Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Early Modern Murder

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

What was the early modern version of CSI? Why might whole pubs have been singing an executed person’s final words? And was the crime of murder different back then?In this episode, Kate spoke to Blessin Adams, a former member of the police who has been researching murders between the 16th and 18th centuries. Her book is called Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain.*Warning - this episode contains mentions of murder, torture, infanticide, suicide, miscarriage, abortion and some gruesome details*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here to forewarn you, forearm you and foretell you. Is that a word? Of the smut to come. This is your fair do's warning. Fair do's, everybody.

This is a podcast about adult themes, spoken to other adults by adults in an adulty way, covering an adult topic, and you should also be an adult. Actually, today we are talking about murder cases. historical murder cases. So it's gruesome, it's grizzly, but people are going to die and we're talking about infanticide as well. And you just might not want to listen to that right now, in which case stash this episode away and come back to it when you are in a more fortified position to listen to it. And the rest of you mucky pups who can't get enough of this stuff, I am ready if you are.

Are you like me? Are you a bit of a true crime fanatic? Or maybe it's like watching true crime dramas on the telly, the occasional documentary, or maybe a podcast here and there. We all like to think we know what it's like when someone's investigating a murder scene, a modern murder scene. We have images of forensic investigators dressed head to toe in those white baby grow things, police officers ducking under police tape to dust for fingerprints and do very cool techy things. Maybe that's just in CSI. And if you are in CSI, as soon as you've done the cool techy things, you have to put your sunglasses on. and say some kind of cool one-liner. I don't know if any of that actually happens in modern police detecting. But here is what we are asking today. Before modern police detecting, before the

advent of DNA and fingerprints and scientific techniques, how did you go about solving a murder? How did you solve a murder in the early modern period, which roughly starts in the 16th century, ends kind of around the 18th century? What was your CSI then? Well today we are going to are getting Petwicks the Bloodied Sheets to try and find out more. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the

funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, but feel no done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Well today, if you happen to be a true crime fanatic like myself, there is a plethora of places for you to look. There are true crime podcasts, true crime documentaries, true crime books, true crime magazines, true crime websites, you are spoiled for choice. But if you were a true crime buff in the early modern period, circa 1600, where would you go for your true crime indulgences?

Well, you could visit a small street stall for a small woodcut booklet. that would contain all the gruesome details about the latest murders of the day. Maybe you could go along to one of the public executions, take your family, a fun day out for all, where you would sing ballads about the final words condemned prisoners said on the scaffold. For this episode, I'm joined by Blessing Adams, author of Great and Horrible News.

It was not only a historian and a researcher, but a former police officer. So if anybody is going to be able to untangle detective practices of the past, it's blessing. Hello and welcome to Betwix the sheets I am only talking to and holding the book of Blessing Adams.

How does that feel to have your book out in the big wide world? It's kind of amazing and kind of scary but I'm mostly excited. Oh, it is a truly, truly beautiful book and a fantastic read, great and horrible news, murder and mayhem in early modern Britain.

Yes. So the question, what made you want to write this book? Why were you attracted to this particular period in history? Well, this period of history is what I studied during my PhD, which is kind of a boring answer. I studied law and literature for my PhD. But I had a real interest in crime and criminal investigation anyway, because before I became an academic, I was a police officer.

So when I was hanging around the legal archives doing my rather dry research, search for my PhD, if I had the opportunity, I'd be digging into the court documents and the coroner's inquest records because just for myself, that's what I found really fascinating. I wanted to dig into. Wow. What were you doing in the police? What was your role there? I was a police constable, so sort of like the bobby on the beat that you see every day. But I was in Norfolk Constabulary, which is quite a rural beat. So I kind of like got stuck into a little bit of everything, other than like the specialised areas, obviously like CID or something like that. But yeah, it was never a quiet day. When you read the book, you can see that there is the kind of detective

inquiry, forensic police brain going about these crimes. Oh, I'm glad you saw that. It's, people sometimes ask me, did being a police officer influence the way you wrote the book? And I think it did inform a lot of the way that I was reading and writing about these cases, because a lot of the things that I was writing about, I had experienced myself, I've investigated crimes, I've arrested criminals, I've questioned suspects, I've questioned witnesses, I've been the first on the scene at sudden and violent deaths. I've been to post-mortems. So as I'm writing about these things in my book,

I'm having my own experiences behind that as well. You can tell that. You can tell that there is a confidence there with the material, and there is, I want to say the word professionalism, but I don't know if that's the right word, but the way that you're talking about it is the way that police often talk about crimes, but with the historical clout as well.

