most notorious examples of husband-murder in the period. Clearly, topicality as such is not at issue here, though the cases continued to be perceived as sensational and culturally significant. But it seems to me that there is a need to be cautious in considering the nature of the news-value of such plays. Wine’s view of Arden of Faversham – that ‘for its


original audience the play most likely had the impact that a sensational newspaper story would have today’ – is debatable, given that nearly forty years separate the murder from its dramatisation.13 But drama as a genre is generally more remote from topicality than ballads or pamphlets; this need not lessen the shock of sensation that a play like Arden of Faversham could create, but it is a shock reproduced through conscious retelling of a known event, rather than the shock that comes from first discovery of facts. It is impossible to reach any firm conclusions as to why some news stories were dramatised and not others. The murder of the London goldsmith John Brewen by his wife Anne in 1592 attracted attention and became the subject of several lost ballads and a pamphlet, but there is no evidence of a play. Similarly, the extraordinary story of child abuse and murder by the Hertfordshire innkeeper Annis Dell which came to light in 1606 through a series of apparently providential events was retold in two pamphlets and a lost ballad, but not dramatised. In both instances, the prose accounts could have furnished the basis for a play, as pamphlets did – for example, for A Warning for Fair Women and The Witch of Edmonton.14 Child-murder seems never to have formed the central subject of any play, fact-based or otherwise. Dolan says that this was because ‘there was not much of a story in it’, though numerous acts of child-killing by mothers are depicted in subplots or minor story-lines of plays, and she claims elsewhere that ‘child-murder and … the obsession with representing it pervade the culture’.15 True, A Yorkshire Tragedy (1605) depicts a father who kills his children, but perhaps it can create a tragic story around this event because the protagonist is a man whose motivation derives from prodigality, anxiety about social rank, and demonic possession, a complex not available to a woman character. This may suggest the limits of domestic realism in early modern drama; infanticide was probably the most common female crime of the period (excluding such criminalised behaviour as theft), but the situation of the typical infanticidal mother, poor, unmarried and socially excluded, could not be represented within the available range of female characterisation. Domestic crime as a subject for news gathered momentum only slowly after Alice Arden’s crime, but it culminated in what seems to have constituted something of a moral panic at the end of the century, yet Anne Brewen’s crime in the 1590s was ignored by playwrights. As is the case today with televised drama-documentaries, which may be a kind of generic equivalent, the choice of subjects, after taking account of such obvious factors as sensational appeal, was to a great extent random. Domestic plays in no way represent even the contemporary perception of domestic crime systematically. *** Since the nineteenth century these plays have been generically categorised as domestic tragedy, referring to both location and to thematic concern

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with the household. As Sidney Lee remarked, ‘that domestic tragedy was a popular form is unfortunately proved, not by the number of extant plays, but from the names of lost plays accessible to us in such places as Henslowe’s Diary or the Stationers’ Registers’.16 Sturgess, in his introduction to a collection of three plays, calls it ‘an entirely new dramatic form, a form without warrant in classical or renaissance dramatic theory’.16 Some at least of the authors not only acknowledged but even drew attention to their generic novelty. Franklin gives an apologia in the epilogue to Arden of Faversham: Gentlemen, we hope you’ll pardon this naked tragedy Wherein no filed points are foisted in To make it gracious to the ear or eye; For simple truth is gracious enough And needs no other points of glozing stuff. The authentication of ‘simple truth’ compensates for any lack of rhetorical or spectacular refinement. The induction to Two Lamentable Tragedies gives even more weight to actuality.18 Homicide searches ‘each stately streete’ of London for someone capable of murder; Avarice tells him of two greedy men with ‘harts relentlesse mercilesse’ ready to be primed for the deed. Truth in a soliloquy anchors the events in actuality. One of the crimes was done ‘in famous London late’, and located for a local audience ‘within that streete whose side the riuer Thames / Doth striue to wash from all impuritie’ (sig. A3). Her assertion that ‘the most here present, know this to be true’ confirms the status of the events as factual and as part of the living memory of the audience. Yarrington’s play is composed of two separate plots about murders committed for money; that the minor, less socially specific plot takes place in Italy and may be derived from a ballad printed in 159519 illuminates by contrast the journalistic representation of the London murder in the main plot. The induction to A Warning for Fair Women suggests a similar theatrical self-consciousness, although it is more generically focused. Comedy and History ridicule Tragedy as a pretentiously high mode, whose lofty passions, especially as realised through Senecan devices for staging bloodshed and horror, are absurd. Comedy evokes what were presumably the audience’s expectations of a tragedy in the 1580s or 1590s: How some damnd tyrant, to obtaine a crowne, Stabs, hangs, impoysons, smothers, cutteth throats, And then a chorus too comes howling in, And tels us of the worrying of a cat, Then of a filthie whining ghost, Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather pelch, Comes skreaming like a pigge halfe stickt,


And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge: With that a little Rosen flasheth forth, Like smoke out of a Tabacco pipe, or a boyes squib: The comes in two or three like to drovers, With taylors bodkins, stabbing one another, Is not this trim? Is not here goodly things? (50–63)20 Tragedy, like Truth, is left alone to address the audience; she revises Comedy’s image: All you spectators, turne your chearfull eie, Give intertainment unto Tragedie, My Sceane is London, native and your owne, I sigh to thinke, my subject too well knowne I am not faind. (93–7) At the end of the play, ‘Tragedie enters to conclude’; at first her summary rhetorically evokes the traditional conception of high tragedy as a purgative medium: Here are the launces that have sluic’d forth sinne, And ript the venom’d ulcer of foule lust. But then she goes on to draw attention to the distinctive qualities of this play: Perhaps it may seeme strange unto you al, That one hath not revengde anothers death, After the observation of such course: The reason is, that now of truth I sing, And should I adde, or else diminish aught, Many of these spectators then could say, I have committed error in my play. Beare with this true and home-borne Tragedie, Yeelding so slender argument and scope, To build a matter of importance on, And in such forme as happly you expected. (2722–32) Her subject was ‘not faind’, which, as in Arden of Faversham, is the justification for the ‘slender argument and scope’ by means of which a matter of importance is represented. Peter Lake implies that there is something spurious about

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the claims of domestic plays like these to the status of tragedy, in that authors attribute moral weight to ‘theatrical presentations of commonplace, local, largely plebeian narratives taken from the bottom end of the cheap print market’.21 The plays, however, present themselves not only as dramatic novelties, but as forms of ‘social experiment’,22 in having for their subjects not only merchants, tailors, tavern keepers, chandlers, but also lives and deaths that took place in circumstances and locations familiar to the audiences. While acknowledging the high status traditionally accorded to tragedy, they extend its moral significance and affective means to subjects that are ‘true’ because they really happened, to people whom the audience might have known and certainly remembered, in places and surroundings where they led their own day-to-day lives. There is an identification between the truth which is a necessary component of tragic effect and verifiable reality. Not all domestic tragedy represented real events, and A Woman Killed with Kindness by Heywood, who wrote some plays with real-life subjects,23 demonstrates how the appeal of a homespun tragedy based ‘upon a barren subject, a bare scene’ could extend to a fictional story; but the typical domestic tragedy is a dramatisation of a true crime. Lena Cowen Orlin even suggests that the form came into being because of the impulse to dramatise an event that would not be accommodated within the ‘ancient parameters of a highly theorized genre’.24 She continues: ‘The pressure upon literature of an event like the Ardern [sic] murder accounts for the generic novelty that Arden of Faversham represents.’ She calls it ‘impertinent’, in the sense of irrelevant, or not belonging. This is perhaps just a more sophisticated way of accounting for the appearance of this short-lived form of tragedy at this time than that of Sturgess, for example, who says that the Elizabethan theatre produced it ‘intuitively responding to its audience’s interests and values’, and that it was ‘the inevitable provenance’ for the form because it was popular and in practice remote from dramatic theory.25 Akin to this is Madeleine Doran’s view that crime stories ‘looked like promising material to be put on the stage … and it would have been strange if the popular stage had neglected to employ them’.26 All of these critics are in reaction to the influential theory of Adams, who, in English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy 1575–1642, proposed the origins of domestic tragedy in the medieval morality play, which provided it with a specific pattern of action in terms of the theological series ‘sin, discovery, repentance, punishment, and expectation of divine mercy’.27 The presence of this pattern in most tragedies is undeniable, and so too the strong influence of aspects of popular theology as expressed in the Homilies, particularly the importance of repentance resulting in some kind of confession or public acknowledgement of sin. What is in dispute is its role in determining, and especially limiting, the cultural meanings of these plays. Adams is intent on presenting the plays primarily as edifying stories of the importance of God’s providential interventions in ensuring the discovery of secret crimes and the


inevitable punishment of all sinners. The murderers, in this account, frequently operate as the scourge of God, ridding the world of those who have committed lesser offences but are still guilty of sin. Although on occasion he acknowledges that this intention is only imperfectly realised, as when in Arden of Faversham the innocent Bradshaw goes to the scaffold with the rest, or in Two Lamentable Tragedies ‘none of the persons murdered shows any moral guilt’,28 he does not allow this to challenge his overriding thesis, that the plays’ prime function was as didactic exempla. In support of his view Adams cites Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612), a contribution to the intense current debate on the role of theatre in contemporary society, which also enlisted domestic tragedy in the service of morality. Heywood, as a writer of plays himself, was hardly a disinterested critic, and his take on the moral efficacy of drama was a much more specific one. With a ‘domestic and home-born example’ he related how the performance of husband-murder in ‘the old History of Feyer Francis’ caused a guilty wife in the audience to admit in public to a secret crime of her own.29 Heywood needed evidence to show that theatre could function as a means of social control and he furnished it by demonstrating how a domestic play could have a directly domestic impact. His example also bears incidentally on the old, though not necessarily providentialist, adage that murder will out. Heywood’s anecdotal evidence of the moral and social efficacy of drama, especially the drama of domestic crime, is hardly disputable, but most recent accounts of domestic tragedy have found Adams’ homiletic formula inadequate as a way of accounting for what domestic tragedy actually does.30 Critics such as Orlin, Dolan and Comensoli have found much in the plays to suggest dissatisfaction with a providential account of the meaning of crime. Comensoli remarks of the conclusion of Arden of Faversham in which one assassin goes free, one innocent victim is executed and (in her view) the crucial remorse of the chief criminal, Alice, ‘is not entirely credible’, that ‘providentialist narrative is forestalled, signalling authorial uneasiness with homiletic closure’.31 Orlin finds the handling of Rachel Merry’s fate in Two Lamentable Tragedies less than orthodox: ‘The text’s eventual advocacy of resistance on the domestic level in the interest of obedience on the political level renders the traditional interdependence of the public and private spheres uneasy.’32 This discomfort with the homiletic formula and the concomitant view of the plays as advocates of political orthodoxy in the domestic sphere stem from a secular, historicist reading of this drama in relation to its social and political context, something which Adams did not attempt. His didactic identification of the drama with sermons and homilies has the effect of emptying the dramatic form itself of signification as well as of radically limiting the cultural meanings which the representation of domesticity in these plays creates. Adams did, however, place considerable stress on what he calls realism, which he identifies with the appearance of non-noble protagonists in

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tragedy, which had become an established tradition from the morality play onwards, and the depiction of the ‘hard earthy facts’ of life.33 This attention to the material context of the action appears in late moral plays such as Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast (c. 1580), or George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth no Man (1576), staged only a few years before the domestic plays. Adams regarded this realism as essentially in the service of didacticism, a means to bring home the ‘message’ of the plays more directly to a nonnoble audience, but in the domestic tragedies realistic elements are now routinely interpreted in more complex ways. At one end of a spectrum of critics concerned to interrogate the humanistic assumptions which informed Adams’ reading of the place of realism in domestic drama is a view like that of Holbrooke, who sees the plays as social experiment in inserting contemporary social types such as merchants or tavern keepers into a high literary mode, resulting in plays which he calls ‘reductions of tragedy’, which both expose and explore a gap between tragedy and ‘truth’.34 Belsey and Dolan define the dramaturgy of A Warning for Fair Women and Two Lamentable Tragedies, which are closely related in this respect, as one which reveals the intersecting of two competing modes of representation, emblematic and illusionistic (or what I have been calling, uneasily, realistic).35 For Dolan, A Warning for Fair Women exhibits these two modes, one ‘an almost obsolete mode of representation’, the other ‘an emergent form of representation’ as entirely separate: ‘The allegorized motive, “Lust”, does not connect with the grim journalistic detail of the re-enacted crime, nor with any of the previous representations of Anne’s motives for allying with Browne.’36 This ‘grim journalistic detail’ is everywhere present in these plays, from the lowlife careers of the hired assassins, Black Will and Shakebag, in Arden of Faversham, detached, masterless men who live outside the bonds of community, to the onstage murders and executions in Two Lamentable Tragedies, and has in earlier times aroused a sense of aversion to the whole genre. A. M. Clark, Heywood’s biographer, typifies this in his remark that ‘there is … something repulsive about most tragedies of domestic crime’, and the relief with which he approaches the discussion of A Woman Killed with Kindness, a play commonly assimilated to the genre but in his view superior precisely because it was not factual: ‘It breathes a different air from the police court; it has an inevitability and universality which even A Yorkshire Tragedy lacks.’37 But for Alexander Leggatt, writing fifty years later, these very ‘police court details’ were the element that helped Arden of Faversham attain the ‘deeper realism that a writer achieves by working on the facts’.38 The drama that offered non-noble protagonists a chance to reach for tragic status and situated them in social worlds dominated as much by problems of money, class and rank as by anxieties about the condition of their eternal souls, also gave a voice and a more prominent role to women. Although Adams noted in passing in his introduction that the model plot


of a domestic tragedy was one of a wife’s infidelity leading to the murder of her husband, he manages to say remarkably little about any of the women characters and evidently did not consider it worthwhile to reflect on the implications of this formula for the representation of women in the plays. By contrast, Comensoli takes as her premise ‘the genre’s preoccupation with the category woman’, and devotes a book to exploring it. Perhaps more than anything it is the late twentieth century’s focus on women’s roles in the culture of early modern England that has redirected attention away from the homiletic aspects and providentialist readings of domestic tragedy towards a social and materialist interpretation of it. From Swinburne with his view of Alice Arden as a domestic Clytemnestra onwards, she has always seemed an astonishing creation, but at the same time unique; and it is true that for all the claims made for Arden of Faversham’s formative influence on the genre, no other play contains a female character remotely similar. None the less, A Warning for Fair Women centres on its two female characters, Anne Sanders and Anne Drury; Elizabeth Sawyer, the witch of Edmonton, dominates the multi-plot play named after her; and the women in The Late Lancashire Witches create the play’s spectacle and constitute its focal point. In A Yorkshire Tragedy and The Miseries of Enforced Marriage the wives play conventionally subsidiary parts, but what they signify lies at the heart of the plays’ explorations of the meanings of marriage and family life. Two Lamentable Tragedies is a rather different case; it does not concern domesticity in the same sense, and the role of Rachel Merry in the English plot is a small one, but only a reading of the play against the grain, which highlights Rachel’s peculiar involvement in the murder, can disclose the element of disquiet with the homiletic formula and the providentialist interpretation which is undoubtedly present. *** Plays share with ballads, the other performative mode, the capacity to give women a voice; and because they can represent, through time, a criminal action from its inception to its outcome, and are not limited, like ballads, to a perspective in retrospect, they are also potentially able to include the moment of choice, in which a woman decides to kill her husband or take the first step on the path which will lead her to become a witch. Dolan lucidly outlines the advantages of plays for the representation of the crime of husband-murder: ‘Because the drama as a form is committed to the exploration of conflict and must by its very nature present multiple subjectivities and voices, it can represent petty treason without subverting its own purposes and conventions. It does not need, therefore, to present its murderous wives as safely dead or to retreat from the contradiction they embody.’39 Any consideration of women and

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crime in domestic tragedy needs to take account of theatre’s institutional identity in relation to women. We know that women from a range of social classes attended theatrical performances, and that their presence and interests were often acknowledged in prologues and epilogues to plays; but the target audience was men, and the references to women members of the audience in prologues to plays such as Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize (?c. 1611) serve only to define the norm as masculine. Women’s roles had to be written for boys to perform; virtuoso playing could contribute significantly to the development of female roles which appear astonishingly illusionistic, but this convention of the early modern theatre, which endured so long in England, imposed constraints and created specific emphases. Perhaps it contributed, as McLuskie speculates, to the theatrical debate about gender: ‘It may have been this pressure, as much as ideological concerns which focused attention on the construction of women out of and in contrast to received ideas about women’s behaviour and characteristics.’40 For writers of plays about women and domestic crime the category woman was a particularly problematic one, given the prevalent cultural fear of deviant or transgressive women such as witches and murderers, and the feeling that they were at heart unknowable and could not be explained through normal processes of rational scrutiny. Feminist critics observe that strong women in plays, like witches, can be assimilated into patriarchal structures of thought only in terms of the supernatural. Belsey points out the difficulties of dealing with characters like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra; this view applies also to Alice Arden and perhaps to Anne Drury: The demonization of women who subvert the meaning of femininity is contradictory in its implications. It places them beyond meaning, beyond the limits of what is intelligible. At the same time it endows them with a (supernatural) power which it is precisely the project of patriarchy to deny.41 On the stage such women existed in an uncomfortable relationship to the stereotypes which had evolved to limit their meanings. They could appear simultaneously ‘dazzling and dangerous’. Various features of the dramaturgy combined to deny such characters the ‘unified, knowable self that can be enacted and articulated’,42 a self which could possibly be recovered in pamphlet accounts of criminal women of the period. The extensive body of received ideas about gender in the period exerted a particularly strong influence on the depiction of deviant women; and the prevalent ideologies defining gender roles within marriage, the family and the community operated negatively as much as positively. But in drama, ‘ideologically based assumptions’ are always set off against theatrical structures, including the institutional conventions and constrictions


within which they operate.43 Against the protection afforded by the multiple perspectives and viewpoints presented in a dramatisation of real-life events must be set the power of theatre to excite the imagination by depicting, through the heightened speech of actors on a stage, characters capable of operating as ‘fantasy vehicles for audience skepticism and wishfulfillment’.44 The fact that a play exists in time should not be forgotten, and its impact on an audience is both continuous, changing moment by moment, and cumulative; strong scenes of rebellion and transgression can take hold on the mind of an audience, and their impact is not necessarily denied or eradicated by a conventionally shaped dramatic closure. It is now perhaps something of a commonplace to suggest that women characters often function as the site where various kinds of ethical and ideological contradictions are played out, especially problems of authority and obligation within the family or community; and familiar, too, is the notion that women’s roles, and especially sexual relations, operate metaphorically to signify political issues on a broader level.45 As Whigham and others have observed, ‘plays about powerful or sexually uncontrolled women may sometimes address interdicted matters of class or kinship authority’.46 Domestic tragedy is a drama of ‘mixed intentions’;47 it wants to report the facts, to make moral judgements on them, yet also to titillate. As the title-page of Arden of Faversham clearly illustrates, the role of the criminal woman was the place where these aims met in conjunction. Its wording is phrased in the manner of a moralistic pamphlet of the period: The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent. Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the meanes of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the loue she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desperat ruffins Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great malice and discimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthie lust and the shamefull end of all murderers. It is generally and reasonably assumed that Arden of Faversham was the first to be written of the domestic tragedies that are extant, though A Warning for Fair Women could have been earlier.48 Almost certainly, there were such plays written earlier, such as The Cruelty of a Stepmother (produced at court in December 1578), Murderous Michael (produced at court in March 1579) and maybe The History of Friar Francis, as cited by Heywood, but all are lost.49 It took no time for the murder of Arden to be acknowledged as a sensational event, and Orlin has traced its long afterlife in exhaustive detail. What gave the impetus for the play seems to have been the account in Holinshed’s Chronicles; first published in 1577, the Chronicles had a second edition in 1587, which is printed with suggestive marginal notes and comments. It is these that add a strong moral emphasis to Holinshed’s account, and, as the Revels editor believes, ‘highlight dramatic possibilities inherent in the narrative’ in a way that might well have influenced the playwright’s approach to his story.50

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Holinshed introduces the long account (six pages or so) with an explanation for its inclusion in what is meant to be an historical chronicle: The which murther, for the horribleness thereof, although otherwise it may seem to be but a priuate matter, and therefore it were impertinent to this historie, I haue thought good to set it foorth somewhat at large, hauing the instructions deliuered to me by them, that haue vsed some diligence to gather the true vnderstanding of the circumstances. (148)51 He tells his tale with something of a story-teller’s interest in the shape and pattern of events. Holinshed’s account is sometimes regarded as neutral or objective, but even without the addition of the marginalia, which admittedly direct the reader’s viewpoint strongly, it is easy enough to trace an implicit moral shaping to the story. For instance, apparently casually, he mentions in his first paragraph the pair of silver dice which Adam Foule of the Fleur de Lys in Faversham brought from Alice to Mosby as a love token, and in the conclusion recalling Mosby’s remark: ‘Had it not beene for Adam Foule, I had not come to this trouble; meaning that the bringing of the siluer dice for a token to him from mistresse Arden, as ye haue heard, occasioned him to renew familiaritie with hir againe’ (159). The difference between Mosby’s role in Holinshed and in the play highlights the greater stress in the chronicle on Alice as Machiavell. It is as if fatal chance draws Holinshed’s Mosby back into Alice’s clutches with the lure of the silver dice, when he might otherwise have ended their affair. He dislikes her secret contriving and plotting against Arden, whom he preferred to challenge openly, ‘for he said he could not find in his heart to murther a gentleman in that sort as his wife wished’, and ‘in a furie floong awaie’, but is ‘at length’ prevailed on by Alice, who beseeches him to go ahead (153). In Holinshed most of the schemes for murdering Arden are devised by Alice, and Mosby plays little part until the night of the murder itself. Apart from the marginal glosses in the second edition the text itself eschews explicit moralising, except at one point when, after the murder has been committed and the blood-stained parlour cleaned, Holinshed comments, ‘Thus this wicked woman, with hir complices, most shamefullie murdered hir owne husband, who most entirelie loued hir all his life time’ (155). This is the single such instance; otherwise Holinshed is not concerned to make Arden sympathetic or exonerate him from moral guilt. Arden’s attitude to Alice’s relationship with Mosby goes beyond toleration; he ‘inuited Mosbie verie often to lodge at his house’ because of a need to safeguard ‘the benefit which he hoped to gaine at some of hir freends hands’ (149). The punctuation of the marginal gloss at this point is exclamatory: ‘Arden winketh at his wiues lewdnesse, & why!’ More significant is Arden’s unscrupulous hunger for land, which has brought him the hatred of many; and Holinshed’s final stress is on the meaning of the mysterious imprint of his body in the field where his corpse lay, in which no grass grows for two years after. This is a field which he


had ‘most cruellie taken from a woman, that had beene a widow to one Cooke, and after maried to one Richard Read’ who ‘curssed him most bitterlie euen to his face, wishing a vengeance to light vpon him, and that all the world might wonder on him. Which was thought then to come to passe, when he was thus murdered’ (159). In the play, Franklin, Arden’s apologist, mentions this briefly in the epilogue, but without any of the emphasis provided by the Chronicles’ marginal gloss: ‘God heareth the teares of the oppressed and taketh vengeance: note an example in Arden’ (159). Neither chronicle nor play is in any way a straightforward account of (comparatively) recent events, and each uses them to shape a particular story of a murder and its consequences. They are, though, rather different stories, especially where Alice and her relationships with Arden and Mosby are concerned. The dramatic medium emboldens Alice, as stage character and as dramatic conception; she is more vivid than either her husband or her lover. She has an immediate and erotic vitality, challenging the depth of Arden’s desire for her in her first lines, and only a few moments later asserting the strength of her passion for Mosby over any valuation of the institution of marriage: Love is a god, and marriage is but words; And therefore Mosby’s title is the best. Tush! Whether it be or no, he shall be mine In spite of him, of Hymen, and of rites. (II.101–4) The exuberance and bravado of her language, and her casual dismissal of all obstacles to her wishes, confer on her a self-assertion denied to the male characters. This – and the fact that the playwright allows her two direct addresses to the audience at the very beginning – establishes her at once as wicked, but dazzling, an imaginatively exciting challenge to the hidebound patriarchy of the ‘narrow-prying’ neighbours and Franklin with his timorous misogynistic commonplaces. She makes choices for Mosby as well as for herself; she organises Adam of the Fleur de Lys to act as their gobetween, and she pits Michael against the painter Clarke as rival suitors for Susan, creating a triangle that echoes her own situation with Arden and Mosby. She is forceful and controlling, and the dramaturgy that displays her in a range of diverse relationships to the male characters helps construct her as many-sided, capable of variety and change. She is sure enough of her power over Mosby to taunt him with rejection, shamelessly drawing on her sense of superior social status to present herself as a trophy too valuable for him to be entitled to: Before I saw that falsehood look of thine, ’Fore I was tangled with thy ’ticing speech, Arden to me was dearer than my soul –

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And shall be still. Base peasant, get thee gone, And boast not of thy conquest over me, Gotten by witchcraft and by sorcery. For what hast thou to countenance my love, Being descended of a noble house, And matched already with a gentleman Whose servant thou may’st be? And so farewell. (II.195–204) Class is a vital component of Alice’s social and erotic power in the play; her high rank, known to all, not only puts the less well-born Arden in a position of dependency to her, as Greene says (I. 488–91), but enables her to present herself as undervalued by an ungrateful husband. Mosby, a tailor or, as Arden and Franklin call him, a botcher, is low-born enough to be openly insulted, even effeminised, by Alice’s domination. Her love-gestures towards him, locking him in her closet, giving him her wedding ring to wear, threaten his masculinity; ‘Tis fearful sleeping in a serpent’s bed,’ he muses, uneasily conscious of her ability, already proved, to replace one bedmate with another.52 Earlier, he has announced himself ready to ‘play your husband’s part’ (I. 638), and in the murder scene assumes Arden’s chair at Alice’s bidding; but the image of the wife who, as murderer and widow, replaces one husband with another, strikes at the heart of patriarchy; and Mosby’s place is never more secure than Arden’s. The astonishing scene in which Alice incites Mosby to confront Arden, ‘you and I both marching arm in arm’ (XII. 67), and insult him as a cuckold, brilliantly stages the scandalous power of the murderous wife to destabilise masculinity. Alice not only kisses Mosby publicly and causes a free-for-all in which Mosby and Shakebag too are wounded, but then contrives to persuade Arden that he has actually misunderstood everything and gets him to beg Mosby’s pardon. As a murderous wife, she manipulates the significance of marriage in a way that illuminates a range of contemporary anxieties around the fearful image of ‘woman on top’; she is capable of dismissing it as an empty ritual compared with the fullness of true love, and also of invoking companionate marriage as an implicit ideal so as to play upon her husband’s guilty sense of social dependency. In this scene (XIII) she wins Arden round by depicting herself (comically) as victim to his domestic tyranny: Ah me accursed, To link in liking with a frantic man! Henceforth I’ll be thy slave, no more thy wife; For with name I never shall content thee. If I be merry, thou straightways thinks me light; If sad, thou sayest the sullens trouble me; If well attired, thou thinks I will be gadding;


If homely, I seem sluttish in thine eye. Thus am I still, and shall be while I die, Poor wench abused by thy misgovernment. (XIII. 104–13) Her reference to the discourse of misogyny at this point intersects ironically with the commonplaces about women with which Franklin attempts to soothe Arden and to which Mosby often has recourse; the playwright uses this discourse in such a way that, by creating a series of jarring asides on his depiction of heterosexual relationships, he suggests the inadequacy of its consolatory function. It would be a misrepresentation of the play to ignore the social context within which the murder takes place, and critics have built up a detailed picture of its post-reformation world of unstable social values. The opening lines refer to Arden’s legal right to the lands of the Abbey of Faversham, granted to him and his heirs by the Lord Protector, as a means of establishing the play’s historical setting, and it is in a field behind the abbey where his corpse is placed, its imprint polluting the ground. But this, it becomes clear, is disputed land, the plot which Arden had ‘by force and violence from Reede’ (Epilogue, 11), and where Arden had ensured the annual town fair be held ‘for his owne priuat lucre & couetous gaine … bereauing the towne of the portion which was woont to come to the inhabitants’ (157).53 Arden’s greed for land, apparently sanctioned by the crown, seems to authorise the disrespect for law exhibited by men at all levels on the social scale. Greene, Arden’s resentful tenant, needs no second bidding to enter into a plot against Arden’s life: Seeing he hath taken my lands, I’ll value life As careless as he is careful to get; And, tell him this from me, I’ll be revenged And so as he shall wish the Abbey lands Had rested still within their former state. (I. 478–82) Greene, looking to hire ‘some cutter’, in Alice’s graphic phrase, to despatch Arden, lights on Black Will, who is so ready to get his hands on twenty angels that he will kill anyone, anywhere: ‘Give me the money, and I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall, but I’ll kill him’ (II. 97–8). Will himself belongs to an extensive, and in the later sixteenth century highly menacing, criminal underworld of unemployed soldiers, thieves like the villainous Jack Fitton (II. 46–59), rough taverns where cutpurses fight and the hostess is a part-time prostitute, sometimes prepared, like Shakebag’s Widow Chambley, to harbour wanted men. Nearer home, Arden’s household is threatened by unscrupulous people who owe him no loyalty, like Michael and Susan, whom Arden dismisses as part of ‘a crew of harlots, all

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in love’ (III. 270), and of course Mosby, steward to an aristocratic household, who, as Arden puts it scornfully, ‘bravely jets it in his silken gown’ (I. 30). The class sense that empowers Alice renders both Arden and Mosby vulnerable. Arden’s insecurity results in his snobbish taunting of Mosby; Alice’s preference for this upstart, not entitled to wear a sword, implicitly demeans the masculinity of her bourgeois husband. Mosby is stung less by Arden’s smears than by Alice’s accusation that she has demeaned herself through a misalliance incapable of rational explanation: Even in my forehead is thy name engraven, A mean artificer, that low-born mane. I was bewitched. Woe worth the hapless hour And all the causes that enchanted me! (VIII. 76–9) When she attempts moments later to win him round with compliments to his intelligence and social manners, he returns bitterly, O, no, I am a base artificer; My wings are feathered for a lowly flight. Mosby? Fie, no! not for a thousand pound. Make love to you? Why, ’tis unpardonable; We beggars must not breathe where gentles are. (VIII. 135–9) The meaning of Alice’s crime is partly defined by its relationship to this world of casual violence; the wish to surrender to passion that prompts her quasi-orgasmic soliloquy (XIV. 142–53) as all the preparations for Arden’s murder are at last underway is not dissimilar to Black Will’s murderous longing to ‘be at the peasant’ (II. 105), though the scandal of her iconoclastic defiance of social institutions designed to keep her in place as woman and wife extends the significance of the crime beyond this. But as the play draws to its conclusion the act of murder takes on dimensions beyond the social and material, and Alice’s bravado immediately vanishes. When she is brought to face the corpse in the presence of the mayor, it continues to gush blood. As Gaskill illustrates, corpse-touching to test the innocence of suspects in a murder case was used as part of the judicial process in the period.54 Confronted by such unchallengeable proof, neither Alice nor Mosby makes any attempt to deny their guilt, and Alice, the most repentant of all the conspirators, readies herself for death: Leave now to trouble me with worldly things, And let me mediate upon my saviour Christ. (XVIII. 9–10)


Susan, in a single stumbling line, also expresses her penitence: ‘Seeing no hope on earth, in heaven is my hope’ (XVIII. 36), finally conforming like Alice to a gender stereotype, but none of the men either repents or asks for mercy. The rapidity with which the play concludes rather undermines its effectiveness as a homiletic instrument, as does the somewhat random delivery of moral justice, by which Alice, Mosby, Michael and also Susan, who had no active part in the conspiracy other than helping to clear up after the murder, are all condemned to death, Clark the painter simply disappears, Black Will and Shakebag die in other ways, and the innocent Bradshaw is doomed to execution with Michael and the rest. Though the playwright has neatened aspects of his story-material in the interests of shaping his play, by combining the parts played by Susan and a maid-servant of Alice, for example, he seems not to wish to conceal the arbitrariness of the events in the murder’s aftermath. The weight of any providentialist reading must rest on Arden and his fate, as Franklin’s epilogue stresses; in his case, the conspirators have functioned like the scourge of God, instrumental in bringing to fruition the curse laid on Arden by Reede.55 But for a play dealing with news, the importance attached to Alice’s act of domestic insurrection is greater than that of Arden’s divinely ordained punishment for landgrabbing. Rapacious landlords cursed by poor tenants were a staple of medieval satire, but the murderous wife whose actions expose the instability of the patriarchal household is to become a symbolic figure of crisis in gender relations for the seventeenth century. The ballad ‘[The] complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of ’[Feu]ersham in Kent’, printed in 1633 and probably composed in the wake of the third quarto of the play in the same year, is worth noticing as a postscript to the play. Belsey remarks of it that ‘for the first time the woman is the unequivocal subject of the narrative’,56 which is of course the usual situation in a complaint ballad. Far from attempting to exonerate herself, Alice in the ballad depicts Arden as the innocent victim of an adulterous and murderous wife, seduced by a lover ‘with sugred tongue’. Neither his involvement in suspect land dealings nor the manner in which his death was discovered is referred to, and the providentialist aspect of his fate is omitted. The form is almost entirely narrative, and by contrast with the ballads on the Page of Plymouth or George Sanders murders, Alice invites no sympathy for herself and is given no space for confession or expressions of penitence. Arden of Faversham is regularly assumed to have influenced A Warning for Fair Women,57 but probably more because the latter was not printed until 1599, seven years after the first quarto of Arden, than for any other reason. It is not impossible that A Warning for Fair Women came first, given that its source, A Briefe Discourse of the Late Murther, was published much earlier, anonymously by ‘A. G.’ in 1573, and again in 1577 under Arthur Golding’s name. The two plays are similar in features shared by domestic tragedy

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more generally; but in their dramaturgy, and their depictions of the early modern family and the place of the transgressive wife within it, they are very different. Their sources, too, have significant differences. Unlike Holinshed’s account in the Chronicles, Golding’s pamphlet is topical news. It is a self-standing pamphlet, written directly after the events it recounts; the murder took place ‘the Tuisday in Easter weeke last past (which was the xxiiij day of March)’, George Browne the murderer was arraigned at the King’s bench on Friday, 17 April 1573 and executed ‘on Monday the xx of the same moneth’ (217, 219).58 But although Golding’s opening sentences give some weight to setting out the facts of the case, his real concern is to ensure that proper use is made of them: Forasmuch as the late murther of Master Sanders, Citizen and Merchant taylor of this citie, ministreth great occasion of talk among al sorts of men, not onelie here in the Towne, but also farre abrode in the Countrie, and generally through the whole realme; and the sequels and accidents ensewing thereupon, breede much diversitie or reports and opinions … It is thought convenient (gentle reader) to give thee a playne declaration of the whole matter … that thou mayest know the truth to the satisfying of thy mind, and the avoyding of miscredite, and also use the example to the amendment of thy life. (216) Sensational events do breed ‘great occasion of talk among al sorts of men’, and Golding’s phrasing evinces an anxiety about information getting into the wrong hands. He is not a chronicler, but a writer with a social and moral mission, and his providential reading of the events of the case is signalled at every turn, with references to ‘the secret working of Gods terrible wrathe in a guiltie and bluddie conscience’, and ‘Gods wonderful providence’ (218). The events are, as it were, a spectacle produced by God, who ‘bringeth such matters upon the stage, unto ye open face of the world’ so that ‘the execution of his judgments should by the terrour of the outward sight of the example, drive us to the inward consideration of ourselves’ (226). The faults of Anne Drury, Anne Sanders, Roger and Browne have been displayed in ‘the open Theater’ of public scrutiny, just as they appear literally upon a ‘stage’ surrounded by huge crowds to make their last confessions (227, 224). After describing the trial, the sentencing and the behaviour of the culprits in prison, Golding explicitly redirects his account in the manner of a sermon: ‘now remayneth to shewe what is to be gathered of this terrible example, and how we oughte to apply the same to our owne behoofe’ (225). The lengthy injunctions which follow are both general, on repentance, God’s mercy and the need for self-scrutiny, and also specific, on the avoidance of adultery. The pamphlet concludes with Anne Sanders’ confession, supposedly verbatim, and her prayer, of which she had made a copy for the Earl of Bedford.


