PROSECUTION OF CRIMINALS
Criminal cases could be prosecuted on behalf of the Crown or the victim. Most offenders were male. The most common charge was theft. Larceny, burglary, and robbery accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of all appearances in court. Homicides accounted for 10-15% of all cases.
In the case of a suspicious death, certain procedures were supposed to be followed. Whoever found the body was to raise a hue and cry, which meant he informed his four nearest neighbors of his find. They went for the bailiff, who sent for the coroner and summoned all free men over the age of twelve in the community. From their ranks the coroner picked twelve jurors for the coroner’s inquest. This was held as soon as the coroner arrived, usually within three days. The deceased was not buried until after the coroner examined the body for wounds, bruises, or signs of strangulation. Autopsies were performed in other countries at this time, but not in England. Dissection was not only illegal, it was considered barbaric.
If an indictment of homicide was made, the coroner ordered an arrest. Arraignment took place before two justices, who bound the accused felon over for trial. In murder cases, this meant holding the accused in gaol until the next assizes.
Murder trials were far different from those today. For one thing, they rarely lasted more than ten minutes. Rules of evidence were unknown. A defendant charged with felony or treason was not entitled to legal representation. Defense witnesses were rarely called and were never sworn in. The theory was that the prosecution’s case ought to be unanswerable. By implication, any defense witness was a liar. Furthermore, that witness meant to speak against the Crown. This was frowned upon. All evidence was given orally in open court, though a written confession might be read. The accused could cross-examine prosecution witnesses, who were sworn in. Verdicts were decided by a jury of twelve men. Women could be tried for a crime but could not serve on a jury. The verdict was usually based on common knowledge rather than on the results of detection.
In the case of Philip Wetherick, common knowledge was wrong. After Ambrose Letyse disappeared in December 1537, the parish constables and bailiff believed that Wetherick had murdered him. Apparently hoping to awe him into confessing, they brought him before the earl of Essex as well as to the local J.P., John Spring. Wetherick’s wife, Margery, asked for assistance from her uncle, the abbot of St. Osyth’s, but when Wetherick’s eleven-year-old son, Martin, testified that his father had killed Letyse and burned the body and produced bones and ashes as proof, Wetherick was tried at the assizes in Bury St. Edmunds in March, 1538, found guilty, and hanged. The following month Letyse turned up in a nearby village, alive and well. The bones had been those of a pig.
Trial by battle was still a possibility in this era, and might be used in felonies or in cases involving a contested land title. There were, however, no recorded instances of trial by battle between 1571 and 1639, and in the 1571 case, one of the parties failed to show up on the day appointed for the showdown.
PUNISHMENTS
Death Penalty
Murder was only one of the crimes punishable by death. Any criminal convicted of the theft of goods worth more than twelvepence (one shilling) could be hanged. In 1590, with a population under five million, England had more than eight hundred hangings. The conviction rate rose from 47% in 1558 to 68% in 1603.
Local studies have produced varied statistics, but a person probably had about a one in four chance of being hanged if he was tried on a felony charge. In Middlesex in the early 1600s, there were an average of seventy executions a year. In Devon in 1598, out of 387 indictments, seventy-four capital sentences were passed (though not all performed). On the other hand, in more than twenty-five Essex parishes, for no discernible reason, there was not a single case of felony during the reign of Elizabeth. Between 1560 and 1650 in the parish of Earls Colne, Essex (which had an average population of 800 during that period), there were only two murder cases. In 1608 a woman was hanged for killing her child. In 1626 another woman was acquitted of a charge of having poisoned her husband. Another Essex study, covering the years 1559-1603, reports 129 homicides, twenty-eight infanticides, 110 highway robberies, 320 burglaries, 1,460 simple or compound larcenies, 172 cases of witchcraft, twenty-eight rapes, and eight cases of buggery. At one assize for Exeter in 1598, 134 prisoners were indicted. Seventeen were ordered hanged, twenty flogged, fifteen pardoned, and eleven, who claimed benefit of clergy, were branded and set free.
Overall, the number of prosecutions for felony rose in the late sixteenth century, and there was a mounting crime problem throughout the years 1570-1630. It is estimated that in London 150 felons were executed every year during the Jacobean period. Still, only about 10% of those convicted of theft were actually executed. Studies of the period from 1550 to 1800 indicate that 25-50% of those indicted were acquitted. Up to 80% of felony suspects escaped trial entirely because they could not be caught and brought into court.
The first permanent London gallows was erected at Tyburn in 1571. Eighteen feet high, it had cross beams that could hold eight at a time. Hangings were accomplished by having the prisoner climb a ladder with the rope around his neck and jump off. Those who refused to jump were “turned” off.
The manner of execution was established by law and determined by the crime. It could not be altered. Most executions were by hanging, but some crimes called for burning and others for pressing to death. Between 1603 and 1621, at least forty-one men and three women were pressed to death in Middlesex.
Execution could be avoided by obtaining a royal pardon, of which about 100 a year were issued. Transportation (sending a convict to a penal colony in another country) as an alternative to the death sentence was proposed as early as 1611 but was not in regular use until after the Restoration.