So it makes, it's fascinating account of some of these crimes. Thank you. I think as well something that I always had in the back of my mind was a sensitivity to the fact that even though these are historical cases, these were real people and there were real victims. And behind a lot of these murder stories, there would have been grieving families as well. So yes, it did happen a long time ago and I'll never know these people. But I still feel that kind of like human connection in a way. Yeah, and that comes through loud and clear. And that's always in that's so important, we can lose sight of the fact that when they were doing history sometimes, these are real people and they sort of become stories to us.

And you need to remember all the time that real people, real lives, they will have descendants wandering around now. Yes. And it requires a certain level of sensitivity. And I think you do that really well. Oh, thank you so much. Okay. So the question that I've got for you is, whenever we're dealing with history and historical documents, it is always a matter of the source availability, of what is there in order to try and understand what's happened. And today, if you're dealing with crime, there is due process, there's forensic.

There's cordoning off crime scenes. There's things being catalogued carefully. We've got science behind us. Not so in the early modern period, which is what you're writing about, which is the 1500s to 1700s. It's like what sources were available to you as a historian to try and piece together some of these crimes?

Well, I think first thing, you're absolutely right in that when you're dealing with historical sources, it can be really hard to get a complete picture, especially with the early modern period. This is hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And very few things have survived. into the modern day. So we only have glimpses occasionally of what's going on, but enough has survived in order to give us a really good picture. So it's good and bad in many ways. But a lot of

the sources I'm working from is the true crime pamphlets of the day, sort of like the newspaper reports, which are so fascinating to read. And because they're designed to sell, they're designed to be dramatic. They're also incredibly fun to read. So these are quite good sources to work from. But that's not all I work from because obviously these are dramatic accounts of events. They're not to be taken at face value. They're to be backed up by more vigorous evidence from the archives. So a lot of the time I'll be working from court transcripts. I'll be working from coroner's inquest records and diaries, letters, people are writing about these events to their friends and families. So these things survive. It can be quite piecemeal the way that these stories are put together. And it can be

quite frustrating as well because you want to know more and you're quite limited by what's available. So I do my best to fill in the gaps and give as rounded and as truthful a picture as possible. But yeah, you're right. You're very much constrained by what survives to the modern day. I was surprised that there was coroner's inquests available to you. I suppose maybe there was just something in my brain that went CSI, it's really modern. But when did that process start that there was inquests and coroners and those kind of sources to go? I mean, the coroner is an ancient office going back to the medieval period. So coroner's inquests have been going on for a long time. Initially, they were a bit more of an administrative role. And the idea was to prove a murder in order to get taxes for the king. But as the role developed,

it became more of an investigative role to discover how people died in strange, sudden or violent circumstances. And yeah, they kept quite in-depth reports. I mean, not all of them. Some of them are quite brief, depressingly so, but every now and again you'll get a coroner who really get stuck in. And they conduct their inquests, almost like how you'd imagine a grand jury or something happening, where it's not just the coroner. He would have a panel of jurymen in with him to examine the body, and they would examine the crime scene, and they would talk to witnesses. They could arrest suspects and question suspects. So the coroner did act much more like an investigating officer into murder. In our imagination, we think of corridors being at the hospital.

Yeah. But in the early modern period, they were at the crime scenes. They were doing the investigations on the scene. Wow. I didn't know that. That sounds so oddly modern to me. And they were, the original detective. They were.

The original idea, because there was no police force in this period. Of course. But people did investigate crimes. People did care about murder. So it was sort of like a job that was divided between various different people. Magistrates also had similar sort of role where they would investigate crime. but the coroner was very much more of the hands-on-the-scene kind of guy. Yeah, I think it's absolutely fascinating.