Golding is anxious that his pamphlet not be seen to contribute to the creation of gossip and scandal; he withholds certain details which might ‘serve to feede the fond humor of such curious appetites as are more inquisitive of other folkes offences than hastie to redresse their owne’; now that all is concluded it is a requirement of Christian charity ‘eyther to burie the faults with the offendours in perpetual silence, or else to speak of them, as the vices and not the parties themselves may seeme to be any more touched’ (216, 217). This refusal to provide a full disclosure does not appear to be a rhetorical move; Golding’s concern is not with the murder and its motivation but with its moral uses in demonstrating how a group of people ‘all … very rawe and ignorant in all things perteyning to god and to their soule health’ (223) were brought to a condition of hearty repentance and readiness for death. Anne Sanders who had persisted in a state of ‘stubborne unrepentauntnesse’ (221) as long as she possibly could, in her confession thanks God that her career of sin has been brought to an end in this world so that she is saved from eternal damnation in the next. In the play Golding’s strong and unified moral emphasis is diffused and disrupted, partly because of the twofold style of the dramaturgy, and partly because of its opening up of the roles of Anne Drury and her side-kick trusty Roger, and partly because of its ambivalent representation of the wife’s role within the early modern household. From one perspective, the greater moral complexity of the play is a function of its concern with issues of gender, absent from the pamphlet where the meaning of the crime inheres in something other than its specific nature as the murder of a husband. As Dolan observes in a persuasive reading of the play, ‘the playwright … individuates Anne and depicts her transgression as a response to the constraints imposed by her gender and class’,59 though this is not the only reading the play offers of Anne Sanders’ transgression. In the style of dramaturgy exemplified in the allegorical scenes, her transition from innocence to adulterous guilt follows a familiar and unproblematic course. These scenes take a simple and clear-cut line on Anne Sanders’ moral accountability, while the realistic scenes, exploring the contribution of social factors such as class and gender to her dilemma, depict her role in a more complex and ambiguous way. The relationship between the two dramatic modes in the play is summarised by Holbrooke so as ultimately to subordinate the realistic: ‘Against the contingency of modern London life is posed the spiritual, fundamental order unfolded in the dumb shows and by Tragedy.’60 It is as well not to ignore the point made by McLuskie that the details of realistic staging can be used ‘as emblematically as the bowers and heraldic trees of court pageantry’,61 as for instance Arden’s chair, taken over by Mosby, or the game of blackjack at which he loses his life. But there is a contrast between the modes, which in terms of dramaturgy is clear enough, though its significance may not be so obvious. The dumbshow, it seems, enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the 1590s and may

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not necessarily have been perceived as archaic or simplistic. The emblematic features of A Warning for Fair Women have sometimes been thought to have been influenced by The Spanish Tragedy, although in this play there is no competition for ideological authority between the scenes of generically self-conscious commentary by the Ghost of Andrea and Revenge, and the rest. And realism, at least in the sense of the depiction of non-élite characters in contemporary social settings, was not absent in late Tudor morality plays, although it was undoubtedly not the primary mode. A Warning for Fair Women continues the tradition of these ‘hybrid’ plays, but the issue is how the play handles what are often read as contradictions between the different versions it gives of Anne Sanders’ transgression. Anne Sanders is slow to emerge as the figure of the murderous wife. For the first part of the play she is entirely without agency, although she never figures as innocent victim in the realistic scenes. Browne’s desire for her, announced without preamble in the first scene, is unprovoked and arises as a response to her dangerous beauty, as his Petrarchan idiom implies: By this light my heart is not my owne, But taken prisoner at this frolicke feast, Intangled in a net of golden wiar, Which love had slily laid in her faire lookes. (157–60) Anne Drury, who has already announced her readiness to entertain him, assures him that Anne Sanders is ‘very honest, very chaste yfaith’; but given that Drury’s main concern is to set a high price on her skills as gobetween, this testimony works in reverse. The significance of Anne Sanders’ chastity is modified both by its commodity status, and by the strong implications of her vulnerability. Although she seems dismissive of Browne’s rather timid advances in the second scene, she none the less appears, as Drury had predicted, sitting at her door, where she knows she may invite the attentions of ‘arrand-making Gallants’ (394), and the exchange with her husband on his return underlines the exposure of her position. She resists Drury’s efforts to exploit her annoyance with her husband when he leaves her without money to pay the tradesmen, but another aspect of her femininity, her submissive readiness to accept this annoyance as ‘destiny’ leaves her fatally vulnerable to Drury’s Iago-like inventiveness. Drury’s claim, as a fortune-teller, that lines in Anne’s palm show her predestined to widowhood and second marriage with Browne does not please her, but she makes no move to question or resist Drury’s authority. No contact between Anne and Browne is depicted in the realistic scenes before the murder, and in the gap between the crucial scene iv and Anne’s reappearance after the murder in scene x, she takes up her role as murderous wife.


In the intervening scenes Anne’s transformation follows the homiletic conception of the ‘chain of vice’, whereby the soul once infected by sin becomes increasingly prone to graver and graver moral lapses, ‘our sins being the chain wherewith Satan doth bind and manacle us’ as John Taylor put it.62 No other explanation is required for the progression from adultery to murder. As Tragedy comments, after Browne and Anne have drunk the wine of Lust: Now bloud and Lust, doth conquer and subdue, And Chastitie is quite abandoned: Here enters Murther into al their hearts, And doth possesse them with the hellish thirst Of guiltlesse blood. (838–42) No act of adultery takes place in the realistic scenes; but after the first dumbshow Anne has become, at least in her heart, a faithless wife. Chastity is a prominent figure in the first and second dumbshows, thrust aside by Drury, then by Anne, as she vainly tries to awaken Anne’s conscience by showing her a portrait of Sanders, and finally making her exit ‘wringing her hands, in teares’ (1278). But even in the second half of the play Anne never fully inhabits her new role. She seems to oscillate strangely between hysterical protestations of guilt and brazen assertions of innocence, in scene x threatening to disfigure her ‘pampered flesh’ as token of her ‘prodigious’ lust, but in the court scene appearing with a white rose and lying blatantly to contradict Roger’s testimony. It is not until she discovers in scene xxi that Drury will no longer take the guilt on herself that she abandons any claim to innocence. In part it seems as if the contradictory versions of Anne’s transgression are kept in play as long as possible, because both Browne, and the minister sent to instruct her in prison, insist on her innocence. Although Browne is warned on the scaffold that his refusal to implicate her in the teeth of all the evidence ‘doth fully prove thou hast no true contrition’ (2452), he still does not renege on his loyalty to her even in his last confession, at the peril of his soul. The playwright may be negotiating between the pull towards homiletic closure urged by his source material and the suspense brought about by the long delay of Anne Sanders’ inevitable contrition and repentance. On the other hand, it may be that this oscillation in fact contributes directly towards the affirmation of an orthodox providentialist conclusion. Events conspire to demonstrate to Anne that she cannot escape God’s mercy. Standing at her prison grate she hears men in the street talking of the gallows ‘both strong and big enough to hold us all’ which strikes terror to her soul; then Drury urges her that ‘yet there’s time of grace, / and yet we may obtaine forgivenes, / if we wil seeke it at our Saviours hands’

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(2595–7). Unlike Faust, she still has one more chance, and feeling herself ‘strangely changed’ by Drury’s words she prepares for full confession: Yet God I give him thanks Even at this instant I am strangely changed, And wil no longer drive repentance off, Nor cloake my guiltinesse before the world. (2605–8) The fullness of Anne’s confession and repentance entitle her to a final, recuperative, scene as pious mother bidding her children farewell. The playwright follows Golding’s text closely at this point, making Anne grateful for the discovery of her part in the murder: And God I thank that hath found out my sin, And brought me to affliction in this world, Thereby to save me in the world to come. (2683–5) The conclusion of the play works to suppress the contradictions that have been exposed in the first part of it. The first four scenes build up a contemporary context for the action in prosperous bourgeois life in London of the 1580s, locating the Sanders’ house very specifically for a local audience ‘against Saint Dunstones church’ but in Billingsgate, not Fleet Street, and defining the marriage in terms of what Comensoli calls early modern civility with reference to material items – the child’s toys and new clothes, Anne’s fashionable purchases from the draper and the milliner – George Sanders’ well-to-do employment at the Exchange, and, particularly, the management of the domestic economy. The moment in scene iv when Anne expresses her resentment at the fact that her husband has left her without enough ready cash to pay the tradesmen, thus humiliating her in front of them and also of Sanders’ manservant, has been seen as exposing the problem of the wife’s role within the family structure.63 Anne says angrily to Drury when the draper and the milliner have gone: I am a woman, and in that respect, Am well content my husband shal controule me, But that my man should over-awe me too, And in the sight of strangers, mistris Drurie, I tell you true, do’s grieve me to the heart. (655–9) She chafes at reaching the limits of her authority; having made an autonomous decision not to ‘goe on credite’ for the goods, although the


tradesmen are willing to accept deferred payment, she is forced to acknowledge her subordination not only to her husband, but to his servant. Probably Anne’s propensity for rebellion, quickly subdued as it is, is less significant for itself than for the fissure it reveals in the contemporary ideology of marriage. This fissure is widened by the operations of Anne Drury, a considerably more fascinating figure here than in the pamphlet. Drury is the archetype of the dangerous widow, a financially independent woman of experience, who controls her own life and sexuality, and is not shy of taking part with men in dinner-table conversation. The information provided in the pamphlet, that Drury has been accused of witchcraft and sorcery, of poisoning her husband, and causing a separation between the Earl of Derby and his wife,64 feeds into her role in the play, even if it is not directly used. To Browne she is the indispensable go-between with special access to Anne Sanders, possessed of equivocal skills such as ‘a sweete tongue, as wil supple a stone’ (259–60), and a ‘preitie’ ability in surgery, from which she makes her living. To Anne Sanders she is a woman neighbour and confidante, but also someone with secret knowledges; not only can she exercise medical skills, but, as she testifies herself, Where I cure one sicknesse or disease, I tell a hundred fortunes in a yeere. What makes my house so haunted as it is, With merchants wives, bachlers and yong maides, But for my matchlesse skil in palmestrie? (688–92) She mediates between male and female worlds, without acknowledging any gender loyalty. In counselling Browne on his strategies to obtain Anne Sanders, she interiorises the male view of female perversity: ‘Women love most, by whom they are most tride’ (295). Her sense of human relations is reductively materialist; Browne is ‘a proper man and hath good store of coin’, and Anne is ‘yong and faire, and may be tempred easily like wax’ (448). Aware of the random contingency of modern life, she looks to her own interests, planning to milk Browne for money to provide for herself and Roger, and also to make her daughter a dowry for a match ‘to some rich Atturney, or Gentleman’ (466). As Roger sagely counsels, ‘There’s no trusting to uncertainties’ (461). In all her transactions, Roger is at her side, in a multiple role; he is her servant, her publicity agent with Browne, but also her ‘heart’s interpreter’ (442). As his suggestive summary of her dealings with Anne Sanders implies, they run a joint operation; Anne is not the first by many, That you have wonne to stoope unto the lewre,

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It is your trade, your living, what needs more? Drive you the bargain, I will keepe the doore. (450–3) In the dumbshows, they are figured as devils, ‘that wicked Drurie, that accursed fiend’ (824), ‘this damned woman’ (1291), and Roger ‘a villaine expert in all trecherie / One conversant with all her damned drifts’ (827–8). Their complicity is a quasi-sexual one; at the bloody banquet they embrace at Lust’s table. Drury rather than Browne is the agent of Anne’s seduction,65 which, in the realistic scenes, is effected through Drury’s rhetoric, not Anne’s desire. In social terms, it is she who expresses the instability of the early modern ideology of marriage, and the fact that it is the woman neighbour rather than the lover who takes the principal part in undermining the wife’s chastity further emphasises how, as Orlin puts it, ‘a female character … is the site of the most profound and moving explorations of the ethical issues addressed in the play’.66 It is hard to accept the view of the play’s only modern editor that ‘Browne stands out sharper than the other characters’.67 Even from a conventional homiletic viewpoint, it is Anne Sanders’ longdelayed acceptance of her guilt and conversion to faith, rather than Browne’s confession and, admittedly, spectacular death, leaping off the scaffold onstage, that makes the play’s climax. Orlin’s point about the female character as the focus of ethical concern links A Warning for Fair Women with Two Lamentable Tragedies by Robert Yarrington, a play close to it in spirit and dramatic technique. In the English murder plot of this play Rachel Merry neither commits a crime nor is complicit in the committing of one, but goes to the scaffold for helping to conceal murders done by her brother. The play is a dramatic hybrid akin to A Warning for Fair Women; personifications of Homicide, Avarice (or Covetousness) and Truth appear in the Induction, four interludes and the Epilogue, though the human characters take no place in these scenes. The English murder plot is interwoven with a separate one depicting a murder done in Italy. The two actions are implicitly connected in several ways, principally through themes of greed and family loyalty. It is not possible to demonstrate which of these two plays is the earlier; Yarrington’s play, for which there is no evidence of performance, was printed two years later than A Warning for Fair Women and seven after the murder depicted in the English plot, though Adams, without supporting his assumption, calls it ‘the second of the extant murder plays’, and believes the opening of A Warning for Fair Women to be ‘an evident imitation’ of Yarrington’s opening. 68 His view that it is more closely based on an old-fashioned mode of drama than plays known to be written for the professional theatre such as Arden may well have influenced his dating. The pamphlet and five ballads, all lost, relating to


the Beech murder in the English plot were all entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, very soon after the executions of Rachel Merry and her brother Thomas, and the text of the play itself, which refers to the murders as recent events, suggests a similarly close date. The Beech murder evidently aroused considerable interest at the time, but it is not now really clear why; the murders (Thomas Merry also killed Beech’s boy), though brutal, were not especially scandalous, and no sexual element was involved. The situation of Rachel which has attracted the interest of some recent critics, is a site of conflict but hardly a major focus in the play as a whole. Perhaps Yarrington’s decision to confine the Beech murders to only half of the play suggests a lack of confidence that this news material had enough dramatic potential in itself as the basis for a complete action. The Italian murder plot provides more conventional stuff for a tragedy, with its evil uncle who orders the murder of his child nephew because he is heir to lands and wealth, its hired assassins who dispute, like those in Richard III, about the morality of the crime, and the destruction of a high-born family. The social level of the characters in the Beech plot affords a sense of generic novelty.69 In the Induction, Homicide begins by lamenting that London offers no substance for the ‘fearefull tragedies’ of mangled bodies and ‘fathers by their children murthered’ (sig. A2) that he delights in; this invokes high tragedy, Senecan style, with its conventional accoutrements like the ‘filthie whining ghost’ that Comedy mocks in the Induction to A Warning for Fair Women. Money-making is the chief occupation of the citizens here, but of no interest to him ‘unleast a deed of murther father it’ (sig. A2v). Truth then offers Homicide the raw material for ‘two shewes of lamentation, Besprinkled euery where with guiltlesse blood’ (sig. A3). The Beech murders can, then, function as a source of tragic truth, even though, as the first scene emphasises, the main participants are a tavern-keeper and a chandler, and the setting a commonplace London alehouse. This is not the gentrified establishment of Arden, or the bourgeois household of Sanders. Merry envies Beech his wealth, but as the chandler explains, it is of modest proportions: My shop is stor’d, I am not much in debt; I haue a score of poundes to helpe my neede, If God should stretch his hand to visit me, With sicknesse, or such like aduersitie. (sig. A4v) Merry’s envy is the meaner and his financial situation, precisely defined, is one that would be immediately comprehensible to shopkeepers and tradesmen in a contemporary audience. His alehouse has a reputation for ‘good rule and orders in his house’, as Beech’s friend remarks, and the drinkers

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praise the quality of the beer, yet Merry is discontented for lack of ready money: I cannot buy my beare, my bread, my meate: My fagots, coales, and such necessaries, At the best hand, because I want the coine, That manie misers coafer up in bagges, Hauing enough to serue their turnes besides. (sig. A4v) The importance of money is socially grounded, an aspect of life in early modern London; but avarice as a sin, and a motive for crime, is also a universal aspect of human life, as its role in the Italian plot makes clear. At his second appearance Merry has already decided to murder Beech for his money; avarice provides all the motivation needed, and Yarrington’s text affords no social or psychological complexity. The homiletic thrust of this play is stronger and more ubiquitous than in Arden of Faversham or A Warning for Fair Women, and dispenses with issues of subjectivity. Merry voices his soliloquy like Envy personified. The quotidian detail of a real-life killing interacts with the play’s tendency to sermon, without at this point complicating it; Merry lays ready his hammer, lures Beech to a room over the alehouse, and, as the stage direction specifies, strikes him in the head fifteen times. The wider impact of the murder, expressed in social and moral terms, extends to the other people immediately affected by it, Merry’s man Williams and Rachel, his sister. Williams immediately decides to leave the house and Merry’s employ, even though this will make him homeless and masterless, but he does not escape the consequences of his involvement with Merry, and is ultimately convicted for his part in concealing the crime. The social consequences of Williams’ situation are hinted at, in references to his loss of a permanent home and his need to resort to underhand means, such as blackmailing Merry, to obtain money, but not explored. Rachel’s predicament is, however, more fully treated, in terms of her role within the family and of her gender. She is horrified at her brother’s crime, but as an unmarried woman leaving his house is not an option for her. She begs Williams to stay: … prethie Harry do not leaue the house, For then suspition will arise thereof, And if the thing be knowne we are vndone. (sigs. B4v–C1) Her loyalty to her brother soon involves her in active complicity with his crimes, helping conceal Beech’s disappearance and dispose of his body.


Her moral dismay is at odds with her sense of her duty as a dependent woman: I am your sister, though a silly Maide, Ile be your true and faithfull comforter. (sig. D2v) The practicalities of hiding the corpse, displayed upon the stage, cleaning the bloodstained house, and burning the rags preoccupy Merry; but Rachel, in a gender reversal, suffers the conscience of Macbeth: oh would to God I could As cleerly wash your conscience from the deed As I can cleanse this house from least suspect, Of murderous deed, and beastlie crueltie. (sig. D3) Her helpless but inescapable involvement in her brother’s act is especially signalled in the short scene where she enters ‘with a bag’; when Merry tells her it is for him to carry away the body for disposal she responds dismally, You cannot beare so great a waight yourselfe, And ’tis no trusting of another man. (sig. E3) But when Merry prepares to dismember the body, onstage, Rachel cannot stay to watch, though she dutifully agrees to clear up after him. In her only moment of soliloquy she comments I feare thy soule wil burne in flames of hell, Unlesse repentance wash away thy sinne, With clensing teares of true contrition: Ah did not nature ouersway my will, The world should know this plot of damned ill. (sig. E2v–E3) Orlin glosses Rachel’s use of ‘nature’ here as ‘ideologically coded’ to mean ‘the contemporary tradition of natural law, and the “natural” or Godmandated direction of duty that is one of its fundamental tenets’.70 Lake objects to this, arguing that there was surely no version of the law of nature available to the sixteenth-century mind that held that murder should be concealed and murderers should be helped to evade capture and condign punishment.

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Rather what ‘nature’ appears to mean here is that nexus of emotional attachment, human sympathy and self-interest that links relatives or subordinates to superiors or kin.71 I would go along with this, because Rachel’s dilemma, like that of Allenso in the Italian plot, also personally guiltless, is that of the subordinate relation who is compromised when his superior, to whom he owes loyalty, behaves unethically. It is not just ‘a problem of patriarchy’,72 because it is one Rachel shares with Allenso, but it does hint at contradictions in the usual analogy between the moral structures of the household and the state. Because Rachel cannot bring herself to betray her brother, she shares his fate on the scaffold, a scene which is again depicted onstage. As Truth indicates, Merry’s punishment is the more shameful, for his corpse is to hang in chains. Williams, however, though condemned with Rachel for complicity, is differently treated. Truth makes this explicit: Williams and Rachel are likewise conuict For their concealement, Williams craues his booke, And so receaues a brond of infamie. But wretched Rachels sexe denies that grace, And therefore dooth receiue a doome of death, To dye with him, whose sinnes she did conceale. (sig. I2v) The special horror of the execution of a woman is suggested by the stage direction given at the moment when Rachel witnesses her brother’s death: ‘Turne of the lather [ladder]: Rachel shrinketh’. The text allows some bitterness to enter her scaffold speech as she upbraids Williams for his initial act of concealment, and wishes that her fate may Teach all sisters how they do conceale The wicked deeds, of brethren, or of friends. (sig. K2v) Her hanged body is left on stage as a visual exemplum to drive home this lesson. As Orlin says, the play is ‘uneasy’ about the contradictions of patriarchal ideology exposed by Rachel’s dilemma; for she is simultaneously required as a woman to obey her brother as her superior, yet also to observe God’s moral law, and there is no position of active resistance for her when the two are in opposition. The difficult point about Rachel is that while she is in no way consciously transgressive like the other women in domestic plays, she still suffers the extremest penalty for her actions. The playwright never attempts to construct her involvement in the murders, or her consciousness, as transgressive, in the way that the writer of A Warning for Fair Women uses


his allegorical material to do for Anne Sanders. This particular version of the situation of the criminal woman is rare as a dramatic subject, but it probably represents the most frequent type of female criminality in the culture of early modern England, where a woman’s involvement in a crime of violence was only rarely as an instigator. Yarrington’s play, perhaps the work of a nonprofessional writer,73 perhaps never staged, owes its existence to the sensation made by a real-life news story, but unlike Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women it cannot create an archetype out of its woman criminal, who fails ever to be a murderous woman, or a figure of scandal. *** Both extant and lost domestic plays support the view that women’s involvement in murder was the main form of female criminality to be staged; but while ballads and pamphlets depict women in the role of childkillers, this situation, though depicted in minor actions in other kinds of tragedy, does not occur in domestic plays.74 Paradoxically, a man who kills his children can become a tragic subject, like the husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy, but this seems impossible for a murderous mother. There are no early modern plays of Medea. The role of motherhood in this period is not dramatic, though parent–child relations apparently did become a dramatic subject in the lost plays The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son (1595–1613) by Chapman, and The Late Murther in White Chappell, or Keepe the Widow Waking (1624) by the Witch of Edmonton team, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley, with Webster.75 Women’s crime outside the domestic family was, however, staged. Witchcraft became a dramatic subject, but a less common one than might be expected from the wealth of news pamphlet material devoted to it. McLuskie speculates that Elizabeth Sawyer may have been chosen by Dekker and his team for their play The Witch of Edmonton because Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer (1621), constitutes an accessible source of raw material, but there were plenty of other, more sensational, accounts of witch trials and confessions that never attracted the attention of any playwrights. According to Goodcole, there were also numerous ballads about Sawyer, but again she was not unique in this. The relative rarity of witchcraft as a subject for domestic plays may be related to the fact that it is essentially a rural rather than an urban crime, and indeed the two surviving plays on the subject, The Witch of Edmonton and The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) by Brome and Heywood, both treat the events as spectacles of rural life, related to particular festive ceremonies and cultural practices, represented for the delectation of a city audience.76 The Witch of Edmonton is a dramatic rarity in another way: it treats witchcraft seriously.77 That it was produced to capitalise on a sensational news story is suggested by the fact that three playwrights, all old hands at collaborative work, were brought together to write it. Elizabeth Sawyer was

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hanged at Tyburn on 19 April 1621, and Goodcole, who had attended her as chaplain in Newgate gaol, produced his account of her confession and execution before the end of the month. The status of witchcraft as a crime differs from that of murder because of its status as a crimen exceptum, and the lively debate in the period about its actual existence.78 Hence, the plays constitute, along with the ballads and pamphlets, interventions in that debate, and must take positions on the spectrum of belief. The position of The Witch of Edmonton is illuminated by reading it alongside Goodcole’s pamphlet, which vies explicitly with other witchcraft discourses, in its references to the ‘most base and false Ballets’ by ‘lewde Ballettmongers’ (sig. A3v), for its status as establishing truth. Goodcole is not interested in disputing the definition or meaning of witchcraft, which he takes as a given: ‘I meddle here with nothing but fact’ (sig. A3). His ‘true declaration of the manner of proceeding against Elizabeth Sawyer’ is a justification of her trial and execution, which stresses all the proofs against her; these include her bodily signs, such as the ‘priuate and strange marke’ discovered by three women appointed to search her, and her swearing, which in his view could only come from someone with no fear of God. Finally, Goodcole gives Sawyer’s own words in her confession, though as he admits ‘with great labour was it extorted from her’ (sig. B4), and a relation of what she said at her execution in the hearing of a large crowd. The status of the confession as a representation of Sawyer’s voice is of course questionable, in view both of the circumstances in which it was originally produced and of its role in Goodcole’s edificatory project; his aim is to publish a pamphlet for Christian readers to warn them against the power of the devil and to guide them in the ways of God. Purkiss rightly defends Goodcole against those who would see him as a voyeuristic exploiter ‘who covered up Elizabeth Sawyer’s defiance and replaced it with an erotic fantasy of compliance’;79 she sees him as investing in what she calls an alternative fantasy, ‘of discursive saviour and restorer of spiritual health’. This is a project in which the play, to an extent, also participates; but through its generic access to a greater diversity of rhetorical strategies and presentational techniques for the construction of human lives and causality than are available to Goodcole in his homiletic pamphlet, it opens up the subject of witchcraft so as to explore, if not to reconcile, ideologically contradictory aspects of it. As in Two Lamentable Tragedies the playwrights interweave their topical, news-related plot with one which is fictional, though thematically connected, and although the play gets its title from the witch plot, to exploit its topicality, the other plot, concerning bigamous marriage and murder, is the main one. A third comic action, involving the play’s clown and his preparations for a morris dance, thickens with further detail of country and rural festivities the play’s clearly delineated cultural context, and supports a reading of the crimes in both main and subplots as materially rooted in the social and economic facts of life in early modern England. Mother Sawyer


is introduced in the second scene with a soliloquy, which openly recognises the role of society in the construction of witchcraft: And why on me? Why should the envious world Throw all their scandalous malice on me? ’Cause I am poor, deform’d, and ignorant, And like a bow buckled and bent together By some more strong in mischiefs than myself? Must I for that be made a common sink For all the filth and rubbish of men’s tongues To fall and run into? Some call me witch, And being ignorant of myself, they go About to teach me how to be one. (I.ii.1–10)80 Her low status, social marginality and physical deformity are translated into terms of moral pollution. She has learnt the meaning of witchcraft from her accusers, and has taken it on herself. The encounter that follows, with Old Banks, a well-to-do landowner and small farmer, exemplifies her point. He abuses her and beats her savagely for gathering sticks from his land; her only resort is to counter his abuse with curses, and she acknowledges that witchcraft, if only she knew how to practise it, could be a needed source of empowerment: What is the name? Where, and by what art learn’d? What spells, what charms, or invocations? May the thing called Familiar be purchas’d? (II.i.33–5) The short encounter is dismayingly but also objectively violent; Sawyer is an unattractive character, but Banks’s harsh treatment of someone so much weaker than himself physically and socially, combined with his mean refusal to give her something of little value to himself invites no sympathy for him. Unlike the pamphlet, the play shows Sawyer learning to become a witch as a way of getting herself some authority in a society whose mistreatment has turned her into an outcast. She shares the popular image of the witch as an old beldam with a mysterious familiar, but also sees it as a means to power, even revenge. Ironically, she images Banks himself as a familiar – ‘this black cur / That barks and bites and sucks the very blood / of me and of my credit’ (II.i.115–17) – who has already initiated the process of turning her into a witch: ’Tis all one To be a witch as to be counted one. (II.i.117–18)

