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Social and economic contributions to the pattern of ‘suicide’ in south-east England, 1530–1590

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

S. J. Stevenson
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Continuity and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , August 1987 , pp. 225 - 262
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Stevenson, S. J., ‘The rise of suicide verdicts in south-east England, 1530–1590: the legal process’, Continuity and Change 2(1) (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Paradoxically, it is a characteristic of the ‘empiricist’ psycho-historical writings in English (largely by Americans), that they have, in contrast to the French ‘theoreticians’ of the Annales School, chosen to concentrate on the field of ‘life history’ rather than the form which Mazlish has described as ‘that treating of groups’, ‘group history’ or ‘“Psycho-Social History”’; Mazlish, B., ‘What is psycho-history?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971), 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tackling the notebooks of the astrologer and physician Richard Napier, Michael MacDonald has attempted to provide such superior evidence on obscure and troubled minds of the past in Mystical bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar

3 See Thirsk, J., ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales 4 (Cambridge, 1967), 1–15.Google Scholar

4 Swinscow, D., ‘Some suicide statistics, 1861–1950’, British Medical Journal (23 06 1951), 1422.Google Scholar

5 See Figure 1 (and Tables 1 a and 1 b appended to the text).

6 Only 8 per cent of Essex inquests could not be placed in any age-group through lack of information; in Norfolk this proposition fell to 6 per cent. Those inquests in both counties lacking any estimate of age were re-distributed according to the average age of those described as spinsters, servants, widows or wives - as described in Stevenson, ‘The rise of suicide verdicts…’, section III.

7 Swinscow, ‘Suicide statistics’.

8 Lee, R., ‘Estimating series of vital rates and age structures from burials: a new technique with applications to pre-industrial England’, Population Studies 28 3 (1974), 495–512.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

9 See Coale, A. J. and Demeny's, P. table ‘Family North’, at expectation of life: 40; GRR: 2.25 in Regional model life tables and stable populations (Princeton, 1966)Google Scholar. Restructuring the tables so that ages 7 + areequalto 100% of the population, the following distribution of such a population is obtained: Age-groups Males (%) Females (%) 7–24 42.9 41.0 25–44 32.9 32.7 45–64 18.6 19.6 65+ 5.6 6.6 100.0 99.9 To quote John Patten: ‘These life tables may be models based on countries which, it is suspected, resemble in type the characteristics of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Life-tables are devised from empirical data of present day populations to show typical age structures given different life expectations. For Pre-Industrial England this has been estimated at a mean of about 40 years.’ Patten, J., ‘Population distribution in Norfolk and Suffolk in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Institute of British Geographers' Transactions (1975), 47.Google Scholar

10 I can find no explanation for Greaves's belief that ‘The statistics indicate that women were more prone to commit suicide than men, with wives and widows most troubled. …’, Greaves, R. L., Society and religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), 536.Google Scholar

11 Dod, J. and Cleaver, R., A Godly forme of householde government: for the ordering of private families according to the direction of God's Word (1614)Google Scholar, cited by Kathleen Davies, M., in ‘The Sacred condition of equality - how original were Puritan doctrines of marriage?, Social History 5 (1977), 570.Google Scholar

12 See Hair, P. E. H., ‘A note on the incidence of Tudor suicide’, Local Population Studies 5 (1970), 42Google Scholar. The terminology employed by coroners in fact makes it rather difficult to distinguish wells from ponds satisfactorily and only allows accurate distinction between standing water and running. In the case of Joan Taylor, a seamstress of Walton-on-Thames, the inquest said that she drowned herself ‘… in quodom puteo anglice a well…’ [sic] (Public Record Office, King's Bench Ancient Indictments (hereafter P.R.O., K.B. 9.), 1037/131), but in the case of Matthew Awood, of Iden, Sussex, the deceased had thrown himself into‘… quendum fontem sive puteus aquae in profunditatem unius pedis et ampleus…’ (K.B. 9., 673/123). While one might conceivably have a ‘pit’ or pond one foot deep, this hardly seems an adequate description of a well.