And I had the exact same reaction as you, because when I was a master's student and I was just learning to use archives for the first time, one of the first things I pulled up was the coroner's inquest records, because I'm morbid. And I went straight to the catalogue and typed in murder, because that's what I was interested in. And when I got the records up and I started reading them,

I was like, oh, my God, this feels really modern. And that's something I touch up in my book as well. There's one chapter called Murder in the Lollard's T. tower where they're investigating what is believed to be a suicide. There's a man found hanging in his cell in the bishop's prison, but the coroner is suspicious. And when he starts looking at the scene, it dawns on him. I think this is a murder that's been dressed up like a suicide. And him and his jurymen, they start to investigate this crime scene in a way that, to me, felt very modern. They started off in a hands-off approach. They thought to themselves,

right, we're not going to touch the body, we're just going to look at the scene, we're not going to disturb the evidence. And they did a full investigation in that way. And I thought, that feels like the way I was trained to investigate crime scenes. You don't just charge in there and start picking things up. You have to be very careful. And then once they've done a thorough hands-off investigation, then they brought the body down, then they conducted a more in-depth investigation. And it was quite forensic as well. They were going into quite a lot of depth about his complexion, the state of his skin. Was he drooling saliva? These are all things that they would expect to see in someone who'd been hanged to death. What date was this? So it was in 1514. So quite early. Yes, quite early. And it's

surprising. And of course, this to me felt like an exception perhaps in the coroner's records. Not every coroner is going to do as an in-depth investigation of this. But there were some who were doing this style of forensic investigation at the beginning of the 1500s. It's quite fascinating to me. Wow. I suppose we just don't like to think of people in the early modern period as being that sophisticated and that's our own bias, isn't it? But why wouldn't they investigate a scene like that? Exactly. But I was exactly the same as you. Like, as I was researching this book, I was having so many sort of like, that's amazing moments because we don't know. And, you know, that's fine.

It's not exactly on the curriculum, is it? Early modern crime investigation. I'll take you back to sort of, say, the beginning of the period that you're looking about. It's about the 1500s. There wasn't a police force, as you mentioned. There was no ye old 999-999 by tapestry or falconry or whatever it was. So let's just imagine that you are walking down the street and you've spied a body that has been a horrible murder. Who would you call what would happen?

Who would look into it? Well, there were local officials that you could get in touch with at the time. So you would have had constables and sheriffs in your local community. And these would have been made up of community members as well. In the early modern period, everyday people were much more involved in the criminal justice system and in regulating law and order in their own communities. So instead of constables being professional police officers, they were volunteers from the community. And you say there was no ye old e-9-99, but there was a thing called the Hugh and Cry,

which he may have heard of. It's one of those things that sort of like sounds like a familiar saying, doesn't it? The human cry for murder. And this really was people putting out the word that there's been a murder, there's a fugitive on the loose, it's up to everybody in this town to catch this guy.

So the human cry was sort of like the effort to get out there on the ground and try and grab someone for the crime. Wow. And then you would go on to more of the investigative side of things. So then the coroner will be summoned and they'd begin their inquest. The magistrates and justices of the peace.

peace would start getting involved as well to help coordinate that investigation. And then if you got a suspect, then that would be either through the coroner's inquest or through something called a grand jury, which would then send that person to court. So you kind of like, you do have sophisticated systems in place to investigate crime, to capture killers and to get them into court. But we didn't have the same system that we have today. Yeah. I suppose when we think about it, you'd be tempted to think it would all be like trial by combat

or there'd be some mad we'll throw you in a lake and see if you float type of a thing. Well, that would be amazing. I mean, child by combat was a thing. It was more in the medieval period. So by our period, things have become a little bit more sophisticated. But then when you're saying about chucking bodies into rivers, yes, they did do that. They did do that.

And there were other strange, superstitious things they used to do as well as part of criminal investigations. There's something called cruintation, which was the belief that a dead body would bleed or blink or do something if the murderer drew near. So during official inquest, the coroner, this is like an actual official working on behalf of the crown, would get suspects in to touch the dead body. He might get them to say the dead body's name. And then they would watch to see, does the body move? Wow. I mean, it wasn't like routine.

It wasn't for every inquest. But there are enough surviving coroner's inquest reports where they're doing this. And the way the coroners talk about it as well, it's like, this is the new science of the day. Like they're doing it in an experimental way. they're so fascinated by this thing called crumentation. I mean, it would be good if that did work, wouldn't it? I can understand the excitement. Wouldn't it be amazing?

Oh, would that be great? Yeah, and excitement's just the word as well. You can really get a sense of like the drama. If you imagine, because the coroner's inquest as well were public events, I guess you could say. So you'd have a massive jury sometimes. We think of juries as being 12 men. Sometimes you'd have 23, 24 men crammed into a room with the coroner to do the inquest. And then you'd have all the people from the town or the village as well,

stuffed in there having a look. And if you can imagine that they're then dragging suspects in to touch the body. And then if the body bleeds, you can read about like the reactions in the crowd. People are screaming. People are getting excited. People are trying to run away. So it's really quite exciting. And to us as well, really strange.