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This invented incident, which does not form part of the pamphlet account, brilliantly displays what has been called the dynamics of victimisation.81 Banks is her chief enemy, and he rouses the community against her; but in IV.i, when he leads them in the act of burning the thatch of her cottage to flush her out, a Justice of the Peace, perhaps the JP Arthur Robinson who examined her in Newgate, intervenes to protect her from mob violence: Come, come; firing her thatch? Ridiculous: Take heed sirs what you do. Unless your proofs come better arm’d, Instead of turning her into a witch, You’ll prove yourselves stark fools. (IV.i.40–4) He interrogates her himself, and despite the fact that Banks and the local grandee, Sir Arthur Clarington, continue vehement in their denunciations, he seems not to take them seriously, but reproves Sawyer for swearing and dismisses her: ‘Old woman, mend thy life, get home and pray’. But this scene is followed in the play by the brief episode with Anne Ratcliffe (Agnes in the source), who has been driven mad by Sawyer’s familiar, the Dog, in revenge for injuring Sawyer’s sow, and commits suicide. Before she dies, mad Anne is given some disordered but clearly satiric utterances in the idiom common to Jacobean madmen, for example, ‘Hoyda! A pox of the Devil’s false hopper! All the golden meal runs into the rich knaves’ purses, and the poor have nothing but bran. Hey derry down!’ (IV.i.187–9).82 This kind of populist satire is similar to that put into Sawyer’s mouth earlier in the scene, when she extends the definition of witchcraft to include the different kinds of transformations wrought at all levels of society, such as the lawyer who turns his clients’ ‘honeyed hopes’ into wealth for himself (IV.i). As Dawson suggests, Anne Ratcliffe ‘is linked in her madness to the transgressive marginality of witchcraft itself. She thus joins hands with Mother Sawyer’.83 Sawyer is also accused of causing disorder amongst other women in the community. The countrymen become anxious about the unruly behaviour of their womenfolk, and one urges, ‘rid the town of her, else all our wives will do nothing else but dance about other country maypoles’ (IV.i.10–11). The witch’s power over male sexuality is sceptically treated, here, and in Banks’s confession that Sawyer has caused him to fall in love with his cow, an accusation even Sir Arthur Clarington finds risible. The text seems to acknowledge the contribution of misogyny to the construction of witchcraft. In other parts of the play, in the Cuddy Banks and Frank Thorney plots, as McLuskie says, ‘the connections between witchcraft and ways of discussing women overlap considerably’.84 Sawyer herself is made to voice this equation in her satirical denunciations in IV.i.103–8. In this scene she also notices how society demonises marginal or unruly women, although it is true that she is not primarily ‘a gendered figure’.85


The material basis of Mother Sawyer’s identity as a witch is linked to the metaphysical through the figure of the Dog, who defines her both as a lonely isolated woman, a ‘mother’ who has no husband or child,86 and as a hate-filled blasphemer ready to make a pact with the devil. He is an equivocal figure, constructed from a range of discourses, part Mephistophelean tempter, part cruel and capricious lover, for whom she desperately longs in her soliloquy in V.i, part the blood-sucking familiar of the pamphlets and folklore, who, dog-like, brings comfort to his mistress but in return for obscenely quasi-sexual contact.87 In the other plots of the play he is alternately an emblematic figure of diabolical suggestion, as when his rubbing against Frank Thorney in III.iii puts it in Frank’s mind to kill Susan, but also a ‘dogged rascal’, a ‘kind cur’ and an ‘ingle’ in his dealings with innocent Cuddy Banks. The distinction between these roles emphasises the mystical view of crime as the expression of human sinfulness. Frank’s heart is open to receive the power of evil, whereas simple Cuddy’s does not know what it is. The Dog’s intervention in Sawyer’s life shifts her witchcraft from its material basis to one in the occult. The Dog’s transformation from black to white in preparation for his desertion of Mother Sawyer prior to her arrest defines witchcraft as a magical phenomenon, and her as the devil’s instrument. As Cuddy sees it, ‘’Tis thou hast brought her to the gallows, Tom’ (V.i.105). The Dog becomes the play’s mouthpiece for its homiletic message when he educates Cuddy in the ways of the devil: I’ll thus much tell thee. Thou art never so distant From an evil spirit, but that thy oaths, Curses and blasphemies pull him to thy elbow. Thou never tell’st a lie but that a Devil Is within hearing it; thy evil purposes Are ever haunted; but when they come to act, As thy tongue slandering, bearing false witness, Thy hand stabbing, stealing, cozening, cheating, He’s then within thee. (V.i.131–9) This play moves more confidently towards homiletic closure than Arden of Faversham or A Warning for Fair Women as Frank Thorney, proceeding through the streets of London to his execution in parallel with Mother Sawyer, is given a full scaffold speech to express the sense of penitence and remorse which has brought him ‘peace within’ (V.iii.74). He is ready to die, purged of sin, and the play’s final moments concentrate on the reconciliation of the bereaved fathers and on the readiness of the community to atone to the wronged Winnifride for her suffering. Mother Sawyer’s ending is in a different key. By contrast with Frank’s orderly progression to the scaffold, her last moments are violent, accompanied as she is by Old Carter,

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falsely accusing her of instigating Susan’s murder, and other hostile countrymen. Her scaffold speech is perfunctory beside Frank’s; when urged by Carter to confess fully she is stubborn and refractory: Carter: Mother:

Thou’dst best confess all truly. Yet again? Have I scarce breath enough to say my prayers? And would you force me to spend that in bawling? Bear witness, I repent all former evil; There is no damned conjuror like the Devil. (V.iii.47–51)

The chance for her to achieve inner peace and reconciliation is not offered. In this respect the representation of Mother Sawyer as the figure of the criminal woman diverges from those of Alice Arden, Anne Sanders or Rachel Merry, all of whom are ushered finally into penitent speech. The occult nature of Sawyer’s crime in itself might appear to preclude her from this, though in the pamphlet she claims that she has confessed to clear her conscience, ‘and now hauing done it, I am the more quiet, and the better prepared, and willing thereby to suffer death’ (sig. D1v). Perhaps more significant in the play is the power of Sawyer’s voice, which not only confirms her as thoroughly disorderly and transgressive but also is the instrument, through her cursing, by which she achieves her witchhood. She is made to address the audience in asides which suggest that she is conscious of conforming to the expectations of the figure of a witch, and also to the idea of the witch as agent. ‘You seem a good young man,’ she tells Cuddy Banks, then adds in an aside, ‘And / I must dissemble, the better to accomplish / My revenge’ (II.i.213–15).88 Her soliloquies construct a distinctive subject-position for her that is not given to other criminal women in domestic plays; and even if its unity is compromised by the satirical discourse in which she participates before the JP in IV.i, the strength and aggressive authority of her speeches are not denied. Dolan puts this well in her account of agency in witches: While some suspects denied accusations or were coerced and manipulated into confessions, some also believed themselves to be the agents of an anger that blew apart their socially constructed subject-positions as dependent, subordinate, and submissive, an anger that upset social order by overturning its distributions of power.89 Any staging of Mother Sawyer’s confession might endanger the discursive authority she has achieved earlier in the play. Although it has been suggested that the play goes some way to representing a sceptical position as to the reality of witchcraft as an occult phenomenon, and thus that it


represents a more distinctively modern view of it than does Goodcole’s pamphlet, the ending of it, and particularly the linkage between the witch plot and the Frank Thorney plot, does much to confirm a homiletic and providentialist reading. The role of the Dog as the devil’s instrument in transforming the human propensity to weakness into a state of mortal sinfulness in both Thorney and Sawyer is crucial here. The other extant news play on witchcraft, The Late Lancashire Witches, is often written off as a comic and trivialising account of the phenomenon.90 Even if this is true, the revelations of recent research about the play’s unique relationship to the events it dramatises suggest that its production has a distinctive cultural significance. The witches themselves were a sensational novelty, on public display in London at the time when the play was performed, in summer 1634, and their fate not yet decided. This play was hot news in a way completely unlike any of the others so far discussed, which all achieve a certain distance from the events they depict; even The Witch of Edmonton, though produced in the same year as its source and as Sawyer’s trial, at least knows what happened to her. It is written with the consciousness that the law had pronounced on Sawyer, and its verdict had been executed. The Lancashire witches had been tried in Lancaster in March 1634, and all but one found guilty; because the judges were dissatisfied with the trial they did not pronounce sentence, but committed the guilty to prison, where three shortly afterwards died.91 Four of those who are depicted in the play were summoned to London for further examination by the Privy Council and searched for witches’ marks, which were not found. As was described in a sceptical witchcraft text of 1677, John Webster’s The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, the boy witness, Edmund Robinson, on whose evidence the whole case had been mounted, confessed in July 1634 that he had fabricated all the stories, though this was probably not public knowledge at the time. The king in fact had already pardoned the women on 30 June.92 The epilogue of the play, however, situates it during the period when they were believed guilty but not yet sentenced: Now while the Witches must expect their due By lawfull Iustice, we appeale to you For favourable censure; what their crime May bring upon ’em, ripenes yet of time Has not reveal’d. Perhaps great Mercy may After just condemnation give them day Of longer life. Clark speculated that the play was written in late June, ‘when the rumour of a pardon was abroad’,93 but since the witches did not arrive in London until 29 June, this seems a little early. Berry has discovered a fascinating letter written on 16 August 1634 by Nathaniel Tomkyns, who had seen the

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play at the Globe a few days before. It was written at a time when, although the case itself was public knowledge, Edmund Robinson and his father notorious figures, and, as Purkiss says, the story was ‘circulated in many forms, elite and popular’, nothing had as yet reached print.94 The play’s authors, Berry suggests, may have obtained their information from manuscript materials supplied to the Kings Men by members of the Privy Council, who wanted the women convicted;95 this speculation buttresses his reading of the play as ‘a case for the prosecution’.96 Certainly, they had access to Edmund Robinson’s depositions, in some form. Purkiss, referring to Tomkyns’s description of the performance, is sceptical about Berry’s view, suggesting that the play was not taken seriously, as conveying any kind of truth about its topic. Tomkyns summarises it as follows: though there be not in it (to my vnderstanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state or tenet of witches (wch I expected,) or application to vertue but full of ribaldry and of things improbable and impossible; yet in respect of the newnesse of ye subiect (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the ende of odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter, and is mixed with diuers songs and dances, it passeth for a merry and excellent new play.97 But such reviews of early modern plays as have come down to us often appear, through their focus on entertainment values such as spectacles, to trivialise their subjects; one has only to recall Simon Forman on Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale. And a single reading is a weak foundation to support a view of the play itself reflecting ‘a split between popular and high views of witchcraft’.98 Because the play literally functions as an intervention in a current debate on a newsworthy topic which was still unresolved, on a ‘scene that’s now in agitation’, in the words of the Prologue, it can only give a provisional ending to its story of witchcraft. This story is undeniably told in comic terms. The Prologue, with its conventional apologia, says of the witches that An Argument so thin, persons so low Can neither yeeld much matter, nor great show. The activity of the witches in the play, though depicted through various kinds of comic spectacle, does strike at the heart of domestic order. In the bewitched household of Old Seely, the children oblige their parents to kneel and obey them, while the servants insult and intimidate their masters. The patriarchy itself is threatened; the society of rural gentlemen, depicted at the beginning of the play, finds its pastimes, such as hunting, endangered, and its order destabilised, by the unruly behaviour of the


witches who are all women. In this play the relation between witchcraft and sexuality is more fully explored than in The Witch of Edmonton or many prose accounts. Peg admits to regular intercourse with the devil, who pleased her well, ‘only his flesh felt cold’ (l. 2756). One sport, devised by the chief witch, Mrs Generous, is to make three of the gentlemen believe themselves to be bastards. The marital harmony of the newly-weds Lawrence and Parnell is disrupted when Lawrence is bewitched by his old flame, the witch Mall, and rendered impotent. Mr Doughty, the play’s sage commentator, remarks of this, ‘Heres a plaine Maleficium versus hanc now’ (l.1967). The dangerously contagious nature of witchcraft, and its power over even the morally upright, is demonstrated at the wedding feast of Lawrence and Parnell, disrupted by the witches and their spirits, when Doughty himself becomes enamoured of Mall. Doughty is friend and neighbour to Mr Generous, a gentry landowner and ‘the sole surviving sonne / Of long since banisht Hospitality’ (ll. 205–6), the character of the highest social status in the play and fulcrum of its major action. Generous does not at first believe in witchcraft, but is eventually forced to accept it as reality when confronted with evidence that his wife is the chief witch (‘the only tragicall part of the storie’, as Tomkyns recognised).99 The action around the Generous marriage translates witchcraft from the mildly comic malevolence exhibited by the minor witches with their familiars in Act 2 to a diabolical practice that endangers the stability of a whole society as well as imperilling the souls of its adherents. Mrs Generous is mysteriously absent from the household on solitary excursions, riding Generous’s own horse, more often, says Robin the groom, ‘then she goes to Church, and leave out Wednesdayes and Fridayes’ (ll. 691–2). Generous, alerted by Robin, denies her the use of the horse, but this does not inhibit her. At one point she saddles and rides Robin, and in Act 4 is revealed to have been transformed herself into the strange horse that Generous has found in his stable. The woman/animal/witch nexus is the focus for a discourse of misogyny; Robin reveals Mrs Generous to his master as ‘that olde mare’, ‘your owne beast’: You have paid for her Provender this twentie yeares and upwards, and furnisht her with all Caparisons that she hath worne, of my Knowledge, and because she hath been ridden hard the last Night, doe you renounce her now? (ll. 1685–8) The confrontation between Mr and Mrs Generous is staged as a potentially tragic moment; Generous is given a speech in high rhetorical style to invoke the momentous quality of the revelation he is experiencing: My blood is turn’d to Ice, and my all vitals Have ceas’d their working! dull stupidity

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Surpriseth me at once, and hath arrested That vigorous agitation; Which till now Exprest a life within me: I me thinks Am a meere Marble statue, and no man. (ll. 1704–9) A similar rhetoric is employed in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness for Frankford’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity. Generous draws on images of cosmic disorder to express his incredulity at the evidence presented by Robin: Tell me the earth Shall leave it’s seat, and mount to kisse the Moone; Or that the Moone, enamour’d of the Earth, Shall leave her spheare, to stoope to us thus low. (ll. 1724–7) He interrogates her about the extent of her commitment to witchcraft, and she confesses to having promised her soul to the devil. Confession appears to lead to penitence, and Generous, persuaded by his wife’s tears, agrees to forgive her: Only thus much remember, thou had’st extermin’d Thyself out of the blest society Of Saints and Angels, but on thy repentance I take thee to my bosome, once againe My wife, sister, and daughter. (ll. 1826–30) But Mrs Generous has irrevocably betrayed her husband and the Christian patriarchal marriage he represents; she is soon with her women companions again, telling Mall that there is no turning back: ‘once and ever / A witch thou know’st’ (ll. 2049–50). The final routing of the witches, who lose their power in the presence of the Constable and can conjure no more, is comic, restorative of social order, but Generous stays apart from the gleeful procession of country people preparing to deliver the witches up to justice, and his marital loss is acknowledged. Adams extracts the Generous plot from what he calls the ‘farce-comedy’ of the rest of the play, seeing in it ‘a plot with tragic elements to teach religious morality’ within the homiletic convention.100 The conspicuously tragic idiom of the scene between Generous and his wife in Act 4 gestures towards this kind of didacticism, but to counter that, it must be admitted that in this play, to a greater extent than in The Witch of Edmonton, witchcraft is ‘allied with the festive rather than the criminal’.101 Through their magic the witches invert


social hierarchy and disrupt the ordered life of the community in a way that creates the comic spectacle which formed Tomkyns’s chief impression of the performance he saw; and they are not shown in acts of violence or murder. However, their unruliness is not depicted as absurd or meaningless, and even if the young Robinson had retracted his depositions by the time of the play, Brome and Heywood do not write this into their text. The assumption of the country-folk at the end of the play is that the witches once arrested wait in expectation of the gallows. McLuskie, in a full and sensitive account of The Late Lancashire Witches, remarks on the ‘process of turning experience into stories … as a primary function of the drama in the culture of a particular society’.102 She goes on to conclude that in this instance the story told, perhaps because of the pressure of extreme topicality, is one that skims the surface of important issues, allowing, for instance, both witchcraft and misogyny to decline into ‘easy theatrical ribaldry’. I would argue that the effect of the Generous plot is more unsettling than this implies, and does constitute an attempt to take seriously both witchcraft as a form of dangerous and unauthorised power, and the impact this has on social structures when such power is assumed by women. All of the plays discussed here use news stories centring on scandalous women to examine the relationships between women and power. The Late Lancashire Witches in 1634 is a late example of such a play; women’s involvement in domestic crime as perpetrators had ceased to be a significant subject for drama for some years, though such cases continued to be represented in pamphlets and ballads. The domestic news play broke loose from its origins in homiletic drama, and once it had fully achieved this, it ceased, at least for the time being, to exist as a genre.

5 Crime News and the Pamphlet

Although the term pamphlet has no completely stable definition, in the early modern period it is commonly used with the force of a diminutive and hence, by association, to refer to a printed publication that is ephemeral, occasional and frivolous in nature; ‘pedlarie pamphlets’, ‘scald, trivial, lying pamphlets’, ‘carelesse scareless Pamphlets’, are some of the ways contemporaries described them.1 Marie-Hélène Davies says that it derives from Old French ‘palme-feuillet’, meaning literally ‘what could be held in a hand’,2 which conforms with the etymologies given in the OED and also with the bibliographers’ view of it as a publication sold stitched or stabbed (sewn sideways) but unbound and therefore cheaper than a book.3 The term denotes a format, a category of printed production, but not a genre of writing like the broadside ballad or the domestic play with its own formal and rhetorical conventions. The pamphlets which are my chief concern here, those that give accounts of crimes committed by women, generally originate as a subset of the literature of ‘strange news’, stories of monstrous, prodigious or disastrous occurrences, and are structured through conventions of style and content developed in accordance with the perceived nature of this content and its cultural functions. But as accounts of criminal activity acquire meanings and significance outside this particular discourse during the seventeenth century, so too do the pamphlets shift generically. After about 1650 the moralistic news pamphlet starts to disappear; crime writing appears in briefer, more factual forms, which separate moralising from information. As I have outlined in Chapter 1, the pamphlet had a special status in the print trade of the period on account of the rapidity and cheapness with which it could be produced. Recent historians such as Lake and Walsham have demonstrated the commodification of providential journalism and the formation of a niche market for it.4 Bellany’s account of the news culture surrounding the Overbury affair and the Somerset murder trials demonstrates how the scandal provided a ‘business opportunity’ for publishers of cheap print such as John Trundle, Henry Gosson, John White, 145


John Wright and George Eld, all of whom specialised in the output of pamphlets, broadside ballads, news books and jestbooks, the staples of the cheap end of the print market.5 While the commercial significance of the ephemeral news pamphlet, as of other forms of cheap print, is becoming increasingly recognised, it is just as important to take account of other aspects of its social identity. Some forms of popular news seem to have taken on a role within the community not circumscribed or defined purely in relation to their value as topical sensation. Walsham gives many examples of how the contents of cheap news pamphlets were summarised or transcribed by individuals in scribal forms such as local chronicles or journals, such as the anonymous town chronicle now held at Shrewsbury School consisting of a compilation of a huge number of summaries of pamphlets on disasters and prodigious events.6 She also mentions the ‘handwritten anthologies of judgments and deliverances prepared to share with relatives, neighbours, and friends’, like those collected by Nehemiah Wallington, a London artisan, and Edward Burghall, a Cheshire vicar.7 Printed compilations of prodigies, disasters, and stories of sensational crimes such as Munday’s A View of Sundry Examples (1580) and T. I.’s A World of Wonders (1595) at the lower end of the market, or Thomas Beard’s The Theatre of Gods Judgments (1597), a magisterial folio which went into many editions, and John Reynolds’ The Triumphs of Gods revenge against the crying and execrable sinne of (wilfull and premeditated) murther (1621), published in instalments, illustrate the same sense of the exemplary function performed by individual items of sensational news when gathered into a compilation. But in all this, the role of pamphlets as a form of journalism should not be forgotten. Many were very topical, put out rapidly to exploit the immediacy of a sensational event. The murder of Sir Thomas Overbury was perhaps unique in its capacity to produce a range of responses in different modes and formats of cheap print from rival publishers,8 but other notorious crimes, such as the murders by Alice Arden, Anne Sanders, Anne Brewen, Annis Dell and Mary Aubrey all stimulated pamphleteers along with ballad writers to rapid productivity. The news value of a particular crime might also create a fashion in reporting, bringing together recollections of similar notorious crimes from earlier decades, or enhancing interest in other current examples. The scandal of Alice Arden’s murder of her husband no doubt helped arouse interest in Anne Sanders’ involvement in the murder of hers, albeit two decades later, and probably also in the more mundane crime of Anne Brewen, recounted in The trueth of the most wicked & secret murthering of Iohn Brewen, Goldsmith of London and in several lost ballads in 1592, the year of the publication of Arden of Faversham. A year earlier, Eulalia Page of Plymouth had been an accessory to the murder of her husband, as recounted in several ballads and pamphlets, and a lost play. At the time of the Somerset murder trials John Chamberlain observed

Crime News and the Pamphlet 147

other reports of women committing acts of murder: ‘Divers such foul facts are committed daily, which are ill signs of a very depraved age and that judgments hang over us.’9 He had in mind Anne Wallen’s murder of her husband on 1 July 1616, and perhaps also Margaret Vincent’s murder of two of her children two months before, recounted in the pamphlet A Pitilesse Mother. The story of a stepmother who unknowingly killed her adult son (News from Perin in Cornwall, 1618) came out not long after. Crime news, and what is sometimes referred to as ‘gallows literature’, occupies a special position in the history of early journalism. The internally contradictory aspects of this position reflect something of the difficulty for the modern reader in constructing a cultural definition of such writing. On one hand, Alice Arden’s crime has been very convincingly located by Richard Helgerson at the beginning of crime writing, and does seem to emerge, from the vast amount of critical attention paid to it in the last two decades, as ‘the first “modern” crime, the act that leads, discursively at least, to our own “true crime” magazines and tabloid newspapers’.10 Helgerson summarises the formative influence of the crime, as recounted initially by Holinshed in his Chronicles, on modes of popular writing: ‘These genres – the murder play, the crime pamphlet, and the collection of wonders – all got going in the decade and a half following the publication of Holinshed’s first edition, and may owe something to the fascination exercised by its account of the Arden murder.’11 But for the early modern writers of crime news and their audience, the fascinating modernity of the Arden murder, inherent, at least partly, in its status as what Helgerson calls ‘vulgar history’, had always to be counterpoised against another and equally important aspect of the crime, its function as an example of God’s providential control over human affairs. The religious dimension of early modern crime news is what separates it from modern journalism, and it is the combination of a declared didactic intent with a readiness to exploit the titillatory details of the crime under consideration that often puzzles historians. The genres to which it is most closely related, rhetorically and conceptually, are religious ones, the sermon and the confession. The relationship between pulpit and pamphlet was perceived by contemporaries as a competitive one, as the very proximity of the bookstall in St Paul’s churchyard to St Paul’s Cross where sermons were preached and penitents paraded in white sheets suggested. Abraham Holland thought it no wonder That Pauls so often hath been strucke with Thunder: ’Twas aimed at these Shops, in which there lie Such a confused World of Trumpery.12 Preachers such as Stubbes, William Cupper and others complained of presumptuous pamphleteers with a little learning and a good deal of


temerity who assumed the authority to appear in print. Lake refers to the ‘overlap between the moral, theological, and narratological universes of the murder pamphlets and plays and those inhabited by the godly’,13 referring particularly to a series of sermons preached at St Paul’s Cross on the sinful condition of London. The opening sentences of the pamphlets constantly illustrate such overlap, directing the reader immediately into familiar homiletic discourse. For instance, the author of Deeds Against Nature, and Monsters by Kinde (1614) addresses his readers with a preacher’s gambit, the rhetorical question: ‘Is it not a maruall, that fire falls not from heauen to consume an infinite number of those worse then sauage natur’d people in this land, when vile wretches, whom God hath markt with his secret brand of secret purpose, so impiously attempt things against nature?’ (sig. A2). The invocation of traditional punishment for sin leads directly towards the specific case to be described, which is that of the murderer John Arthur, a cripple, and thus marked with ‘Gods secret brand’. Pamphlet writers draw on a variety of rhetorical devices to establish their homiletic credentials at the start of the work, such as the truism, as in the first sentence of Two Horrible and inhumane Murders done in Lincolneshire (1607): ‘Of all the sinnes which mankinde is subiect to (whenas the spirit and grace of God hath left him) there is none more hatefull to our Maker than murther is’ (sig. A2v), or ‘How Execrable a thing, the unnatural and inhumane sinne of Murther is in the sight of God, is made apparent unto vs by many Texts in the Sacred Scriptures wee reade Gen.9.5’ (A True relation of a barbarous and most cruell Murther, committed by one Enoch ap Evan, 1633, sig. A2). The exemplum from the Bible or a classical text is another technique. The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by an Inkeepers Wife, called Annis Dell (1606) opens with just such an anecdote: Herodotus writeth of Sesostris King of the Egiptians, that he was carried in a Chariot drawne with foure Kings, whom he before had conquered, when one of the foure, casting his eyes behind him, looked often upon the wheeles of the Chariot: which Sesostris earnestly noting, at last demaunded of him what he meant by looking backe so often, who replied, I see that those things which were highest in the wheeles become lowest, and the lowest as soon become highest, cogito de mutatione fortunae, I thinke upon the inconstancie of things. Sesostris hereupon as in a glasse beholding himselfe, waxed more milde, and deliuered the imprisoned Kings from that slauerie. (sig. A2) Given that the account to follow, an unusually sensational one, is of a murder story with supernatural overtones involving children, this opening may have been designed as much to take the readers by surprise as to establish the homiletic credentials of the text. It is succeeded by two paragraphs on the familiar theme of the brevity of human life, with only the merest


clue, in a reference to the vain desire for gold, of the nature of the news story to come. But although the learned anecdotal style of the pamphlet’s prologue is rather different from that of the main body, it functions as something more than gratuitous moralising; the thrust of the story is a revelation of God’s plans and methods in uncovering hidden crime, as the full title of the pamphlet indicates: The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by an Inkeepers Wife, called Annis Dell, and her Sonne George Dell, Foure yeeres since. On the bodie of a Childe, called Anthony Iames in Bishops Hatfield in the Countie of Hartford, and now most miraculously reuealed by the Sister of the said Anthony, who at the time of the murther had her tongue cut out, and foure yeeres remayned dumme and speechlesse, and now perfectly speaketh, reuealing the Murther, hauing no tongue to be seen. Despite the fact that Anthony James and his parents had been dead for four years, and the only witness to the crimes, his sister, mutilated and speechless, the voice of God spoke through the dumb child and the murders were revealed. The story is so strange that it has been reckoned an invention,14 but the existence of a second pamphlet, a lost ballad, and a court record prove that some such crime did in reality take place and two people were executed for it.15 The writer of this pamphlet is unknown, but, judging from its style and careful provision of detail, may have been someone with clerical or legal training. Many pamphlets were known to have been written by such men, and probably the same is true of the great number of anonymous ones, many of which are far from unvarnished accounts of newsworthy crimes and punishment, despite the absence of a named author. Ian Green notes the involvement of ‘godly clergy’ in their production, such as Henry Goodcole, visitor for the jail of Newgate, who wrote five pamphlets based on his experiences with the convicted prisoners he counselled there, and Thomas Cooper, chaplain to the Fleet prison, and author of The Cry and Revenge of Blood (1620), who put his insider knowledge of God’s ways in dealing with secret felonies to good use in this account of a long-concealed murder in Suffolk.16 Walsham identifies a number of such ‘quasi-clerical figures’, including William Averell, a London schoolmaster and author of moralistic pamphlets, such as A Wonderful and Straunge newes, which happened in the countye of Suffolke (1583), and Samuel Saxey, a ‘Student in Divinitie’, author of A Straunge and Wonderfull Example of the Iudgment of almighty God, shewed upon two adulterous persons in London (1583), which buries at the heart of a hellfire sermon a lurid description of the bodies of an ‘olde fornicator’ and his married mistress burnt together on a wooden settle. But Saxey’s short pamphlet represents very much one extreme of news writing in tilting the balance so far towards moralising that the actual item of news is demoted to the status of a mere exemplum. Goodcole’s pamphlets, although undeniably didactic and intent on inculcating orthodox Protestant attitudes towards witchcraft, adultery and murder, are also concerned with narrative strategies for creating stories which will persuade readers of their truth.


They are full of factual detail, of times and places, of the past lives of his subjects, of speeches made and dialogue exchanged, of meals taken and injuries inflicted, and in some cases of legal proceedings. John H. Langbein, examining crime pamphlets with the eye of a legal historian, remarks on the high level of accuracy in some cases, mentioning both Goodcole’s The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, and, more surprisingly, the Annis Dell pamphlets, which he singles out for the light they throw on early modern legal systems: ‘The case is attractive [to the legal historian] … because it illustrates so clearly the way in which the investigating JP was led to take up a forensic role at trial.’17 Generically, the pamphlets are extremely flexible. Their close relation to homiletic discourse does not preclude connections with writing in other modes. There is, of course, a strong element of sensationalism in the range of lurid epithets used on title-pages to describe the act of murder: horrible, cruel, unnatural, inhuman, barbarous, bloody, outrageous, detestable, strange, notorious. Such terms constitute an essential aspect of the marketing methods, which have been characterised as ‘aggressive, even rude’, used by early modern news writers to attract readers.18 Early news feeds on the extraordinary, the bizarre, the prodigious. But sensationalism has also long featured in religious and moralistic writing, as the scriptures amply illustrate, often an integral component of the texts’ rhetorical strategies. The recurrence of the words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ in titles does not necessarily counter this, but it does imply the presence of alternative interests. This may, of course, be God’s truth, the revelation of a providential pattern behind the apparently accidental events of human life; it may be true in the sense of having long been held to be so,19 but it may also be what is real, actual, authentic, what can be validated by witnesses and the authority of legal testimony, evidence that can be marshalled to counteract the false claims put forward in fabricated accounts, in ballads, lies and gossip. At a time when the relative meanings of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ were unstable, the truth claims made by pamphleteers need careful evaluation. Some are independently verifiable, such as the insistence on topicality and lists of witnesses; others, such as appeals to local knowledge, carry a high degree of probability. Thomas Brewer prefaces The Bloody Mother (1610) with a strong assertion of such claims: You haue heere no translated wonder, no far fetcht matter, no English lie, to passe for an outlandish truth: but a true relation of that that many tongues can witnes to those that ambiguously shal stand to withstand it. … This I cannot suspect can be suspected by any (after they haue read it:) For first, the nearnesse of the place where these cruelties were executed; secondly the time: thirdly the rumour hath bin spread of it: and lastly the names of those that at the bench gaue euidence against them, persons (for the most part) of good suffiencie, yet liuing, cannot


but enforce a beleefe in any that haue sence to sensure vpon such manyfest markes of veritie. (sig. A2) In the competition for discursive authority, such authenticity effects as a pamphleteer could marshal would often be an important asset; and news was valued, probably increasingly, for information and veracity, though news pamphlets appealed to their readers in other ways too. It is not necessarily the case that the credibility of the text was a primary consideration; and though modern commentators on early modern news may write dismissively of the credulity of contemporary readers,20 it is as well to remember that there are still plenty of people who enjoy reading about sightings of UFOs, the arrival of aliens, the continued existence of Elvis, alive and well in South America. The relationship between early modern crime news and social reality has been figured in various ways. It is hardly disputable that accounts of crime in the pamphlets are not transparently reflective of society and its structures and internal tensions, but this does not mean dismissing them, as Peter Lake does, as ‘concentrated little tableaux, bitter little stories, vehicles only for collective fantasy and obsession’.21 True, they represent the society they depict very selectively, but the processes of selection and the interstices between those elements that writers choose for their focus, have meaning in themselves. The strong emphasis on the providential pattern of crime writing, particularly by historians, has tended to direct attention away from features which don’t fit into it, and also to exclude from discussion the numerous pamphlet accounts of crime which are less concerned to frame themselves in this way. A ‘model’ crime story has begun to define itself; it is invariably that of a murder, the components of which are outlined by Faller in Turned to Account. The crime is depicted from the outset so as ‘to raise disgust and fear’; ‘sordid details’ are provided to alienate the reader from the murderer, but only until the murderer begins to experience guilt; most accounts dwell less on the crime itself than on the events leading up to it, the murderer’s efforts to avoid suspicion, the manner of his apprehension, and of his spiritual condition during prison and at death.22 Faller calls this ‘the mythologising of the familiar murderer’ (that is, one who acts against a family member or intimate), and says that ‘ideally [the pamphlet] would like to record his confession, contrition, repentance, conversion, and finally, that he made of the gallows a pulpit’.23 Needless to say, this cannot quite happen on every occasion, but its occurrence seems to be so common and its rehearsal so formulaic, that irregularities in the pattern can be discounted. Lake’s view of the typical murder pamphlet as structured by its conclusion in the murderer’s confession and repentance into an affirmation of providence, divine justice and the social order is very similar. Joad Raymond follows the same line by stressing the idea of closure in confession and penitence in his account of what he calls