13 P.R.O., Assi[ze] 35/13/1/31, in J. C. M. Walker, ‘Crime and capital punishment in Elizabethan Essex’. See Stevenson, ‘The rise of suicide verdicts…’, note 106.

14 P.R.O., ASSI. 35/36/T./12, ibid.

15 P.R.O., K.B. 9., 1027/66.

16 K.B. 9., 629/255. Amongst other instances of flight ending in suicide were the cases of Edward Leeman (K.B. 9., 658/409), apprenticed to a Suffolk smith; 15-year-old Mary Payne (K.B. 9., 640/322); Bartholomew Pronger, aged about 14 (K.B. 9., 668/337): and John Borowe, c. 20 years (K.B. 9., 617/186).

17 K.B. 9., 1032/178. One might wonder if servants were commonly kept from Church or if the inclusion of this statement here is intended as part of the explanation for the suicide.

18 Macfarlane, A. D. J., The family life of Ralph Josselin (Cambridge, 1970), 209–10.Google Scholar

19 Laslett, P., ‘Size and structure of the household in England over three centuries’, Population Studies 23 (1969), 219.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

20 Thomas, K. V., ‘Age and authority in early modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 12, 14–15.Google Scholar

21 These themes had been brought to England in the engravings of Wynken de Worde's ‘Death of Moriens’, in The arte or crafte to lyve welle to dye well (1505–6) and have recently become readily accessible in historical journals; see Figure 2, ‘L'agonie entre anges et demons’ (1542) in R. Chartier, ‘Les Arts de Mourir, 1450–1600’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations (hereafter Annales E.S.C.), 31 1 (1976), 58; and Brigden, S., ‘The Dyenge Creature’, in her piece ‘Religion and social obligation in early sixteenth-century London’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 John, Wilkinson, Treatise collected out of statutes of this kingdom… concerning the office and authoritie of coroners and sherifes (London, 1628).Google Scholar

23 Sprott, S. E., The English debate on suicide from Donne to Hume (Illinois, 1961).Google Scholar

24 Forbes, T. R., Chronicle from Aldgate: life and death in Shakespeare's London (New Haven, 1971), 165–70.Google Scholar

25 Cf. Radzinowicz, L., A history of English criminal law and its administration since 1750 1. (London, 1948), 195–7.Google Scholar

26 In the case of witches, similar restraints on resurrection can be seen in a photograph of a bound and nailed skeleton uncovered at St Osyth's; Essex Countryside 18 163 (1970), 36.Google Scholar

27 Schmitt, J.-C., ‘Le suicide au Moyen Age’, Annales, E.S.C., 31 1 (1976) 11–12.Google Scholar

28 P.R.O., Sta[r] C[hamber] 5/A.56/11.

29 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.40/20, membrane 3.

30 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.40/29, membrane 2.

31 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.49/9.

32 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.56/11.

33 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.58/1, m.2; A.4/33; A.34/21 (with A.8/17); A.3/34; A.22/14; A.6/37; A.53/5; A.58/36; A.19/13; A.39/4 (with A.48/25 and A.33/34); A.28/28; A.3/11 (with A.20/37); A.24/21 (with A.12/39); A.28/28; A.3/11 (with A.20/37); A.24/21 (with A.12/39) [Perse]; A.1/16; A.54/27 (with A.17/18); A.40/19, m.2; A.38/33; A.42/15 (with A.38/35); A.5/28 (with A.17/39); and A.43/16.

34 P.R.O., K.B. 9., 671/282.

35 As regards insanity or melancholy, even physicians like Timothy Bright remained unsure whether the origins of suicidal acts lay in physiological predisposition or social circumstance. See his, Treatise of melancholie, containing the causes thereof … with the phisicke cure, and spirituall consolation for such as have thereto adioyned an afflicted conscience (London, 1586).Google Scholar

36 McClure, N. E., ed., The letters of John Chamberlain 2 (Philadelphia, 1939), 223.Google Scholar

37 See above note 33. The suicide of a married woman - unlike that of a married man - did not result in the confiscation of household property for alms and in the case of a widow was frequently one-third, or less, of an estate already divided.

