David John Cox - Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Shrewsbury and Around Shropshire

I would like to acknowledge the help and assistance given to me by the staff of the numerous archives, libraries and record offices visited during the course of my research. Special thanks must go to Mary McKenzie (County Archivist) and Armand De Filippo (Principal Librarian) together with all their colleagues at the Shropshire Archives and Record Centre, who provided unfailingly courteous help and advice, Birmingham Central Reference Library, Chester Archives, Keele University Library, The National Archives, Kew, University of Birmingham Library, The Queens Dragoon Guards Regimental Museum, Cardiff, and the Archives Office of Tasmania.

The majority of photographic images in the book have been taken by the author. Due permission has been sought and sources credited for those other illustrations that remain in copyright. Many thanks are given to Shropshire Archives and Record Centre for their permission to reproduce images of several items in their care.

A lawyer and his client, 1572. Authors collection

JOHN SPEEDS 1611 MAP OF SHROPSHIRE showing the location and date of cases referred to in the book

(map extract Shropshire Archives)

T he above sixteen cases demonstrate that over a period of some 800 years, foul deeds and suspicious deaths have never been absent from in and around Shrewsbury and Shropshire. Whilst certain crimes such as computer-based identity-theft or credit-card fraud are very much of their time, other misdeeds such as murder and larceny have occurred since the human race first stood upright.

I have tried throughout the book to give a flavour of the numerous crimes that have taken place in and around Shrewsbury and Shropshire and which are recorded in a wide variety of historical sources (now richly augmented by many research tools available on the internet). Researching the crimes has reinforced my awareness of the tremendous steps in both jurisprudence and detection that have been made since the thirteenth century when the first crime in this book was recorded. No longer is the defendant banned from giving evidence on oath; or is (s)he unable to obtain a qualified legal defence counsel for want of funds. Similarly, several of the foul deeds and suspicious deaths detailed in this book would undoubtedly have been solved much more quickly and accurately had they occurred today the plethora of forensic tests from fingerprinting, blood-sampling and DNA fingerprinting that have been developed throughout the twentieth century up to the present-day would have made the lives of medieval, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian crime investigators much more straightforward. Methods of punishment thankfully have also changed from the barbaric physical tortures inflicted on many medieval offenders, through a mainly retributive system to a more prison-based reformative and restorative regime.

However, it is equally apparent that whilst judicial and detective methods may have changed over the centuries, the motives for the foul deeds and murders detailed in the book have not. Humans have remained fundamentally unaltered in the eight centuries covered in this publication: greed, jealousy and cruelty are unfortunately very much still part of mankinds nature.

Researching the cases, on many occasions it has been hard not to become involved with the lives of the participants in the unfortunate events detailed. It is fairly straightforward to establish the how, what, where, and when of the facts surrounding each of the cases. It is far more difficult, if not impossible, to detect the why the implicit motives behind the carrying out of many of the foul deeds described in the book, and what drove the offenders to commit such deeds of sometimes almost unimaginable cruelty.

Some of the cases evince a sense of pity, shock and horror despite the intervening centuries; others occasion a degree of humour and sometimes even a grudging admiration for an audacious rogue who almost got away with it.

I hope that readers have experienced at least some of these feelings during their perusal of this book and that their interest in Britains fascinating and well-documented criminal justice history has been stimulated. A brief bibliography of suggested further reading is therefore printed below in the hope that others will become as fascinated and intrigued by Englands Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths as I have been during the writing of this book. Many colleges and universities offer courses on criminal justice history and as a university-based researcher and lecturer, I can recommend them highly as a source of unending interest and fascination.