‘the rules of the genre’.24 Joy Wiltenberg, referring similarly to ‘this popular genre of the gallows confession’, traces a ‘standard structure’ inherent in accounts of crime which ‘follow both logical and chronological order, recounting the crime, its discovery, the criminal’s condemnation and/or confession, and the execution’.25 This narrowly prescribed structure can be filled in with stereotypical figures: the criminal should be a murderer, because ‘only murderers, once made into saved sinners, stayed such’,26 though he or she could take the form of one of several ‘archetypes of demonic temptation’, as typified by the whore or sinful wife (Alice Arden, Margaret Ferneseede), the masterless man or ‘depraved marginal’ (Black Will, Canberry Bess) or the prodigal (Walter Calverley, Sir John Fittes).27 Gaskill summarises the tendency of these views: ‘Printed accounts [of crime] … were highly stylised … It was only really important that they remained faithful to the genre of the murder pamphlet.’28 What I should like to suggest, however, is that this ‘genre’, if the term can be applied, was actually much more variable and less readily reducible to a single pattern. The elements of penitence and confession culminating in a good death are often entirely absent or, perhaps more tellingly, present, but not insisted on; and the kind of ‘narrative remoulding’29 required to shape the raw material of crime and its discovery into a story could take several forms. Women’s criminal activities are more circumscribed than men’s, and they are more readily hijacked by the self-imposed constraints of misogynistic thinking into stereotypes, but the narratives themselves are capable of more variation than historians often suggest. The problems of accounting for violence and deviancy in women lead to some interesting complexities in exploring what it means for them to assert themselves against the patriarchal order. *** In pamphlets where the criminal is not penitent, the closure that creates a model crime is necessarily prevented. Sometimes a writer, conscious of the deficiency, takes measures to compensate for it. In the account of the Page of Plymouth murder in Sundrye Strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed (1591) Eulalia Page at her arrest does not deny complicity in the murder, but is quoted in a defiant statement that ‘she had rather die with Strangwidge, then to liue with Page’ (sig. B4). After the execution of all four concerned, the writer takes pains to mention that there were ‘other strange things seene at that time’ such as the appearance of a bear-like shape with fiery eyes carrying a cloth, representing the kerchief with which Page was strangled, and a raven strangling itself with rope yarns hanging from a ship’s mast. These confirm the meaning of the murder as a monstrous act noted and condemned by God. In The Apprehension, Arraignment, and Execution of Elizabeth Abbot (1608), Abbot is convicted on circumstantial


evidence of the murder of her landlady but adamantly refuses to confess to it. To justify the execution, the author emphasises the strength of the testimony against her, the fairness of the trial, and the strenuous efforts of the authorities to procure a confession: ‘I cannot yet with silence passe ouer, the care which our moste honourable Magistrates, tooke of her soule, labouring by all meanes to haue her make it plaine by confession, which was so cleare by euidence’ (sig. C3). It is almost as if Abbot should have been grateful. In prison, as was customary, ‘a graue doctor of diuinity … beate against the doores of her heart’ (sig. C3), but to no avail. Finally, the unusual measures taken by the trial judge on Abbot’s behalf are described: though the proceedings against her were so Just, the euidence so plaine, and her tryall so gratious, that she had leaue to speake in her owne defence, euen what she would, & where it is not ordinary seene, she was called into the inner court, euen to the barre where the foreman of the iurie stood, that my lords and the whole court might plainly heere what she could speake, in her owne excuse. (sig. C3) Trials were commonly rapid affairs, with a number of cases all being taken together, and it was not customary for one of the accused to receive so much individual attention;30 but despite the writer’s compensatory strategies, the concluding emphasis in the account on the steps taken to get Abbot to confess exposes the absence of proper closure and also the failure of the consoling belief that a guilty conscience will in the end be forced to reveal itself.31 Although crime pamphlets are usually believed to end with confession, where possible, and execution, the endings in practice are often much less tidy and consolatory. The Araignment and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede (1608) is one of the pamphlets which Lake draws on to construct his stereotype of the whore/unfaithful wife; and the stereotype is sharpened, not undermined, by the fact that Ferneseede refuses to confess. But the last paragraph of the pamphlet, which is strikingly bare and factual in its manner, attempts no compensatory moralisation or justification for the judicial procedures which sentenced this woman to be burned at the stake: On Munday being the last of February, she had notice giuen her, that in the after-noon she must suffer death, and a Preacher commended unto her to instruct her for her soules health, who laboured much with her for the confession of the fact, which she still obstinately denied, but made great showe of repentance for her life past, so that about two of the clocke in the after-noone she was stripped of her ordinary wearing apparell, and uppon her owne smocke put a kirtle of Canuasse pitched cleane through, ouer which she did weare a white sheet, and so was by the keeper deliuered to the Shreue, on each hand a woman leading her,


and the Preacher going before her. Being come to the place of execution, both before and after her fastning to the Stake, with godly exhortations hee admonished her that now in that minute she would confesse that fact for which she was now ready to suffer, which she denying, the reeds were planted aboute, unto which fier being giuen she was presently dead. (sig. B4) The long first sentence moves with its artlessly lumbering syntax through the mundane sequence of events during the last hours of Ferneseede’s life, noting the passage of time as it proceeds. The fact that she ‘still obstinately denied’ the murder is implicitly contrasted with the ‘great show of repentance for her life past’ which she is willing to offer, but the narrative makes no comment on the possible meaning of this conjunction.32 The inexorable rituals of execution are presented with the same starkness; symbolically robed in a black canvas kirtle topped with a white sheet, she is led in a small procession to the place of death. The preacher makes a last effort, even as she is tied to the stake, to extract that so-desired confession ‘now in that minute’, the urgent phrase pointing up the finality. Only the typographical arrangement of the four last lines, conventional though it is, seems to evoke the sense of a formal closure to Ferneseede’s death which the narrative itself denies. The endings of the two pamphlets about the Annis Dell case, different though their styles of conclusion are, serve to suggest even here, where the outcome of events lends itself so readily to a providentialist reading, a textual unease to the resolution. The story is of the murder, by more than one person, of a wealthy young couple with two children; Annis Dell, an innkeeper, and her son George agree in return for money to conceal this crime, which they do by killing the boy and cutting out his sister’s tongue. But the latter measure turns out to be a mistake, and their crime is miraculously revealed. In The horrible murther of a young Boy (1606), the shorter account, the trial and executions of Annis and George Dell are described without any detail, both having pleaded not guilty. The writer concludes with two paragraphs of moralising. In the first he observes that God has revealed some of the guilty persons involved, but, ‘for some secret purpose best knowne to himselfe’ has hidden the identities of the rest, assuring the reader that ‘questionlesse [they] shall be made knowne in his good appointed time’. Then follows a disconcerting section urging readers to question their desire to have their children survive them, and to regard it as a kind of self-love, which may be out of line with God’s wishes. Finally, he mentions that the pedlar and his wife, who had killed the children’s parents (in the other pamphlet, it is a criminal gang), are still at large. After this grim tale of several brutal killings and of child mutilation, the assertion


that truth will be revealed by God ‘all in good time’ lacks reassurance. The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by an Inkeepers Wife, called Annis Dell forms the larger part of a composite pamphlet which contains an account of the case of two witches who were tried and convicted at the same assizes as the Dells. The effect of conflating the two accounts of very dissimilar criminal activities, and of ending the whole with the less sensational (which itself peters out in a jestbook-style, scatological anecdote headed ‘How the Witch served a fellow in an Alehouse’) is to create a confusingly mixed discourse. The narrative of the unravelling of the Dells’ crime is providentialist, drawing attention to ‘miraculous accidents’ and ‘wonderfull workes of God’ at every turn. Yet the ending of their story denies the satisfaction to be expected from such an exemplum. Annis and George Dell, found guilty by ‘12 credible men of their own countrey’ as well as the evidence provided by the tongueless child whose power of speech was divinely restored, refuse when asked to confess or to name the murderers of the children’s parents: ‘Nothing preuailing to molify their obdurat harts, briefly thus they replied: since the law hath cast us, we desire to die’ (sig. C2). In prison the mother and son are ‘permitted to be together as long as they had stay in this world’, which sounds oddly compassionate. The writer reports a cryptic snatch of dialogue overheard between them: ‘Mother (quoth George Dell) the law hath cast me and I am resolued for death, I pray you (if you can) resolue the world, whether I am guilty or no? Who answered him, Sonne be contented, take thy death patiently, it is now too late, I haue spoken what I will’ (sig. C2). The ambiguity of this exchange is curious and unsettling. The son questions, the mother answers; he is uncertain, she is resolved, but what is it George is asking of his mother? Does he want her to mitigate his part in the crime or is he asking her for comfort? That his conduct in prison is suggestive of penitence is not challenged by the writer’s faltering syntax in the last sentence of the narrative, which reads as follows: The young man spending the time he had to liue, in prison & praier, and singing of Psalmes, that if the outward appearance may be a perfect witnes in earnest repentance, till Monday the 4 of August, where being with his mother, by the Jaylor deliuered to the Sheriffe, his Mother hauing by suit obtained, that she might see her Sonne first suffer death, they were executed at the common place of execution; the young man (though the Mother before this was beloued) the most lamented for. (sig. C2–2v) The writer’s commitment to circumstantial detail, which characterises this account throughout by contrast with the other one, complicates his ending and denies it any neatness of closure. He does not seek to interpret the mother’s wish to have her son die first, which resonates ironically with the


moralisation in the conclusion to The horrible murther of a young Boy; this, the discrimination between the reputations of the two, and the recognition that the deaths of convicted murderers may be lamented, reminds us of the human reality behind the reconstruction, and of the sometimes uncomfortable fit between the random facts that surface and the meanings that critics have tried to create for them. The shapes that emerge from these narratives are more often irregular than one might expect; so too there are images of the criminal that do not conform to the demonic stereotype, and this in itself is capable of some variation. Elizabeth Abbot is a murderer, and perhaps a figure of Lake’s ‘depraved marginal’, but her victim is another woman, not her husband, and in fact a woman of questionable reputation herself, a widow called Mistress Killingworth. Though the writer, who clearly possessed a first-hand knowledge of the circumstances of the case, makes prim gestures towards social decorum in his announcement that he won’t ‘bite the dead’ or discuss Killingworth’s reputation, given that no one is unassailable, he hints at the possibility of making scandalous disclosures about her, then states bluntly that she often came home drunk and was found ‘wallowing unseemly on the ground in her owne soyle’ (sig. A2v). He locates her behaviour in a context of the violation of gender norms; the drunken widow is sometimes helped home by neighbours, ‘especially the women whom for womanhood sake it most concerned to be a helpe to her infirmity’ (sig. A2v), but she shows no gratitude. ‘She was so sharpe in blowes and pinching in victuals’ that no servant will stay in her house. Unexpectedly, Killingworth takes Elizabeth Abbot, up from the country, in as her lodger, though when Killingworth’s charred body is discovered by the neighbours, Abbot is not the first suspect. She is captured, however, attempting a burglary; when asked by one of the neighbours ‘how shee beeing a woman could be so hardy as to attempt to breake open a house, to robbe and undoe an honest countrey-man … this Abbot replied: why, as I did before with my handes’ (sig. B4). Abbot gives herself away by knowing too much about the Killingworth murder: ‘heere note the power of the Diuell, that would make her owne tongue betray her, into that mischiefe of which no man had suspicion of her’ (sig. B4). This is not the typically unstoppable tongue of a woman, but the tongue which the devil uses as his instrument. Abbot’s motives for the murder are never examined. The evident strength and independence of both women are anomalous, and in a sense the crime has no clear meaning, or at least the writer does not attempt to create one for it, beyond using it, broadly, to illustrate the evil nature of the times. Killingworth does not act like a woman or a neighbour; and she meets her match in Abbot who refuses the role of criminal penitent. Gender considerations are clearly relevant to the construction of this crime, but the writer makes no attempt to moralise it in such terms. That these are both disorderly women whose fates reflect the violation of social roles for


women’s behaviour is a notion available now; but it was not one that the pamphleteer considered making explicit. These are women who have demonstrated agency in the form of rejecting the norms of respectable society, and conduct their lives accordingly outside its confines. But women who commit crimes of violence may also come from within, Alice Avieu, for instance, or Elizabeth Caldwell, a wellborn and educated woman, who brought her husband the considerable annuity of £10 on their marriage, and attempted (but failed) to poison him. There is also Mary Aubrey, the French midwife, who murdered (and dismembered) her husband, Margaret Clark, a respectable servant, who set fire to her master’s house, Mary Cook, Katherine Fox and Margaret Vincent, married women who killed their children, and many more. The narratives of such women’s crimes often display different features from accounts of crimes committed by women like Ferneseede or Abbot. Caldwell’s story is told by Gilbert Dugdale, who visited her in prison, in A True Discourse Of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, Ma. Jeffery Bownd, Isabell Hall widdow, and George Fernely (1604). Dugdale constructs an exemplary narrative by means of three particular strategies: careful suppression of certain aspects of Caldwell’s criminal behaviour, deflection of responsibility for the crime onto the others involved, and a strong stress on her conduct as a penitent prisoner. The story bears a certain resemblance to Golding’s account of Anne Sanders (A brief discourse of the late murther, 1573), but without his emphasis on the providential revelation of truth. Caldwell is not an autonomous agent like Ferneseede, but acts only under pressure from her lover, Jeffery Bownd, and Bownd’s accomplice, Isabell Hall, a widow, whose efforts she resists for some time. The motives of Hall are obscure, simply ascribed to ‘that filthy envying to all goodnes’ (sig. A4). Caldwell’s husband is not, like George Sanders, a respectable bourgeois provider, but an irresponsible young man who goes off travelling for long periods and abandons his wife without sufficient provision. The decision to poison him comes from Hall, who gets Bownd to buy ratsbane, which Caldwell bakes into oatcakes. At the very moment when she puts them out for her husband, ‘she euen trembled with remorse of conscience yet wanted the power to call to him to refraine them’ (sig. B1v). Womanly weakness disables her at this crucial time. The only human fatality is a neighbour’s child, who Dugdale notes was already ill and might have died from something else. Caldwell’s agency is downplayed at every turn, as is her adulterous relationship with Bownd and the meetings shared with him at Isabell Hall’s house. Once the child’s death and the murder attempt are in the open, Caldwell is transformed; in prison she becomes ‘the true image of a penitent sinner as the like hath not often in these daies beene seene’ (sig. B3v), to the extent that ‘many of all sorts resorted to see her, as no fewer some daies then three hundred persons’ (sig. B2) to whom she offers pious counselling. Hall, by contrast, ‘the onely instrument of this


timeless action … did very stoutly denie euerything’ (sig. D3). The pamphlet concludes with a letter Caldwell writes to her husband from prison, cleverly taking over the moral high ground by urging him to reform his way of life, and her confession at the stake. Before her death she leads the crowd in the singing of a psalm. The sensational element in this pamphlet is diverted from the circumstances of an attempted murder itself to the transformation of the guilty wife into a model of penitence. Hers indeed is a felix culpa. The crime of Mary Aubrey is more ambiguously represented. Caldwell’s attempt was, according to Dugdale, notorious enough to have occasioned ‘diuers reports passed vp and downe the streets of London’ which he needed to correct, but Aubrey’s was far more scandalous. Not only did she single-handedly strangle a violent and abusive husband while he lay in a drunken stupor, but she also chopped up and dismembered the body, distributing the parts in several different London locations. It is represented in four pamphlet accounts in different modes: a two-page news-sheet, An Account of the Manner, Behaviour and Execution of Mary Aubrey (1687), a textual hybrid, called A Cabinet of Grief: or, The French midwife’s Miserable Moan (1688) consisting of a first-person account in prose, followed by a first person confessional ballad (set to the tune of ‘The Pious Prisoner’s Exhortation’), a verse account in couplets, printed in three columns on a single sheet entitled, A Warning-Piece to All Married Men and Women, and the longest and fullest of them all, A Hellish Murder Committed by a French Midwife on the Body of her Husband (1687/8). A Hellish Murder, put forward as ‘a Plain and Naked Narrative’ to dismiss gossip and frenzy, contains numerous witness statements, with passages of dialogue between interrogators and witnesses, and Mary Aubrey’s own testimony, partially mediated by the narrator, partially in her own words, and translated from French. This textual variety is a feature of the different conditions of publication obtaining in the later years of the seventeenth century, when newsbooks and newspapers had begun to appear on a regular basis, and representation of crime was moving out of the discourses of monstrosity and providentialism into that of journalistic reportage. At the same time, crime remained a subject for imaginative exploitation, in texts like A Warning-Piece and A Cabinet of Grief, which explore the possibilities created by the still unstable boundaries between fact and fiction. But in this respect, the verse accounts are in fact less innovatory than the prose. The continuation of the confessional mode established in the broadside ballad allows for Aubrey to be given her own voice in the ballad in A Cabinet of Grief; but the last stanzas conventionally emphasise that her death, like Caldwell’s, was staged as a moral spectacle, and that her penitence was an essential part of it: To see me go some Thousands throng, And thus in shame and much disgrace,


Through many crowds I past along, Unto the execution place. Lord, tho’ my Body here must Burn For my sad Crime so gross and foul Yet when I shall to Ashes turn, Receive my poor Immortal Soul. (p. 12) The narrative verse in A Warning-Piece in like manner concludes with a couplet which interprets Aubrey’s criminal fate as an exemplary lesson for her sex: She is now Burn’d, and begges of all Mankind And Women too, Wisdom by her to find. It is the prose texts that make the most of the opportunities to explore the meaning of the crime through their construction of a subjectivity for Aubrey herself. This emerges much more fully, and movingly, than is possible in earlier crime pamphlets more restricted by the constraints of a providentialist agenda. In certain ways Aubrey’s situation as murderous wife resembles Caldwell’s. Both are ‘respectable’ women, Caldwell as well-born and financially well provided, Aubrey as an industrious woman belonging to a respected immigrant community, the Huguenots, who supports her family with ‘what I earned by my industrious care’ (A Cabinet, p. 2). Both have restless, irresponsible husbands, often absent from the household. Caldwell blames her temptation to take a lover on her husband’s inattentiveness; Aubrey’s marital relationship takes on a recurrent pattern of misuse/ separation/ reunion. Both are overcome with remorse at the very moment of the murder attempt; Aubrey, having strangled her sleeping husband, tries to revive him with brandy, but too late. And both are unfeignedly penitent, devoting their days in prison to piety and remorse. In Aubrey’s case the fact that she pleads guilty, although the court urges her to retract her confession and ‘in tenderness … [to] put myself upon Tryal’ (A Cabinet, p. 7), means that she is sentenced to death (‘rendered … Dead in Law’, An Account, p. 2), without going through further court procedures. The writers of A Cabinet of Grief and A Hellish Murder both draw attention to this, the first with the implication that Aubrey might not have attracted so much opprobrium had she opted for a trial. The author of A Hellish Murder suggests that if she had stood trial, ‘it would not have gone much better with some of her Companions, than it did with the Miserable Creature her self’ (p. 39). Caldwell, of course, did not go alone to her fate, and the roles of her lover and the equivocal widow, Isabell Hall, in the planning and


committing of the crime, both lessen her responsibility for it and make it possible for Dugdale to rehabilitate her as a model of penitence. But what makes Aubrey singular as a murderous wife is not only the strong sense of personal agency created in the two prose accounts, but also, especially in A Hellish Murder, the ambiguity with which this agency is constructed. Aubrey is recognised in all the accounts as the victim of a drunken and violent husband. Her own testimony in A Hellish Murder strongly suggests an element of sexual brutality. The marriage is unhappy because ‘this Examinate would not submit to a compliance with him in Villanies contrary to Nature’ (p. 30). On the fatal night he comes home drunk and rouses her from sleep with a blow. At this point the testimony renders Denis Aubrey’s French in direct speech, and the consequences of his speech, mediated through Mary Aubrey’s account, in narration: ‘I have been among Bougres and Rogues, that have made me Mad, and you shall pay for’t; whereupon he gave this Examinate another violent Blow upon the Breast: With that, this Examinate turn’d from him, and fell a weeping.’ Subsequently, he ‘attempted the Forcing of this Examinate to the most Unnatural of Villanies, and acted such a Violence upon her Body in despite of all the Opposition that she could make, as forc’t from her a great deal of Blood’ (p. 33). A Warning-Piece repeats this account: He forc’d on her such barbarous Violence In spite of what she did in her Defence; Forcing much Blood from her, she cried out To her Land-lady, who did not hear her Shout. In A Cabinet of Grief, a fictionalised depiction of Mary Aubrey as a criminal which is shaped by the conventions of criminal biography, she displaces the responsibility for her decision to do away with her husband onto the devil, whom she initially resists, though eventually, ‘I gave way to the Temptation, which has proved the Ruine of us both’ (p. 3). But in A Hellish Murder, according to her own testimony as transcribed and edited by a court official, she takes the decision herself, in response to her own understanding of her situation. After the marital rape, she lies ‘in Torments both of Body and of Mind, thinking with her self, What will become of me? What am I to do! Here am I Threatned to be Murder’d, and I have no way in the World to Deliver my self, but by Beginning with him’ (p. 34). As Dolan describes this moment, Aubrey’s subjectivity is seen not only as the midwife’s deliverance of herself but as a birth that depends on a death. ‘Immediately upon these thoughts’, she stoutly undertakes the murder of her husband, strangling and dismembering him, and lugging parts of his body around in her petticoat to dispose of them.33


This account of husband-murder is an extraordinarily adventurous one, not only in presenting the wife’s sense of a need to escape domestic tyranny through an act of violence without (at this point) any condemnatory rhetoric, but in allowing the motivation for the crime to emerge so directly. True to its origins in witness testimony, A Hellish Murder does not suppress evidence that rounds out the representation of Mary Aubrey’s situation with implications of her equivocal sexual reputation; one witness, Maria Anne Rippault, mentions two young male cousins who, she suggests, have been the lovers of Mary and her daughter. One of these is quoted in direct speech; the dramatic mode of the narration here, the direct representation of the speaker’s native language and the interpretation of his delivery by the writer, bring the moment to vivid life: This Enformant asking the said Woman, He bien! Vous vous etes desfaite donc de votre Mary: In English, Well! You have got quit of Your Husband then? The Woman Answer’d Ouy: and the Young Favet (or Cosin) stood a little while, Pale, and Surpriz’d, but recovering Himself: Ouy (dit il) nous l’avons envoyée aux Maroquins; quand il reviendra il nous apportera des Diamonds: in English, Yes (says he) we have sent him into the Indies, and when he comes back again he will bring us Diamonds; speaking the words Smiling, and in a way of Raillery’. (p. 15) The ambiguity of the French idiom, reinforced by its blunter English translation, perfectly captures an aspect of the complexity of this case, where a French woman’s most intimate life is exposed to the scrutiny of men of an alien culture. Mary Aubrey’s assumption of agency, her decision to take charge of her own life and thus of her husband’s death, makes her guilty of petty treason in the eyes of the law; the extenuating circumstances, which emerge so clearly through the various testimonies in A Hellish Murder, cannot outweigh the early modern conception of her act as an example of this most extreme crime of insubordination. All the accounts describe the decapitation and dismemberment of her husband’s body, which took between three and four hours, and required several separate journeys to dispose of the parts, evoking the horror and fear of the act enhanced by the sex of its perpetrator. In the Postscript to A Hellish Murder, the writer sums up the emotional tone he has aimed for in his narrative, and the pains he has taken to ensure that it is fair and appropriate to such a case: In the Woman’s Story, I have done all the Right that Honestly I could to the Compassionable Condition of an Unhappy Wretch, but without Extenuating the Horror of the Wickedness. I have, since that time, Enquir’d into the Humour and Character of the Husband; and his Acquaintance report him at all hand to have been a Libertine and


Debauchee to the Highest Degree, but Drunk or Sober, without any Malice. This is, in Fine, an Impartial report of the case. (p. 39) It is not clear whether ‘the Horror of the Wickedness’ refers to the murder itself, or to the dismemberment, or both. The recognition that Denis Aubrey, though drunken and debauched, was ‘without any malice’ is a further acknowledgement of the complexity and variousness of human life. *** There is no providential neatness about this case. In terms of early modern women’s crime, Mary Aubrey’s is a late example, taking place at a time when providentialist moralising was a less common feature of crime pamphlets. But the understanding that strange events in life, and especially acts of violence which run counter to gender-based assumptions about ‘natural’ behaviour, cannot always be explained by recourse to stereotypes or providentialist interpretations appears much earlier. The account of another crime of violence committed by a ‘respectable’ woman, like Caldwell and Aubrey, A pitilesse Mother. That most Unnaturally at one time, murthered two of her owne Children (1616) describes an atypical case of infanticide. The perpetrator, Margaret Vincent, is not the indigent bastard-bearer at whom the infanticide statute of 1624 was aimed, but a gentlewoman, married for more than twelve years, ‘graced with good parts’, and well respected among her neighbours. That she should murder two of her three children by the violent means of strangulation was obviously extraordinary, and the case was widely reported.34 The printer of the pamphlet considered it worth his while to commission a woodcut for the title-page; the striking illustration depicts Vincent in the act of strangling a child on an elaborate bed, where the corpse of another child is already laid out. Beside the bed stands the devil, a huge figure with horns, wings, a black scaly body and what appear to be webbed feet, offering her cords. The writer describes Vincent’s crime as motivated by religious fanaticism and thus also by diabolic temptation. It is not the conscious act of a responsible woman making her own choices, like Aubrey, but of one ‘conuerted to a blinde beliefe of bewitching heresie’ who has been singled out for the devil’s attentions after a life of virtue: ‘at last there was such trappes and enginis set that her quet [sic] was caught, and her discontent set at liberty’ (sig. A2v). She is a victim, not an agent, a ‘sweete Lambe’, savaged by ‘Romaine Wolues’. The devil has released an impulse of disorder in the woman, which completely destroys the natural feelings proper to her as a mother. Where she should have behaved like the pelican, nourishing her children with her own blood, she becomes instead ‘a Tygerous Mother … more cruell then the Viper … like a fierce and bloudy Medea’ (sigs. A3–3v). Persuaded that it is her duty to do away with Protestants she kills her children to save their souls, and shows no remorse when the murders are


discovered: ‘they are Saints in heauen, and I nothing at all repent it’ (sig. A4v). There is an implied distinction between the murderous mother’s own psychotic view of her act as protective and the construction of it by outsiders as unnatural and barbaric. Although in prison Vincent is prevailed on by ministers of the church to repent, her crime remains exceptional, ‘begot by a strange occasion’ (sig. B2), not easily subsumed into any comprehensible scheme of things. This is not so much because it was a crime against womanhood as because it was an extreme example of religious deviance resulting in an unnatural act, and because the writer makes no distinction between crime and sin. It is recalled in another pamphlet describing an act of familiar violence perpetrated because of deviant religious beliefs, A true Relation of a barbarous and most cruell Murther, committed by one Enoch ap Evan (1633). The writer compares the deeds of Evan, a yeoman’s son, who killed his mother and brother with an axe and then cut off their heads, with other notorious crimes, including the child murders of Walter Calverley, in Two most unnatural and bloodie Murthers (1605), and Margaret Vincent, whom he calls a ‘Gentlewoman … of Unquestioned life and conuersation’ seized by ‘some distraction or frenzy, of which the subtill suggestions of the Deuill taking hold murdered diuers of hir own sweet Children and suffered for the fact’ (sig. A3). Evan, apparently driven to violence by his Puritan dislike of his family’s Anglican practices, also repented in prison; the pamphlet includes verses in first-person confessional ballad style in which Evan urges nonconformists to reform their ways. This pamphlet and A pitilesse Mother depict crimes of shocking violence perpetrated by people who are in no way social deviants or marginals on members of their own families. Bloudy Newes from Dover (1647) records two cases comparable to Vincent’s, where mothers of infants, one a Catholic, the other an Anabaptist, kill their children to prevent them from being brought up as Protestants. Mary Champion’s act, in beheading her child and then presenting the head to her husband for baptism, suggests a high level of mental disturbance; but to the writer of the brief news story she is only ‘a wicked minded woman’ who uses ‘a great knife’ to rob her innocent child of life. In such accounts the gender issues are subordinated to the propagandistic intention of the pamphlets. Yet it remains true that in pamphlet writing child-murder is characterised as a woman’s crime, as John Taylor in his account of a father guilty of this act, The Unnatural Father: Or, A Cruell Murther committed by one John Rowse (1621), pointed out. As it happens, however, there are other pamphlets concerning fathers who bring about their children’s deaths, like the widower Lincoln in Sundrye Strange and inhumaine Murthers (1591), who bribes an impoverished friend to kill three of his four children, Walter Calverley in Two most unnatural and bloodie Murthers, and the unnamed water-carrier in Strange and Lamentable News from Dullidg-Wells (1678). In all cases the act is described as monstrous and unnatural, but the depictions differ from those of murderous mothers particularly in the ways they


figure the relationship between parent and child. The view of the mother’s love for her offspring as an inherent, deep-rooted, irresistible emotion, common to all species, was an unquestioned belief in the period and remains culturally powerful today.35 The author of A pitilesse Mother typically comments that ‘the Caniballs that eate one another will spare the fruites of their owne bodies, the Savages will doe the like, yea every beast and fowle hath a feeling of nature, and according to kinde will cherish their young ones’ (sigs. B1–B1v). Similarly, Martha Scambler, in Deeds Against Nature (1614), an unmarried woman who buries the corpse of her baby in a privy, is ‘another Caterpiller of nature, a creature more sauage then a shee woolfe, more unnatural then either bird or beast, for euery creature hath a tender feeling of loue to their young, except some few murtherous-minded strumpets, woemen I cannot call them, for a woman esteemes the fruit of her owne womb, the pretious and dearest Iewell of the world’ (sig. A3v).36 Yet the depictions of women who kill children do not invariably demonise these women as monstrous and unnatural; and there is sometimes a considerable degree of empathy extended to the woman’s social situation, especially surprising in the light of the infanticide statute of 1624, and the climate of belief about the criminality of unmarried mothers which gave rise to it. The moral judgements on the actions of women who kill children extend over a spectrum from the automatic condemnation deriving from the ‘worse than animals’ verdict to a humanitarian assessment of the crime seen in a context of poverty, isolation and social exclusion. Unlike the generality of pamphlets about husband-murder, narratives of child-killing consider motivation for the crime in often quite complex ways. The simplest accounts are those in the pamphlets about mothersurrogates, nurses and child-minders who kill their charges for expediential, usually financial, reasons. The revelations of the crimes of Abigail Hill (in A True Relation of the most Horrid and Barbarous murders committed by Abigall Hill (1656)) and Mary Compton (in The Cruel Midwife), both serial child-killers over a long period of time, come about through those quasimiraculous accidents that God’s special abhorrence for the crime of murder was believed to prompt. In Compton’s case, a crying child brings about a neighbour’s intervention, leading to the discovery of several small corpses in the cellar. The narrator assesses the situation in an urbane manner: ‘Its generally conjectured, and that not without a great deal of reason, that these were those commonly called By-Blows, or Bastards, which she undertook, for a certain sum of money agreed on, to ease the Parents of, by keeping them as long as they lived’ (p. 7). This is not so much a personal as a social crime, for which the uncaring (and unidentifiable) parents also bore responsibility. There is a rudimentary interest evident here in the sociology of crime. Compton’s mysteriously anonymous manner of life, her residence in a large London house, her failure to associate with neighbours,


her lack of visitors except for ‘some gentlemen and others often in the Evening or Night’ are all of more concern to the writer than the killings themselves. Moral outrage is reserved for the crime of child-murder in general as expressed in the opening paragraph, where the inherent naturalness of a woman’s love for children is extended from mothers to nurses and midwives; but Compton’s activities are described without reference to this, in a different discourse. Abigail Hill is another child-minder who manages to escape scrutiny for some years: ‘No notice was taken of her Children if any were missing, it being believed that they dyed from sickness’ (p. 11). But her neighbours do not lack all curiosity, and rumours arise from time to time ‘that such and such a Child was conveyed away’. They are soon on hand when someone overhears Hill and her husband arguing, ‘wher in the heat of his passion hee did upbraid her with the Children she had made away’ (p. 12). Indicted for the murder of four children, she admits that ‘she had made a Trade of it, and that at Quarter day, she would borrow Children of her poore acquaintance, and bring them to the masters of the parish as if they were those she had taken into her custody to Nurse’ (p. 13). In this pamphlet too, the moralistic preliminaries are completely separate from the narrative of crime. The writer draws little explicit attention to Hill’s reprobate conduct. He concludes with a wry description of her execution: ‘It is observable that being on the Ladder, as the Executioner was fitting the fatall Rope about her neck, she turned sodainly unto him as if she had been in some passion, and said unto him, What! Doo you make account to choake me?’ The rhetorical separation in these two late pamphlets between moralisation and information implicitly acknowledges the changed function of news writing, which now operates primarily as a means to satisfy public curiosity about scandal and sensation. Such child-murders are the outcome of calculation and sustained effort of a period of time. In an earlier example, Jane Hattersley, in Brewer’s The Bloudy Mother (1609), conceals the murders of her bastard offspring by Adam Adamson over twelve years, despite the earnest efforts of suspicious neighbours to catch her out, and, like Abigail Hill, eventually gives herself away in an overheard argument. Brewer characterises Hattersley conventionally as monstrous and bestially savage. Gaps in the narrative disclose the possibility of an exploitative relationship with the socially more powerful Adamson, but this, in a discourse which is moral rather than social, is never brought into the open. Mothers like Hattersley who plan the killings of their children in their own self-interest are dehumanised beings, ‘unnatural cruell Beastes in womens shapes’, as Henry Goodcole puts it in Natures Cruell Step-Dames: or, Matchless Monsters of the Female Sex (1637). This account of how Elizabeth Barnes takes her eight year old daughter on a picnic in the country and then cuts her throat at nightfall in the sinisterly named Wormerall Wood has, as Dolan observes, something of a fairy-tale


quality.37 Various narrative techniques, such as the provision of domestic detail about the food taken by the mother and child (‘an Apple Pye, a Herring Pye, Raisins of the Sun, and other fruits’) and the deployment of the continuous present tense at critical moments (‘towards the evening of the same day, these alluring kind of deadly junkets, she brings with her childe, into a wood’), turn the intimate family outing into a horror story. But Goodcole is more interested than Brewer in the woman as criminal, drawing on two distinct kinds of motivation to construct her. To begin with, this is an account of ‘the Diabollical seduction of the woman, first to murder her child and afterwards to kill herself’. But a secular explanation intervenes, whereby Barnes’s act of murder is also one of desperation, carried out after she had spent all her money on an unfaithful lover, who made her pregnant and abandoned her. It was, comments Goodcole at the conclusion of his story, this man ‘through whose deceits and flatteries, this poore creatures ruine was occasioned’ (p. 16). Devil and lover operate by the same means, seduction and flattery, to destroy their victim’s soul. Goodcole writes as a minister, using the example of Barnes’ sinful deeds to draw his readers’ attention to the need for communication between people and representatives of the church, and for the protection afforded to the soul by devout prayer. Barnes’ failure to confide in her minister about her problems is reckoned to have been crucial: ‘if a sinner be at any time silent, he is but the Devils secretary’. Goodcole takes the opportunity to point out the superiority of Protestant practice in this respect: ‘Our ayme of the Church of England is not such, as that of Rome, to creepe into mens secret hearts, to hold them in awe, but to discover their sinnes, to saue their soules’ (p. 15). The power of the devil to utilise women’s weakness becomes in some narratives a way of accounting for the moment of desperation at which the mother takes the decision to kill her child. But it does not provide a complete account. Murther will Out (1675) reworks the story of a murder which had taken place some thirty years earlier, and was only revealed when the woman, mistakenly supposing herself on her deathbed, confessed to it. The fictional flavour of this short tract, perhaps an occasionel, is enhanced by the fact that the writer explicitly refuses to name his subject, supposedly in the interest of protecting the anonymity of her adult son, and provides only the vaguest of local details. The woman is widowed, with a baby of nine months, which becomes sick and keeps her awake at night with crying. Satan comes to her and badgers her with temptations, rather as he did Bunyan in Grace Abounding (1666): For now says he you are unhappy onely in this child of yours, which as long as it lives you will never enjoy a good day: and besides it hinders your preferment; you are young and handsome, and might have a husband or two more if this childs head was but laid. (p. 3)