38 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.40/29, membrane 7 (evidence of John Bletcher, ‘clerk’, aged c. 31 years).

39 Parish register of Great Hallingbury, Essex; Essex Record Office, D/P 27/1/1, 9r.

40 See P.R.O., STAC 5/A.5/28; A./38/20 and A.19/8. In the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1628–29, Charles I 2 119, we also find listed, for example (SP 16/104), a ‘Grant to Nathan Bolt and Mary his wife, of so much of the estate of Nicholas Simondson late husband of Mary being felo de se as was not received by the Lord Almoner, nor the Earl of Cleveland being lord of the liberty’.

41 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.38/20.

42 Greaves, Richard L., Society and religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), 535.Google Scholar

43 P.R.O., STAC 5/A.49/9; (Queen's Almoner v. William Yeoland). Compare also the effects when leases reverted (K.B. 9., 665/248 & 249) or loans had to be repaid earlier than anticipated (K.B. 9., 661/271).

44 Ibid. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the worst coin remained in circulation longest, the new quickly disappearing into private hoards. Cf. Letwin, W., The origin of scientific economics, English economic thought, 1660–1776 (London, 1973)Google Scholar, chapter 1, and Usher, A. P., ed., Two Manuscripts by Charles Davenant. 1. A Memorial concerning the Coyn of England, November, 1695…, (Baltimore, 1942). Unused silver tarnishes.Google Scholar

45 Macfarlane, A. D. J., Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, a regional and comparative survey (London, 1970), 205–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 One could detrend the grain series to allow for inflation, devise some means to inflate the suicide series to compensate for the comparatively inferior administration of the 1560s and 1580s, or attempt to adjust these same series to allow for growth in the underlying population; but the basis for any such adjustments other than those for inflation would only introduce further uncertainty.

47 The price index employed was that derived from Bowden's work on the harvest-year prices of peas, oats and barley recorded at Cambridge and given in Thirsk, , ed., Agrarian history 4, 819Google Scholar. For triennial figures on cloth export from London, see Fisher, F. J., ‘Commercial trends and policy in sixteenth-century England’, Economic History Review, series 1, 10 (1940), 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Spufford, M., Contrasting communities: English villagers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Cambridge, 1975), 52.Google Scholar

49 Holderness, B. A., ‘Credit in English rural society before the nineteenth century, with special reference to the period 1650–1720’, Agricultural History Review 24 2 (1976), 97–109.Google Scholar

50 K.B. 9., 605/89; 607/196; 665/250. By contrast, there is only one possible instance of post-natal depression recorded in these inquests, when Margaret Croke, wife of George Croke, of Staines, Middlesex, ‘…iacens in lecto suo postquam paperit puerum.…’, left the house and drowned herself (K.B. 9., 600/164).

51 See Schnucker, R. V., ‘Elizabethan birth control and puritan attitudes’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975), 658–9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Another interesting case is, however, cited in Emmison, F. G., Elizabethan life: morals and the church courts (Chelmsford, 1973), 25–6Google Scholar: ‘A certain Gabriel Galvano of Leyton had misbehaved with his maidservant, and both were summoned, together with “Mistress Rooke, widow of West Ham, because she keeps the said servant of Galvano in her house being pregnant”.’ Against this entry the scribe added in a unique note, ‘Mr Cole will not have this case called, for the said Rooke kept the said maid from drowning’.

