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“This Death Some Strong and Stout Hearted Man Doth Choose”: The Practice of Peine Forte et Dure in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Andrea McKenzie
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Extract

…he [that] is judged mute, that is dumme by contumacie…his condemnation is to be pressed to death, which is one of the cruellest deathes that may be: he is layd upon a table, and an other uppon him, and so much weight of stones or lead laide uppon that table, while as his bodie be crushed, and his life by that violence taken from him. This death some strong and stout hearted man doth choose, for being not condemned of felonie, his bloud is not corrupted, his lands nor goods confiscate to the Prince…

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Law and History Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 2005 , pp. 279 - 313
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2005

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References

1. In the case of high treason, non-capital felonies, and misdemeanors, the prisoner's silence was taken as a guilty plea. See discussion in Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 337–38)Google Scholar.

2. These quotations and the extract above are from The Proceedings at the Sessions of the Peace, and the Oyer and Terminer, for the City of London and the County of Middlesex 13–15 January 1720/1 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17210113-43.html (hereafter Proceedings). In cases where two names are given (e.g., Phillips alias Cross), I follow the contemporary convention of giving preference to the second, except where it is an obvious nickname (e.g., “Handy”). Unless otherwise indicated, all printed primary sources are published in London.

3. Applebee's Original Weekly Journal 14 January 1720/1.

4. The Ordinary of Newgate his Account of the Behaviours, Confessions and Last Dying Words of the Malefactors that were Executed at Tyburn on the Wednesday the 8th of February, 1720/1, 4 (hereafter abbreviated as Ordinary's Account, followed by date of execution); Applebee's Original Weekly Journal 14 January 1720/1; The Daily Post 16 January 1720/1.

5. The Daily Post 14 January 1720/1.

6. Dawks's News-Letter 3 August 1699 (the prisoner is not identified by name); The Confession and the Execution of the Eight Prisoners suffering at Tyburn on Wednesday the 30th of August, 1676 …(1676), 4.

7. PRO ASSI 94/585; Gentleman's Magazine August 1735, 497.

8. According to Daines Barrington, a man was pressed to death at the Cambridge assizes in 1741; however, I have been unable to find either any surviving court records or newspaper or pamphlet accounts confirming this report ( Observations on the More Ancient Statutes from Magna Charta to the Twenty-First of James I. Cap XXVII …, 4th ed. [1775], 86)Google Scholar.

9. Knapp, Andrew and Baldwin, William, Criminal Chronology; or, the New Newgate Calendar … (1809), 1:214.Google Scholar

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11. Thayer, James Bradley, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (Boston: Little & Brown, 1898), 77.Google Scholar

12. As John Langbein points out, “despite fascinating parallels” with torture, “the peine forte et dure is best regarded as a special kind of guilty plea. The defendant underwent a different mode of capital punishment in order to save his estate for his kin”(Torture and the Law of Proof, 76).

13. Marks, Alfred, Tyburn Tree: Its History and Annals (London: Brown, Langham & Co., 1908), 41Google Scholar; Summerson, H. R. T., “The Early Development of the Peine Forte et Dure,” in Law, Litigants and the Legal Profession, ed. Ives, E. W. and Manchester, A. H. (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), 124Google Scholar ; and idem, “Suicide and the Fear of the Gallows,” The Journal of Legal History 21 (April 2000): 54.

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16. Quoted in Babington, Zachary, Advice to Grand Jurors in Cases of Blood… (1677), 191.Google Scholar According to this statute, prison forte et dure applied only to “Notorious Felons,” not “Prisoners which be taken of light Suspicion.” By the early fourteenth century, “the rule came to apply to all who would not put themselves on a jury” without exception ( Bellamy, John, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973], 141)Google Scholar.

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21. The Proceedings on the King's Commission of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol-Delivery of the County-Gaol, held for the County of Surry, at Kingston upon Thames 30 March–4 April 1726, 2. I am grateful to John Beattie for this reference.