Satan’s temptation works, because he speaks with the voice of expediency and self-interest. He is right; she does remarry, and her life improves. The pamphlet is terse and unexpansive, yet buried in this interpretation of a single woman’s recognisably difficult situation and the decision she takes in her solitude can be read a way of understanding despair. In contrast, The Distressed Mother: OR, Sorrowful Wife in Tears (?1699), a single-side newssheet, renders another mother’s grim situation in purely secular terms. Katherine Fox is the mother of two young children, married to a libertine husband who wastes all their money on drink. The starving children beg for food, and the mother responds to them in desperation: Where shall I get it? Your Father hath lost his Patience, with his Wealth, and we our hopes, with his mishaps: Alas! Alas! What shall become of me, or who shall succour you, my Children? Better it is to Die with one Stroke, then to languish in a continual Famine. So pressed by these Miseries, and brought to this Despair, she took a Knife in her Hand, and cut her Childrens Throats from Ear to Ear, setting herself down purposely to Die, and perish in her Sorrows. The idiom here is consciously melodramatic, and the writer’s literary model seems to be pathetic fiction rather than Puritan autobiography; but this does not entirely conceal the social actuality of the situation which drives Fox, a gentlewoman, to such extremes. After killing the children she takes the same knife to her husband’s throat, as he lies sleeping. When discovered, she readily confesses and becomes another penitent prisoner, dealing out on her way to gaol ‘wholesome Admonitions to the numerous Spectators, which tended, That wives should beware of too much Fury, and husbands to be more circumspect in their Families’. This sort of transformation is more expansively described in the extraordinary account of the child-murderer Mary Cook, who became after her conviction a model of spiritual redemption, like Elizabeth Caldwell. It is by N. Partridge and J. Sharpe, entitled, in headline terms, Blood for Blood, or Justice Executed (1670). Cook’s situation is not one of social isolation or marital abuse; she is a married mother of eight children, ‘of a very civil and sober life and conversation’, with a fatal predisposition to melancholy. This is both psychic infirmity and spiritual weakness, and it gives an opening to the devil, who persuades her to attempt suicide; he also causes her to consider what will happen to the children should she die before them. Under his influence, she looks at her infant daughter Betty, and decides ‘she had better rid that of life first, and then all her fears and cares for it would be at an end, and so she should put an end to her own miserable life, which was so burdensome to her’ (p. 15). This is child-murder as an act of protection, and it is also a version of that ‘altruistic suicide’ discussed by Dolan, whereby mothers in distress like Cook ‘experience such a vexed connection


to their offspring [that they] might perceive murder as a positive action on behalf of their children’.38 In this instance, the writers reinforce the mother’s particular attachment to the child by their characterisation of the child, a comparatively rare effect in pamphlets of child-killing, giving it typical infant speech and gestures. On the fatal day, Cook goes to the cradle and ‘asked the innocent Babe about two years and one quarter old, Betty, Wilt have thy break-fast? unto which the Babe answered, Ey, crying Aha, Aha, as it used to do when it was pleased, and put forth her hand to stroke her mother’ (p. 15). Mary Cook then cuts the little girl’s throat and stands still in horror, ‘exceedingly stupid’ at the sight of her own bloody hands. To a present-day reader this is an account of severe depression, and the writers characterise the condition very fully; Cook has tried to commit suicide on several occasions and her husband has had to remove all nails and hooks in the cellar to prevent her from hanging herself. When questioned as to why she has killed the child that was her favourite, she answers that ‘she was discontented, and thought her husband and Relations did not love her’. Cook is doubly a sinner, through her suicide attempts, which Dolan calls ‘a blasphemous form of self-determination’, and her act of child-murder. But once in jail she is transformed. She embarks on a series of spiritual preparations for death which give her life a new meaning and evidently created a significant public role for her as a penitent prisoner. Partridge and Sharpe, who may have been Cook’s ministers in jail, describe at her execution ‘thousands of spectators beholding her with a general compassion, to whom we signified her desire was to have the benefit of all their prayers: upon which, with one consent they uncovered their heads, and lift up their hands, using this expression, The Lord have mercy upon her soul’ (p. 47). This aspect of the account is conventional enough; what is of greater interest is the detailed description of a woman who commits an act of extreme violence not as a type of the ‘tigerous mother’ beyond human comprehension, but as an individual whose mental state drives her to do this as a form of self-determination. *** Early modern child-murder is typically a woman’s crime, and so too is witchcraft. Records of this crime, which was both more common and more commonplace than others discussed here, demonstrate that women far outnumbered men as witches.39 The reasons given by Barbara Rosen for this gender imbalance, that ‘witchcraft deals predominantly with the concerns of women and their world was a much more closed and mysterious society to men in the fifteenth century than it is now’ apply also to child-murder.40 Christina Larner, in her influential book Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland, also historicises the connection between the crime and the relation to it of the misogynistic Christian view of woman as ‘more wanton, more


weak, and more wicked than men’.41 Such misogyny, as Joy Wiltenberg observes, is commonly internalised, inherent in the ideology of crime: ‘often authors [of witchcraft texts] seem to expect the culprits’ sex to raise no questions in readers’ minds; women’s susceptibility to the devil’s snare of witchcraft was an accepted convention’.42 While diabolical prompting features not uncommonly in accounts of child-murder, its status as an explanation began in the seventeenth century to become questionable, and such claims by the women could be read as a psychological strategy for negotiating the difficult question of responsibility. In witchcraft texts, however, the reality of the devil is taken for granted, and the disclosure of his full relationship with the suspect is a central part of the account. Such texts, like many murder and prodigy pamphlets, and other discourses of monstrosity, demonstrate that disquieting overlap discussed by Macfarlane and other historians of witchcraft between the everyday material world and ‘a sphere inhabited by strange, evil creatures, half animal, half demon. A world of “power”, both good and evil’.43 But whereas murder in all its forms was, despite the emphasis in its literary representation, a rare crime, witchcraft was an extremely common one, especially in the later sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth.44 The literal involvement of the devil separates witchcraft as a crime from others committed by women, and confers on it a different ontological status. As Larner succinctly puts it, ‘witchcraft is an idea, before it is a phenomenon’,45 and the evidence for it relates to beliefs rather than activities; all depends on interpretation. For the historian of witchcraft, this poses special problems in dealing with ‘documents we do not believe to be factual’ which are ‘mental productions with an organisation which is in itself significant’.46 For the literary student of witchcraft, like myself, the special status of the crime is important in that such texts generally take very different forms from those of other crime reports, and function differently in the marketplace of print. Some of them, for example Goodcole’s The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, are productions quite similar to murder pamphlets, short, topical, brought out soon after the events described so as to assert authority in the marketplace and establish authenticity over rival productions. But many are lengthy, carefully produced accounts, often with multiple authors, deriving from transcripts of the actual trials and containing interrogations, directed at the patronage of the influential men who presided over the cases in court, in some instances commissioned or written by legal personnel involved in the case.47 Historians have noted the extraordinary fullness and detail of some pamphlet accounts, which contain information beyond what is found in court records.48 Others, however, have stressed the extent to which pamphleteers have distorted the ‘social and legal reality’ of the witchcraft phenomenon, both by editing their accounts to satisfy the expectations of their readership, and promulgating the stereotype, unchallenged until


recently, of the witch as old and poor, in Reginald Scot’s words, ‘old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles’, ‘a toothles, old, impotent, and unweldie woman’, a stereotype accepted as widely by contemporaries as by modern historians, and by both élite and popular cultures.49 The aim of the long witchcraft accounts is not so much to present current news, though this is part of their appeal, but to participate in learned theological debate, and in some cases to participate in projects for social control, as suggested by Annabel Gregory in her analysis of a witchcraft episode in seventeenth-century Rye,50 and for the forging of a Protestant state.51 Witchcraft was a topic which appealed to élite as well as to popular culture; Dolan talks of witchcraft discourses residing ‘at an intersection of the two’.52 The bewitching of members of noble families is the subject of several accounts, and the examinations of the suspects recorded in Newes from Scotland, Declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian (1591) took place, as the pamphlet notes, in the presence of King James. Witchcraft was the subject of important legislation in the period, particularly two acts during Elizabeth’s reign which made the invocation and conjuration of evil spirits a felony, and an early one of James, which included the keeping of familiar spirits as a felonious act.53 There was a considerable body of learned treatises and handbooks on witchcraft, attempting to clarify the provisions of the law and to establish a set of native procedures in distinction to the continental treatises of the earlier sixteenth century. Some of the witchcraft pamphlets clearly position themselves outside the area of élite debate; Goodcole, in asserting that ‘I meddle heere with nothing but matter of fact’ (sig. A2), implicitly refuses involvement in disputation; the writer, or perhaps more properly compiler, of the long account entitled The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1618),54 begins by asserting that ‘My meaning is not to make any contentious arguments about the discourses, distinction, or definition of Witchcraft’ adding disingenuously, ‘because the Scriptures are full of prohibitions to this purpose’ (p. 3), while Edmond Bower, author of Doctor Lamb revived, or, Witchcraft condemn’d in Anne Bodenham (1653), an account of a specific case, mentions that although some have asked him to write generally about witchcraft he is prevented by ‘other publike employment’ and lack of time. The Civil War period saw the publication of numerous short reports, nine or ten pages long, such as The Examination, Triall, and Execution of Joane Williford, Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott (1645), A Strange and true Relation of a young Woman possest with the devill. By name of Joyce Dovey (1647), The Divels Delusions Or A Faithfull relation of John Palmer and Elizabeth Knott two notorious Witches (1649), and The Tryall and Examination of Mrs Joan Peterson (1652), which provided unadorned information about recent events. Two of these, A Strange and true Relation and The Divels Delusions, take the form of letters of news, rendering the substance of possibly lengthy interrogations and confessions into succinct narratives with


only perfunctory moralising; the writer of The Divels Delusions observes that one kind of witch is a person ‘impatient to be coop’t up within the narrow scantling of his own intellectualls’ (p. 3), reminding his readers that man was created with all ‘the excellent beauty of knowledge in his mind’ necessary for a virtuous life. General lessons on human conduct are regularly extracted, as with murder pamphlets, sometimes derived from the specifics of witchcraft, but not always. Bower states that his account has a straightforward monitory function: ‘This Narration was penned to reclame poor people from running after such persons [as the witch Anne Bodenham] for the restauration of lost health, or the recovery of stollen goods’ (p. 42). The writer of A Rehearsall both straung and true, of hainous and horrible actes committed by Elizabeth Stile (1579) offers some practical advice direct to his readers: ‘If then by the lawe of the Lord of life Witches and Inchaunters are compted unworthy to live. If by the lawe of this Lande, they are to be done to death, as Traitors to their Prince, and felons in respect of her highnes subiectes, whosoeuer thou be, beware of ayding them’ (sig. A3). The writer of The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower sums up by demonstrating ten ‘particulars’ by means of which the reader can ‘make vse of so wonderfull a Story, and remarkable an accident’ (p. 25). The didactic impulse is as strong as in the murder pamphlets. More evidently than any other kind of crime writing of the period, these are distinctively hybrid texts combining several different modes of writing within a single production, possibly deliberately aimed at a socially heterogeneous readership.55 Recent feminist critics have considered witchcraft accounts as texts peculiar to women in ways unlike other crime writing, because of the strong reliance on the witches’ own depositions. For instance, Diane Purkiss claims that ‘the witches were women who scripted their own stories, at least in part’ although she has to admit that the texts never constituted ‘a pure and unconstrained form of female authorship’ on account of the high level of intervention of male narrators, which she sees as increasing during the seventeenth century.56 Arguments for female ‘authorship’ must be constricted by the need for a rather specific understanding of the term, but it is true to say that witchcraft writing does offer a unique opportunity to hear women’s voices, often producing, in collaboration with their interrogators, powerful fantasies about their psychic lives and their anxieties about their roles as wives, mothers, lovers, and neighbours. Women commonly testify against other women. Through their testimonies they also condemn themselves, implicitly drawing on frameworks of beliefs about gender roles to which they must, impotently, subscribe. The kinds of evidence on which prosecutors in witchcraft cases can draw are unusual because of the peculiar nature and status of the crime, and because of judges’ reluctance to engage with theological issues relating to the crime as a heresy.57 Much depended on the confession itself, deemed one of the strongest proofs,58 though the


discovery of a witch’s ‘mark’ on the body of the accused was also an important sign, which could prove conclusive. So witch pamphlets also differ from other crime writing in that their objective is to reveal the witch’s innocence or guilt; no murder pamphlet ever concerns itself with a crime the perpetrator of which is not already known to be guilty. Witchcraft writers discover the status of the suspect; murder pamphlets discover the means by which her guilt comes to light. The hybrid forms of witchcraft writing give scope for many kinds of textual strategy. Though these texts may consist of trial records and depositions, produced ostensibly at the behest of an influential patron or to vindicate the reputation of a noble family involved in the scandal (like the Rutlands), they are nevertheless concerned to engage with their readers. Some accounts are graphically illustrated, even quite fully;59 Rosen notes of The Examination and confession of certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex (1566) that care was taken in the woodcuts to differentiate the witches ‘or at least give the impression that the pictures are portraits’.60 The devil’s memorable appearance as ‘a blacke dogge with a face like an ape, a short taile, a chaine and sylver whystle … about his neck, and a peyre of horns on his heade’ clearly caught the illustrator’s imagination. The same text is prefaced by a lengthy metrical exhortation to the reader; the verse is not delineated as functionally separate from the prose. Writers regularly address their readers; Edmond Bower flatters his with ‘Judicious reader’ or ‘Friendly reader’. They are sometimes conscious stylists, deploying rhetorical structures, like the compiler of The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1618), an obviously learned writer with a classical education, who builds up his account of the process by which the Earl and Countess of Rutland succumbed to the powers of Joan, Margaret and Phillipa Flower, using a long series of parallel clauses, and anaphora, varied with alliteration and antithesis: By this time doth Satan triumph, and goeth away satisfied to haue caught such fish in the net of his illusions: By this time are these women Diuels incarnate, and grow proud again in their cunning and artificiall power to do what mischeife they listed: By this time they haue learnt the manner of incantations, Spells and charms: By this they will kill what Cattle they list; and vnder the couert of flattery and familiar entertainment, keepe hidden the stinging serpent of mallice and a venomous inclination to mischiefe: By this time is the Earle and his family threatened, and must feel the burthen of a terrible tempest, which from these women’s Diuellish deuices fell uppon him … (p. 10) Effects of realism are achieved by simpler narrative means. Bower, who is a considerable story-teller, builds up his account of Anne Bodenham, servant to the late notorious Doctor Lambe, ‘wizard’ to the Duke of Buckingham,


and much sought after as a wise woman, with details about her meeting with a potential apprentice: The witch put on her Spectacles, and demaunding seven shillings of the maid which she received, she opened three Books, in which there seemed to be severall pictures, and amongst the rest a picture of the Devill … After the witch had looked over the book, she brought a round green glass, which glass she laid down on one of the books, upon some picture therein, and rubbed the glass, and then took up the book with the glass upon it, and held it up against the Sun, and bid the Mayd come and see who they were, that she could shew in that glass. (pp. 2–3) Anne Bodenham, who claimed to have been taught her trade as cunning woman by her master Doctor Lambe, is far from the stereotyped witch, but more like a kind of female magus, being literate, intelligent, self-sufficient and, as Purkiss says, a woman who deliberately courted a witch’s reputation.61 Bower’s long account of her career individualises her strongly, not least in his story of her bad end; she goes drunk to the scaffold, and adamantly refuses to confess. And when the hangman asks her forgiveness, as custom dictated, as a preliminary to carrying out his task, ‘She replyed, Forgive thee? A pox on thee, turn me off; which were the last words she spake’ (p. 36). Women’s speech in these pamphlets is real, not abstract. The author of The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three Witches of Warboys (1593) quotes the words of Agnes Samuel at her judgment; her mother Alice has pleaded pregnancy, and it is suggested Agnes follow suit: ‘Nay, sayd she, that will I not do; it shall neuer be sayd that I was both a Witch and a whore’ (sig. O3). This writer too has a fine sense of narrative momentum, building up his story slowly with careful accumulation of suspicious instances, pausing to fill in crucial moments in the progress of the case with evocative detail: In the meantime … M. Whittle, mistris Andley, and others went into the house, & three of the children then standing in the hal by the fire perfect wel, but no sooner than mother Samuel entered the hall, but at one moment the said three children fell down upon the ground strangely tormented, so that if they had been let lie stil on the ground they would have leaped & sprung like a quick Pickerel newly taken out of the water, their bellies heauing up, their head & their heels still touching the ground as though they had been tumblers, and would have drawen their heads and their heeles together backwards, throwing out their armes with great grones most strangely to be heard. (sig. B1v) The story is carefully paced, and its writer skilfully positioned as narrator; he mentions from time to time that he must summarise and abridge, and


he claims that the text is ‘set down upon the sudden and as it cometh to present memory’ suggesting a spontaneous style of composition, yet he keeps close track of dates and times. Important events often occur at specific seasons of the year: ‘Towards All Hollontide the spirits grew very familiar with the children …’ (sig. E3v), ‘Mother Samuel is now upon Christmas euen at night gone home to her husband & her daughter, where we doubt she hath a cold welcome’ (sig. G3v). The fits of the Throckmorton children, which produced the chief evidence against the Samuel women, are dated and often timed. The contrast in style between the narrative sections of the pamphlet and those devoted to summarising the two examinations and the confession of Alice Samuel are marked; despite the third person form a distinct sense of the woman’s own voice emerges in the latter, pathetic, confused, occasionally giving vent to fantasy, but mostly telling the story which had been given her to tell. The confession in particular conveys the flavour of collusion; Alice is nearly eighty, exhausted by the long proceedings, and can take no pleasure in any of her claims to power over life and death: First, being demanded what the names of those spirits (wherewith shee bewitched) were called, she sayd, they were called Pluck, Catch and White, the which names she often repeated. Being asked whether she had bewitched the Lady Cromwell to death or not: she answered that she had. Being asked with which of her spirits she did bewitch the said Ladie to death: She sayd, with Catch: And being demaunded for what cause she did it: She answered: For that the said ladie had caused some of her haire and her haire-lace to be burned: and that she sayd, Catch willed her to be reuenged of the sayd Ladie: and that thereupon the sayd Mother Samuel bid him goe and do what he would. (sig. O3) Alice is perhaps not the best example of the witch as agent and as ‘speaking subject’ in the senses discussed by Dolan,62 partly because the narrative energy of this account is all contained in the descriptions of the behaviour of the bewitched Throckmorton children. It is more as if she, and her daughter Agnes, collaborate with the fantasy of their empowerment through their familiar spirits as created by the Throckmorton family, rather than constructing it themselves. Joan Prentice in The Apprehension and Confession of three notorious Witches (1589) who reveals in her examination a lively relationship with a sinister (and vocal) ferret, Elizabeth Stile in A Rehearsall, who asserts that she only enters the jail because she has chosen to do so, and Margaret Flower in The Wonderful Discoverie are probably more convincing examples of the witch as a figure who, like Mary Aubrey, can claim agency and the power of self-determination, even though acknowledging it (in the case of the witches) as malevolent and selfdestructive. Flower is resentful at what she considers to be unfair treatment


by her employers, the Earl and Countess of Rutland, who dismiss her after some years as a ‘continual dweller’ in Belvoir Castle.63 With the help of her mother and the compliant familiar, the cat Rutterkin, she is able to perform magic that causes the death of the Earl’s eldest son, and prevents the Earl and Countess from having any more children; these she regards as direct acts of revenge achieved by herself and her family with what she comes to see as diabolic assistance. But even in this case Margaret’s sense of selfawareness is compromised; it is not until she is in prison and visited by four devils, one of which is Rutterkin, that she recognises the family cat for what he is: She further saith, that about the 30 of January last past, being Saturday, four Diuells appeared vnto her in Lincoln Jayle at eleuen or twelue o’clock at midnight: the one stood at her beds feete, with a blacke head like an Ape and spake vnto her, but what, shee cannot well remember, at which shee was very angry because he would speake no plainer, or let her understand his meaning: the other three were Rutterkin, Little Robin, and Spirit, but shee neuer mistrusted them nor suspected herselfe till then. (pp. 23–4) *** All prose accounts of women’s crimes are written by men and directed to a readership which lacks gender specificity but is none the less assumed to be male. Women’s voices emerge, but nearly always contained within narrative structures created by men. The dialogic quality of genres like the ballad or the domestic play, which allows women’s voices to escape, however temporarily, this mediation, is not available to the prose pamphlet, with the possible exception of some of the witchcraft accounts. Misogynistic assumptions condition the pamphlets’ representation of women at every turn, particularly that view of woman’s criminality as simultaneously ‘aberrant and yet typical’, in a succinct phrase recently applied to the scandalous Frances Howard.64 The pamphlets function, as I have discussed earlier, as part of a larger discourse of godly writing; accounts of crimes are shaped to display how assaults on the social order can be absorbed into a framework constructed from what has been termed ‘the comforting trilogy of sin, divine providence, and redemption’.65 The historian Garthine Walker, whose words these are, considers that in pamphlets about murderous women there is no specific focus on gender as such, and that their deeds represent only another version of ‘the inevitable consequences of the subversion of patriarchal and familial authority – an authority upon which the social order itself was seen to rest’.66 An account like The cruell murther of Maister Browne in Suffolke (1605), the second part of Two most unnaturall and bloodie Murthers, could have been used to support her case.67 For


although Browne is murdered, in that most familiar scenario, by his wife and her lover, his servant Peter Golding, the central focus of this fascinating story of disloyalty and deceit is on the wily, Iago-like Golding, who desires to revenge himself on a master whom he believes to have robbed him of his rightful expectations. Mrs Browne’s role in the narrative is entirely secondary, and its primary theme is a servant’s wickedness not a wife’s sin. It is Golding’s confession and penitence which conclude the story. Lake, while accepting the existence of certain gendered images of crime and depravity, such as the whore, takes a similar stance to Walker’s, considering that the work of feminist critics such as Dolan, Orlin, and Belsey, gives an undue primacy to gender in its accounts of disorderly women and their crimes.68 He shares Walker’s view of husband-murder, the only type of crime with which she is concerned, as an intensified example ‘of almost all the conceptual requirements of wrongful violence’,69 in that it takes place in opposition to order, hierarchy, moral law and the King’s peace, and is both treacherous and deceitful. Walker argues that early modern readers of these texts would not have responded to them ‘as women’, but rather as sinners or penitents or members of a godly community. She sees no space for anything other than literalistic and orthodox responses. This might conceivably be the case for readers of the murder pamphlets, though, as I have argued in earlier chapters, women’s responses to ballads and perhaps to stage plays could have been more gender-specific; also, given the more distinct attention to women’s imaginative lives that can be discerned in witchcraft pamphlets featuring viva voce examinations and confessions, there seems some chance here that women and men readers might have reacted differently. (Henry Goodcole and Anne Bodenham, for instance, would surely have seen very different meanings in the confessions of the Samuel women.) Historians acknowledge that these texts are neither strictly factual in themselves nor transparent windows onto social reality; but they are not always prepared to explore the possible meanings that can be produced by the act of reading. I want to conclude by looking at a pamphlet of husband-murder to demonstrate not only that the text embodies something distinct from a titillatory account of sex and violence, justified by a moralistic conclusion, but also that the gender issues involved transform the story in the writer’s telling of it into something more than an intensified example of social disorder. The pamphlet is by Henry Goodcole, who made rather a speciality of writing about women’s crimes.70 It is given a sensational title, The Adultresses Funerall Day: In flaming, scorching, and consuming fire: or The burning downe to ashes of Alice Clarke late of Vxbridge in the County of Middlesex … 1635 … for the unnatural poisoning of Fortune Clarke her Husband (1635). Its subheading, ‘Murder upon Murder: or, The Old Way of Poysoning newly Revived’, and its preliminaries, which include citations of biblical texts on the heinousness of murder and the justification of the


death penalty, indicate that Goodcole’s intention is to locate this case within a familiar tradition and also to particularise it; poisoning was (and is) regarded as an especially culpable method and often one associated with those devious and cowardly killers who worked by stealth, such as women and hired assassins. Reginald Scot makes an analogy between poisoning and witchcraft as women’s crimes: ‘As women in all ages have beene counted most apt to conceiue witchcraft, and the divels special instruments thereof: so also it appeareth, that they have been the first inuenters, and the greatest practisers of poisoning, and more naturallie addicted and giuen thereunto. than men’.71 Part way through his pamphlet Goodcole inserts a section called ‘A Short Tract upon the hainousnesse of Poysoning’ which emphasises it as an especially wicked technique, in that it is secret and premeditated, and allows the victim no time to prepare himself for death. It is more unnatural than killing by physical violence. In his account of the trials of Frances Howard David Lindley observes that ‘the cultural associations of poisoning and adultery assisted in securing the conviction of the accused’.72 Goodcole’s pamphlet twenty years later draws on these assumptions to construct the meaning of Alice Clarke’s crime, and he creates a further context for it in the history of early modern English husbandmurder with references to the crimes of Alice Arden and Eulalia Page, by this time so well known that details of them ‘may very well be spared in this short discourse’ (sig. B1). The circumstances of the latter’s marriage are implicitly invoked in the summary of Alice Clarke’s: ‘her husband being old, she yong, by which may be apprehended the misery of inforced marriage’ (sig. B1). This name-check will become relevant later in the account. Goodcole’s pamphlet, like so many, is a textual hybrid in separate sections; the disjunction between its sections draws attention to its artless construction, and also, more importantly, to the contradictory views that it offers of its subject. The second section shows Alice Clarke as abused wife and victim of an old and sadistic husband, ‘a poore wretched creature’, ‘loath in her modesty’ to reveal the nature of her husband’s violence: ‘[he] used not only to beat her with the next cudgell that came accidentally unto his hand, but often tying her to his bed-post to strippe her and whippe her, etc.’ (sig. B1v). Goodcole’s ambiguous syntax complicates the issue of Alice’s responsibility for her crime: ‘her iniuries, and harsh and unmanly usage spurred on by the instigations of the diuell, almost compelld her to what she did’ (sig. B1v). It later becomes clear that the devil’s instigations are directed towards Alice, but in this sentence they appear to motivate Fortune Clarke’s violence too. After the deed of husband-murder is done, Alice, like Elizabeth Caldwell, Mary Aubrey and many others, is remorseful and urges Fortune to take an antidote to the poison, but in what comes across as a curious act of spite he refuses: ‘Nay thou Strumpet and murderesse, I will receiue no helpe at all but I am resolv’d to dye and leaue the world, be it for no other cause, but to haue thee burnt at a stake for my


death: which hauing said, and obstinate in that Hethenish resolution, he soone after expired’ (sigs B1v–B2). The origin of this dramatic speech is unclear; Goodcole confirms that ‘this relation I receiued from those of credite, who were well acquainted with the conditions of them both’ (sig. B2), implying that this part of the narrative is not derived from Alice Clarke. Her confession, in fact, forms the next section, in which her own account of her circumstances changes the complexion of the first story. Here, Alice’s own words are paraphrased by Goodcole to create a narrative with very little commentary. Only at one point does he offer an authorial judgement on the story. It now emerges that Alice had a lover, White, whom she knew before her marriage to Fortune Clarke; that White had urged the poisoning on her, and given her money for it; that previous to all this she had become pregnant by her master who married her off to Clarke, ‘whom she could not loue, or have any matter of maintenance, but relied upon her Masters former promises for the same: and he fayling of giving her meanes, fell into folly and wickednesse. A great clog unto such a mans conscience, if it be true; to seduce a woman unto his will, and so leaue her’ (sig. B3). Goodcole’s brief moral interjection at this point, inserted into the text almost as if he could not help himself, suggests an attempt to make some sense of the untidy material of human weakness and irresponsibility with which he has been confronted in Alice’s confession. Alice’s selfpresentation gives complexity to the image of the helpless victim of male depravity evoked in the previous section; she is a woman at the mercy of men who use her without regard to her own needs, but she is also a woman who goes to Uxbridge and buys a pennyworth of mercury to commit murder. She gives various pieces of evidence for her actions without trying to make any connections between them, and it is now Goodcole’s turn, as master of the narrative, to define what it means. In his account of Alice’s second confession, her identity is now clearly summarised; she is ‘this obdurate Malefactor … who in Adultery was so Rooted, and insensible of the heavy Burthen, and most intollerable plagues insuing for it’ (sig. B4v). She refuses to repent when Goodcole visits her in prison, and remains of this mind until she arrives at the stake, where crowds have assembled to watch her die. At the last she does repent, with an outpouring of further confessions, further lovers, further temptations to commit murder; her promiscuity now seems more significant than the murder itself. In this instance, the penitential confession is anything but perfunctory; Alice gives way to a need to reveal the whole of her sinful life, and when Goodcole remarks ‘what a deal of comfort she found’ in her outpouring and sees evidence of her spiritual readiness for death in her countenance which was ‘very ruddy’, it is hard to read this as simply another conventionally ‘good death’ bringing about the necessary closure to a story of sin and redemption. Although, as Dolan says, there is a


conflict here between ‘telling the story from the wife’s perspective and creating a subjectivity for her … and presenting an edifying tale of sin and retribution’, it is not one that Goodcole acknowledges.73 Indeed, the perspective of this disconnected story is never entirely Alice’s and the text offers no coherent subject-position for her. To say that ultimately Fortune Clarke was Alice’s husband and she deserved the punishment designated by law for the crime of petty treason, is not in the end what Goodcole’s pamphlet does, even if there are indications that this is what it set out to do. The very formlessness of his text, the gaps and discrepancies in narrative perspective that it exhibits, let the reader slip in to explore the contradictions and complexities that typify early modern pamphlet accounts of women’s violations of the law.