It is, but then, you know, I was just thinking about this when I knew I was going to interview today. We are still obsessed with true crime, aren't we? So they were back then as well. It was endlessly fascinating. Yes, yeah. So in the only modern period, they didn't have quite the same media that we have. Today we kind of like we have podcasts, we have websites, and we do have more traditional things like true crime books as well. So in the early modern period they digested their true crime

mostly through true crime pamphlets, which would have been small, portable, unbound, sort of like little magazine style things. Penny dreadfuls and that type of thing. Yeah, sort of like the very early version of the Penny Dreadful. And then they also had these wonderful things called Broadside Ballads, which were the latest murder news that would have been put into verse. So the idea was that you would sing this. And they were designed to. at the less literate or even the illiterate parts of society. So they were very simply written with very simple language, big writing, big pictures. And the idea was that you would stick this on the wall of an inn or an alehouse. And people who could read could then sing them out and everybody

else could join in. And at the top of each one, they'd tell you which tune to sing it to. I was just going to ask you what tune. And some of these tunes, you can still find them online. I can't read music, but I've got a friend who plays the organ. So I took one of these to her. And I said, could you play this for me? And I had one of these broadside ballad tunes stumbled out to me on a massive organ. Was it a good tune? Did it work?

It was so jolly. I thought it was going to be quite... I thought I embraced myself to hear something really dramatic here, but it was so cheerful. We never change, do it? Yeah, no, we don't change. Well, today I guess you could say we have something... It's called cosy crime, isn't it?

It's that idea of crime is that something that's quite joyful or quite playful. And if you think about it, it's kind of creepy. It's kind of weird. But, you know, I love cosy crime. I love midsummer murders. Yes. A bit of Poirot, bit of Colombo.

Yeah, or people who go on these murder mystery evenings and stuff like that. It's a laugh, isn't it? It's some fun. So it's murder as entertainment in the truest sense of the word. We do it now when they did it back then. Wow. And of course, back in the day, especially the time that you're looking at, is not just the crime itself and the due process,

but the punishment was actually very public as well. Yes, it was, yeah. I mean, the theatre of crime, the theatre of executions, yeah, and it's deliberately so. It was designed to be that way. It was sort of like part of the whole idea of demonstrating to the general public that justice has been done and social order has been restored and the guilty party has been properly punished. And it was very important as well during executions that the person being executed had to be suitably penitent. They had to be very sorry. And if they were granted a gallow speech, they were only allowed to use that speech to beg forgiveness, to sound really Sorry. Oh, really? I've often wondered why, when I have seen these speeches, they've been like really quite nice and contrite because I think I wouldn't. I'd take every fucker down with me. I know. That's the thing. It's just like, because I had the exact same reaction as you. And a lot of the time, they'd say things like, I welcome my punishment. I welcome this. And you think, are you mad? But it was very carefully orchestrated. These people were primed. They would have had time before their execution and they'd been worked on quite heavily by an official who was called the ordinary. And this. This would have been like your chaplain of the prison. Sounds very ominous. It's incredibly ominous. It's all part of the performance. And there's this whole other genre of true crime writing

that was the confession, the murderous confession. So you can imagine that before trial, a confession is really important. This is what you need in order to secure a conviction. But it was equally important for the only moderns to secure a post-trial confession. So even though the person has been found guilty and it's guaranteed they're going to be executed on the platform, they still wanted that post-trial confession

because they wanted to hear them sing and they wanted to hear them say they were sorry and it was really important for them to do that because it fed into the narrative of justice has been done, sin has been eradicated, the person is penitent, it was very much part of a Christian framework of understanding crime.

Wow. Did you find anyone in your research? Was there any examples of someone that just, you know, they got on the stand before they're about to be executed? I mean, at that point really, what do you have left to lose? Did you find any account of anyone that broke ranks and was just like, You're all a bunch of bastards. This is horrible. I don't want to die.