52 K.B. 9., 1021/43.

53 Two of the cases recorded occurred in Maidstone (K.B. 9., 661/263 and 646/156). Although Professor Clarkson provides no clue as to the employment of arsenic in the leather industry of the time (‘The organisation of the English leather industry’, Economic History Review, series 2, 13 (1960), 246–7)Google Scholar, it may have been easily obtainable from this source. Agnes Browne, alias Andrewes, one poison victim, was the widow of a shoemaker (K.B. 9., 646/156), and the inquest on William Westwood (661/263) specifically states that he went to the house of Richard Hawkyns, ‘shoemaker’ of Maidstone, to obtain the poison. Joan Bray of Cliffe-next-Lewes, bought her poison in Lewes - about a mile away - for ½d (K.B. 9., 657/83) and Elizabeth Shotwater ‘… inter horas decimam et undecimam ante meridiem, egressa est de domo sua… usque ad villain Hyde [Hythe, Kent]… et… cum uno denario emit de Ricardo Bate servientus de Ricardi Clerkson de Hyde…quoddam venenum vocat Rattesbane…’ (K.B. 9., 657/89).

54 Stenghel, E., Suicide and attempted suicide, 2nd ed., (Harmondsworth, 1973), 25.Google Scholar

55 Thirsk, , ed., Agrarian History 4, 46Google Scholar; for a picture of the ‘light-sheep-corn lands’, see Allison, K. J., ‘The sheep-corn husbandry of Norfolk in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Agricultural History Review 5 i (1957), 12–15.Google Scholar

56 Thirsk, , ed., Agrarian History 4 48–9.Google Scholar

57 Very few cases seem to have involved unnamed vagrants: 16 cases in all, 8 were judged accidental deaths, 8 suicides.

58 See table 4b, in Stevenson, ‘The rise of suicide verdicts…’, and Rich, E. E., ‘The population of Elizabethan England,’ Economic History Review, Series 2, 2 (1949), 254–5.Google Scholar

59 Sheail, J., ‘The distribution of taxable population and wealth in England during the early sixteenth century’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 55 (1972), 119 ff.Google Scholar

60 Kent and Surrey combined provided 35.5 per cent of the population estimated to be found in the eight counties, but 49 per cent of the surviving records of death at the minimum, and, therefore, most certain level of suicide. Assuming the observed, or adjudged, level, they provided 44.2 per cent but at the maximum level of risk only 39.7 per cent.

61 Whether this feature was related to either the custom of partible inheritance Thirsk posits as making the Kentish family a more ‘powerful agent of social control and discipline’ or to the rapid turnover of land and expulsion of small tenants under a system of ‘capitalist farming’, which is also suggested as a feature of the contemporary Kentish scene, is a matter we will have to leave open. Cf. Thirsk, , Agrarian History 4 9 and 64.Google Scholar

62 Thirsk, J., ‘Industries in the countryside’, in Fisher, F. J. (ed.), Essays in the economic and social history of Tudor and Stuart England in honour of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge, 1961), 70–88.Google Scholar

63 On the latter, see Clark, P., ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640’, Clark, and Slack, eds., Crisis and order in English towns (London, 1973), 117–63.Google Scholar

64 Evidence derived from my own impressions and conversations with Dr Terence Murphy of the University of Washington in 1977. Process of ‘State formation’ may be increasingly cited in explanation of the north-west/south-east difference in levels of criminal proceeding in England in the future however. The concept has clearly become fashionable in criminal justice history of late; see, for example, Spierenburg, R., The spectacle of suffering (Cambridge, 1984), x, 1, 55, 77–80, 177–8, 201–7, 259, n.9.Google Scholar

65 For the view that the community only stole the suicide's goods so as to defeat the prospective avarice of the Almoner and return them to his family when the coroner had departed, see MacDonald, M., ‘The inner side of wisdom: suicide in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine 7 (1977), 568, col. 2 and 569, col. 1.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

66 ‘Gardiner claimed that Hales's actions proved that Protestantism was a “doctrine of desperation”,’ MacDonald, , ‘Inner side’, 573, cols. 1–2.Google Scholar