Benefit of Clergy
A man who could read had “benefit of clergy,” and therefore could get a lesser sentence (usually branding on the thumb) for a first offense. This had ceased to have much connection to the clergy or clerical status by the sixteenth century. At the Essex assizes between 1579 and 1603, 80% of those convicted of stealing sheep or cows successfully read the “neck verse” (Psalm 51, verse 1). In 1576 at the Launceston assizes, seven were executed and seven others “had their books” and were reprieved.
A series of statutes attempted to reduce the use of benefit of clergy. From 1536 on, those suspected of robbery, piracy, murder, or other felonies at sea, crimes which had previously been tried by civil law in the Admiralty Courts, were to be tried without benefit of clergy and by common law. Benefit of clergy was later disallowed in cases of petty treason, homicide, burglary, housebreaking, robbing of churches, theft from the person, rape, and abduction. However, court records show that, in practice, there were exceptions. In Sussex, although a thief could only use the neck verse if the value of the items stolen was less than £40, a number of murderers used it to escape hanging.
Benefit of clergy was not available to female felons, unless they could prove they had been nuns before the Reformation. If a convicted felon was pregnant, however, her execution was postponed until after the child was born. A woman who committed murder had a further disadvantage under the law. She could be charged with petty treason if her victim was either her husband or her employer. Then the sentence was death by burning rather than death by hanging.
Lesser Crimes
Those who stole items valued at less than a shilling (petty larceny) were publicly whipped. Misdemeanor was at this time a vague term for any non-felony. In many cases, a jury would deliberately undervalue the goods that had been stolen in order to avoid passing a death sentence.
Imprisonment
Going to prison as a punishment was a relatively new concept and gaols were primarily for holding prisoners until trial. Legislation passed under Edward VI created separate houses of correction for the incarceration of petty offenders. The prototype was Bridewell, a prison, hospital, and workhouse from 1556. Public floggings were held there twice a week and prisone
rs were issued blue uniforms. It housed about 200. By the 1630s there was a house of correction in every county. The two daily meals of an inmate in the House of Correction at Bury, Suffolk, in 1588 included eight ounces of rye bread, a pint of porridge, a pint of beer, four ounces of meat on flesh days and a half pound of cheese or one good herring on fish days.
London prisons specialized in the type of offender they held. Those charged with felonies went to Newgate and were held in “the Limboes,” a dungeon lit by a single candle set on a black stone. A bell at nearby St. Sepulchre tolled for Newgate prisoners at ten every night, and at six in the morning of execution days. The great bell also began to toll when the dead cart brought prisoners out to the gallows at ten in the morning and continued to toll until the day’s executions were over.
The Tower of London housed traitors, at least those from the upper classes. When the duke of Northumberland’s three younger sons were housed there during the first part of the reign of Queen Mary, they had allowances for food, wood, coal, and candles. Each had two servants. They were allowed out of their cells to exercise and their wives were permitted to pay conjugal visits.
Londoners guilty of any crime but treason or felony were sent to Ludgate. This included imprisonment for debt. The Counter in Poultry and the Counter in Wood Street (moved from Bread Street in 1551) were for offenders against city laws and both stayed open all night. In 1606 the keepers of both Counters were ordered to provide two tables, one on the “Master’s Side,” which would charge ninepence for a meal, and another in the “Knight’s Ward,” which would charge fivepence. For a weekly charge of ten shillings a prisoner could dine alone or with friends and be waited on. Beef, veal, capon, bread, beer, and claret wine were served, with fish substituted on fish days.
The Fleet and the Marshalsea housed recusants but the Fleet got those committed by the monarch’s personal decree. By the late seventeenth century, the Fleet had become primarily a debtors’ prison while the Marshalsea held pirates and mariners. The King’s Bench took persons brought before that court, the majority of whom were debtors. Bridewell, under Elizabeth, was a political prison.
Furloughs were common. If sufficient bail was provided, a prisoner could leave prison for up to a year. For a day outside prison walls one had only to pay twenty pence, the wages of the prison official who went along. Prisoners could also hire other prisoners as their servants, if they had the funds, and “entertain” lady friends.
In 1602 an experiment in privatization of a prison, at Bridewell, turned its management over to four London businessmen, paying them £300 a year. Within a few years, most of the prisoners had been released and whores were subletting the premises.
Community Standards
In the country the community turned out to shame those who violated community standards of decency. They made “rough music” (banging on pots and pans), to accompany the carting or “riding” of a whore. Rough music also accompanied the placarding (wearing of a sign detailing her shortcomings) or ducking (forcible immersion in the nearest body of water, sometimes on a ducking or cucking stool) of a scold. In the Northeast, a scold (a nagging woman) might be put into a metal head-and-mouth clamp called a brake instead. Related traditions are the hanging of antlers or horns over a cuckold’s door and the charivari or skimmington, used to ridicule husbands who were ruled by their wives. A “skimmington ride” could be anything from youthful highjinks directed against a stuffy neighbor to a violent riot.