22. This was likely the case even in the middle ages; see Bellamy, , Crime and Public Order, 142Google Scholar.

23. Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), 4:325.Google Scholar Whether the accused was maliciously or congenitally mute was established by the jury. In April 1725 at the Old Bailey, when George Armstrong, a “deaf and dumb” man was arraigned for theft, “the Jury enquired if the prisoner stood mute by his own Will, or by the Act of God; and on the Evidence of several Witnesses, who had known him for 12 or 13 Years past [already in court, ready to speak to Armstrong's character], they gave their Verdict for the latter. Then the Court directed them to enquire into the Felony, in the same Manner as if the Prisoner had pleaded Not Guilty.” After being given a very good character, Armstrong was acquitted (Proceedings 7–10 April 1725 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17250407–70.html). See also Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, 337Google Scholar.

24. Blackstone, Commentaries. If the offense was clergyable, the prisoner could claim benefit of clergy and be released “even though he was too stubborn to pray it” (4:325).

25. Ibid.

26. Babington, , Advice to Grand Jurors, 192.Google Scholar

27. It was however the executioner, acting as the sheriff's deputy, who carried out the punishment of tying the thumbs of recalcitrant prisoners or pressing mute defendants.

28. Summerson, , “Early Development of the Peine Forte et Dure,” 120Google Scholar ; see also Bellamy, , Crime and Public Order, 142Google Scholar.

29. Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles, comprising the description and histories of England (1586), 1:185.Google Scholar

30. Mush, John, “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, ed. Morris, John, 3rd series (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 432.Google Scholar A woman arraigned at the Old Bailey in 1676 was sentenced to be pressed, but there is no evidence that this sentence was subsequently carried out ( A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-house in the Old Bayly… 23–25 August 1676 [London: Printed for D. M.], 7)Google Scholar.

31. The Unhappy Marksman. Or a Perfect and Impartial Discovery of that late Barbarous and Unparallel'd Murther Committed by Mr. George Strangwayes (1659 [sic; recte 1658]), 29–30.

32. London Magazine August 1735, 452. Judging by the description of the pressing of Spiggot and Hawes, a board does not appear to have been used at the Old Bailey; rather, the weights seem to have been applied to the prisoner's bare chest.

33. Saussure, Cesare de, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I. & George II., trans. and ed. Muyden, Mme. Van (London: John Murray, 1902), 119.Google Scholar

34. The Bloody Murtherer, of the Unnatural Son His Just Condemnation … (1672), 54. The duration of this execution is corroborated in A Most Barbarous Murther, Being a True Relation of the Tryal and Condemnation of Henry Jones and Mary Jones … for Murthering of their own Mother … (1672), 8.

35. Langbein, , Torture and the Law of Proof, 76.Google Scholar

36. Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials… (London: Hansard, 1809), 1:914.Google Scholar

37. Langbein, , Torture and the Law of Proof, 76.Google Scholar For the discretionary nature of the eighteenth-century criminal law, see King, Peter, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

38. A Brief Historical Account of the Lives of the six notorious Street Robbers executed at Kingston, viz., William Blewet, Edward Bunworth [sic], Emanuel Dickenson, Thomas Berry, John Higges, and John Legee (1726), repr. in G. H. Maynadier, ed., Freebooters and Buccaneers: Novels of Adventure and Piracy (New York: Dial Press, 1935), 381.

39. The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals who have been condemn'd and Executed … (1735), 2:178.Google Scholar

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41. Proceedings 25–27 May 1721 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17210525-66.html. Andrews was acquitted when her prosecutor failed to appear; the following year she was again acquitted at the Old Bailey for a theft when the prosecutor did not appear to testify (Proceedings 7–12 September 1722 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17220907-61.html).

42. Proceedings 17–19 May 1716 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17160517-41.html. In his subsequent trial, White “confess'd he shot the Woman” whom they had robbed, “but that he did not intend it, but only fir'd to frighten her.” Thurland and White were hanged.

43. Ibid.

44. The Confession and Execution of the Eight Prisoners suffering at Tyburn on Wednesday the 30th of August… (1676), 4. Parker was subsequently convicted and hanged.

45. Saussure, , Foreign View of England, 119–20.Google Scholar

46. Hawkins, William, Treatise on the Pleas of the Crown, 8th ed. (London: S. Sweet, 1824), 2:464Google Scholar ; Summerson, , “Suicide and the Fear of the Gallows,” 53–54Google Scholar.

47. Proceedings 13–15 January 1720/1 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17210113-43.html.

48. Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, 338Google Scholar ; Saussure, , Foreign View of England, 120Google Scholar.