67 Stenghel, , Suicide, 70.Google Scholar

68 Holdsworth, W., A history of English Law, 2nd ed. (London, 1923), iii, 315Google Scholar; Cf. Pollock, F. and Maitland, F., The history of English law before the time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1898), ii, 488.Google Scholar

69 Hair, , ‘A note on the incidence of Tudor suicide’, 40–41.Google Scholar

70 Cf. Abbott, L. W., Law reporting in England, 1485–1585 (London, 1973), 224–6Google Scholar; also Cobbett, W., State trials, i, 46Google Scholar, ‘Proceedings against Sir James Hales’. For the contemporary (early seventeenth-century) cultural impact of this judgement, see Rudden, B., ‘For the First Gravedigger’, Law Quarterly Review 100 (1984), 540–4.Google Scholar

71 Holdsworth, , History of English law 7 305.Google Scholar

72 See also MacDonald, ‘Inner side’, 580, who found very similar figures in his study of this subject.

73 Loades, D. M., The reign of Mary Tudor (London, 1979), 276–80Google Scholar. I am much obliged to Prof. Loades for his advice in respect of this Act.

74 Whether or not there is any effective link, it is nonetheless of interest to note (in connection with the apparent loss of much the greater part of inquests from the larger towns and cities) that it was just in these cases, cited in Section 2 of the Act (‘the Citie of London, and the Countie of Middlesexe, and… other Cities Boroughs and Townes Corporate within this Realme’) that coroners were not having their powers of binding witnesses firmly restated.

75 See Byman, S., ‘Suicide and alienation: martyrdom in Tudor England’, Psychoanalytic Review 61 3 (1974), 355–73.Google ScholarPubMed

76 P.R.O., K.B. 9. 658/190.

77 K.B. 9. 101/165.

78 K.B. 9. 610/274. On the cloth industry, see Pilgrim, J. E., ‘The rise of the “new draperies” in Essex’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal 7 (1959), 36–59.Google Scholar

79 What one must surely avoid is the temptation to indulge Schmitt's type of reasoning, e.g. that because 4 of 14 suicides where the day of the week is noted occurred on a Friday (Schmitt, ‘Le Suicide au Moyen Age’, 9.), the day of Christ's crucifixion is necessarily ‘par excellence le jour de le Mort’. Schmitt tells us, similarly, that in the case of the Spring peak in the suicide rate, this is necessarily related to the psychological impact of Lent or Easter. Whatever its strengths as a suggestion (i.e. that the suicides took place in a period of abstinence) and its other weaknesses as mode of argument, this rhetorical statement simply ignores the fact that high spring suicide rates appear as a psychological constant in both northern and southern hemispheres, Easter falling in autumn in the southern hemisphere. Cf. D. Swinscow, ‘Suicide statistics’.

80 K.B. 9, 619/125.

81 Stone, L., ‘Interpersonal violence in English society’, Past and Present 101 (1983), 22–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82 Pollock, and Maitland, , English law, ii, 488.Google Scholar

83 Cf. Hoffer, P. C. and Hull, N. E. H., Murdering mothers: infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York, 1981), 3–31.Google Scholar

84 Paul Slack mentions suicide by a prospective victim in his book The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), 21Google Scholar; but it would also be of interest to know whether the suicide of surviving relations increased in the wake of crisis mortality. Examining the timing of suicide peaks in relation to that of crisis mortality in this period would seem to provide little support for that hypothesis. Nor is there any evidence that suicide increased in the wake of an increased birthrate. Cf. Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (London, 1981), 496–7Google Scholar; and Table 2 in this text. I am obliged to Dr Schofield for his assistance.

85 See Sharpe, J. A., ‘Domestic homicide in early modern England’, Historical Journal 24 1 (1981), 29–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86 Cliff, A. D. and Ord, J. D., Spatial autocorrelation (London, 1973).Google Scholar

87 The Grantchester cases are: K.B. 9, 658/178; 1014/82; 629/282; 637/254 (3 bodies); 653/188 (2 bodies); 635/144; 1036/244; 617/181.

