Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
8 - Not the Usual Suspects: Men
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The early modern assumption was that infanticide was committed by unmarried women to avoid shame and punishment, yet archival sources show that men were frequently responsible for the killings, or directly involved in them. Such versions of the crime were also described in news pamphlets and ballads, which reveal a variety of motives. They include men who destroyed the unborn child of their pregnant lovers, as well as those who ended the lives of newborns and of very young children. Motives may have been poverty, loss of future, and the sexual shame of clergy, or incest. The means by which men killed were particularly physically violent, and may have involved beating, striking, crushing, or bloodshed.
Keywords: Fathers and lovers who murder; Clergy who kill; Drunkenness; Physical violence; Sexual Shame
Thomas Cranley of Homestreet ‘yoman’, murdered a recently born live male child […]. He violently ‘did croushe’ the child's head with his hands, of which ‘croushing’ he immediately died.
The sins of the fathers
Thus far, this research has focussed mainly on women, but men killed children too. The hundred or so Sussex inquests dealing with suspicious infant deaths include eighteen cases in which men either killed infants or are believed to have had direct involvement the death of a newborn or young child (See Appendix 7). They show that men killed infants in the womb, newborns, and older children. A similar picture is painted in the ballads and pamphlets which describe cases in which men kill infants. This literature suggests that the men who committed these crimes were from all social levels, and they killed for a range of motives.
Francis E. Dolan writes that literary accounts of infanticide ‘scrutinize all of the circumstances, perpetrators, and motives for which the law cannot account’. Certainly, motives are largely missing from the Sussex archival accounts for all crimes, though informed conjecture can go some way toward filling out these lacunae. Just as infanticide by married women appears to have interested the authors of popular literature, so did child killing by men. As with the accounts of the female crime, ballads and pamphlets reveal something of the possible events which led to the killing, and social attitudes toward this kind of infant murder.
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- Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England , pp. 253 - 282Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019