Vanessa McMahon's publishers have done her a disservice with the title of her book, which presumably was altered from Murder in Early Modern England—an Internet search reveals that it is sometimes listed thus—in order to appeal to a popular market in the United Kingdom and the United States. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that her scope extends beyond William Shakespeare's death by well over a century. Many of the detailed cases originate in the now thoroughly plundered files of the Northern Circuit assize depositions, which only survive for the period after circa 1640.
McMahon's declared interest is “how ordinary people and the courts interpreted homicides and how these interpretations were often contingent on external factors like gender, race, religion and social status” (xiv). A crime that changed in meaning over time is one which, she argues, allows to us understand nuances of early modern attitudes and beliefs. This is true, albeit not an especially original idea. Nor does McMahon's claim that the 1624 Infanticide Act was meant to regulate sexual behavior in unmarried women come as a revelation to anyone familiar with the history of crime; it is an interpretation dating back to the earliest scholarship on the subject. Presumably she is catering here for the general reader, but elsewhere she reverts to academic mode, for example, describing crimes as “gendered” and using other terms likely to furrow nonspecialist brows.
To begin with the author leads us through investigative and other pretrial procedures, then proceeds to examine spouse murder, poisoning, infanticide, child murder, brawling, dueling, serial killers, and sex crimes. She might have included a separate chapter on witchcraft, given that murder by magical means was its salient definition in most people's minds; like poisoners, witches were feared and reviled because of the secrecy associated with their crimes. With lucidity and concision, McMahon describes the vagaries of an accusatory legal system and explores the motivations of witnesses in helping to bring murderers to justice. What is lacking is a sense of how this engagement developed over time, and how ordinary people were drawn into a web of formal obligation to the law between 1550 and 1650. Murder may well offer an opportunity to study popular beliefs, but that cannot be done properly without reference to the growth of the state.
In an interesting, if derivative, chapter on the place of the supernatural in conceptions of murder, McMahon describes how the devil tempted moral weaklings to commit murders and how the all-seeing eye of God exposed them. This served the ideological needs of both church and state, providing object lessons in the power of providence while promoting public confidence in the inexorability of justice. The statement that “witnesses seldom viewed crime and legal retribution in divine terms, especially after 1640” (22) is questionable. McMahon means that the laconic depositions described in the first chapter did not record popular associations between homicide and the supernatural. But did people think in these terms privately? Perhaps they even spoke publicly about such things, only to be ignored by magistrates interested in substantive evidence alone. Most intriguing is the putative 1640 watershed: Why might this have been the case? Furthermore, McMahon renders supernatural stories as metaphors, which somewhat dismisses their deep-rooted and potent origin in sincere belief. A chapter on forensic medicine is lively and perceptive but has little to say about why more surgeons, apothecaries, and physicians found their way into the courtroom in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is correct that standards of evidence were being raised, but how and why did this come about?
The rest of the book tells a story by now well known to early modernists. Women, central to the decision-making process in infanticide cases, were marginalized in the eighteenth century. Domestic murders illustrated how “male violence replicated hierarchies of power, gender and marital order” (72). Good order in households was valued by moralists, but the reality was often far from the truth. Poisoning was associated with women but was also carried out by men, albeit in a way that was “exclusively and specifically male” (120). Honor caused men to fight, and alcohol did not help the situation. Accusations of secret murder were shaped more by interpersonal assessments of reputation than by the scapegoating of minorities and cultural bogeymen. Outlandish murders excited a degree of horror disproportionate to their actual incidence. A short chapter on punishment brings all this to an abrupt end, without reflection or consolidation.
This book has much to recommend it to the nonspecialist. It is (except for the lack of a conclusion) well structured, largely comprehensive, and, above all, written with conviction and clarity. Some of the laments about the injustices of a patriarchal society seem a bit tired, but the fact remains that this is a book concerned with power and its savage consequences and that the distribution of power consisted in cultural conventions shaped by class and gender. And yet this area of exploration represents a missed opportunity in McMahon's book: she has relatively little to say about changing social relations and treats the state—for example, with respect to public attitudes to child killers—if it were an entity distinct from the community. It is right that a historian should seek lost attitudes in the records of crime, but attitudes shifted with the development of a legal culture. As McMahon acknowledges, enforcement of a parliamentary statute against infanticide was limited because of the leniency of provincial juries. This, surely, is a prime example of the dynamic continuum between governors and governed—a motor of early modern state formation.
If one wants a reliable, descriptive account of murder in early modern England, one could do no better. The problem is that there are so few new ideas contained here. Specialists know the territory; now we await more explanations for why it appears the way it does. Historians still need to understand how a fascinating world of attitudes came to be transformed to the extent that we sometimes struggle to see ourselves in our ancestors.
