Crime pamphlets were popular with printers and readers alike. For printers, they were cheap and easy to produce and could yield profits to assist in the production of other work. For readers, the stories provided entertainment and the paper upon which they were printed could be repurposed for a variety of uses in the household.129 Moreover, pamphlets reached a wide audience as they
were often read aloud in households or taverns. The story of Edmund Kirk illustrates this practice. On Friday, May 23, 1684, Kirk asked his master’s leave to witness the execution of wife-killer, John Gower.130 Afterwards, Kirk “brought back the speeches and confessions which
he related to the family.”131 The author of the pamphlet later laments that Kirk “could take no
warning from [Gower’s] sad example.”132
That Kirk had failed to learn from Gower’s mistake points to the heart of this
investigation. As we have seen, crime pamphlets were meant to instruct. Authors intended their subjects to serve as examples for readers. They admonished the sinful lives of criminals and stressed that sin could lead to felony. Writers warned male readers of the dangers of
drunkenness, jealousy, and adultery. Women were also advised to refrain from these sins, but more importantly, they were told to remember their place in the household. This is crucial to our examination of these sources because it places these stories in the context of wider cultural anxieties concerning order. It is well-established that early modern society was plagued by a fear of the breakdown of order. However, there is less consensus on whether or not this breakdown
129 MacMillian, Stories of True Crime, 4.
130 Anonymous, A Full and True Relation of a Most Barbarous and Dreadful Murder,(London, 1684), 1. 131Anonymous, A Full and True Relation of a Most Barbarous and Dreadful Murder, 1.
was real. Nevertheless, these pamphlets serve as evidence that fear of a breakdown was real and that this fear was not only discussed by officials and intellectuals. It trickled down to the lowest ranks of society through the authors of cheap print.
While authors universally warned against sin, their discussion of patriarchy and humoral theory was less straight-forward. They consistently advised women to remember their place in the patriarchal order, but rarely felt the need to do the same for men until after the Civil War. They occasionally referred to these men as “cruel” or “inhumane” husbands but made no overt statements on a man’s obligation to be a good patriarch. Concerning humors, authors were even less coherent. There are a handful of references to blood and heat, but they do not speak of “hot” men and “cold” women. If humoral theory was truly as ubiquitous as Laqeuer and other
historians have claimed, then these pamphlets are evidence that either there was a shift away from this theory in the seventeenth century or that it was not widely endorsed by people of lower ranks.
The next chapter will examine the apprehension of criminals and their prosecution to analyze how authors portrayed men’s and women’s participation in enforcing order and in court proceedings. The maintenance of order in early modern England relied upon the efforts of both lay and professional participants. Chapter Three will explore this portion of crime narratives to determine whether gender impacted people’s willingness to participate in those systems and analyze how writers conveyed their involvement.
3 CHAPTER III: A MORE FULLER AND EXACT ACCOUNT OF THE TRIALS AND EXAMINATIONS OF SEVERAL MALEFACTORS
This scene from The Bloody Papist: Or, A True Relation of the Horrid and Barbarous Murder Committed by one Ro Sherburn of Kyme in Lincolnshire reflects not only a prominent element of seventeenth century crime literature, but also the realities of early modern law enforcement.133
The apprehension of a criminal involved the combined efforts of neighbors, law enforcement officers, and sometimes even God. The lack of a professionally-trained police force or the aid of advanced forensics meant that seventeenth-century people could not simply dial 911 and wait for authorities to arrive. Nor could convictions be confidently obtained by fingerprints or DNA samples. Instead, maids spied acts through windows, landlords heard screams through walls, and God sent agents, in various forms, to reveal the identity of murderers or circumstances of deaths. In this chapter, I will examine the portions of crime pamphlets which relate the apprehension of killers and the gathering of evidence to bring them to trial. A survey of these sections of
133 Anonymous, The Bloody Papist: Or, A True Relation of the Horrid and Barbarous Murder Committed
by one Ro Sherburn of Kyme in Lincolnshire, (London, 1683), 2.
“The next Forenoon, when some Neighbours wondring that they did not see the doors open’d, nor him about his business as he was wont to be; after several times knocking and calling, but no Answer, fearing some misfortune had happen’d to them, broke open the Doors, and (to their Amazement) found her thus Murder’d in her bed, and he lying upon another. And receiving no Satisfaction from him to their Inquiries…they carried him before a Magistrate”
narratives shows that although the household and common law were ordered according to gender difference, the maintenance of law and order equally relied on the participation of both sexes. On the office of the Coroner, the Statutes of King Edward I state, “it is too be inquired, who were culpable either of the Act, or of the Force, and who were present, either Men or Women, and of what age soever they be, if they can speak, or have any Discretion.”134 A statute enacted in 1487,
by King Henry VII, offered the same instruction to coroners.135 Although the appointed offices
of law enforcement were held solely by men, both men and women were expected to assist them in the pursuit of justice. Maintaining order was the duty of all subjects. The popular crime narratives in this study provide evidence that early modern men and women took that duty seriously.
Additionally, tracking the changes in procedure and in standards of evidence will help determine the ways in which religious beliefs and scientific advancements influenced ideas concerning gender and order in law enforcement. The grand narrative of the Scientific
Revolution, developed by a group of historians during the twentieth century, suggests that the origins of modern science were rooted in the sixteenth and seventeenth works of mathematicians and natural philosophers such as Galileo and Newton.136 Although the nature and timing of this
supposed revolution has since been challenged by historians, for the purpose of this study it is sufficient to note that there were advancements in the understanding of the natural world which appear to have influenced the criminal justice system. In crime narratives, that influence is most evident in their authors’ relation of the detection of murder and the evidence used to convict
1344 Edward I, “The Office of the Coroner,” (1275, 1276), Statutes of the Realm, Hein Online. 1353 Henry VII, c. 1, 2 (1487), Statutes of the Realm, Hein Online.
136Lindy, Orthia, ““What’s Wrong with Talking About the Scientific Revolution? Applying Lessons
from History of Science to Applied Fields of Science Studies,” Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning & Policy 54, no. 3, (Sept., 2016), 354.
suspects. An investigation of the depiction of the apprehension and conviction of criminals in printed material published in the second half of the seventeenth century reveals a shift away from the miracles and divine providence prevalent in narratives printed during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Overall, the breakdown of censorship, the pamphlet wars of the 1640s, and the severing of Charles I’s head created not only an atmosphere which permitted questions about the nature of authority, but also the means to communicate those questions far beyond the houses of
Parliament. Although patriarchal authority did not definitively tumble down with the king’s head, it did begin to slowly erode. While elite writers, such as Hobbes and Locke, explicitly challenged divine right and patriarchal authority, the authors of crime literature expressed their views on order in unintentional and more subtle ways. Thus, studying murder pamphlets will show both how the early modern system of law enforcement was perceived and how the mentality of those who wrote and read about crime changed over the seventeenth century.