John Beaulieu's newsletter to William Trumbull recounting the Morgan– Egerton duel informed him that Edward Morgan had killed John Egerton, after which he ‘scaped himself very narrowly, having had two grievous wounds; whereof though he scape the danger it is thought he will scarce scape that of the gallowes’. This bare relation accurately reported the ‘facts’ of the event: a duel, a death and the pursuit of justice. The business of determining at law what happened in Sow Wood, however, would be much more complex and contested. As in almost all legal cases, there were different versions of events, disputes over their legal categorisation, inconsistent witnesses and contested interpretations. Because the evidence which has come down to us is constituted largely from the legal archive, we find ourselves in very uncertain terrain with our sources offering a variety of perspectives rather than a body of facts from which we can reconstruct confidently the events of 21 April 1610. This uncertainty leaves us in something of a quandary as historians who wish to give an accurate and honest account of the past. It also, however, opens other avenues of enquiry.

The Morgan–Egerton case gives us an opportunity to examine the evidence from a homicide trail arising out of a duel. This is rare enough, but these examinations and depositions also allow us to consider the manner in which understandings of a Jacobean homicide were shaped by contemporary legal categories and deployed in legal argument. The archive from which we must try to understand the duel is fractured and fragmented, conditioned in part by the tactics the respective sides employed to implicate and exonerate. It is an accumulation of contrary positions, a set of often contradictory perspectives. There is still, however, much to be gained in considering the depositional evidence which emerged from the investigation by the Middlesex justices and the coroners. This chapter considers how the narratives of what happened on the morning of 21 April were constructed partly through the discourses and structures of the English legal system and contemporary understandings of the honour code.