49. The Suffolk Parricide. Being the Trial, Life, Transactions, and Last Dying Words, of Charles Drew, of Long-Melford, in the County of Suffolk … (1740), 42.

50. Marks, , Tyburn Tree, 41.Google Scholar

51. Proceedings 27 February–1 March 1733/4 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1730s/t17340227–6.html. Durant was convicted of single (non-capital) felony.

52. Proceedings 30 August–1 September 1727 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/html_units/1720s/t17270830–45.html; Ordinary's Account 18 September 1727, 3.

53. According to one of Bacon's Apophthegms, “A Welshman being at a Sessions-House, and seeing the Prisoners hold up hands at the bar, related to some of his acquaintance there, Judges were good Fortune tellers, for if they did but look upon their hand, they could certainly tell whether they should live or die” ( Bacon, Francis, A Collection of Apophthegms, New and Old [1674], 29)Google Scholar.

54. News from Newgate: A Gaol-Delivery for the City of London and County of Middlesex … [3–10 September] … (1673), 6.

55. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3:62–63.

56. An Authentic Account of the Trials, Behaviour, and Dying Declaration, of the Five Malefactors, who were Executed at Kennington-Common, on Monday the 23d of April … [1770], 5.

57. 4 & 5 William and Mary, cap. 8. See Beattie, J. M., Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231; 377–79Google Scholar.

58. For all but the most minimal, not to mention inadequate, board and accommodation funded by public charity, prisoners were expected to pay their own way. They were also plagued with numerous other expenses such as “fees” extorted by jailers or “garnish” by other prisoners. See A Companion for Debtors and Prisoners … Together with a Particular Description of Newgate, the Marshalsea, the two Compters, Ludgate, the Fleet, and Kings Bench, with Reflections upon Prisons in general, and Proposals for regulating the whole (1699), 10–13Google Scholar ; Hell upon Earth: or the most Pleasant and Delectable History of Whit-tington's Colledge, Otherwise (vulgarly) called Newgate … (1703), 1–9Google Scholar ; Sheehan, W. J., “Finding Solace in Eighteenth-Century Newgate,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (London: Methuen, 1977), 229–45Google Scholar ; Pugh, R. B., “Newgate between Two Fires. Part II,” Guildhall Studies in London History 4 (April 1979): 210–15Google Scholar.

59. Proceedings 28 August–1 September 1741 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org.html_units/1740s/t17410828_3.html.

60. An Account of the Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, Edward Burnworth alias Frazier, William Blewet, Emanuel Dickenson, Thomas Berry alias Teague, John Higgs, and John Legee … 2nd ed. (1726), 58Google Scholar ; Johnson, Captain Charles, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, &c … 2nd ed. (1742), 476Google Scholar ; Parker's Penny Post (4 April 1726)Google Scholar.

61. Ordinary's Account 22 December 1721, 5; Select Trials at the Sessions-House at the Old Bailey … To which are added, Genuine Accounts of the Lives, Behaviour, Confessions, and Dying Speeches of the most eminent Convicts (1742), 1:111Google Scholar.

62. Summerson, , “Early Development of the Peine Forte et Dure,” 124.Google Scholar

63. Calef, Robert, More Wonders of the Invisible World, or, the Wonders of the Invisible World Display'd in Five Parts … (1700), 106.Google Scholar

64. PRO ASSI 94/585; The Gentleman's Magazine August 1735, 497.

65. Summerson, , “Suicide and the Fear of the Gallows,” 54; Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 4.Google Scholar

66. State Trials, 1:913–14.

67. Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 2, 3.

68. Saussure, , Foreign View of England, 120.Google Scholar

69. Barrington, , Observations on the More Ancient Statutes, 87.Google Scholar Significantly, peine forte et dure could theoretically extend not only to those who refused to plead, but for anyone who in general rejected the tribunal. After a defendant in 1664 challenged thirty-six prospective jurors, so that he could not be tried, the panel of judges decided “that he should be hanged and not pressed to death” despite the fact that precedent suggested “that he should be pressed as a Person that refused the Law” ( Kelyng, , Report of Divers Cases in Pleas of the Crown, 36)Google Scholar.

70. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:109.

