‘For Publick Satisfaction’

Chapter 5 turns to the ways in which killings became ‘public’ in the sense of being made widely known, and how that contributed to making homicide public in the sense of being seen as an offence against a community. It examines public executions, the advent of printing—including both the new genre of the murder pamphlet and legal printing more generally—and the rise of the commercial stage. It examines the ways in which these discussions and displays helped inculcate a message that vengeance ought to be left to law, a public rather than private matter.

‘In Corona Populi’

Chapter 2 examines the coroner’s inquest, asking how homicides become known and categorized, and how this changed over the period. Coroners held an office that dated from the late twelfth century, but one freshly charged from around 1487, when statutes sought to press the coroners to action through fees and fines. The coroners’ determinations of the nature of a sudden death, in early years, focused on the financial incidents owed to the king. Over time, financial interests in a killing became more diffuse and the king’s interests became more expansively understood. The active intervention of the Privy Council and the Court of Star Chamber helped police the efforts of inquests. The mix of lay participation and central oversight gave the early modern inquest a special flavour. Coroners’ inquests came to be seen as serving not just the king’s interest and the king’s peace, but something conceived as public justice.

Introduction

This chapter surveys the existing scholarship on the declining incidence of homicide and on the changing legal definitions of murder and manslaughter in early modern England, adds to it the results of new research on both subjects, and explains why we ought to view these two changes alongside each other and as linked. It explains, too, the ways in which homicide might beneficially be viewed through a political lens, and sets out the argument that homicide became, in these years, increasingly ‘public’. That is, people came to see homicide increasingly as an offence not just against individuals and their kin, but also against a ‘king’s peace’ that was in turn being reconceptualized as belonging to a bigger, broader community.

Conclusion

The conclusion sums up ways in which the manslaughter verdict became a useful mechanism for criminalizing homicide, or making murder public, and thus how it might have contributed to the declining incidence of homicide in the period. It surveys the responses to a number of killings by elite men at the end of the period, and how these responses show signs of the broader changes under discussion in the book. It ends with a brief summary of the political aspects of homicide and its prosecution, and addresses how talk of murder as an offence against a collectivity beyond king and kin both drew upon broad participation and served to exclude some people from law’s protections.

‘An Image of Deadly Feud’

Chapter 3 turns to the history of private satisfaction-seeking, or feuding, and focuses on compensation for homicide. It shows that payments continued longer than we might have thought. When such compensation served as a means to bypass legal sanctions, it hindered the successful imposition of the king’s peace, let alone any emerging notion of a public peace. Mediated through the ancient mechanism of the appeal, however, compensation continued into the sixteenth century and beyond, thanks in part to the needs and actions of victims’ widows. But appeals did decline over the early modern period. Here, too, a statute of 1487 played a part, as did the uses judges made of the new manslaughter verdict. Judges and others derided appeals as ‘suits of revenge’, tainted by association with the feud and an approach to peace-making and satisfaction-seeking that had less and less legitimacy as public justice came to supersede private interests.

‘That Saucy Paradox’

Chapter 4 looks at the duel as envisioned when it first appeared in late sixteenth-century England. Seen as an inherently private, unauthorized quest for revenge fought by elite men, the duel prompted responses from King James VI and I that some common law advocates in time came to see as problematic. The chapter surveys the history of duelling in practice and as an idea. It argues that the abstraction of the duel as a special kind of fight by men of special status helped in the creation of stronger statements of the supremacy of the king’s peace and public justice over private interests, in part by doing so in ways that many elite men found useful or at least not unduly threatening.