Tudor and Stuart Gun Control—A Summary of Laws
1487 Proclamation vs. unnecessary carrying of weapons.
1523 Act vs. crossbows and handguns.
1557 Proclamation to ban fighting in churchyards and limit the use of long rapiers, swords, and “other than bladed weapons.”
1559 Proclamation to restrict the use of handguns and dags (similar to pistols) due to their use in crimes.
1575 Proclamation vs. dags and pistols because so many vagrants were armed.
1600 An act against dags, fowling pieces, and other guns, linking the common practice of carrying firearms to the high rate of criminal activity.
1612 Law against pocket-dags.
1616 Law against handguns.
A SAMPLING OF CASES
July 16, 1533: John and Alice (Tankerfelde) Wolfe and three accomplices murdered Jerome de George and Charles Benche, two foreign merchants, in a boat on the Thames. John escaped to Ireland but Alice was arrested and was imprisoned in the Tower. She escaped, but since she was “a woman appareled like a man,” she roused the suspicions of the watch and was caught. Because of the location of the murder, Alice was tried by the Admiralty Court and sentenced to be hanged by the neck on the pirates’ gallows at Wapping Stairs.
February 15,1551: Alice (Mirfyn) Arden supervised the murder of her husband, Thomas Arden, by her lover and several hired assassins. The crime was poorly planned. A trail in the snow led directly from her door to the body. Alice was burned to death in Canterbury. An account appeared in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) and the murder was the basis of an anonymous 1592 play.
1576: At Launceston Assizes a schoolmaster was sentenced to lose his ears and spend six months in prison for “repining against the sacrament.”
1586: William Painter, Clerk of Ordnance, was charged with embezzling almost £2000 from the Crown. His official wages were eightpence a day.
May 30, 1593: Playmaker Christopher Marlowe was slain in Deptford by Ingram Frizer. Officially, he died during a quarrel over a reckoning (bill), but murder for political reasons has never been completely ruled out. For a full account see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992).
1601: John Daniel, formerly a servant of the earl of Essex, was tried for “forgery, corrupt cosenages and other lewd practices” in the Star Chamber for blackmailing the countess of Essex with some letters he’d stolen in 1599. He was sent to the Fleet for life and fined £3000, the same amount he tried to extort.
1612: Mary Frith (Moll Cutpurse) was fined £2000 and made to do penance at Paul’s Cross on a Sunday. She had appeared dressed as a man on stage at the Fortune (a theater) and sung bawdy songs while accompanying herself on the lute. She was also a pickpocket, a forger, a fortune-teller, and a receiver of stolen goods. In 1610 she had been the subject of a book and in 1611 the model for The Roaring Girl, a play by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker.
September 15, 1613: Sir Thomas Overbury died in the Tower of London, poisoned on the orders of the countess of Somerset. For a full account of this case see Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (London: John Murray, 1965).
1615: Ellen Pendleton was arrested and tried for leading bands of outlaws in the shires of Norfolk, Kent, Lincoln, and Leicester. She was convicted of burning the town of Windham, Norfolk, and suspected of conspiring against King James and giving false evidence to the king’s council. Because she was pregnant, her execution was delayed until her child was born.
1630: Anne Walton, a pregnant seventeen-year-old, was murdered in Lumley, County Durham, by Mark Sharp on the orders of Anne’s uncle, Christopher Walker. The two men were convicted and hanged the following April on the basis of evidence given by the ghost of the murder victim. For a full account see the chapter titled “Anne Walton’s Murderers” in Neville Williams’s Knaves and Fools (New York: Macmillan, 1959).
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cockburn, J.S., ed. Crime in England 1550-1800. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1977.
Hunnisett, R. F. Sussex Coroner's Inquests 1558-1603. Kew, Surrey: PRO Publications, 1996.
Ives, E.W. “The Law and the Lawyers.” Shakespeare Survey 17. (1965): 73-86.
McMullan, John L. The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld
1550-1700. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1984.
Sharpe, JA. Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750. New York and London: Longman, 1984.
CHAPTER TEN: COINS, MONEY & HOW MUCH THINGS COST
In England the mark was never an actual coin. Rather it was imaginary money, a unit used only in accounting to indicate 100 pence (“pence” is the plural of “penny”). In the currency of the day, the mark had a value of thirteen shillings and fourpence (13s. 4d.). The pound (£) shilling (s.) and penny (d.) were also denominations used in accounting, with the pound sterling valued at 20s. Until the first issue of a sovereign in 1489, there was no coin with the value of exactly £1.
There was no paper money. English coins were either yellow money (gold), white money (silver), red money (copper), or black money (billon). Some merchants used square lead or copper tokens as small change, but England had no authorized coin of pure copper or of billon (mixed copper and silver) except between 1542 and 1551, when the king’s economic advisors made the mistake of thinking that decreasing the amount of precious metal in coins and minting more of them would be beneficial to the kingdom. What is now called “the great debasement” reduced the silver content of coins to as little as 25% of what it had been and was a leading cause of subsequent problems of inflation and poverty in England.
Between 1551 and 1562, the coinage was restored to its proper value, but at the same time gold coins were almost completely replaced with silver coins. This recoinage had the effect of calling down the value of all coins in circulation.
The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England Page 14