That would have been me. The only time I've read about people not conforming is when they've been silent or they've just folded their arms and looked away and refused to join in with the prayers. Because they would have been like prayers as well. It was all part of like, you know, the final thing. That was the only time I've read about people rebelling. But I didn't personally read any of these sources, but I did read about cases where people who were due to be executed if they did start screaming and shouting, they'd have been forcibly gagged. So you really didn't have a choice. If you started to scream and shout. about the injustice of your execution. Nope, that was not allowed. Nope, you're not allowed to do that. I'll be back with blessing after this short break.

We're about to witness the first coronation at Westminster Abbey in 70 years. And gone medieval from history hit is your perfect companion for the event. From the earliest English coronation records. To what the royal regalia used in the ceremony means. From the surprising origins of the recognition part of the service. To the lavish banquets that took place afterwards. I'm Matt Lewis and I'm Dr Kat Jarman and on Gone Medieval in April we'll be exploring the medieval origins of this feast of pageantry.

We'll try to pick out the key moments for you to watch and trace their origins back into the mists of time. We've got some great guests and fascinating topics to lift the lid on a moment when, let's face it, people all around the world will have gone medieval. Subscribe and follow Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Was it true that Guy Fawkes beats the executioner because he was supposed to be hanged drawn and quartered

which is just the worst thing ever but he jumped off the scaffold with the noose round his neck and broke his neck effectively? Yes. And it happened a lot because it was a bit of a tricky business sort of like orchestrating a perfect hanging, drawing and quartering. God, I'm like, I'm okay to talk about it? But just for anyone who's listening who isn't aware of what this is, can you just give us a rundown of what hanging, drawing and quartering is?

Yes, so it was an execution reserved for men found guilty of treason. So it was particularly gruesome because it's one of the worst crimes imaginable to the early moderns. What it is in short is a person would be hanged until they were unconscious but not dead. Then they would be cut down, revived. Then they would be disembowed so their stomach would be cut open and their guts would be pulled out. And it's in the sentencing guidelines as well is this has to be done before they're watching eyes. they have to be conscious while this is happening. Fuck.

Sometimes their penis would be cut off to symbolise the end of the traitorous line. That too will be done with they're conscious. That feels a little unnecessary by that point. I mean, at this point... Watching your guts being ripped. At this point, it's so extreme. It's so extreme.

And there'll be abrasia on the executioners platform. So the penis and the guts are thrown in and burnt before their eyes. Then their head is chopped off and their heart is cut out and displayed to the audience. So, yeah, it's really... gruesome and then the body is cut into quarters and then those would be displayed around the town

or the city where the crime or the conspiracy or the treason took place and then the body parts and so will be boiled in a special sort of like spicy malage to preserve the flesh and to stop birds from eating it so quickly my god what happened to the genitals and guts that were being burnt did they just burn away to nothing I assume so I've assumed they just get tossed out with the rubbish. Jesus Christ. Yeah. But can you imagine being in attendance and watching that,

having a front-row seat, something like that? Because it was like a family day out, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. And I find it difficult sometimes to wrap my head around it because you'll read accounts of people having a great time at events like this. But then you'll read other accounts of people who have experienced or who have witnessed other similar horrific events, and they are traumatized by it.

So the early moderns weren't inured to the horrors or the trauma of human. and suffering. I just think it's the sort of person that would turn out to an execution perhaps is slightly more robust. I don't know. I was just thinking that

when you were saying it I was thinking two thoughts simultaneously is that people still like to look at video nasties. There are still videos of executions that people do go and watch there's clearly people want to do that.

And secondly, if for some mad reason it was like, right, we found this person, they are a traitor and we've just decided to bring a rat hanging, drawing, and quartering, and it was actually going on

in your city centre, would you go? Oh. Oh. I wouldn't. I don't know. You know these films that are sort of like the torture porn films

who are hostas, stuff like that? I can't watch those. They freak me out. The thing is, is I can read about it. I can't watch it. I'm just thinking that's a strange disconnect for you. So I probably wouldn't go. I'd have nightmares.

But I tell you what, people would, wouldn't they? They would go. That's the thing is if you put this thing on and said, right, we're actually doing this. I mean, aside all the obvious moral outrage that would occur, people would go and you know that people would go and a lot of people would go.

Yeah, I think it's human nature in many ways because I'm sure you've come across this talking to a lot of other historians. You do tend to come across the odd sneery people that think that people who lived hundreds of years ago were a lesser sort of person. They were not as sophisticated as us. They were quite debased and depraved

and horrible all round. I just think, I don't know, I think it's human nature. I think you're right. Yeah, I think if we had it today, there'd be plenty of people turning out to an execution. There were some famous people that went along to executions and didn't really care for them. Samuel Pepys was one, wasn't he? He saw some hangings, I think.