Conclusion

Encouraged by the convenient vagueness of the phrase ‘early modern England’ I have in this book been consciously vague about drawing chronological boundaries; while the majority of the texts discussed were published between about 1580 and about 1650, there are a few probably earlier and rather more certainly later. During this period, which witnessed a huge expansion in that mode of public discourse represented by various kinds of printed news, both the forms and conception of news underwent important changes. Of the forms of writing I discuss, the domestic play as a medium for the representation of news events had the shortest lifetime and was significant really only at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The stage was voracious in its appetite for novelty, and although the domestic play had antecedents in earlier dramatic forms, the drama of crime and topical sensation had only a limited shelf-life. The power of theatre to ‘search into the secrets of the time’ and of the players to operate as time’s ‘abstract and brief chronicles’ is acknowledged in many plays of the period from Hamlet to Massinger’s The Roman Actor, and represented by apologists for the stage as one of its moral functions, but these functions could be achieved in dramatic modes other than contemporary domestic realism. The broadside ballad’s role as a purveyor of sensational news, delivered in oral and printed forms, lasted much longer, well into the nineteenth century; and there remains a still audible echo of this traditional way of telling a lurid story in present-day self-consciously literary redactions such as Blake Morrison’s ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ (1987). The news pamphlet has the most complex history of the three forms. The period of greatest currency for providentialist news writing, in which crime stories feature as a subset of those of monstrosity and the prodigious, overlaps with that of the domestic news play; thereafter, moralising and news begin the business of separating out, the former becoming more perfunctory, often rhetorically constructed as a preamble to a very different kind of discourse, secular and utilitarian. Authorial perspectives reshape 180

Conclusion 181

themselves. Initially, the tales of crimes and their just outcomes are delivered, preacher-style, in the manner of the hell-fire sermon; the voice is that of the stern moralist, impersonally warning his readers by grim exempla of the judgment that will befall the ungodly who fail to repent of their ways and reconcile themselves to God. In this discourse, murder, the crime most hated by God, never remains hidden; however long the time taken, and however extraordinary the method used, God always brings human secrets to light. This moralistic perspective is never abandoned in prose accounts of crime in early modern England, which are always stories of crimes solved, the detective work carried out by God and his agents. But none the less, the perspective does undergo modification, as the tones of the journalist begin to mingle with those of the preacher. The expansion of the marketplace of print existed in reciprocal relationship with the growth of a public, even perhaps the emergence of a public sphere, and its increasing desire for news and information; the development of new forms – the coranto, the news sheet, the news book and, after the Civil War, the newspaper – came about to meet this desire. Writers begin to make more personal investment in the production of news material, directing their work to the consideration of patrons or particular kinds of readers, drawing attention to the special authenticity of their accounts, even forging personal relationships with those whose lives and crimes they explore and exploit. They are in the business of producing news stories to satisfy the public’s appetite for information about the world around it, and to render extraordinary occurrences of disorder culturally intelligible to an increasing number and range of readers. Throughout the period crime is conceived of fundamentally as moral disorder; in the 1680s supernatural events take place so that hidden crimes may be revealed, in just the same way as they did a hundred years earlier. It is to God’s law first that criminal acts constitute an outrage, and second to those of the state. Crime and sin remain intertwined. The justness of state punishments, however brutal they may now appear and however violent the regime of godliness they underpin, is never questioned, nor are the operations of a legal system that we interpret as often arbitrary and inhumane ever challenged. But there is, however, evidence for a conscious awareness of crime as a social phenomenon from at least the early seventeenth-century pamphlets of Henry Goodcole onward; and criminal behaviour is partly defined as social effect even in Arden of Faversham, in the deviance of Black Will and Shakebag as much as in the transgression of Alice Arden herself. The devil has a part to play in many of these stories, taking on special roles devised to negotiate questions of female agency, and the origins of criminal behaviour are often concealed in mystification. But not all representations of the criminal subject are demonised, or, at least, they are not simply demonised; there is a constant recognition of the significant contribution to crime made by explicable


factors in the form of social pressure: marital disharmony, poverty, fear of social disapproval, inequality within relationships of power – all these and more have a part to play in the narratives. In some later accounts of childmurder by mothers there begins to emerge some understanding of how mental disorder, disturbed subjectivity, may act as a precursor to violent or criminal behaviour. It is worth noticing that these accounts in particular do not demonise the woman as criminal. Admittedly, they are not narratives of that category of child-killing selected by law for specially harsh treatment by the statute of 1624, ‘An Act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, which laid the burden of proof on the accused, to demonstrate innocence, rather than on the law, to show guilt. The indigent unmarried mother who kills her newborn infant at whom the Act was aimed seems at this time to have no story to be told. Although child-killing is acknowledged as a woman’s crime, the meaning of gender in such cases is negotiated with some nicety, and there is a spectrum on which it is defined, coloured increasingly by social and economic considerations. At one end stands the hardline image of the tigerous mother, the Medea figure, at the other the liberal construction of the despairing mother, psychologically and perhaps socially isolated, unable to support a new dependant; the gap between them is filled by a range of figures of female weakness and gender-based deficiency, succumbing variously to the inducements of the devil, the seductions of irresponsible lovers and the delusions fostered by heterodox religious faiths. In accounts of witchcraft, another woman’s crime, gender issues take different forms. Where women kill children, their own or those they are employed to care for, it is first of all the family whose integrity is violated, but the crimes of witches impact on society more broadly. Their victims are employers, employers’ children, neighbours, other members of their communities; they lay claim to powers and knowledges forbidden to the godly and they imperil society by operating outside its authorised structures. At the same time, in prose pamphlets, the often verbatim recording of their depositions presents their own stories in their own words, enabling the authentic voices of women to be heard in ways not so easily available to other women offenders. Despite the special epistemological status of witchcraft as a crime, Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s play The Witch of Edmonton recognises the role of social forces in making women on the margins of society become witches. I have focused on texts about women as perpetrators of crime, believing that, even more than those that feature women as victims, they illuminate the patriarchal and misogynistic nature of contemporary society. But I would not want to argue that all these texts are most fruitfully explored from a perspective which prioritises gender above all else. In a large number of cases the woman’s transgressive acts signify as exemplary of the endemic wickedness of humankind, not as an aspect of her nature as

Conclusion 183

woman. Implicitly, the crime is more sensational because it is committed by a woman, and the text’s appeal to an audience thus enhanced, but the crime is not de facto worse, or more evil, than if committed by a man. Even the crimes of the child-killer Margaret Vincent register primarily as acts occasioned by heretical beliefs, secondarily as those of a murderous mother. The woman criminal’s sexuality may be a relevant factor, especially where an irregular sexual liaison features in the crime; in most cases involving an adulterous relationship, the greater opprobrium predictably falls on the woman, though even here there are instances to the contrary, as in the story of the servant Peter Golding and his employer’s wife, told in Two most vnnatural and bloodie Murthers (1605). It is not only in questions of opprobrium that the woman’s gender singles her out; a guilty woman’s capacity for remorse and penitence, like that of Elizabeth Caldwell or Mary Cook, can transform her into a figurehead and special object of reverence, in her demonstration of a spiritual strength in contrary proportion to the weakness of her sex. But in early modern Protestant belief systems, women are sinners rather than saints, and it is undeniable that these texts utilise gender-specific stereotypes, especially those of the whore and the shrew, to short-cut or codify their explanations of the crimes. In the domestic environment which is the site of the majority of women’s crimes, disorder of whatever kind is an ideological offence against the head of the household and a challenge to patriarchal authority. Hence, in marital disagreements, however occasioned, the weight of responsibility is almost always heavier on the wife. Stories of crimes taking place in a context of failed marriages or irregular households have been seen as deterrent fables directed at a male audience; the whore who corrupts masculine honour or the shrew who transgresses the proper order of the household emerge as hate-figures constructed to satisfy masculine anxiety about authority, and to redirect the responsibility for certain types of social breakdown from the self to the other. That domestic space in the early modern period was a site of unease, threatened by conflicts of authority from within as well as by intrusion from without, its equilibrium often maintained only by delicate negotiations with the surrounding community, is recognised in the many recent studies of its social and cultural history. There are some generic distinctions between the forms of writing discussed here which relate to their handling of matters of gender. Prose pamphlets, addressed initially to the literate, consumed in private, presume an ideal reader who is godly, socially responsible, and also implicitly male, whereas ballads and plays, delivered in public, reach out to a broader, more heterodox audience, less easily definable in terms of sex or class. Even so, pamphlets are capable of treating gender and sexuality with some flexibility; although women’s agency in crime stories is always a fraught issue, and in the earlier pamphlets it is usually represented as dangerous and self-destructive, the representation of it does


begin to take on a more humanitarian dimension in the course of the period. If not the ideological constraints, then at least the social and economic pressures against which female subjectivity has to define itself start to be acknowledged. The view of women who commit crimes of violence as abnormal beings, pathological exceptions to nature’s law, was present in the early modern conceptualisations of witches as Satan’s daughters and of mothers who killed their children as savage and tigerous, thus putting them beyond explanation. It has not ceased to exist. A recent broadsheet newspaper article on the death of Myra Hindley concludes that ‘we have never come to terms with her unique brand of evil’.1 Disappointment that she had died a natural death and the wish that she might ‘subsequently burn in hell’ were expressed in several tabloids. Hindley had converted to Catholicism and expressed herself repentant, but in the twenty-first century this cannot be used to close her story. The woman criminal of the present day has lost the chance afforded to her predecessor in early modern England to become an exemplary spectacle of penitence, and the difficulty of reconciling her gender and her actions remains.

Notes Chapter 1 1 Stuart Hall et al., ‘The Social Production of News: Mugging in the Media’, in Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (eds.), The Manufacture of News. Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (London: Constable, 1973), p. 335. 2 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 13. See also Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. Mugging, the State, Law and Order (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), Chapter 3. 3 Hall et al., ‘The Social Production of News’, p. 341. 4 The theory is formulated in Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). It is given extensive discussion in David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5 Hall et al., ‘The Social Production of News’, p. 337. 6 See Roger Fowler, Language in the News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13–15 for an account of news values and the high rating given to ‘negative events’. 7 Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars. Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 25, notes that statistics in the period show husbands murdering wives twice as often as the converse. J. S. Cockburn, ‘The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England, 1559–1625’, in J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), J. A. Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal 24 (1981), 29–48, and Susan Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History 6 (1994), 70–89, also demonstrate that certain types of crime were over-represented in popular reporting. For further discussion, see Chapter 2, below. 8 Mitchell Stephens, A History of News (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1997), p. 122. 9 Victor E. Neuberg, Popular Literature. A History and Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 86, refers to a lost play entitled Murderous Michael, performed at Court by the Chamberlain’s Men, 1578/9, which he conjectures was the basis for Arden of Faversham. 10 Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 68. 11 See Stephen Foley’s analysis of an anecdote about a woman conycatcher from Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dreame in ‘Falstaff in Love and Other Stories from Tudor England’, Exemplaria 1 (1989), 229. 12 For example, J. B. Williams, A History of English Journalism to the Foundation of the Gazette (London: Longmans, 1908), Chapter 2, F. S. Siebert, The Freedom of the Press in England 1476–1776. The Rise and Decline of Government Controls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), p. 148. 13 Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper. English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.10. 185

186 Notes 14 Stephens, A History of News, xiv, gives 1470 as the date of ‘the oldest known news publication printed on a letter press’. 15 See Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), esp. pp. 335–63. 16 Ibid., p. 336. 17 The phrase is that of Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 178. 18 M. A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), pp. 114–16. 19 This phrase comes from the title of the book by Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print. Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44. See also Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat. Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 4. 21 Lake, ibid., p. 7. On the commodification of scandalous news, see also Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England. News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially Chapter 2. 22 Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 AD, 5 vols. (London: Privately printed, 1875–94), II, 75. 23 The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949), p. 155. 24 In an oration of 1610, cited in Siebert, The Freedom of the Press, p. 142. See also Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame, Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos, edited by G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1926), p. 9, and John Davies, A Scourge for Paper-Prosecutors (1625) for further examples. 25 The dedicatory epistle to Martine Mar-Sixtus (1592) is couched in similar terms. See also Dekker, Jests to Make you Merrie, in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. A. B. Grosart, 5 vols. (London, 1885, reissued New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), vol. 2, p. 272, ‘With such a tickling itch is this printed Ambition troubled …’ 26 Smith, The Acoustic World, maintains this was not so in the earliest days of the broadside (pp. 170, 179). But Nashe does not appear to be making a new point. 27 Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, reprinted with corrections by F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 1, 25. The reference to Latinless authors comes from Works, 1, 194. 28 Though this might be a reference to The Choise of Valentines. 29 See Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 214 and Ch. 2. 30 Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934), identifies Anthony Now now on p. 37. He is also referred to in the second part of Deloney’s The Gentle Craft. 31 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 54, and p. 215, fn. 11. 32 Quoted in Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor, The Water-Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 68. 33 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660 (Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 46. 34 Capp, The World of John Taylor, p. 67.

Notes 187 35 For example, by Bush and Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, revised by J. W. Saunders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967). 36 Sheavyn, ibid., p. 162. 37 For example, by Neuberg, Popular Literature. 38 Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions. The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 50. Davis cites The Sack Full of Newes (1557), apparently a jestbook and a play. 39 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 46. 40 See Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, p. 215. 41 See Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 306, n. 57, and p. 49. 42 Smith, The Acoustic World, p. 187. 43 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 11. 44 Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1557–1709) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1924). See the Index of Names and Subjects. 45 Quoted in Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640, p. 11. See Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, pp. 146–62, on street-ballads of news, and also Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, pp. 193–4. Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, p. 150, makes the important point that the ballad is a contemporary ‘news’ medium only to a very limited extent, but this assertion is conditioned by the fact that she makes a somewhat artificial distinction between ‘news’ and ‘narratives’. 46 Sharon Achinstein, ‘Audiences and Authors: Ballads and the Making of English Renaissance Culture’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992), 320. The production of unlicensed ballads appears to have increased in the seventeenth century. Watt suggests that in the sixteenth century, approximately 65 per cent of all surviving ballads were recorded, which is on a par with other varieties of print (p. 42). See also Rollins, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, PMLA 34 (1919), 258–339, p. 281. For further discussion of the regulation of the ballad trade, see Chapter 3, pp. 71–2. 47 Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608), in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, III, 178. 48 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 14. 49 See the revisionist account of the role of playbooks in the printing trade by Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 50 Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939, 1974), p. 93. 51 H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1558–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 271. On this point see also Arber, Transcript, II, 751, on the infighting that threatened to destabilise the Stationers’ Company in the 1580s. 52 W. W. Greg, A Companion to Arber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 169. 53 In a letter to John Carleton of 17 September 1598. 54 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 15.

188 Notes 55 Greg, A Companion to Arber. 56 See Arber, Transcript, II, 753–69. 57 See Arber, Transcript, I, 144, and Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, p. 74. 58 Arber, Transcript, I, 144. 59 Works, 3, 105, and 1, 287. 60 Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, p. 196. 61 Greg, A Companion to Arber, pp. 126–33. 62 Halasz, The Marketplace of Print, p. 27. 63 Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, p. 154, observes that John Taylor, along with Dekker, Nashe and Jonson, situates the ballad in this way, followed by ‘sensationalistic accounts of monsters, murders, and miracles’. 64 Tessa Watt, ‘Publisher, Pedlar, Pot-poet: The Changing Character of the Broadside Trade, 1550–1640’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Spreading the Word: The Distribution Networks of Print (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), p. 72. 65 Hyder E. Rollins gives examples in his still definitive article, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, PMLA 34 (1919), 258–339. 66 See Hyder E. Rollins’ comment in A Pepysian Garland. Black-letter Broadside Ballads of the Years 1595–1639. Chiefly from the Collection of Samuel Pepys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 139. 67 Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, pp. 150–1. 68 Cited in Plant, The English Book Trade, p. 47. 69 Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 77. 70 See Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, pp. 17–18, 25–9. See also Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700, Chapter 7. 71 See E. H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England. A Study of Non-Dramatic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 166–9, on the ‘factories’ of hack writers run by printers such as Wolfe and Danter. Reference is made to this practice in The Return from Parnassus. 72 See Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p. 49, and Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 428. Both make a case for a significant clerical input into the production of news and crime pamphlets. 73 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700, p. 336. 74 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender. Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 172. 75 Ibid., p. 173. 76 Laurence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 302. 77 Siebert, The Freedom of the Press, p. 148. Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone believes that Stone the tavern fool is a spy who ‘has received weekly intelligence … out of the Low Countries’ (II. i). 78 Halasz argues at length that Habermas’s view of the public sphere as emerging in the eighteenth century is flawed, and that it ‘emerged in and around pamphlets’ in the late sixteenth century in conditions of the increasing commodification of culture (The Marketplace of Print, p. 163). Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper, also challenges Habermas, but on the ground that ‘a popular sphere of political discourse was being created in the early 1640s’ (p. 83). See also Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700, p. 336, on the emergence of ‘public opinion’ at the end of the seventeenth century.

Notes 189 79 Mark Z. Muggli, ‘Ben Jonson and the Business of News’, SEL 32 (1992), 332. 80 Joad Raymond, ed., Introduction to Making the News. An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641–1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993), p. 1. 81 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974), p. 30. 82 See Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, pp. 154–60 on these ballads. 83 Nashe, Works, 1, 20. 84 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 109–10. 85 Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p. 75. Anyone taking this account at face value might, if he or she went off to compare it with the actual works, be inclined to feel that historians lead rather quiet lives. 86 Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 203. 87 Hall, in Cohen and Young, The Manufacture of News, p. 352. 88 Ibid., p. 337. 89 See also Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 97–8, and Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), p. 192, on ‘the awareness of the impossible’, as only appearing in France in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He refers at this point to Le Problème de l’incroyance, p. 473. 90 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp. 213–14. 91 Stephens, A History of News, p. 122. 92 Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, pp. 39–40. 93 Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, p. 7. 94 Ibid., pp. 142–3. 95 On this point, see Jerome Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution (London: University College Press, 1993), p. 260. 96 Stephens, A History of News, p. 117. 97 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (London: Methuen & Co., 1981), p. 258. 98 Stephens, A History of News, p. 80. 99 John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 3 and chapter 1. 100 Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, p. 313. 101 Deeds Against Nature, and Monsters by Kinds; Tryed at the Goale deliuerie of Newgate … the 18. and 19. of Iuly last, 1614. 102 A True Report of the horrible Murther, which was committed in the house of Sir Ierome Bowes (1607), sig. A2. 103 A Brief Discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers (1583), sig. A2. 104 For an account of Trundle’s career and publications, see Gerald D. Johnson, ‘John Trundle and the Book Trade 1603–1626’, Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986), 177–99. 105 A true Relation of the most Horrid and Barbarous murders committed by Abigall Hill of St Olaves Southwark (1658), p. 3. 106 Murther, Murther. Or, A Bloody Relation how Anne Hamton dwelling in Westminster nigh London, by poyson murthered her deere husband (1641), p. 1. 107 William Harrison, The Difference of Hearers (1614), p. 39, cited in Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700, p. 342. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p. 32, cites other examples.

190 Notes 108 J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present 107 (1985), 148. For other historians interested in this writing see J. S. Cockburn, Crime in England 1550–1800, Peter Lake, ‘“Deeds against Nature”: Cheap Print, Protestantism, and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 273; and J. H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, and Alan MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge, 1970). Dolan also discusses the uses to which such writing is put by historians in Dangerous Familiars, p. 2. 109 Sharpe, ibid., p. 156. 110 See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, 1986) which has been so influential in discussions of the ritual of execution, especially p. 47. 111 Frances Dolan, ‘“Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say”: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680’, Modern Philology 92 (1994), p. 171. 112 The texts are: Arthur Golding, A brief discourse of the late murther of George Sanders (1573), and A warning for fair women (1599), ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 113 Cohen and Young, The Manufacture of News, p. 354. 114 Lake, ‘“Deeds against Nature”’, p. 273. 115 Sharpe, ‘“Last dying speeches”’, p. 148. Friedman, Miracles and the Pulp Press, p. 33, makes the same point. 116 See Chapter 2, below. 117 Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, pp. 49, 47. She discusses the subject of ballads and their claims to truth, pp. 47–53. 118 Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed (1990), p. 184, cited in Raymond, Making the News, p. 22. 119 Natalie Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France (London: Polity Press, 1987). See also Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History 23 (1998), 1–30, which looks at the nature and function of fictional elements in witness depositions in English murder trials. 120 Davis, Factual Fictions p. 69. 121 Ibid. The reference to Foucault is to The Order of Things, p. 40. 122 Roger Chartier, ‘The Hanged Woman Miraculously Saved: An occasionel’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), The Culture of Print. Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (London: Polity Press, 1989), p. 62. I am deeply indebted to this article for what follows. 123 Ibid., p. 60. 124 Ibid., pp. 70–3. 125 J-P. Seguin, ‘L’information en France avant le périodique. 500 canards imprimés entre 1529 et 1631’, in Arts et Traditions Populaires, 11 (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Laroc, 1963), p. 119. Seguin’s study constitutes the seminal account of this genre. 126 Chartier, ‘The Hanged Woman Miraculously Saved’, p. 67. 127 Raymond, Making the News, chapter 4, examines the various versions of this story, and prints the accounts from Mercurius Politicus. 128 Davis, Fiction in the Archives, pp. 65–6, gives the titles of what appear to be two earlier versions of this same story, Histoire merveilleuse et veritable des homicides, voleries, et assassinats infinis et detestables, commis par le Capitaine la Noye (1608),

Notes 191

129

130 131

132 133 134 135

136 137

138 139 140 141

142 143

and Discours au vray de la cruauté plus que barbare exerce par le Capitaine la Noue (1610). She calls it ‘an exemplary story without roots in time or place’. Albert Camus, The Outsider, translated by Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 82. The narrator finds the story in an old newspaper; this time the events take place in Czechoslovakia. Seguin, ‘L’information en France’, p. 145. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, pp. 75–96. The pamphlet entitled Anthony Painter The Blaspheming Caryer (1613), an exemplary tale of the mysterious fate of a man struck down by God for cursing and blaspheming, supposedly ‘translated out of French: and printed at Paris’, seems like an obvious example of an English occasionel. Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 55. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, p. 194. Rollins, ‘The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad’, pp. 269–70, gives examples. See also Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 6. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476–1622, pp. 249–50. See also Barbara Rosen’s remarks on the writing of witchcraft pamphlets in Witchcraft (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 20. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, p. 46. Many plays based on tragic domestic incidents seem, like Page of Plymouth, to have been lost. See Gertrude Marian Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques, 1500–1642 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Studies in English, vol. 19, 1933), and C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), and Chapter 4, below. Lake, “Deeds against Nature”, p. 262. Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, pp. 27–8, 377–80. Ibid., p. 263. On this pattern, see Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 81, and Garthine Walker, ‘“Demons in female form”: Representations of Women and Gender in Murder Pamphlets of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Writing and the English Renaissance, eds. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 124. Joseph H. Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England, 1550–1640 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), lists the documentation, pp. 75–6. For example, Davis, Factual Fictions, and Faller, Turned to Account. See also Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p. 114, on the close relation between ‘novelistic didacticism and the didactic novel’ in the later seventeenth century.

Chapter 2 1 Martin Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women Cucked or Washed”: a Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London: ULC Press, 1994), p. 49. 2 An infant was defined as a child of eight years old or less in Tudor homicide trials. After the 1624 Act ‘to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, often referred to as the Infanticide Act, infanticide meant the killing

192 Notes

3

4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

of a newborn or very young infant. See Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558–1803 (Linden Studies in Anglo-American Legal History, New York and London: New York University Press, 1984), and Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). A crimen exceptum is one that is not amenable to normal principles of proof or normal court procedures. This calculation has been made by Francis Barker, in The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1993), p. 179. He extrapolates it from the statistics of J. S. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records. Home Circuit Indictments. Elizabeth 1 and James 1. Introduction (London: HMSO, 1985). J. S. Cockburn, ‘The Nature and Incidence of Crime in England 1559–1625’, in Cockburn, Crime in England 1550–1800, p. 50. In Tudor Economic Documents, eds. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1925), 2, 339. J. M. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History 8 (1975), 80–116. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records, p. 114, Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace. Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 150–1. See also J. H. Baker, ‘Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law 1500–1800’, in Cockburn, Crime in England 1550–1800, p. 44. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, p. 87. This phrase comes from Joy Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 214, but discussions of this issue can be found in a wide variety of work dealing with gender relations in the period. I have found particularly useful D. E. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. Fletcher and D. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 116–36, Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society. Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), and Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 17–18. Barbara Rosen (ed.), Witchcraft (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 53–8 gives extracts from these laws. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London and New York: Longman, 1984), pp. 92, 5–6. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers. Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 12, 61. Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’, p. 36. Frances Dolan, ‘Household Chastisements. Gender, Authority, and “Domestic Violence”’, in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (eds.), Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 206. Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Form and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 224, fn. 10 notes in passing that infanticide and murder of apprentices went relatively unattended in popular literature and ballads, compared to the murder of spouses.

Notes 193 16 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 89, Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, pp. 214, 221, and Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 238. 17 See Mark Jackson, ‘Suspicious Infant Deaths: The Statute of 1624 and Medical Evidence at Coroners’ Inquests’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 64–86 for an account of the Act, its implications and its history. 18 Sharpe, Crime, p. 61. Beattie, ‘The Criminality of Women’, calls this ‘an offence unique in English law’ in its presumption of guilt. He notes that in the eighteenth century judges and juries tried their best to acquit women accused of it (p. 84). 19 T. C. Curtis and F. M. Hale, ‘English Thinking about Crime, 1530–1620’, in L. A. Knafla (ed.), Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada (Waterloo, Canada: Calgary Institute for the Humanities; Wilfred Laurier Press, 1981), p. 124. 20 J. A. Sharpe, ‘The History of Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past and Present 108 (1985), p. 214. Sharpe’s article is in answer to Lawrence Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1980’, Past and Present 101 (1983), 22–33, which in turn comments on Sharpe’s article ‘Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England’, cited Ch. 1 n. 7 above. See also J. S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent 1560–1985’, Past and Present 130 (1991), 70–106, who makes a judicious and balanced contribution to this debate. 21 Cockburn, ‘The Nature and Incidence of Crime’, p. 56. 22 In another pamphlet of the same year, A most horrible and detestable Murther committed by a bloudie minded man vpon his owne Wife, there is an account of the plethora of recent murders in the same tone. 23 Quoted from Joseph Marshburn and Alan R. Velie (eds.), Blood and Knavery. A Collection of English Renaissance Pamphlets and Ballads of Crime and Sin (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), pp. 42–3. 24 Though not necessarily an official one. It has been argued that there is no evidence that the Privy Council itself regarded personal violence as particularly threatening at this time, and was seriously concerned only with criminal actions based on contempt for authority or the subversion of religion. See Timothy Curtis and Jill Grinstead, ‘Personal Violence and Elizabethan Thought’, in G. Lamoine (ed.), Images et Representations de la Justice du XVIe au XX Siècle (Université de Toulouse le Mirail, 1983), pp. 15–36. 25 Timothy Curtis, ‘Explaining Crime in Early Modern England’, Criminal Justice History 1 (1980), p. 119. 26 Peter Lake, ‘Popular Form, Puritan Content? Two Puritan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet from mid-Seventeenth-Century London’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 330. 27 A Warning to Servants (1680), pp. 21, 22. 28 Henry Goodcole, Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry after Lust and Murther (1635), sig. A4v. 29 Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers: The One by Maister Cauerly … The Other, by Mistris Browne (1605), in J. Payne Collier (ed.), Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature, 2 vols. (London, 1963, reissued New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), vol. 1, p. 11. 30 Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers, p. 19.

194 Notes 31 Ibid., p. 24. 32 Keith Sturgess, in his edition of the play in Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 33 discusses the incorporation of diabolic motivation as the most significant difference between the play and the pamphlet. See also Chapter 4, p. 108. 33 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, p. 226. 34 Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 21–5, gives a useful broad survey of historians’ changing views on the relations between women and the law in early modern times. 35 Herrup, The Common Peace, p. 195. 36 Ibid., pp. 143, 151. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Essex Record Office Publications, 56, Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1970), pp. 149–50, gives several interesting examples from the Essex Sessions and Assizes records of women accused of murder and not found guilty, in the face of the testimony of witnesses. J. S. Cockburn, ‘Trial by the Book? Fact and Theory in the Criminal Process, 1558–1625’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 73, notes that ‘only about one-fifth of all females convicted at assizes suffered the full legal penalty for their misdeeds’. 37 Herrup. The Common Peace, p. 150. 38 Though not where it really mattered. T. E., The Lawes Resolution (1632), notes that ‘In matters criminall and capitall causes, a feme covert shall answere without her husband’ (sig. O7v). 39 William Lambarde, Eirenarcha: or The Office of the Justices of Peace (1579). My quotations come from the edition of 1599 in the British Library, pp. 277–8. 40 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 37. 41 Lambarde, Eirenarcha, p. 184. 42 Ibid., p. 241. 43 Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (4th edn, 1630), p. 232. 44 Lambarde, Eirenarcha, p. 242. 45 Dolan, The Countrey Justice, p. 24, notes that there was some debate in legal handbooks as to whether the killing of a mistress by a servant did constitute petty treason, given the anomalous nature of female authority. 46 Dalton, The Countrey Justice, p. 282. 47 Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) believes that ‘the rate of bastardy, already high, rose as the century progressed’, p. 369. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), regards the illegitimacy rate in the period as low relative to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to modern times (pp. 19, 157–8). The viewpoint taken by Hoffer and Hull in Murdering Mothers who give figures to show the increase in bastardy prosecutions after the poor law of 1576, is relevant here. 48 Ingram, Church Courts, p. 156. 49 Ibid., p. 162, citing Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1982) in support of this view. 50 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 16. 51 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, passim. 52 Maria Cioni, Women and Law in Elizabethan England with Particular Reference to the Court of Chancery (New York and London, 1985); Amy Louise Erickson,

Notes 195

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

63 64

65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73

74

Women and Property in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), and Stretton, Women Waging Law. James C. Oldham, ‘On Pleading the Belly: A History of the Jury of Matrons’, Criminal Justice History. An International Annual, vol. 6 (1985), 1–64. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold’, Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 166–97. Herrup, The Common Peace, pp. 91–2. See also Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, passim, but esp. pp. 250–62. Gaskill, ibid., p. 250. J. A. Baker, ‘Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law 1550–1800’, in Cockburn, Crime in England 1550–1800, p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, p. 80. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p. 53, note that women were called as witnesses in secular and ecclesiastical courts, but there was some disquiet as to whether they could properly serve in this role. F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Essex Record Office, Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1973), p. 293. Ingram, Church Courts, p. 51, does not see the procedure in this light. A. D. J . Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, in Cockburn, Crime in England, p. 85. For a fuller exposition of this view see A. D. J. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1970), and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), especially chs. 14–18. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, Chapter 2, discusses some of these. J. A. Sharpe, ‘Women, Witchcraft and the Legal Process’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (London: ULC Press, 1994), p. 113. Rosen, Witchcraft, pp. 26–7. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, p. 20. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p. 208. Rosen, in an annotation on a witchcraft pamphlet, notes that ‘neither unhappiness, illness nor childbirth carried any right of privacy, and to turn away even curious strangers would apparently have been regarded as an unthinkable breach of hospitality’ (Witchcraft, p. 250, n. 10). Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 206, 221. Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 103. Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam. Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 106. Jackson, New-Born Child Murder, p. 78. For instance, in A true and just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S.Oses in the countie of Essex (1582), it is noted in the pre-trial examination of the witnesses that ‘The said Margerie sayth, that she had hard the Widowe Hunt to say, that the sayde Joan Pechey shoulde say that shee could tell what any man saide or did at any time in their houses’ (sig. A5). The pamphlet which relates this grim story is A True and Sad Relation of Two Wicked and Bloody Murthers, The one done by the Earl of Pembroke, and his company … the other was done by one Jane Lawson, the Wife of James Lawson (1680).

