James Moore - The Tudor Murder Files

What was murder?

Of all the felonies murder is the most heinous so wrote the Elizabethan legal expert Sir Edward Coke. His contemporary, the writer Anthony Munday, branded it an abhominable offence in the sight of God and Man. This did not mean that the Tudors thought that murder was the worst crime; that position was reserved for treason, which as well as including direct attempts to overthrow the monarch could even include counterfeiting. Felonies were defined as serious crimes where the punishment was usually death. In Tudor England, it was not only murder or treason that could see you executed you could equally be hanged for offences such as rape or robbery.

By the 1500s it was established that murder was something carried out furtively with some form of premeditation. In The Boke of Justyces of Peas, published in 1510, murder was described as where a man by malice pre-pensed lies in wait to slay a man and according to that malicious intent and purpose he slays him so that he who is slain makes no defence.

During the course of the sixteenth century, English law began to define the boundaries of murder more clearly. Someone who was an accessory to a murder, or who instigated one, became equally culpable even though they hadnt wielded a weapon. Beating a person or making someone else do so could be murder if the victim then died of their injuries. If a murderer planned to kill someone but happened to kill someone other than their intended target, it could still be murder. And, if a group set out with the intent to kill, they could all be tried for murder, even though they might not have committed the act themselves.

Murder was made distinct from manslaughter under the Tudors, with the latter defined as a death that occurred as a result of chance medley, essentially in a hot-blooded affray. The line between manslaughter and murder remained muddied, particularly in the case of sudden, apparently unpremeditated murders, during theft for instance. The penalty for manslaughter could still be death but the crime rarely ended in a hanging. When the playwright Ben Jonson killed actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in 1598, he was tried for manslaughter and escaped execution.

Infanticide, the killing of newborn babies, had historically been dealt with by the separate ecclesiastical courts, but from the Tudor period, as worries grew about its prevalence, secular courts became involved. It filled Tudor commentators with horror. One pamphlet told of a maid delivered of a sweet and tender infant but casting all motherly and natural affection from her buryed the same alive. Infanticide carried the death penalty, but prosecutions were few as proof was needed that the baby had been born alive.