88 K.B. 9, 1036/244.

89 K.B. 9, 1014/82 and 635/144. Discounting many cases with the same surname, living in parishes close to each other, two other pairs of inquests were left. Two cases of hanging were recorded amongst the Willowbys/Willowbyes, in Kitchen, Hertfordshire. In the first, of April 1565 (K.B. 9, 613/258), we have John Willowby, described as son of John Willowby, senior. Might the lack of any other addition indicate that the name was not singularly ubiquitous in Hitchen? The second case involved a John Willowbye, aged 60 years ‘…vel id circiter…’, in January 1585 (K.B. 9, 662/188). Coroner William Cocke took the first inquest, George Drywood the second. From Marden, in Kent, John Fremlyn returned an inquest in June 1571, on one ‘Amauri Plumer,’ husbandman, who had left his bed and apparently drowned himself while ill (K.B. 9, 629/246). In May 1575 William Webbe returned a verdict of suicide on one Amos Plummer, labourer of Marden. Only the date of the inquest, the place, the name of the deceased, that of the coroner, the occupation of the deceased, and the valuation of goods appear in the second case. Unlike the usual cursory return that the suicide had no goods or chattels, a hasty assessment or the simple omission of such matters, the valuation in this instance was vicious and petty - including individual items of clothing and a purse (K.B. 9, 637/226). The lack of other detail and the unusual confiscation of all possessions might again be taken to suggest the same family, if this is not simply an extraordinary repetition of an inquest on the same man. Loss of records and poor administration may without doubt be responsible for several other missing pairs or groups.

90 Laing, R. D., ‘The study of family and social contexts in relation to schizophrenia’, in The politics of the family and other essays (London, 1971), 49.Google Scholar

91 For the modern figures, see West, D. J., Murder followed by suicide - an inquiry carried out for the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge (London, 1965), 153Google Scholar. Jim Sharpe writes as a result of similar findings on murder followed by suicide that this might indicate ‘marked differences between the emotional and psychological make-up of the modern Englishman and his early modern predecessor’. The implications for the family of the time might mean ‘differences in the degree of emotional demands’ being made on the institution but he nonetheless concludes that ‘the normal family relationships in the past were… basically similar to those current in twentieth-century England.’ Sharpe, , ‘Domestic homicide’, 48.Google Scholar

92 John Graunt's Natural and political observations upon the bills of mortality provides figures on those who ‘Hanged and made away with themselves’ for mid-seventeenth-century London but it is naturally difficult to provide further analysis on the basis of this limited evidence. For the proportion of surviving inquests returned from market towns; see Appendix, Table 2.

93 Sharpe, , ‘Domestic homicide’, 48.Google Scholar

94 See Coleman, D. C., ‘Labour in the English economy of the seventeenth century’, reprinted in Cams-Wilson, E. M., ed., Essays in Economic History, ii (London, 1962), 208.Google Scholar

95 Thomas, , ‘Age and Authority’, 31.Google Scholar

96 Hajnal, J., ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in Eversley, D. E. C. and Glass, D. V., eds., Population in History, essays in historical demography (London, 1985), 101–43.Google Scholar

97 Braudel, F., Capitalism and material life (London, 1973), x.Google Scholar

98 As with the case of M. MacDonald's article (cited at note 132 of Stevenson, ‘The rise of suicide verdicts…’), so also did Michael Zell's article on the situation in Elizabethan Kent (‘Suicide in pre-industrial England’, Social History 11 3 [1986], 303–17)CrossRefGoogle Scholar appear when preparation of this article for the press was at an advanced stage. Much that is said there I might agree with, save that I have tried to err much more on the side of caution in considering the impact of administrative factors and the limitations these must impose on our certain knowledge of developments in the period 1530–90. Compare, similarly, the cautions issued by John Post in this issue of Continuity and Change.