196 Notes 75 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 109. 76 This ballad is to be found in The Pepys Ballads, ed. W. G. Day, 5 vols. rpt. (Cambridge: Derek Brewer, 1987), vol. 2, p. 191. 77 Brewer, the author of this lively account, also wrote The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton (?1608), several ballads, and various pamphlets, including some on the plagues of 1625 and 1636. See Hyder E. Rollins’s note on him in A Pepysian Garland, p. 11. 78 Anne Worrall, Offending Women. Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Justice System (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 31. See also the article on infanticide by Allison Morris and Ania Wilczynski, ‘Rocking the Cradle. Mothers who Kill their Children’, in Helen Birch (ed.), Moving Targets (London: Virago, 1993), which discusses how women are punished for breaking traditional sex-role expectations. 79 Allison Morris, Women, Crime and Criminal Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 52. 80 See Cathy Spatz Widom, ‘Perspectives of Female Criminality’, in Allison Morris with Lorraine Gelsthorpe (eds.), Women and Crime (Cambridge: Croftwood Conference Series no. 13, 1981), pp. 33–48. She notes that Freud saw criminal women as sexual misfits. 81 Frances Heidensohn, Women and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 47. 82 Ibid., p. 74. 83 This view, typical of nineteenth-century analyses of female criminality, is that of Mary Carpenter, Our Convicts, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), p. 32, quoted in Morris, Women, Crime and Criminal Justice, p. 13. 84 Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 14. 85 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, pp. 89–90. See also Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”’, and Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women. 86 Diane Purkiss, ‘Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England: the House, the Body, the Child’, Gender and History 7 (1995), 408–32. See also Purkiss, The Witch in History (London: Routledge, 1996), especially Chapter 6, ‘Self-fashioning by the witch’. 87 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 57. 88 Ibid., p. 5. 89 Faller, Turned to Account, p. 222, n. 4. 90 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, pp. 35–6. 91 See Henry Goodcole, The Adultresses Funerall Day for ‘A Short Tract upon the hainousnesse of Poysoning’ (sigs. B3v–B4v), which gives reasons for the special wickedness of this technique for murder, in particular that it allows the victim no time to prepare himself for death. See also Chapter 5, p. 177. 92 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 48. 93 This is the fullest and most interesting of several accounts to which this extraordinary case gave rise. Others include An Account of the Manner, Behaviour and Execution of Mary Aubrey, Who was Burnt to Ashes, in Leicester Fields (1687), A Cabinet of Grief: Or, The French Midwife’s Miserable Moan for the Barbarous Murther Committed upon the Body of her Husband (1688), and A Warning-Piece for All Married Men and Women, Being the full Confession of Mary Hobry, The French Midwife, Who Murdered her Husband on the 27th of January 1687/8. 94 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 34. 95 See Miranda Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century’, Gender and History 7 (1995), 378–407; and Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in

Notes 197

96 97 98

99

100

101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

England between 1550 and 1700’, in The Sexual Dynamics of History, ed. The London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 28–42, for discussions of the meanings of the crime in early modern England. G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives. Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early SeventeenthCentury England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), pp. 172–3, notes the extreme legal difficulties facing any woman who might have grounds to take a man to court for rape. But it was not an unknown crime, as an examination of the Calendar of Assize Records, ed. J. S. Cockburn, will show. See Chapter 5, pp. 159–62 for further discussion of this case. Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”’, p. 76. Patricia Crawford, ‘Public Duty, Conscience and Women in Early Modern England’, in J. Morrill et al. (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 60. Crawford appositely cites Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (1622), p. 18, where he states that for a good wife ‘a conscionable performance of household duties … may be accounted a publike work’. Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”’; and An Ordered Society, Gowing, Domestic Dangers, Diane E. Henderson, ‘The Theater and Domestic Culture’, in Cox and Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama, pp. 173–94; Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music’, and Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold’. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit. Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 116; and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). William Le Hardy (ed.), County of Middlesex. Calendar to the Sessions Records New Series, 4 vols. (London, 1935–41), Vol. IV, xx. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals, pp. 7–8. Amussen, ‘“Being stirred to much unquietness”’, p. 83, Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy. Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 147. Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, p. 92. John Wing, The Crowne Coniugall (London, 1632), p. 297, cited in Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 21. See also p. 21, n. 2. Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion. The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500–1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), passim, and Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 56. The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (1632), sig. B3v. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, p. 231. Rose, The Expense of Spirit, pp. 126–9, Amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 41. Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 108. Walker, ‘“Demons in female form”’, p. 132. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 138. Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music’, p. 176. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 41. Accounts of wife-murder in which the husband is set on by a female servant do appear, for instance the ballad ‘The Unfaithful Servant’ (PB, ed. Day, 2. 151), Thomas Cash, Two Horrible and inhumane Murders done in Lincolnshire, by two Husbands upon their Wiues (1604); in Thomas Brewer’s The Bloudy Mother, the woman servant plans the wife’s murder, but fails to carry it out.

198 Notes 116 These ballads are to be found in A Pepysian Garland, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, pp. 238–42, 299–334. For discussion of the unsafe household, see Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, Chapters 1 and 2. 117 Sharpe, ‘Domestic Homicide’, pp. 36–7. 118 Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence’, passim. 119 Cahn, Industry of Devotion, pp. 132–3. 120 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 256. 121 Ibid., p. 257. 122 Cahn, Industry of Devotion, p. 168. 123 Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, p. 245. 124 Cited by Cahn, Industry of Devotion, p. 136. 125 Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 256. 126 Ibid., p. 266. 127 Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture. Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 17. 128 Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters. Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), p. 88. But see also Stretton, Women Waging Law, p. 32. 129 Willis, Malevolent Nurture, pp. 17–18. 130 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 149. She extends her argument to suggest that violence against a child is thus seen as ‘familiar’, as a stratagem for downplaying the idea that not all mothers do identify with their children. 131 Ibid., p. 148. 132 Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, p. 149. 133 See Quaife, Wanton Wenches, pp. 143–5 on the sexual associations of the widow. Fuller accounts of the early modern widow in society can be found in Vivian Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations’, in L. Bonfield, et al. (eds.), The World We Have Gained (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 122–54, Charles Carlton, ‘The Widow’s Tale: Male Myths and Female Reality in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England’, Albion 10 (1978), 118–29; and Barbara J. Todd, ‘The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Considered’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1985). 134 See The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619). 135 This notion of the witch is extensively explored by Willis in Malevolent Nurture. 136 Susan Amussen, ‘The Gendering of Popular Culture in Early Modern England’, in T. Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 54, and Quaife, Wanton Wenches, p. 16. 137 Though I do not entirely accept the position taken by Garthine Walker in ‘“Demons in Female Form”’ who assumes knowledge of how early modern women would or would not have responded to this writing, and argues that they would not have read it ‘as women’, p. 135. 138 Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, p. 76.

Chapter 3 1 ‘The lamentation of Agnes Bruen &c’, entered 1 July 1592, ‘The Burnynge of Anne Bruen’, entered 10 July 1592, ‘John Parkers lamentacon &c’, entered 11 July 1592, and ‘The Lamentacion of John Parker’, entered 15 July 1592.

Notes 199 2 3 4 5

6

7 8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17

Entered in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, 7 March 1608. Entered 18 July 1637. Entered 28 June 1605. Entered 7 September 1594. Joseph H. Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England, 1550–1640 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), p. 83, gives details. Other relevant lost ballads include ‘A ballett of the Murther of A boy of 3 yeres of Age …’, related to the Annis Dell crime, ‘A new ballad of the life and deathe of Three Wyches Arrayned and executed at Chelmisford’, ‘A lamentable songe of Three Wytches, of Warbos. And executed at Huntington’, and ‘A warning for all wicked wives’ (on Katherine Francis), details of which are given in Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England. There are also an unnamed ballad, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 15 April 1608, on Elizabeth Seabrooke [Abbot], whose murder of another woman is related in The Apprehension, Arraignement, and execution of Elizabeth Abbot alias Cebrooke (1608) (number 1274 in Rollins’s Analytical Index), and the ‘lamentable confession of mistres James for consentinge with Lowe her servante to the deathe of her husband’ (1609), related to the murder in A true relation of the most Inhumane and bloody Murther, of Master James (1609). The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (New York: AMS Press, 1964), vol. VII, 154. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 56, calculates rather too airily from Rollins’s Analytical Index to the Ballad Entries in the Stationers’ Register that criminal behaviour was the most popular of all ballad subjects, but he bases his figures purely on entries in Rollins’s index of names and subjects. Had he used the index of titles, the information yielded would have been different. Margaret Spufford, ‘The Pedlar, the Historian and the Folklorist: Seventeenth Century Communications’, Folklore 105 (1994), 13–24, says that broadside ballad publishers concentrated on four topics: religion, politics, issues of identity within family, region and nation, and above all marriage, courtship and sexuality. I owe this reference to David Atkinson. Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 178. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 11–12, discusses prices, suggesting that they may have been lower than a penny. Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, translated by Gayna Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 9 ff. is typical here, but Watt, Cheap Print, esp. pp. 78–9, 148–50 and 167–77, is an exception and takes the woodcut seriously. The use of woodcuts to decorate the walls and chimney-pieces of rooms is well documented. Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London, 1810–24), 3, 894. Statutes of the Realm, 4, 240. Statutes of the Realm, 4, 445, 659. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 383. Rollins gives an account of early attempts to regulate the publication of ballads in the introduction to Old English Ballads 1553–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). The Records of the Court of the Stationers Company, 1576–1602, eds. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell (London, 1930), p. xx. Watt, Cheap Print, p. 43.

200 Notes 18 In Thomas of Woodstock, IV.iii. Nimble, a lawyer’s man, says he can ‘find treason’ in the whistle of a carman. See Rollins, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, p. 313. 19 See Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), pp. 225–31. The tune was known well before 1590, and was one of the most familiar of all ballad tunes. 20 Rollins, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, p. 271. 21 Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 123–4. 22 Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, p. 149. 23 A. B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 40. See also The Common Muse. Popular British Ballad Poetry from the 15th to the 20th Century, eds. V. de Sola Pinto and A. E. Rodway (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 33. 24 Fox gives the example of a metrical prophecy, akin in form to a ballad and in this instance adapted to predict Cromwell’s downfall from an earlier ballad made in the reign of Henry VI, circulated amongst a group of Yorkshiremen including several clerics who made copies of it and handed them on to sympathetic contacts (Oral and Literate Culture, p. 365). See also Smith, The Acoustic World, pp. 178–81 on the Cromwell ballads. 25 See Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 382 ff., for more on this subject. The similarity in format between the broadside and the proclamation, noticed by Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England (Preface, ix), both printed on one side of a folio sheet nine by twelve inches, is suggestive. See also Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 48, who says that the ballad ‘acted as a usurper … of the royal prerogative on information dissemination’. Friedman (The Ballad Revival, p. 39) makes the point that the broadside ballad is the ancestor of the handbill. 26 Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, p. 386. 27 John Selden, Table Talk, ed. F. Pollock (1927), p. 72. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 320–1, suggests that composers of extempore ballads and libellous verses may well have drawn upon the format and conventions of the printed broadside. 28 ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh his lamentation’, printed in Rollins, A Pepysian Garland, no. 15. This collection is henceforth referred to as PG. Smith, The Acoustic World, p. 191, notes that the publication of ‘A lamentable Dittie composed upon the death of Robert Devereux late Earle of Essex’ was not published until fifteen months after the execution, when a new monarch was on the throne. 29 Rollins, PG, p. 89. 30 Rollins, PG, p. 277. 31 Smith, The Acoustic World, p. 187. See also Davis, Factual Fictions, pp. 48–9. 32 See Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, pp. 152–3, and Rollins, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, p. 269, for examples. 33 Rollins, PG, p. 432. 34 Rollins, PG, p. 84, from The Court and Times of James I, 1, 418. 35 Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, p. 193. 36 In Henry Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame and William Kemp, Nine daies wonder, Bodley Head Quartos, ed. G. B. Harrison, p. 4. 37 Shaaber, Forerunners, pp. 193–4. 38 For example, J. A. Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 36 (1986), and in many other of his works, and Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature’.

Notes 201 39 See Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653), chapter 4, and Dorothy Osborne, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–4), ed. E. A. Parry (London, n.d.), pp. 84–5. 40 Friedman, The Ballad Revival, pp. 52–3. Walton records this anecdote in The Compleat Angler, chapter 4. 41 Rollins, ‘The Black-letter Broadside Ballad’, p. 308. Brome in The Antipodes (1640) has one of his characters refer to a ‘ballad-woman’ who ‘gives light to the most learned Antiquary in all the kingdom’ (IV.8). 42 Records of Early English Drama: Norwich 1540–1642, ed. David Galloway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 115. Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650–1850 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 23, gives an illustration of a woman ballad-singer from the 1680s. 43 Records of Early English Drama: Somerset, ed. James Stokes, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 1, 164. Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, p. 126. See also Somerset, vol. 2, 495–6 on ‘Women and performance’. 44 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, p. 11. 45 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, especially chapter 3, Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage’, p. 72, and Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, p. 26. 46 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women, p. 48. 47 Smith, The Acoustic World, p. 195. 48 The Common Muse, Introduction, p. 15. 49 Ibid., p. 19. 50 Mayhew recorded the words of a street ballad-singer who said: ‘I get a shilling for a “copy of verses written by the wretched culprit the night previous to his execution”. I wrote Courvoisier’s sorrowful lamentation. I called it “A Voice from the Gaol”.’ See London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861), 3, 196. 51 Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 56. 52 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, 1986), p. 44. 53 See James Shirley, The Court Secret (1653), in The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, eds. W. Gifford and A. C. Dyce, 6 vols. (London: James Murray, 1833), V, 300, for a speech by Pedro, who wants a ballad written to celebrate his conduct on the scaffold. But see also The Insatiate Countess, V.ii.60 ff., for a less enthusiastic response to the idea of having ‘a scurvy ballad’ made of one’s death. 54 Rollins, PG, p. 54 gives more details. 55 The text is from The Common Muse, no. 84, pp. 255–8. For another ballad on Essex’s death see ‘A lamentable Ditty composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, late Earle of Essexe’, in The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Charles Hindley, 2 vols. (London: Reeves and Turner, 1874), 2, 202–11. See Smith’s discussion of it in The Acoustic World, pp. 190–3. 56 The comparison here with ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh his lamentation’ (PG 15) is interesting. Ralegh is made to stress his guilt and folly, and details of his courageous behaviour on the scaffold are largely omitted. 57 He was the author of The Blacke Dogge of Newgate (1596), a pamphlet of prison life, and a Repentance, now lost. 58 A. L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1967), pp. 220–1, notes the traditional ‘sympathy of the poor’ towards the outlaw, including the highwayman, as a folk hero in ballads. On the celebration of highwaymen as ballad-heroes, and their later versions, see Roy Palmer, The Sound of History. Songs and Social Comment (London: Pimlico, 1996), pp. 125–7.

202 Notes 59 This is motif E422.1.11.5.1 in Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-tales, Ballads, Myths, etc., revised and enlarged edition, 6 vols. (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58). 60 Though there is a much later ballad about a woman highway robber, ‘The Female Highway Hector’ (c. 1690), which is a celebratory account of a woman who carries out a successful career of robbery, dressed as a pretty young man, and is not caught or punished (RB, 8, Editorial Preface to Part IV, ix). 61 Text from The Pepys Ballads, ed. Rollins, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929–32), p. 7. 62 Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 46. 63 Rollins, PG, p. 299. Richard Smyth, The Obituary of Richard Smyth (ed. Henry Ellis, Camden Society, 1849), p. 7, notes a separate case of ‘a woman burnt in Smithfield for poisoning her husband’ in 1632. 64 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, pp. 89–90. 65 See Hyder E. Rollins, ‘Martin Parker, Ballad-monger’, Modern Philology 16 (1919), 113–38, for an account of Parker’s career. 66 Six of the ballads in PG are set to it, and Rollins cites a number of others (p. 300). 67 McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 47. 68 The only known copy of this ballad is that printed in 1633 by Cuthbert Wright, who had printed the quartos of the play in 1592 and 1599 (RB, VIII, 47–53). There is no record of its having existed before this date, and it seems likely that the publication of the ballad is related to the publication of another quarto of the play, Arden of Faversham, in the same year. Both use the same woodcut. 69 Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England, p. 75, notes another entered in the Stationers’ Register on 14 December 1624. 70 Text from Rollins, ed., Old English Ballads, pp. 340–8. 71 The pamphlet is reproduced in Louis Thorn Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1937), p. 172. 72 Rollins, PG, p. 341. 73 I have used the version of the texts given in The Roxburghe Ballads, I, pp. 553–63. That in the Pepys Ballads, I, 126–7, contains numerous textual variants, but they do not affect my argument here. 74 See Simpson, British Broadside Ballads, p. 226, who says that the pedigree of the ballad as a work of Deloney was ‘cooked’ by Collier, in Broadside Black-letter Ballads (privately printed, 1868), p. 63. 75 Lloyd, Folk Song in England, pp. 222–7. In RB 8, pp. 190–208, there is a selection of ballads from the 1690s grouped under the heading ‘Unhallowed marriages’, in which the woman’s situation is always represented sympathetically. ‘The Old Miser Slighted; or The Young Lasse’s resolution to marry the Young Man that she Loves, and not be troubled with the groans of a gouty fornicator, for the benefit of his Riches’ typifies the genre. 76 RB I, 561. 77 Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 56. 78 Rollins, PG, p. 425. 79 Parker was born about 1600, and his first extant ballads date from 1624/5. By the date of this ballad he was eminent as a ballad-writer, and came to be regarded as supreme in this mode. A funeral elegy to him by ‘S. F.’ appeared in 1656. More than 80 of his ballads and other works (including romances and in the Civil War

Notes 203

80

81 82 83

84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91

years royalist pamphlets) have survived. See Rollins, Modern Philology 16 (1919), 113–38. For example, Henry Goodcole, Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637), or A Pitiless Mother (1616), as discussed in Chapter 2. A lost ballad which may have dealt with the subject of the murdering of bastard neonates is ‘a dolefull discourse of a mayd yet suffered at Westminster for burying her child quicke’, registered on 31 March 1580. The case is briefly mentioned in Munday’s A View of Sundrye Examples (1580), p. 87. Jean Freedman, ‘With Child: Illegitimate Pregnancy in Scottish Traditional Ballads’, Folklore Forum 24 (1991), 3–18, p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. Although few of the Child ballads are preserved in manuscripts earlier than the seventeenth century, some of them were demonstrably in existence two centuries before this. Broadside versions also exist of many, including ‘The Cruel Mother’ (Child, 20). In this striking ballad, which exists in many variants, the woman gives birth alone and in pain. She kills and buries the child (sometimes more than one), but is later revisited by it as a revenant who rebukes her for her cruelty. A later ballad, ‘Witchcraft discovered and punished. Or, The Tryals and Condemnation of three Notorious Witches, who were Tried the last Assizes, holden at the Castle of Exeter, in the County of Devon’ (RB 6, 706–8), is also a summary account. See Golding, An Elizabethan Puritan, p. 167. A View of Sundrye Examples, p. 79. Sundrye Strange and inhumaine Murthers, sig. B3v. Sundrye Strange and inhumaine Murthers, sig. B4. The ballad texts are taken from The Pepys Ballads, ed. Rollins, 7, 3–20, which also gives the full text of The Cruel Midwife. Technically, of course, this was not a crime of infanticide as defined by the 1624 statute, still in force, since these were not neonates killed by their mother. According to Narcissus Luttrell, who noted the progress of events during this case, the maid was acquitted. A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678–April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857), 3, 205.

Chapter 4 1 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4, 323. Subsequently referred to as ES. 2 ES 3, 455. 3 ES 3, 286. 4 Rosalyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), pp. 126–7. 5 ES 2, 53–4. For a fuller account, see also Janet Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 140–1. 6 The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 4, 1613–1660, general editor, Lois Potter (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 170, says it was ‘written, acted, censored and acted again within six weeks of the Dutch patriot’s trial and execution’. Clare, p. 183, has further details. 7 See C. J. Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 80–124, who discusses this fascinating story in great detail.

204 Notes 8 See Charles Dale Cannon (ed.), A Warning for Fair Women. A Critical Edition (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1975), pp. 46–7 on the date. 9 Henslowe’s Diary, eds. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 62. Beech’s Tragedy (Henslowe’s Diary, p. 130) is probably the same play. 10 References to these plays are in Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 123, 124, 64, 125, 126, 127, 182. See also Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques 1500–1642, and Sisson, Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age for further information. The two parts of Edward IV, also plays about a real-life transgressive woman (Jane Shore), though not a recent one, were entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1599. 11 H. H. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy 1575–1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 197, and the entry in Henslowe’s Diary, pp. 123, 124. 12 Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, p. 44. 13 M. L. Wine, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1973), p. lix. 14 And perhaps also for Robert Yarrington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), though the pamphlet about this murder, A true discourse of a most cruell and barbarous murther committed by one Thomas Merrey, on the persons of Roberte Beeche and Thomas Winchester, entered in the Stationers’ Register for 29 August 1594, is not extant. 15 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 126. See also Betty Travitsky, ‘Child Murder in English Renaissance Life and Drama’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama 6 (1993), 63–84. 16 Sidney Lee, ‘The Topical Side of Elizabethan Drama’, Transactions of the New Shakespere Society, series 1 (1887–92), pt. 1, p. 20. H. H. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. vii. 17 Sturgess, ed., Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 15. 18 The play is cited in the facsimile edition published in the series Old English Drama, 1913. 19 The ballad is entered in the [Stationers’ Register] for 15 October 1595, as ‘The Norfolke gent his will and Testament and howe he Commytted the keepinge of his Children to his own brother who delte most wickedly with them and howe GOD plagued him for it’. It was popular and appeared in many collections, including RB 2, 216. Yarrington changed the story from the ballad considerably to make the Italian plot of his play parallel to the English one. 20 The text cited is Cannon, A Warning for Fair Women. 21 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 26. 22 Peter Holbrooke, Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), p. 91. 23 Such as Sir Thomas Wyatt (with others), Fortune by Sea and Land (in part), and Edward IV. 24 Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, p. 75. 25 Sturgess, Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, pp. 16, 15. 26 Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 143. 27 Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 7. 28 Ibid., p. 110. 29 The same story is also told, but more briefly, by Master James in A Warning for Fair Women, scene xv. The play has been identified as Friar Francis, which was

Notes 205

30

31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

performed by the Earl of Sussex’s Men in London in 1593, with some boxoffice success. See Henslowe’s Diary, p. 20. Heywood gives a second example of a murder play having this effect on a guilty woman in the audience, this time at a performance by English players in Holland. The exception here is Lake, in The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, who, although he seems not to know of Adams’ work as such, bases his analysis of the plays on the centrality of what he calls ‘the sin, providential judgment and repentance triad’ (p. 104). Viviana Comensoli, Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 92. Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Familial Transgressions, Societal Transition on the Elizabethan Stage’, in Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (eds.), Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama (Lewiston, Queenstown and Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press, 1991), p. 118. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 74. Holbrooke, Literature and Degree in Renaissance England, pp. 99, 86. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, pp. 32–3, Frances Dolan, ‘Gender, Moral Agency, and Dramatic Form in A Warning for Fair Women’, Studies in English Literature 29 (1989), 201–18. Dolan, ibid., pp. 201, 211. A. M. Clark, Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), p. 235. Alexander Leggatt, ‘Arden of Faversham’, Shakespeare Survey 36 (1953), 121. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 51. McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 228. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 185. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 52. McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 124. Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4. For examples of this, see Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, and Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture. Whigham, Seizures of the Will, p. 15. David Attwell, ‘Property, Status, and the Subject in a Middle-Class Tragedy: Arden of Faversham’, ELR 21 (1999), 328. Cannon, A Warning for Fair Women, pp. 46–8. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, in Appendix A includes these in his list of lost domestic plays of the period. See also Andrew Clark, ‘An Annotated List of Lost Domestic Plays, 1578–1624’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 18 (1975), 29–44. Wine, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, p. xl. Holinshed’s Chronicles is cited from the extract included in Wine’s edition of Arden of Faversham. Page references are given in the text. Whigham, Seizures of the Will, p. 109. See Wine, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, fn. 301, I.292–5, also 458ff. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England, pp. 227–31. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 105. This is also the line taken by Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 111. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 134. For example, by Sturgess, Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 19, and Wine, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, p. lx.

206 Notes 58 Golding’s pamphlet is reproduced in Cannon’s edition, which is cited here. Page numbers are given in the text. 59 Dolan, ‘Gender, Moral Agency’, p. 215. 60 Holbrooke, Literature and Degree in Renaissance England, p. 95. 61 Kathleen McLuskie, ‘“Tis but a woman’s jar”: Family and Kinship in Elizabethan Domestic Drama’, Literature and History 9 (1983), 231. 62 See Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 118, Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 47, and John Taylor, The Unnatural Father (1621), p. 1. 63 By Orlin, in ‘Familial Transgressions’, and Dolan, in ‘Gender, Moral Agency’, though Lake, anxious to play down any gender-specific aspects in this drama, argues for it as a more general problem of authority (pp. 90–2). 64 Cannon, A Warning for Fair Women, pp. 224–5. See Chapter 2, pp. 66–7 on the widow in early modern society. 65 Orlin, ‘Familial Transgressions’, p. 34. 66 Ibid., p. 38. 67 Cannon, A Warning for Fair Women, p. 83. 68 Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, pp. 108, 115. 69 Holbrooke, Literature and Degree in Renaissance England, p. 99. 70 Orlin, ‘Familial Transgressions’, p. 37. 71 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, pp. 82–3. 72 Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, p. 116 (another discussion of this speech). 73 Adams, English Domestic and Homiletic Tragedy, p. 113. 74 But see Travitsky, ‘Child Murder’. 75 Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, pp. 202–3. It was apparently a two-part play, with separate tragic and comic plots. See Sisson, Lost Plays, pp. 80–124. 76 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 210. Lost plays, which seem from their titles likely to have been about witchcraft, include The Witch of Islington of 1597 (Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 195), and Black Joan of the same year. See Andrew Clark, Domestic Drama. A Survey of the Origins, Antecedants, and Nature of the Domestic Play in England (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1975, Appendix C). There was also Doctor Lambe and the Witches, licensed in August 1634, but probably an old play then. For which, see G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68), III, 73–6. 77 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 210. 78 See Chapter 2, pp. 34–5. 79 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 236. 80 The text is taken from the edition of Arthur F. Kinney, New Mermaids (London, New York: A. & C. Black, W. W. Norton, 1998). 81 Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton’, Renaissance Drama 20 (1989), 90. 82 Compare the speech of the madmen in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. 83 Dawson, ‘Witchcraft/Bigamy’, p. 85. 84 McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 71. 85 Ibid. 86 She is called mother in the play, but not in the pamphlet, where there is a reference to her husband. 87 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 260, contrasts the ‘man-dog’ relationship of Cuddy with the Dog.

Notes 207 88 Purkiss says that the play ‘shows the figure of the witch to be a role’ (The Witch in History, p. 246). 89 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 198. 90 Even its most recent editor, Laird Barber, An Edition of the Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979) takes this position. Quotations from the play are taken from this edition. 91 Herbert Berry, ‘The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984), 215. The uncertainty as to the witches’ fate seems not to have been unusual. Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, demonstrates that it was often difficult to discover even what happened to those who were convicted. Fewer were executed than might have been expected (p. 76). 92 For accounts of the events see Purkiss, The Witch in History, pp. 233–4, Clark, Thomas Heywood, p. 125, and Barber’s edition, An Edition of the Late Lancashire Witches, pp. 55–67. 93 Clark, Thomas Heywood, p. 125. See also Barber, pp. 72–3, on the dating. 94 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 233. 95 Berry, ‘The Globe Bewitched’, p. 221. 96 Ibid., p. 218. 97 Ibid., pp. 212–13. 98 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 249, n. 40. 99 Berry, ‘The Globe Bewitched’, p. 212. 100 Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, p. 205. 101 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 217. Barber, drawing on a different critical idiom, calls it ‘an essentially good-natured play designed to provide amusement for a summer’s afternoon’ (An Edition of the Late Lancashire Witches, p. 20). 102 McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 84.

Chapter 5 1 The expressions come from John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McLure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 57, and Henry Fitzgeffery, Satyres and satyricall epigrams (1617), Book 1. 2 Marie-Hélène Davies, Reflections of Renaissance England, Life, Thought and Religion in Illustrated Pamphlets 1535–1640 (Princeton Theological Monographs series 1, Allison Park, Penn.: Pickwick Publications, 1986), p. 2. See also Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers 1580–1640 (London: Athlone Press, 1984), pp. 23–4. 3 Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 123. 4 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 1; Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat. Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 4. 5 Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England. News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 127. 6 Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, p. 1.

208 Notes 7 Ibid., p. 66. The commonplace book of William Davenport, a Cheshire gentleman, filled with transcriptions of London news, is another such example. For references to manuscript accounts of phenomena, see also Walsham, ibid., p. 182, n. 76, and p. 184, n. 85. 8 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, lists 17 printed primary sources on the Overbury murder and the trials of the Somersets, the products of at least 8 different publishers. 9 Chamberlain to Carleton, 6 July 1616, Letters, 2, 15. 10 Richard Helgerson, ‘Murder in Faversham: Holinshed’s Impertinent History’, in Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 138. Helgerson has more to say on the Arden murder in Adulterous Alliances. Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 13–31. 11 Helgerson, ‘Murder in Faversham’, p. 137. 12 Abraham Holland, A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (1625), p. 2. 13 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 335. 14 By Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, p. 49. 15 The second pamphlet is called The Horrible Murther of a young Boy of three yeres of age (1606). The ballad was registered on 13 October 1606. For the indictment of Agnes and George Dell, see J. S. Cockburn, ed., Calendar of Assize Records. Hertfordshire Indictments. James 1 (London: HMSO, 1985), no. 163. 16 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 428. 17 Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, p. 49. 18 Mitchell Stephens, A History of News (Orlando, Fla: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1997), p. 93. 19 Lionel Gossman, ‘History and Literature. Reproduction or Signification’, in Robert H. Canary and Henry Koznicki, eds., The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 11. 20 For instance, Victor E. Neuberg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 78, and Jerome Friedman in Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution (London: University College Press, 1993). 21 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 57. 22 Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 46. 23 Ibid. 24 Joad Raymond, Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641–1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993), p. 295. 25 Joy Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1992), p. 211. 26 Faller, Turned to Account, p. 46. 27 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 128. 28 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, p. 214. 29 Walker, ‘“Demons in female form”’, p. 134. 30 Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter 6.

Notes 209 31 Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 224–5, gives some interesting evidence for the existence of this belief in court records. 32 In The Lives, Apprehension, Arraignment & Execution of Robert Throckmorton. William Porter. Iohn Bishop. Gentlemen (1608), an account of three men sentenced for robbery and murder along with her, Ferneseede’s generally repentant conduct in prison is also mentioned. 33 Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 35. 34 There are references to the case by John Chamberlain in his letter to Dudley Carleton of 18 May 1616, in the Calendar of State Papers, ed. R. Lemon, ser. 1, IX, 267–8, and in Le Hardy (ed.), The County of Middlesex Calendar, vol. 3, p. 247. 35 A recent newspaper story about a case of child-murder by a mother opens with the sentence: ‘A mother defied nature and instinct to murder two of her babies as they lay in their cots, a Winchester crown court heard yesterday’ (Guardian, 20 February 2002). Media coverage of this case (Angela Cannings) and of that of Sally Clark (1999) reiterates commonplaces about the naturalness of mother-love. 36 See also The Cruel Midwife (1693), p. 2, cited in Chapter 3. 37 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 162. 38 Ibid., p. 148. See also Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 83–4, for a discussion of cases of maternal child-murder regarded by a contemporary physician as acts of mental disorder. 39 See for instance Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, p. 80. 40 Barbara Rosen (ed.), Witchcraft (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 8. 41 Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), p. 10. On women and witchcraft, see also Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 251, Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 6, Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 201. 42 Wiltenberg, Disorderly Women and Female Power, p. 244. 43 Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, p. 87. 44 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, p. 42. 45 Larner, Enemies of God, p. 2. 46 Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 202. See also Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, p. 68. 47 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 179, n. 16. 48 Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, p. 77. 49 See Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, p. 47, citing Reginald Scot, The discoverie of witchcraft (1584), pp. 7, 13. 50 Annabel Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, Politics and “Good Neighbourhood” in Early Seventeenth-century Rye’, Past and Present 133 (1991), 31–66. 51 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, p. 43. 52 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 179. Wiltenberg largely excludes English witchcraft pamphlets from her account of Disorderly Women and Female Power, the implicit reason being that they do not qualify as ‘street literature’. I have to admit to taking the definition of the term rather more loosely.