Yeah, he went to quite a few, and he writes about it quite amusingly in his diaries. Oh, do you? Right. Yeah, because I was really interested in what the crowd would be like at an execution and what it would be like to attend one. And he's a wonderful resource if you want to read about this stuff, because he liked to go along to the odd execution. And he talks about it, so he pays money in order to get a good view. Sometimes he doesn't get the best view.

He talks about how I think he spent something like, whole penny. I can't remember the exact amount. A whole penny. A whole penny to get a view by staying on a cartwheel. And then he grumbled about it because it was really uncomfortable and it took over an hour for the condemned man to be led out and everybody was getting pissed off and restless and tired. And I just sort of like, yeah, this sounds like the sort of grumbling there. Don't do anything right. Honestly, been it. Yeah. This is did you get the execution last week? It was an absolute yasker. I just couldn't see anything. I had a really bad view. Wasted my money. And they were packed as well. And there's very,

accounts of these executions where people are sitting on roofs, they're hanging out of windows. They're building extra platforms at the backs, raised platforms so you can cram even more people on them. They were packed out and there was a lot of money to be had to get a good view. So if your house overlooked the execution site, you were in. You could charge people a lot of money to sit in your window. Wow. How many people would be attending these things? I mean, for big events, like for the big celebrity ones, there's talk of there being sometimes between 10 to 15,000 people turning out of these sorts of things. Jesus.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean, these would have been the big star money events in London and things like that. But even so, in sort of like the spoiler less notorious crimes, you'd have thousands of people turning out to these things. They were huge. I mean, and the thing is, like, because I find it hard to visualise numbers sometimes.

So I'll go online and I'll type in like 20,000 person stadium or 10,000 person stadium. And then I look at it and I think, my God, you had all those people crammed into like, you know, Tyburn or something to see this person. They couldn't possibly have seen it all, can they? No, they'd have been lining the route as well. So the person being executed, they would have been dragged along a specific pre-planned route. Either in a cart or something called a hurdle, which would have been sort of like a flat thing made of sticks that they were tied to.

So that would have been dragged along a procession route, and those have been absolutely round as well. Oh, my God. And when you said that the big celebrity ones, what would be a big celebrity case? Okay, so yeah, the celebrities sort of like in early one period wouldn't be the same idea of what we have as celebrities. So it would have been like the lords and ladies of the day, courtiers, people that were quite high up in society were thought of as being like, you know, their version of like the big celebrity names of the day. Everybody knew who Lord and Lady So and So were.

And if Lord and Lady So and so got caught up in a murder investigation, it's juicy gossip, which is good for me because people write about it a lot. People are going to write about the crimes of famous people far more than they're going to write about the crimes of, you know, Fred Blugs, who's never heard of. That's very true. when you research something like crime and execution a lot of it is kind of funny and shocking and all the rest of it but there's also a lot of it that it's unavoidably very sad and I'd imagine the stuff that you're dealing with as well it must actually be quite harrowing to read some of this stuff

yeah it is heartbreaking and infuriating as well to read about is you have these poor women so I'll dial it back a little bit so in the early bottom period if you were an unmarried woman and you became pregnant that was game over you were a social outcast you will be kicked out by your family, you'd be shunned by your friends, you wouldn't be able to work. It was really hard to get by. Most women either had to go into lives of vagabondage, always on the move, always trying to scrape a living somewhere, or they had to become prostitutes, make their living that way.

A lot of women were faced with this dilemma when they discovered that they were pregnant. Sometimes through consensual act, a lot of the time to not. They had to decide what on earth am I going to do. Do I give up my whole life? is my life now over? Or do I hide my pregnancy and kill my child without anybody knowing that I was ever pregnant? So it's quite distressing to read about. And of course, then I start getting really indignant because I read about all these men who get away with it. And they don't have to suffer any of these consequences that the women have to suffer in the any modern period. So yeah,

it's really hard to read about. It's infuriating. And yeah, there is a very sad case that I write about. It's called Poor to Spice Creatures. And it's a case is quite close to my heart because it takes place in my local town. And it's one of the first cases that I found when I was going through the archives through these coroner's records. Years and years ago as a master's student, I found this. And I was so touched by it, I thought, I really want to write about this woman. So this is the case of a young woman called Elizabeth Balance. And she was a maid of all work.