71. According to Beattie, “less than one per cent of defendants charged with grand larceny and only four per cent of those indicted for petty larceny pleaded guilty in the Surrey courts between 1722 and 1802”; this was at least in part because guilty pleas were “actively discouraged”(Crime and the Courts, 336). For more on this, as well as the “lawyer free” eighteenth-century trial as a “sentencing proceeding,” see Langbein, John, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 1, esp. 57–60.Google Scholar For the importance of character, see King, Peter, “Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 34–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, 613.Google Scholar Cynthia Herrup has also noted the centrality of character in legal decision making, but sees the crucial criterion not as recidivism but whether the offense itself was perceived as “forgivable” or “unforgivable” ( The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 197–200)Google Scholar.

72. The Mirror of Justices, ed. Whittaker, William Joseph and Maitland, Frederic William, Selden Society, vol. 7 (London: B. Quaritch, 1895), 157Google Scholar ; see also 173.

73. Wells, Charles L., “Early Opposition to the Petty Jury in Criminal Cases,” The Law Quarterly Review 30 (January 1914): 101.Google Scholar

74. The “truism” of the “self-informing” jury is described—and qualified—by Powell, Edward in his “Jury Trial at Gaol Delivery in the Late Middle Ages: The Midland Circuit, 1400–1429,” in Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. and Green, Thomas A. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 78–116Google Scholar (quotations on 79); however, see also Thomas A. Green, “A Retrospective on the Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800,” Ibid., 370.

75. Beattie, J. M., “London Juries in the 1690,” in Twelve Good Men and True, 251Google Scholar ; see also idem, Policing and Punishment, 266–69.

76. Indeed, defense witnesses in regular felony cases were not permitted to testify under oath until 1707; defendants themselves were denied this privilege until 1898 (Criminal Evidence Act, 61 & 62 Victoria, cap. 6); see discussion in Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 14. In theory, of course, denying the oath to defendants and their witnesses was supposed to prevent them from jeopardizing their immortal souls; in practice, however, it tended to privilege the evidence brought by the prosecution over that of the defense (see Ibid., 51–53).

77. Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, Douglas et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1975), 26, 25.Google Scholar

78. King, , Crime, Justice and Discretion, 372, 346.Google Scholar The classic formulation of early modern English execution as a exercise in social discipline, influenced in large part by Foucault, Michel, is Sharpe, J. A., “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past & Present 107 (1984): 144–67.Google Scholar Approaches emphasizing popular resistance and/or inversion or reappropriation of the normative message intended by the eighteenth-century gallows include Linebaugh, Peter, “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,” in Albion's Fatal Tree, 65–117Google Scholar , and idem, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1993)Google Scholar ; Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4Google Scholar ; Laqueur, Thomas W., “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. Beier, A. L., Cannadine, David, and Rosenheim, James M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar For more recent work on the English gallows as a “contested” and “unstable” space, see Lake and Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric”; Gladfelder, Hal, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)Google Scholar ; King, , Crime, Justice and Discretion, 334–52Google Scholar ; and McKenzie, “Martyrs in Low Life?”

79. King, , Crime, Justice and Discretion, 372.Google Scholar

80. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3:62. Harris was hanged on 11 September 1728.

81. Hell upon Earth: or the most Pleasant and Delectable History of Whittington's Colledge … (1703), 10Google Scholar ; Eden, William, Principles of Penal Law (1771), 167Google Scholar.

82. Proceedings … held for the County of Surry, at Kingston … (30 March–4 April 1726), 2.Google Scholar

83. Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

84. The Proceedings at the Sessions at the Old-Baily, August the 27th and 28th … (1679), 4.Google Scholar

85. The (unfavorable) comparison between little rogues and lawyers and politicians was a popular one; for a dialogue between Julius Caesar and the recently executed but “honester” burglar Jack Sheppard, see The British Journal 4 December 1725; for the equation of the law with a spiderweb, see S. R., Martin Markall Beadle of Bridewell; his Defence and Answers to the Bellman of London … (1610), reprinted in The Elizabethan Underworld, ed. A. V. Judges (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 391–92Google Scholar.

86. Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1699), Canto I, 1; Johnson, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers &c … (1734); Captain Alexander Smith, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Famous Jonathan Wild. Together with the History and Lives, of Modern Rogues … (1726).

