Dangerous Familiars by Frances E. Dolan

Author:Frances E. Dolan [Dolan, Frances E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801481345
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1994-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legal Constructions of Infanticide

In England prior to Elizabeth I’s reign, neonatal infanticide was dealt with primarily by the church courts, which could assign penances but not capital punishments.14 Thus, infanticide was not considered homicide in this period, and it did not result in execution for the convicted.15 Although “coroners were charged with the examination of all corpses, and an inquest into the cause of death of an infant could lead to an indictment for homicide in the king’s courts,” infanticide cases rarely appeared in the secular courts and rarely resulted in convictions.16 In addition, surviving records of infanticide in the Middle Ages, from penitentials to church court records, suggest that this crime was not yet associated only with women or with illegitimate children.

As the regulation of personal conduct shifted from the church courts to the secular courts, infanticide came under secular control. Increasingly rigorous legislation against infanticide was interwoven with legislation controlling the poor and the sexually incontinent and linking the two.17 In the secular courts, infanticide was treated as homicide and thus as a capital offense. Although the murder of children older than a few hours or days was not distinct from other forms of homicide in terms of how it was punished, the statutes increasingly associated the murder of newborns with social and sexual disorder, singling it out as an important target of regulation. In this process, statutes under Elizabeth and James (Acts 18 Eliz. c. 3 [1575/76] and 7 Jac. 1 c. 4 [1609]) that attempted to control the rates of illegitimacy and to hold parents responsible for supporting bastards played an important role. According to the first statute, parents who could not support their bastard infants could be imprisoned in the House of Correction.18 The later law, which focuses on the mothers of bastards, connecting them with “rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and other lewd and idle persons,” empowers magistrates to set unwed mothers “on work” or to imprison them indefinitely for repeat offenses. Both statutes thus focus on bastards “which may be chargeable to the Parish.”19

In trying to control one form of social disorder, this legislation may have produced another. Hoffer and Hull argue that these poor laws so fiercely punished the parents of illegitimate children, especially mothers, that they might even have motivated infanticide: “With the same force that the poor law urged magistrates to ferret out bastardy among the poor and punish it severely, the law counselled the poor to conceal bastardy pregnancy and perhaps to murder their bastard newborns.”20 Probably because of both increased rates of infanticide and increased vigilance in hunting down the mothers of bastards and the indigent, after the poor law [1576], indictments for infanticide increased 225 percent.21 Later in the seventeenth century, legislation about bastardy and other forms of sexual irregularity (for example, the short-lived 1650 act making adultery and incest felonies) may have continued to prompt violent forms of concealment.

Because of the increase in indictments for infanticide following the poor laws, and the concomitant interest in regulating the

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