Petty Treason

Women who ignored these ideals, those who dressed inappropriately or displayed violence, were seen to upset the basic rules of nature. Following this pattern as laid out by Howard, women who murdered their husbands threatened the collapse of society.

It was not just women who committed the murder that were charged with petty treason; if a woman was at the scene of the crime and did nothing to stop the murder of her husband it was enough to convict her of this crime. This was a warning to all women who conspired against their husbands that it was a crime to even consider challenging his authority. Katharine Hays was charged with petty treason in 1726 and burned at the stake despite her innocence.

'The Prisoner in her Defence acknowledged, that 3 or 4 Days before her Husband was kill'd, She knew that there was a Design against his Life, and that she was in the next Room when the Murder was done, but said that she had no Hand in it, and therefore she was clear of his Blood'.

If a husband were to abuse his position of authority, there was little a wife could do to protect herself other than seeking the help from a priest. A plea of self-defence was not an option for women of the early modern period as her presence was a physical manifestation of her 'cruel' husband's restraint. If a woman killed her husband in defence of herself it was branded as revenge; a planned and deliberate act. Vengeance was a task that only the Lord could carry out. A murderous wife made an attempt to usurp the Lord's power. Printed accounts of trials were common in the early modern period, often issued as warnings to deter future criminals. One particular document from 1677, Murder and Petty - Treason or Bloody News from Southwark, offers a keen insight into how society expected wives to deal with an abusive husband. It notes:

'If they prove unkinde, cruel or unreasonable they [the wife] ought to mollifie and amend such depravity of their humours by mildness and compliance'.

Women were expected to use their feminine attributes to re-establish a harmonious marriage, to ensure they obeyed their husbands to avoid future conflict. Frances Dolan, one of the main scholars of the criminal female in the early modern period wrote an account of what it meant to be a 'home-rebel' or a 'house-traitor'. Dolan stressed that according to early modern law, namely the laws of coverture, a woman ceased to exist as an individual. Before marriage a woman was an extension of her father until he passed her to a husband who assumed her dependency. Women were largely viewed in relation to their male counterparts and were assumed to possess no singular identity. In Dolan's words:

'The murderous wife calls into question the legal conception of a wife subsumed by her husband and largely incapable of legal or moral agency'.

According to these rules, once convicted of petty treason and sentenced to death, a murderous wife became an individual and assumed full responsibility for her treacherous deeds. Dolan continued to note how ballads, written from the perspective of the convicted, focused primarily on the brutality of the executions they faced as opposed to the facts of the crime itself. The idea of a wife planning to kill her husband was such an unnatural and devious deed that 'to imagine, let alone sympathize or identify with the frustrations of a wife' would be analogous in treachery.

For many scholars such as Vanessa McMahon and Ulinka Rublack, the possibility of escape from an unhappy marriage was a major influence that drove women to kill their husbands. Rublack argued that petty treason was a method used by women to end marriage in a time where divorce or separation were near enough impossible; 'murder often paved the way for the establishment of a new household'. A literary example of this is depicted in 'The Changeling' written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley in 1622. Beatrice-Joanne, stuck in an unrequited engagement, contracts De Flores to murder her betrothed so that she may choose another lover. In murder trials such as the aforementioned case of Katharine Hays, the actual perpetrator of the crime was often the wife's lover or friend. Marriage provided women with both economic and physical security but for some it proved to be a prison. With no legal agency, murder offered women the chance to break the shackles of matrimony and to retaliate against her oppression.

Bound by the supposed superiority of their husbands, wives were often subjected to great abuse in the name of being submissive. Prescri ptive texts, such as William Gouge's 'Domesticall Duties' 1622, published guidelines to becoming the 'perfect' wife' and how to fulfil societies expectations of female obedience. Expected to conform to the stereotypical subservient wifely figure, a wife who acted violently towards her husband, her superior, had no grounds for defence. As theoretically naturally passive creatures 'a wife was seldom depicted as casually violent; she was always portrayed as determined to kill'. The law determined that for a wife to kill her husband was so diabolical and subversive of her character that she had to have planned it as an act of revenge. Studies have shown that 'no man in Cheshire in the seventeenth century who beat his wife to death was convicted of murder' yet if a wife was merely present during the murder of her husband she was condemned. In part, this inequality of convictions is due to the novelty factor of a seemingly unfathomable crime.

When press licensing was revoked in 1695 an influx of criminal biopics appeared in London from the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary of Newgate's accounts to cheaper printed works such as pamphlets and ballads. An interest in texts regarding female criminals arose because their behaviour was completely contradictory to the supposed meekness of the female sex. The language used in prints that told of describe petty traitors adopted a sensationalist tone that intended to shock its female audience to 'deter all women [from their] traitorous attempts to rebel against and destroy their husbands'. Accounts of trials and executions of petty traitors gained a great deal of readership partially due to its paradoxical nature. That a woman could overpower and murder her husband was so far from the traditional notions of their inferiority that these texts sparked an interest disproportionate to their occurrence. J.S. Cockburn's study of the Essex Assize records 1559-1625, revealed that three quarters of victims of marital killing were women. It was far less extraordinary for a husband to accidently murder his wife thus texts regarding petty treason were in higher demand. Robert Shoemaker's essay, 'Print and the Female Voice', highlighted how women often tried to justify their crimes by accusing men for 'leading them into crime.[they were] victims of forces beyond their control'. Traditionally crime was an occurrence most commonly perpetrated by men but by the late seventeenth century the female criminal became more of a public concern.