So she would have been sort of like the general skivy running around house. So many of them are maids and in domestic service. Yes. So maids in the only one period. Because when we think of maids, we tend to think of downtown abbey, upstairs, downstairs, they'd have their own rooms at the end of the day that they can shut themselves away in and have some privacy. that didn't happen in the early modern period.

Maids existed in shared spaces. They slept in hallways, in cupboards, in kitchens. They were always available. Wow. Yeah, and sometimes I've read reports of the maids being bedded down at the end of the master's bed. Like she's there available for his sexual convenience. It's infuriating. So these poor women, so they've got no privacy, they've got no safety, they have nowhere to go.

They live in. They don't go home at the end of the day, so they're living in. There's no laws against sexual assault in the early bottom period. There are laws against rape, but it's so impossible to prove that they may as well not bother. So yeah, and you're right, there's an awful lot of maids that are sexually abused and raped by their masters. And then as soon as it's discovered that they're pregnant, see you, out the door, don't want to know. And there's no welfare state really to speak of, is there? And you literally be on your own in a very unforgiving world with a baby to care for.

Yes, yes. There was some provisional support, so they could rely on the parish to offer them some sort. support, but it wasn't easy and they would have to submit to corporal punishment and various humiliating rituals of penance. And in the year that our girl, Elizabeth Ballance was made pregnant by her master, there was a recent piece of law that came in that said that any woman lying on the parish would have to be imprisoned for a year. So... Fucking hell. What a bunch of dicks. Oh! So we'll help you, but we're also going to lock you up. It's really hard decision to make. So she does end up hiding her pregnancy and she does

quite well hiding this. She has the support of her mother and her sister, which again, you couldn't guarantee. But unfortunately, if she has an accident, she falls against a well pump and delivers a stillborn male child. And when she tries to seek help for this, she's reported for it. And automatically presumed to be a child murderer because the law at the time said that if you were discovered with the body of a dead infant, then you were presumed guilty, which goes against the rule of law in this country. You're presumed innocent until found guilty. But in this particular a case, women were presumed guilty unless they could prove themselves innocent. Now, these are not well-educated women. They don't know how to stage a defence in the face of an accusation like

this. So so many women went to the gallows for the crime of a fantaside because they had miscarriages, because they had stillbirths. It's absolutely crazy to me, but it was in law. Why did they, because I know that they changed that law and it's to do with concealing a pregnancy, really, isn't it? Is that if you've been found with a baby that's dead, that nobody knew you were pregnant, that you have concealed a pregnancy. Why did they bring that law in at all? I think the idea behind it was to be as harsh as humanly possible to prevent women from committing infanticide. But the way it's written, the wording of this particular law, it feels like it's trying to punish women for the crime of being pregnant in the first place. Yeah. That's how it feels to me. I can't get into the minds

of the lawmakers and what they were thinking when they wrote it. But the way that they wrote this law, and in one of the cases I look at, the way this law was applied, there was a woman who had a very early miscarriage in a toilet. And witnesses said that you couldn't even tell it was a baby. And she put some leaves over it and staggered out of the toilet and said, oh my God, what's just happened? And because she covered the miscarriage with leaves, she was found to be guilty. But yeah, it's so harsh. And you think to yourself, well, where is the justice in that? There isn't any. It's designed to punish her for the crime of being a woman pregnant out of wedlock as far as I'm concerned. I absolutely agree. And I had a very similar reaction when I was reading through

just some of these court documents about just, I guess, a lot of pain and anger for the horrendous situation that people found themselves in, because it's like, I don't know what I do. What's the option? The option is that you have the baby and then you become destitute, and you have to take on all that social shame and stigma that it's heaped upon you, and you might get some help from the local parish after they've been really shitty to you and imprisoned you for a year. Or you can, what's your option? It's just created a horrendous situation. It's extraordinarily only difficult to read about from modern perspective. And I suppose another crime is it was a crime was suicide. Yes. So crime in the early modern period was it wasn't called suicide. It was called