87. Langbein, , Torture and the Law of Proof, 75.Google Scholar

88. Barrington, , Observations on the More Ancient Statutes, 84n.Google Scholar

89. State Trials, 3:913–14, 3:929–30n.

90. Bellamy, , Crime and Public Order, 142Google Scholar ; Pike, Luke Owen, A History of Crime in England (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), 1:211Google Scholar.

91. Knott, John, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 82Google Scholar ; McKenzie, , “Martyrs in Low Life?” 194–96Google Scholar.

92. Mush, , Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow, 416, 413, 436, 418, 428, 431–32.Google Scholar

93. Ibid., 435.

94. Gerard, John, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. Caraman, Philip, ed. Graham Greene (New York: Image Books, 1955), 79.Google Scholar

95. Lake, and Questier, , “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric,” 79.Google Scholar

96. Silverman, Lisa, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

97. McKenzie, , “Martyrs in Low Life?” 190–91.Google Scholar

98. Bloody Murtherer, 17, 50.

99. Ibid., 54.

100. “Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 105.Google Scholar

101. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed.Townsend, George (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 5:550; 8:102; 8:326.Google Scholar

102. Unhappy Marksman, i; Smith, Life and Times, 156.

103. Unhappy Marksman, 14, 26.

104. Ibid., 4, 25, 22.

105. Ibid., 25.

106. Smith, , Life and Times, 164.Google Scholar

107. Ibid., 165.

108. Unhappy Marksman, 21, 26, 22.

109. Ibid., 26–27.

110. Smith, , Life and Times, 168Google Scholar ; Unhappy Marksman, 29–30.

111. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:110.

112. Linebaugh, , “Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,” 115.Google Scholar For the popular association between “game” criminals and bridegrooms, see [Defoe, Daniel], Street-Robberies, Consider'd (1728), 52Google Scholar ; Fog's Journal 19 May 1737, 169.Google Scholar I discuss the connection between execution dress and symbolic claims of innocence at greater length in “God's Tribunal: Guilt, Innocence and Execution in England, 1670–1770,” Cultural and Social History (forthcoming).

113. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 3:30.

114. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 11.

115. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 2:158, 2:160–61.

116. Smith, , Life and Times, 281.Google Scholar Something of Burnworth's reputation and self-conception can be inferred from his nickname, “Young Frazier,” deriving from the fact that he had “spent a great deal of Time in Cudgel-Playing, Wrestling, &c. at the Ring in Moorfields kept by one Frazier” (Weekly Journal; or British Gazetteer 9 April 1726).

117. Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 5.

118. Ibid., 16 September 1741, 5.

119. Mist's Weekly Journal 26 March 1726; Weekly Journal; or British Gazetteer 9 April 1726; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 2:179.

120. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 67.

121. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:108.

122. Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 5.

123. See for instance the advertisement in the Ordinary's Account 12 July 1742, 20.

124. Proceedings 13–15 January 1720/1.

125. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 50.

126. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 2:141; Weekly Journal: or British Gazetteer 19 March 1726.

127. Weekly Journal; or British Gazetteer 19 March 1725/6; Ordinary's Account 14 March 1725/6, 4.

128. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 2:179.

129. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 65.

130. Measure for Measure, Act IV, Scene ii.

131. Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 4, 5.

132. Ibid., 22 December 1721, 5; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:112.

133. Ordinary's Account 14 March 1725/6, 4.

134. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 24

135. Ordinary's Account 14 March 1725/6, 2; Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 24.

136. Ordinary's Account 8 February 1720/1, 2, 3.

137. Lives of the Six Notorious Street-Robbers, 379.

138. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 2:179.

139. Ibid., 1:102, 1:104.

140. Ordinary's Account 22 December 1721, 5.

141. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:109.

142. Simon Devereaux, “The Burning of Women Reconsidered,” in Crime, History and Societies, forthcoming.

143. The story of Walter Calverly, the inspiration for the 1608 play The Yorkshire Tragedy, sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, is a little garbled in this account, which claims that Calverly murdered his wife and seven children. According to the contemporary accounts that have survived, Calverly attempted to murder his wife, and succeeded in killing two of his three children. The relevant documents are reprinted in A Yorkshire Tragedy, ed. A. C. Cawley and Barry Gaines (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 94–112.

144. Annual Register, No. 13 (1770), 163–65.

145. Lives of the Most Notorious Murderers and Robbers, 63.

146. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, 1:110.