210 Notes 53 The Acts are, respectively, 5 Elizabeth c.16, 23 Elizabeth c.2, and 1 James I c.12. 54 This pamphlet is cited from A Collection of rare and Curious Tracts, relating to Witchcraft in the Counties of Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincoln between the years 1618 and 1664 (London: John Russell Smith, 1837). 55 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 92, 170. 56 Purkiss, ‘Women’s Stories of Witchcraft in Early Modern England’, p. 410. 57 Rosen, Witchcraft, p. 332. 58 Macfarlane, ‘Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex’, p. 73. 59 E.g. The Apprehension and confession of three notorious Witches. Arreigned … at Chelmes-ford (1589), A detection of damnable drifts, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisford in Essex (1579), and A Rehearsall both straung and true, of hainous and horrible actes committed by Elizabeth Stile (1579). 60 Rosen, Witchcraft, p.72. In fact, although often lively and stylish (especially the illustrations of animals) many of these look to me like stock images, with some exceptions. 61 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 148. Further details about Bodenham are to be found in James Bower, Dr Lambe’s Darling, or Strange and Terrible news from Salisbury (1653). See also Purkiss, The Witch in History, on Bodenham, esp. pp. 147–53, 171. 62 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 203. 63 Rosen, Witchcraft, p. 372. 64 By David Lindley in The Trials of Frances Howard. Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 178. 65 Walker, ‘“Demons in female form”’, p. 124. 66 Ibid., p. 125. 67 Walker does in fact discuss this pamphlet, but her curious reading of the Browne murder ignores Golding’s role, and lays part of the blame on Browne himself for his failed marriage. 68 Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 56. 69 Walker, ‘“Demons in Female Form”’, p. 131. 70 He wrote five pamphlets, The Adultresses Funerall Day (1635), Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry after Lust and Murther (1635), Londons Cry Ascended to God (1620), Natures Cruell Step-Dames (1637), and The Wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch (1621). All except Londons Cry concern crimes committed by women. 71 Scot, Discoverie (1584), p. 116. On women and poisoning in relation particularly to the Somerset murder trial, see also Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard, pp. 163–6, and Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, pp. 144–8. 72 Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard, p. 163. 73 Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, p. 37.

Conclusion 1 Headline to an article by Nicci Gerrard entitled ‘The End of Innocence’, in the Observer, 17 November 2002.

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Index Abbot, Elizabeth, 67, 152–3, 156, 157, 199 Account of the Manner, Behaviour and Execution of Mary Aubrey, An, 158, 159, 196–7 Adams, H. H., 107, 111–13, 129, 143 Admiral’s Men, 107 adultery, 34, 35, 44, 63, 149, 177, 183 almanacs, 13 Ambree, Mary, 85 Amussen, Susan, 61 Anderson, Mary, 68 ‘Anne Wallens Lamentation’, 75, 86, 87 Anthony Painter The Blaspheming Caryer, 191 Apprehension … of Elizabeth Abbot, The, 37, 53, 67, 152–3, 199 Apprehension … of three notorious Witches, The, 67, 174 Araignment and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, 153 ‘Araignment of John Flodder and his wife, The’, 80 Arden of Faversham, 61, 67, 69, 89, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116–22, 129, 131, 134, 138, 146, 181, 185, 202 Arden, Alice, 2, 42, 63, 87, 90, 98, 101, 108, 112, 114, 115, 117–22, 139, 146, 147, 152, 177 Arden, Thomas, 54, 117–22 Armin, Robert, 6 arson, 34, 38 Atkins, Anne, 68 Aubrey, Mary, 60, 62, 146, 157, 158–62, 174, 177 Averell, William, Wonderful and Straunge newes … in the countye of Suffolke, 149

ballads, 3, 9, 19, 30, 35, 46, 54, 64, 69, 70–105, 106, 108, 114, 145, 158, 180, 187 audience, 21, 71, 77, 105, 183 contrasted with pamphlets, 98–105, 175, 176 cost, 71 folk (traditional), 76, 77–8, 83, 87, 93–4, 95, 98, 101, 105 numbers, 11 titles, 10, 19, 22, 25, 27 truthfulness, 27 women and, 76–7, 98, 105 woodcuts, 71, 199 writers, 13, 15 ‘ballett of the Murther of A boy of 3 yeres of Age, A’, 199 Barley, William, 4 Barnes, Elizabeth, 39, 40, 58, 67, 165–6 Barrough, Philip, 5 Barrs, Joane, 68 bastard-bearing, 34, 35 bastardy laws (Act of 1624), 43–4, 48, 58, 97, 162, 164, 182, 192 Batman, Stephen, 20 Beard, Thomas, The Theatre of Gods Iudgments, 20, 146 Beast, Mistress, 47, 58, 63 Bedford, Earl of, 123 Beech murders, 130 Bellany, Alastair, 145 Belsey, Catherine, 62, 113, 115, 122, 176 Belthumier, Anne, 26 Belvoir Castle, 175 benefit of clergy, 41 Berry, Herbert, 140–1 Bissel, J., 104 Black Joan, 206 blasphemy, 34 ‘Bloody minded Midwife, The’, 102, 103, 104 Bloody newes from Dover, 55, 163 Blount, Edward, 18 Bodenham, Anne, 171, 172–3, 176

Bacon, Sir Francis, 44 ‘Ballad of Luther, the Pope, a Cardinal, and a Husbandman, A’, 73 ‘ballading’, 30 225

226 Index Bodley, Sir Thomas, 12 Bower, Edmond, Doctor Lamb revived, 29, 170, 171, 172 ‘Bragandary’ (tune), 90 Brathwait, Richard, 14 Breton, Nicholas, 9 Brewen, Anne, 47, 70, 146 Brewen, John, 58–9, 108 Brewer, Thomas: The Bloudy Mother, 39, 49–51, 68, 150, 165–6, 198 The Life and Death of the Merry Devil of Edmonton, 196 Brief discourse of two most cruell and bloudie murthers, A, 28–9, 47, 58, 67 Brome, Richard The Antipodes, 201 The Late Lancashire Witches (with Heywood), 107, 134, 140–4 Brown, Judith, 68, 79 Browne, Mistress, 58, 63 Buckingham, Duke of, 172 Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding, 166 Burghall, Edward, 146 Burghley, Ord, 34 Burton, Richard, 9 Cabinet of Grief, A, 158–9, 160, 197 Caldwell, Elizabeth, 24, 57, 66, 157–8, 159, 162, 167, 177, 183 Calverley, Walter, 38, 54, 152, 163 Calvinism, 37 Camus, Albert, L’Etranger, 27 Cannings, Angela, xii, 209 Carleton, Dudley, 75 Carr, Robert, 106 Cary, Phillipa, 43, 68 Cash, Thomas, 68, 198 censorship, 74, 76, 107 Chamberlain, John, 12, 18, 74, 75, 146 Champion, Mary, 55, 163 Chapman, George, The Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son, 134 chapmen, 14 Charles I, King, 3 Chartier, Roger, 26 Chettle, Henry, 7–8 Kind-Harts Dreame, 6, 7, 185 The Orphan’s Tragedy, 107 The Stepmother’s Tragedy (with Dekker), 107

Child, F. J., 76 child-killing, 63, 134, 163–5, 167, 168 ballads, 65 narratives, 39–40, 48–51, 53, 55–6, 162–8, 169, 182 see also infanticide Children of Blackfriars, 106 church (ecclesiastical) courts, 44, 45, 61, 195 Church of England, 166 Churchyard, Thomas, 20 Civil War, 35, 76, 170, 203 Clark, A. M., 113, 140 Clark, Margaret, 38, 55, 57, 157 Clarke, Alice, 57, 89, 177–9 Cockburn, J. S., 36 Cokain, Aston, The Obstinate Lady, 76 Collier, John Payne, 59 Comensoli, Viviana, 112, 114, 127 Common Muse, The (Pinto and Rodway), 78 ‘Complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent, The’, 87, 91, 122 Compton, Mary, 58, 68, 74, 80, 87, 99, 102–4, 164–5 Concealed Murther Reveiled, 56, 68 confessions, 9, 30, 151–2, 153, 171, 176, 178 Cook, Mary, 56, 57, 65, 157, 167–8, 183 Cooper, Thomas, The Cry and Revenge of Blood, 17, 37, 149 Copper, John, 68 corantos, 3, 9, 13–14, 15, 18, 181 Cosbye, Arnold, 28 Cotton, William, 6 Courtney, Charles, 28 coverture, 42 crime, 2, 33–41 conviction rates, 34, 41 ‘dark figure’, 34 diabolic intervention, 40–1 and the family, 61–7 ideology of, 169 as masculine attribute, 52 men’s 53, 69, 70, 152 and sin, 22, 37–8, 163, 181 sociology of, 164, 181 crimen exceptum, 192 Cromwell, Thomas, 3, 72, 74

Index 227 Crosse, Henry, 4 Cruel Midwife, The, 102–3, 164–5 ‘Cruel Mother, The’, 98, 203 cruell murther of Maister Browne in Suffolke, The, 175 Cruelty of a Stepmother, The, 116 Crying Murther, The, 37 Cunny, Joane, 67 Cupper, William, 147 Curtis, Timothy, 37 Dalton, Matthew, 42, 43 ‘Damnable Practises Of three Lincolnshire Witches’, 99 Danter, John, 4 Davenport, William, 208 Davies, Marie-Hélène, 145 Davis, Alice, 63, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95 Davis, Lennard J., 10, 14, 25, 27, 78 Davis, Natalie Z., 25 Dawson, Anthony B., 137 Day, John: Cox of Collumpton (with Haughton), 107 The Tragedy of Merry (with Haughton), 107 Day, John (printer), 12 Deeds Against Nature, 40, 48, 53, 65, 148, 164 defamation, 35, 44 Defoe, Daniel, 32 Dekker, Thomas, 7, 8, 9, 11, 31, 188 Keep the Widow Waking (with Ford and Rowley), 107, 134 Page of Plymouth (with Jonson), 107 The Stepmother’s Tragedy (with Chettle), 107 The Witch of Edmonton (with Ford and Rowley), 107, 108, 134–40, 142, 143, 182 Dell, Annis, 67, 108, 146, 150, 154–5, 199, 208 Deloney, Thomas, 6, 92 The Gentle Craft, 186 Derby, Earl of, 128 devil, the, 38, 40–1, 55–6, 58, 65, 135, 138, 142, 156, 160, 162, 166–7, 169, 172–3, 177, 181, 182 Dickerson, Thomas, 83 Dilworth, John, 39 Distressed Mother, The, 167

Divels Delusions, The, 170–1 Doctor Lambe and the Witches, 206 Dolan, Frances, 36, 39, 54, 57–8, 59, 60, 65, 89, 108, 112, 113, 114, 124, 139, 160, 165, 167, 168, 170, 174, 176, 178 domestic tragedy, 108–14, 116, 122 domestic violence, 34, 61, 62–3 Doran, Madeleine, 111 Drury, Anne, 66, 91, 92, 101, 114, 115, 123, 124, 125, 128–9 Dugdale, Gilbert, 14 A True Discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, 29, 66, 157–8, 160 dumbshow, 124 E., T., The Lawes Resolution, 194 Earle, John, 18–19, 21, 76 early modern period, 180–4 Eld, George, 146 Elderton, William, 6 Elizabeth I, Queen, reign of, 34, 72, 73, 83, 170 Elsden, Anne, 107 Elston, Sarah, 57 Emmison, F. G., 45, 61 employers, 68–9, 182 Essex, 35, 61, 194 Essex, Earl of, 81, 83, 84, 200, 201 Evan, Enoch Ap, 55, 163 Evans, Ann, 43, 57, 68 Evans, Elizabeth (Canberry Bess), 38, 75, 84, 98, 152 Examination and confession of certaine Wytches, The, 172 Examination … of Joane Williford, Joan Cariden, and Jane Hott, The, 170 execution, 190 Fair Warning to the Murderers of Infants, 29, 48–9, 67 Faller, Lincoln B., 57, 151 family, 33, 36, 61–7, 115, 123, 127, 131 ‘family opposition to lovers’, 93, 105 Faversham, Abbey of, 120 Fennor, William, 8 Ferneseede, Margaret, 47, 58, 70, 152, 153–4, 157, 209 Fitton, Lady Anne, 7 Fletcher, John, The Woman’s Prize, 115

228 Index Flodder, John, 80 Flower, Joan, 98, 172 Flower, Margaret, 172, 174–5 Foley, Stephen, 2 folklore, 82, 84, 85 Ford, Frances, 50, 51 Ford, John: Keep the Widow Waking (with Dekker and Rowley), 107, 134 The Witch of Edmonton (with Dekker and Rowley), 107, 108, 134–40, 142, 143, 182 Forman, Simon, 141 fornication, 34 ‘Fortune my Foe’ (tune), 73, 92 Foucault, Michel, 19, 25, 27, 79 Fox, Adam, 3, 4, 15, 71, 74 Fox, Katharine, 157, 167 Foxe, John, 72 France, 26, 27, 189 Francis, Katherine, 63, 88, 90, 199 Freud, Sigmund, 196 Friar Francis, 205 Friedman, A. B., 73, 76 Frith, Moll, 85 Gaskill, Malcolm, 21, 40–1, 44, 121, 152 Gataker, Thomas, 64 gender, 182–3 in ballads, 83, 85, 95–6, 98, 105 characteristics, 52 difference, 41, 54 law and, 33, 36, 54 in pamphlets, 156, 163, 175–6, 183 in plays, 124, 131, 137 roles in marriage, 61, 71, 105, 115 and theatre, 115 and witchcraft, 168–9, 171, 182 Germany, 53, 62 Glapthorne, Henry, The Ladies Privilege, 79 Globe theatre, 28, 141 Golden Legend, 26 Golding, Arthur, A briefe discourse, 24, 29, 66, 91, 100, 122–4, 127, 157 Golding, Peter, 67, 176, 183, 210 Goodcole, Henry, 15, 30, 149, 176, 181 The Adultresses Funerall Day, 28, 43, 89, 176–9, 211

Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry, 16, 75, 211 Londons Cry Ascended to God, 211 Natures Cruell Step-Dames, 39, 40, 53, 58, 67, 68, 70, 165–6, 203, 211 The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, 29, 75, 134–5, 140, 150, 169, 170, 211 Goodenough, Mary, 48–9, 57, 67 goodnights, 78, 80, 82–3, 90, 95, 96, 100 Gosson, Henry, 72, 145 Gouge, William, Of Domestical Duties, 197 Gower, John, 22 Gowing, Laura, 44, 62, 63 Gowrie, 106 Green, Anne, 27 Green, Ian, 149 Greene, Robert, 13, 19 Greenes Groatsworth, 7 ‘Greensleeves’, 11 Greg, W. W., 12 Gregory, Annabel, 170 Habermas, Jürgen, 1 Halasz, Alexandra, 12 Hall, Isabel, 66, 157, 159 Hall, John, 9 Hamton, Anne, 66 Harrison, Amy, 69 Harrison, William, 23 Harvey, Gabriel, 5, 6, 9, 19 Harwood, Margaret, 66 Hattersley, Jane, 39, 49–52, 68, 165 Haughton, William: Cox of Collumpton (with Day), 107 The Tragedy of Merry (with Day), 107 Helgerson, Richard, 147 Hellish Murder Committed by a French Midwife, A, 60, 158, 160, 161–2 Henry IV, King, of France, 74 Henry VI, King, reign of, 200 Henry VIII, King, reign of, 72, 74 Henslowe, William, 107, 109 heresy, 34, 171 Herrup, Cynthia, 41, 44 Hext, Edward, 34 Heywood, Thomas: An Apology for Actors, 112, 116 Edward IV, 204

Index 229 The Late Lancashire Witches (with Brome), 107, 114, 134, 140–4 A Woman Killed with Kindness, 111, 113, 143 Higges, Susan, 84–5 highway robbery, 21 highwaymen, 82, 202 Hill, Abigail, 58, 68, 164, 165 Hindley, Myra, 184 History of Friar Francis, The, 112, 116 Holbrook, Peter, 113, 124 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles, 107, 116–17, 123, 147 Holland, Abraham, 147 Holmes, William, 12 Homilies, 111 Horrible Murther of a young Boy, The, 67, 154–5, 156, 208 hospitality, 195 Howard, Frances, 66, 99, 175, 177 Huguenots, 159 Hutton, Luke, 82, 84, 85, 96 The Blacke Dogge of Newgate, 202 I., T., A World of Wonders, 146 illegitimacy, 44, 194 infanticide, 34, 36, 38, 54, 108, 192, 193, 203 ballads, 96–8 pamphlets, 65, 67 see also child-killing Ingram, Martin, 34, 44, 46 ‘Injured Children, The’, 86, 102, 103 Isle of Gulls, The, 106 James I, King, 6, 106, 170 reign of, 34, 35, 73, 170 Jardine, Lisa, 65 Jeffes, Abel, 72 ‘John Spenser. A Chesshire gallant’, 82–3 Jonson, Ben, 8, 9, 31, 188 The Isle of Dogs (with Nashe), 106 Page of Plymouth (with Dekker), 107 The Staple of News, 14, 15 Volpone, 188 Kemp, Will, 7 Kemps nine daies wonder, 75 Killingworth, Mistress, 53, 67, 156 King’s Men, 141

Knutson, Rosalyn, 107 Kyd, Thomas, 30, 59 The Spanish Tragedy, 125 ‘Lady Maisry’, 98 Lake, Peter, 4, 21, 23, 24, 29–30, 110, 132, 145, 148, 151, 153, 156, 176 Lamb, Dr, 74, 172–3 Lambarde, William, 4, 42 ‘lamentable complaint of France, The’, 74 ‘lamentable songe of Three Wytches of Warbos, A’, 199 ‘Lamentation of George Strangwidge, The’, 94 ‘Lamentation of Master Page’s wife of Plimmouth, The’, 92–4, 95 Lancashire witches, 140–4 Langbein, J. H., 28, 150 Langland, William, 22 larceny, 34, 42 Larner, Christina, 168, 169 law: and gender, 33, 36, 54 neighbours and, 44–51 women’s crime and, 41–4 Lawson, Jane, 47–8, 63, 98, 99 Le Hardy, William, 61 Lee, Sidney, 109 Leggatt, Alexander, 113 Leicester, Earl of, 100 Lewis, Miles, 68 libel, 74, 80, 105, 107 Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, The, 35 Lillo, George, Fatal Curiosity, 27 Lindley, David, 177 Lodge, Thomas, Wits Miserie, 92 London, 4, 14, 17, 46, 76, 88, 127, 130–1, 148, 158 ballads on, 22 Clerkenwell Green, 89 earthquake, 69 Fleet prison, 149 Newgate, 137, 149 prisons, 14 St Paul’s Cross, 147–8 Smithfield, 89 Tyburn, 135 witches displayed in, 140 Lowe, curate, 67 ‘Luke Hutton’s Lamentation’, 82

230 Index Lupton, Thomas, 15 Luttrell, Narcissus, 203 Lydgate, John, 20 McDonald, Michael, 46 Macfarlane, A. D. J., 45, 169 McKeon, Michael, 10 McLuskie, Kathleen, 88, 115, 124, 134, 137, 144 Manley, Laurence, 18, 22 Marlowe, Christopher, ‘Come live with me’, 76 marriage, 61–3, 71, 105, 115, 127–9 forced, 95 ‘Martin Marprelate’, 6 Martine Mar-Sixtus, 186 Mary, Queen, reign of, 72 Massinger, Philip, The Roman Actor, 180 Maurice of Nassau, 106 Mayhew, Henry, 78 Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford, 46 Mercurius Politicus, 26, 191 Merlinus Anonymous, 76 Merriot (Somerset), 76 Merry, Rachel, 114, 129–33, 139 Middlesex Sessions, 61 Middleton, Thomas: A Game at Chesse, 106 The World Tost at Tennis, 70 ‘Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation, The’, 102, 104 ‘Midwife’s Maid’s Lamentation, The’, 102, 104 midwives, 68, 102 ‘Mistress Turners Farewell to all women’, 85 money, 127, 130–1 monopolies, 12 morality plays, 111, 113, 125 Morrison, Blake, 180 Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by … Annis Dell, The, 53, 54, 67, 148–9, 155–6 most horrible and detestable Murther committed …vpon his owne Wife, A, 193 most strange and admirable discoverie of the … Witches of Warboys, The, 173 motherhood, 64–5, 134, 164, 184, 198

Munday, Anthony, A View of Sundry Examples, 17, 19, 29, 69, 101, 146, 203 murder, 2, 9, 21, 23, 37, 80, 149, 169, 181 of apprentices, 35, 193 of children, 21, 35, 36 of husbands, 21, 35, 42–3, 63, 176 of servants, 35 of spouses, 2, 35, 53, 63, 193 trials, 190 of wives, 35–6, 42, 63, 185, 198 by women, 35, 134 ‘Murder upon Murder’, 84 Murderous Michael, 116, 185 Murderous Midwife, The, 68 Murther will out, 28, 40, 55, 166 Murther, Murther, 28, 53–4, 66 Nashe, Thomas, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 188 The Isle of Dogs (with Jonson), 106 Strange Newes, 9 ‘new ballad of the life and deathe of Three Wyches … at Chelmisford, A’, 199 Newes from Perin in Cornwall, 27, 147 Newes from Scotland, 170 Newes from the Dead, 26 news, nature of, 1–3, 21, 180 newsbooks, 18, 35, 158, 181 newspapers, 1, 3, 158, 181 news-writing, 9–21, 71, 103, 165 antecedents, 22–3, 32 criminal, 14–21, 147–52 fact and fiction in, 25–32, 73, 150–1 ‘Norfolke gent his will and Testament, The’, 204 Norwich, 76 ‘nouvelles’, 9 novel, 31, 191 occasionels, 25–6, 27, 166, 191 oral sources, 3, 4, 15, 22, 23, 32, 71, 74, 105 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 2, 61, 64, 69, 111, 112, 116, 129, 132, 133, 176 Osborne, Dorothy, 76 Overbury murder, 66, 145, 146 Page, Eulalia, 90, 93–5, 98, 101, 104, 146, 152, 177

Index 231 Page of Plymouth murder, 31, 54, 60, 63, 90, 146, 152 ballads on, 92–5, 96, 100, 101, 122 pamphlets, 5, 9, 11–13, 19, 35, 46, 54, 69, 71, 73, 75, 106, 108, 145–79, 188 contrasted with ballads, 98–105, 175, 176 dedications, 17 as ‘genre’, 145–52 prefatory matter, 15–16 providentialism in, 145, 147, 150–1, 154–5, 157–9, 162, 175, 180 readership, 21, 175, 183 sensationalism, 29–30 title-pages, 16–17, 24, 43, 51 titles, 10, 19 Parker, John, 47, 58–9 Parker, Martin, 11, 203 ‘Have among you! Good women’, 46 ‘No natural Mother, but a Monster’, 36, 86, 96 ‘A warning for wives’, 63, 85, 88, 89–90, 96–8 Partridge, N., and Sharpe, J., Blood for Blood, 56, 167–8 Peacham, Henry, 11 Penitent Prisoner, The, 57 Pepys, Samuel, 71 Percy, Thomas, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 73 Peter, John, 22 petty treason, 42–3, 61, 89, 114, 161, 179, 194 Philpot, Charity, 47, 55, 68 ‘Pious Prisoner’s Exhortation, The’, 158 ‘pitiful lamentacon of Rachell Merrye’, 70 Pitilesse Mother, A, 147, 162–3, 164, 203 play-books, 12, 187 plays, 30, 35, 46, 54, 69, 71, 98, 105, 106–44, 145, 175, 176, 180, 183 pleading the belly, 41 poison, 42, 59, 89, 177, 196, 211 Pory, John, 18 ‘Post of Ware, The’, 14 Potts, Anne, 68 Poysoners Rewarded, The, 57, 68 Prentice, Joan, 174 Price, Laurence, 23 print, growth of, 3–9, 181

printing, sixteenth-century, 12–13 Privy Council, 193 proclamations, 200 propaganda, 72, 73, 74, 80 prostitution, 34, 35, 84 providence (providentialism), 19, 23, 26, 30, 54, 101, 108, 112, 122, 123, 140 in pamphlets, 145, 147, 150–1, 154–5, 157–9, 162, 175, 180 public order offences, 34, 35, 45 public sphere, 1, 18, 181, 188 Puritanism, 41, 100 Purkiss, Diane, 135, 141, 171, 173 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 74, 76, 84, 202 rape, 60, 197 Ravaillac, François, 74 Raymond, Joad, 13, 18, 26, 151 realism, 112–13, 124–5, 180 Rehearsall both straung and true, of … Elizabeth Stile, A, 171, 174 Returne from Parnassus, The, 5, 188 Reynolds, John, The Triumphs of Gods revenge, 146 Rhodes, John, 77 Rich, Barnaby, 5–6 rioting, 34 robbery, 35 Roberts, J., 13 Robinson, Arthur, JP, 137 Robinson, Edmund, 140–1, 144 Rollins, Hyder, 11, 73, 76, 89, 90, 92, 96, 98, 199 Roper, Lyndal, 61 Rosen, Barbara, 45, 168, 172 Rowley, William: Keep the Widow Waking (with Dekker and Ford), 107, 134 The Witch of Edmonton (with Dekker and Ford), 107, 108, 134–40, 142, 143, 182 Rowse, John, 47 Roxburghe Ballads, The, 92 Rublack, Ulinka, 53 Rutland, Earl and Countess of, 172, 175 Rye, 170 Samuel, Agnes and Alice, 173–4, 176 Sanders, Anne, 24, 57, 90–2, 93, 96, 98–9, 100–1, 104, 114, 123–9, 134, 139, 146, 157

232 Index Sawyer, Elizabeth, 29, 75, 114, 134–40 Saxey, Samuel, A Straunge and Wonderfull Example … of almighty God, 149 scaffold speeches, 23–4, 56–7, 133, 139 Scambler, Martha, 48, 65, 164 scolding, 34, 44 Scot, Reginald, 170, 177 Seguin, J.-P., 27 Selden, John, 71 Table Talk, 74 servants, 67–8, 176, 194, 198 Shaaber, M. A., 21, 75 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 180 1 Henry IV, 13 Macbeth, 141 Measure for Measure, 62 Richard III, 130 The Winter’s Tale, 71, 76, 141 Sharpe, J. A., 23, 35, 36 Sharpe, Nan, 76 Sheavyn, Phoebe, 9 Sherwood, Thomas, 38, 75, 84 Shirley, James, The Insatiate Countess, 201 Shore, Jane, 204 Shrewsbury School, 146 ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh his lamentation’, 202 skimmingtons, 30, 46, 63 slander, 34, 35 Smith, Bruce, 11, 71, 74, 77 Smith, Susan, xii Somerset murder, 145, 146, 211 ‘sorrowful ballad made by Mistris Browne’, 70 ‘Sorrowful Complaint of Mistris Page, The’, 94–5 Speght, Rachel, A Mouzell for Melastomus, 64 Spenser, John, 82–3, 84 Spufford, Margaret, 22 Staffordshire, 77 Star Chamber, 12, 13, 107 state, 24, 33, 34, 181 Stationers’ Company, 8, 11, 12, 70, 72–3, 74, 187 Stationers’ Register, 27, 60, 74, 109, 130 Stephens, Mitchell, 21 Stile, Elizabeth, 174

Strange and lamentable News from Dullidg-Wells, 163 Strange and true Relation of a young Woman possest with the devil, A, 170 Stubbes, Philip, 6, 147 Sturgess, Keith, 109, 111 Sundrye Strange and Inhumaine Murthers, lately committed, 29, 31, 95, 101, 163 swearing, 34 Swinburne, A. C., 114 ‘Tam Lin’, 98 Taylor, John, 7, 8–9, 126, 188 The Unnatural Father, 30, 54, 163 television, 2 ‘theatre of punishment’, 24 Thomas, Keith, 20 Thompson, Hunter S., 25 Tomkyns, Nathaniel, 140–1, 142, 144 Tomson, Christopher, 47, 67 Tragedy of Sir John van Oldenbarnevelt, The, 106 treason, 34, 42–3, 80, 81 see also petty treason True and Sad Relation of Two Wicked and Bloody Murthers, A, 99, 196 True and Wonderful Relation of a Murther … in the Parish of Newington, A, 55, 68 true discourse of a … murther committed by one Thomas Merrey, A, 204 ‘true Relation of one Susan Higges, A’, 84–5 True Relation of … Abigall Hill, A, 52, 164, 165 True relation of … one Enoch ap Evan, A, 148, 163 True Relation of the … Murther of Master James, A, 67, 199 True Report of the Horrible Murther, A, 28 Trueth of the … murthering of John Brewen, The, 47, 58–60, 70, 146 Trundle, John, 22, 145 Tryall and Examination of Mrs Joan Peterson, The, 170 Turner, Anne, 66, 98 Two horrible and inhumaine Murthers done in Lincolneshire, 29, 39, 68, 148, 198

Index 233 Two Most Unnatural and Bloodie Murthers, 38, 54, 58, 63, 67, 163, 175, 183 ‘Two unnaturall Mothers’, 70 ‘Unfaithful Servant, The; and The Cruel Husband’, 68, 78–9, 198 ‘Unnatural Mother, The’, 48, 99–100 ‘unnatural wife, The’, 63, 87 vagrancy, 13, 34 Vincent, Margaret, 55, 65, 147, 157, 162–3, 183 Wager, William, Enough is as Good as a Feast, 113 Walker, Garthine, 175–6 Wall, Wendy, 15 Wallen, Anne, 75, 86, 87–8, 90, 147 Wallington, Nehemiah, 146 Walsham, Alexandra, 4, 19–20, 21, 27, 145, 146, 149 Walton, Izaak, 76, 78 Wapull, George, The Tide Tarrieth no Man, 113 Ward, Roger, 12 ‘warning for all desperate women, A’, 63, 85, 87, 88, 89 ‘warning for all wicked wives, A’, 199 Warning for Fair Women, A, 24, 66, 100, 107, 108, 109–10, 113, 114, 116, 122–9, 130, 131, 133, 134, 138, 205 Warning for servants, 55 Warning-Piece to All Married Men and Women, A, 158, 159, 160, 197 Watkins, Richard, 13 Watt, Tessa, 11, 73 Webster, John, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 140 ‘Welladay’ (tune), 97 Welles, Anne, 58–9, 60 Whigham, Frank, 116 White, John, 145 widows, 66–7, 128, 198 wife-beating, 62 Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 114 Williams, Raymond, 1 Willis, Deborah, 65 Wiltenberg, Joy, 46, 62, 77, 152, 169

Wine, M. L., 107 Witch of Islington, The, 206 Witch of Wapping, The, 28 witch’s mark, 172 witchcraft, 9, 19, 35, 41, 44, 45, 47, 53, 128, 149, 169 ballads, 80, 84, 99, 134, 135, 144 special status of, 34, 135, 169, 182 pamphlets, 28, 134, 135, 144, 168–75, 176, 182, 191, 210 plays, 134–44 women and, 168–9, 171, 177, 182 writing, 171–2 ‘Witchcraft discovered and punished’, 203 witches, 67, 115, 134–44, 155, 168, 170, 171–2, 173, 174, 182, 184, 198, 207 witnesses, 45, 46, 48 ‘wofull lamentacon of mrs. Anne Saunders, The’, 91–2, 100 women: and ballad-singing, 76–7, 105 criminal, 2, 35, 42, 51–60, 134, 157, 166, 175, 182, 184 domestic authority, 62 economic role, 64 and law, 41–4 as political metaphor, 116 social history, 46 and theatre, 115 weakness, 38, 41, 52–3, 157, 168–9, 183 and witchcraft, 168–9, 171, 182 witnesses, 195 women-warriors, 85 Wonderful discoverie … of Margaret and Phillippa Flower, The, 99, 170, 171, 174 Wood, Anthony, 71 World of Wonders, A, 22, 36–7, 56, 65 Wright, John, 146 writers, professional, 6–7 Würzbach, Natascha, 10, 25, 73, 77 Yarrington, Robert, Two Lamentable Tragedies, 70, 107, 109, 112, 113, 114, 129–34, 135, 204 Yorkshire Ripper, 2, 180 Yorkshire Tragedy, A, 39, 64, 108, 113, 114, 134

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