Phalo de Se, which was Latin for to commit a felony against yourself. And that was often short-handed to self-murder. So suicides were treated as murders. There was no other way they thought about it. It was murder. And it's quite fascinating to read the coroner's inquest reports when they're going to suicides because they investigate the suicides as though they were murders and they're often talking about the victim as the victim is the perpetrator. They were their own murderer. Yeah, it's a bit funny to wrap your head around but yeah, that's the way it was covered and of course say somebody's found guilty of committing self-murder, how do you punish a dead body? Yeah. So there are many ways they do this. First, they would punish the suicide themselves

by something called profane burial. They would desecrate the corpse. They were not permitted to Christian burial. They were not permitted to be buried on consecrated grounds. So this is where you get the cross-road burials, burials and fields and highways and things like that, which I'm sure most people have heard about sort of like, you know, the haunted highway, there are lots of these myths come from this sort of thing. So yeah, they would have been tumbled naked into a hole. You weren't permitted a burial shroud or anything like that. You would have had a wooden stake with an iron tip driven through your body, pinning you into the ground. And then when they heap the earth back on top of you, the end of the iron stake is standing proud of the burial mound.

As a symbol to say, here lies a desecrated corpse. No name, just the stake on the display. And of course, because it's on the highway and on something like a crossroads, it's going to be seen by an awful lot of people travelling here and there. They're going to see this and they're going to think, oh, God, I better not kill myself because that's what happened to me. But then it wasn't enough just to punish the body of the dead. They had to punish their surviving relatives as well. Oh, of course. Yeah, so this was through something called felony forfeiture, which is a very posh way of saying that we're just going to take all your money off you. No. Yeah, so it usually worked if the person who committed suicide was the head of the household, the patriarch,

because in the early modern period it was the men that had all the money, and those who inherited the money were usually men. So if the fathers of the family killed himself, his entire family would be destitute because all his goods and chattels would be forfeit to the crown. And I'm talking absolutely every single brass father. So it was the job of the coroner to gather up all this stuff and to make catalogs of all the goods of suicides. And it's so sad because the majority of these suicides are people that don't have a lot. So he'll go into their house and he'll start cataloguing their goods and it'll be something like one blanket, one one box, one spoon. And you're like, my God, even these they're taking that you're not

permitted to have anything. So of course, not only are you suffering because your dear loved one has committed suicide, but you're further suffering because you don't know what your future is going to be like. You have no inheritance. You have no money. Your house is gone. If you had one, it's incredibly harsh. And people in the early modern period, they were generally supporting of profane burial. They were happy for a corpse to be desecrated. But felony forfeiture was really unpopular. And the good news is that a lot of people collaborated to fight back against this. So you could be hopeful that your friends and family would gather around you. And they would do this perhaps by getting all your stuff out of the house before the coroner arrives, hiding all your money, hiding all your

goods, doing that. Or in a couple of the cases that I write about in this book, trying to dress suicide up as a murder. So if you can trick the coroner into thinking, Dad didn't kill himself, he was murdered. And it's horrific. One of the cases I write about in this book is about a chap called Francis Marshall, and he was found dead in a pond. And just by the rumour that he'd killed himself, there was no proof at the time, but people were gathered around the body,

and they were saying, it looks like he's killed himself. That was enough for the family to get really worried. And they knew that the coroner was on his way, and as soon as the coroner got there, he might find against them. So in their desperation, they'd just start beating the shit out. of this corpse. I just just thought of it as well is really upsetting. This is their dad, like, and they've just found his body, and they've been driven to such desperation that they think we have no choice. So this particular chapter, I look at that, and I look at how the coroner,

and the King's Armourner, who was sort of like a bit of a high-up official who was after the money of the family, how they were determined to punish this family and drag them through the courts and try and prove that they were guilty of beating up this corpse. It's, such a strange case, but it's so illustrative of how desperate people could be, but it's also quite heartwarming in a way. They were supported by all of their friends and their family. The whole

community rallied around to help them. So it also demonstrates that the force of loathing the general public had to these sorts of laws. Blessing that you have just been amazing to talk to. I could honestly, I could just sit here and keep asking you things, but I can't

do that. But if people want to know more about you and your research, and frankly, They should. Where can they find you? So they can go to my website. It's bless thanadams.com. Or they can find me on Twitter at Adams underscore Blessed, I think. I'm sure they'll find me. The book is Great and Horrible News, Murder and Mayhem in early modern Britain. Thank you so much. This has been horrific but amazing.

Oh, thank you. It's been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Blessing for joining me. Wasn't that fascinating? I had a great time. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody says that, but honestly, it's a damn popularity contest out here. It really does help us out if you give us a review. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.