Often in cases of spousal abuse men would not testify or even report the violence of their wives in order to avoid embarrassment. If a wife had the opportunity to challenge her subordination that meant her husband was not fulfilling his duties. Amongst the lower levels of society traditional rituals were used to humiliate men who could not control their wives. 'Charivari' publically punished a husband for his wife's transgression of gender roles in the domestic sphere. The husband of a violent wife would be paraded around the village dressed as a woman, riding backwards on a donkey as a symbol of the unnatural circumstances he had allowed himself to be in. Garthine Walker identified how, ' the women's disorderliness not the fragility of the victim's manhood was emphasised' in order to save face. It was common for men to talk of violent women as destroying the family house or honour as a way of deflecting the shame. The female murderer was most often depicted as insane in order to rationalize the violation of their social position; 'women's proneness to anger argue[s] imbecility of mind and strength of imagination'. The tendency of historians to focus on petty treason as an example of women defying social expectations merely furthers early modern ideas of female subordination. It will be the purpose of this thesis to identify masculine traits amongst female criminals in order to think of petty treason in terms of role reversal as opposed to female retaliation.

The research that will be conducted is made feasible by the extensive trial records available from the Old Bailey Online and various printed material accessible via Early English Books Online. Accounts and texts from the early modern period have been preserved and digitised on these websites making them readily available for analysis. The use of search facilities simplifies the selection of primary sources, enabling users to narrow searches according to specific criteria. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online offers a collection of not only the proceedings from 1674 to 1913 but also of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts between 1676 and 1772. The archive contains the details of over 197,000 trials and biographical details, provided by the Ordinary of Newgate, of approximately 2,500 executed criminals. Early English Books online possesses a digitised collection of over 125,000 titles starting with the first book that was published in English covering the period from 1473 to 1700. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online will offer an insight into the early modern courtroom providing evidence for statistical data to be drawn regarding the number of female petty traitors and convictions between 1650 and 1750. The Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts are instrumental to this thesis as they enable a glimpse into the minds of condemned prisoners. The printed works available at Early English Books Online will provide a more informal account of how society dealt with petty traitors. Using these sources will extend the reach of this essay and provide the basis of examination across class boundaries.

Trial accounts will form the majority of the sources used to conduct this thesis. Using these records will facilitate an understanding of how women defended themselves and what questions were asked in order to secure a verdict. The Old Bailey Proceedings are quite diverse in their content, some offering more than others. In some records the trial is merely summarised and others just present a list of given depositions. Shoemaker debated the usefulness of this type of source, highlighting the limitations of short hand accounts. He argued that trial records only present a partial account of the truth depending on what the scribe felt was important to include or omit. Despite only being presented a somewhat narrow view of trial proceedings, the records more generally provide sufficient information to get a sense of: how frequent the crime occurred; how often a conviction was secured; what motives women had for killing their husbands and what defences were offered by criminals.

The Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts are biographical records of condemned criminals created by the chaplain of Newgate prison. The Ordinary's duty was to offer spiritual guidance to prisoners awaiting execution. Alongside the Old Bailey Proceedings, the Ordinary published a personal account of executed prisoners including transcribing their final words and emotions. There is some scepticism surrounding the motives of the Ordinary who made a profit from selling these texts. Unsurprisingly the records would contain a message about God and the importance of religion in subsiding criminal behaviour. After speaking to Joyce Hodgkis the Ordinary noted:

'I found her very ignorant in Matters of Religion, tho' she said she went frequently to Church; but not being able to read, she had not that Advantage of understanding Good Things, which they have who were brought up to Reading, and to know the Principles of the Christian Religion from their Youth'.

The accounts were created in order to satisfy elite curiosity towards criminals and were presented with morals to abide by. Despite the suspicion of the Ordinary's accounts being fabricated, they are highly valuable sources as they often provided the perspective of the criminal, details that were often omitted from other forms of cheap print. The sources that will be used to carry out this research do have some limitations but will prove highly valuable in identifying events when traditional notions of gender were blurred.

The idea that women were not naturally capable of committing crimes as diabolical as petty treason dominates the current historiography. Unlike their female counterparts, men who murdered their wives had grounds for defence. The superiority of men granted them leniency in pursuit of 'taming' their wives thus historically there has been no need to explain in great detail the events of murdering one's wife. The most adopted strategy by historians has been to focus on the phenomenon of the husband murderer in attempts to create something novel. This thesis will supplement the current historiography regarding petty traitors, as it will provide an approach to studying women's criminal behaviour without relying on notions of oppression. A discourse of 'female masculinity' will hopefully bridge the gap between existing schools of thought that seek to explain female criminal behaviour using early modern linguistics and those who define women's crime as a retaliation of their subordination. The current historiography is in need of a middle ground that identifies women in a right of their own, capable of being violent regardless of how they were expected to behave. This will be achieved by a redefinition of the female petty traitor in which their crimes will be explained as merely an expression of what was deemed 'masculine' behaviour despite simply being human traits.