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The Haunting of Isabell Binnington: Ghosts of Murder, Texts, and Law in Restoration England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Todd Butler
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 248 - 276
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2011

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References

1 Binnington’s initial encounter is typical of such cases, all the way down to the green coats such ghosts often seem to have worn. Also typical is the oath imposed upon the ghost by Binnington. See Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 103–5Google Scholar.

2 A review of the catalog of depositions from the Northern Assizes reveals no instance in which individuals in the case are mentioned.

3 The manuscript covers three and one-quarter pages of 7.5 × 11.875-inch paper and is written in a careful italic hand. Other distinguishing elements of the manuscript will be discussed in the main text. The manuscript was purchased by the Folger in 1962 from C. Richardson Booksellers, whose catalog contained only a brief description of its contents. No other information exists as to its provenance. A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery is readily available at Early English Books Online. The Examination of Isabell Binnington, however, is not. A copy of it is available at the British Library (C.40.e.80).

4 As J. A. Sharpe notes, “the sense of the limitations of the formal records of these courts is rendered more poignant by the constant glimpses that surviving informal documents … provide of the possible variety of motives and individual case histories that lay behind prosecution.” Sharpe, J. A., “Crime and Delinquency in an Essex Parish, 1600–1640,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 90–109Google Scholar, quotation on 91.

5 Gaskill, first made this argument in “Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England,” Social History 23, no. 1 (January 1998): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The work later became part of his Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar. More generally, see Davis, Natalie Zemon, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA, 1987)Google Scholar; Sabean, David Warren, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; and Chaytor, Miranda, “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,” Gender and History 7, no. 3 (November 1995): 378–407CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Timothy Stretton has similarly argued that given the difficulties of assembling complete historical records about many crimes we should shift from identifying events to “the manner of their description.” See his Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1998), 18Google Scholar. Scholars have long remarked upon the importance of popular participation to the success of both formal and informal legal proceedings during the period, and in particular the potential dependence of the legal system upon private individuals to pursue the investigation and prosecution of crime. See, e.g., Sharpe, J. A., “The People and the Law,” in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Reay, Barry (London, 1985), 244–70Google Scholar; Herrup, Cynthia, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; and Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 250–62. The extent to which the communal processes of the law were particularly benign, however, has been questioned. See, among others, Gattrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1996), 210–21Google Scholar, esp. 213; Andy Wood, “Subordination, Solidarity, and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley,” Past and Present, no. 193 (2006): 41–72; and, most recently, Kesselring, K. J., “Felony Forfeiture and the Profits of Crime in Early Modern England,” Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 271–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I’m thankful to Prof. Kesselring for having shared with me a copy of this essay prior to its publication.

6 The corrective potential of such a reading should be obvious. In one of only two brief readings of this story that I have encountered, for example, Vanessa McMahon, who summarizes the case solely from A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery, casts Binnington as a largely passive figure, working in concert with her local JPs in “a practical approach.” See Murder in Shakespeare’s England (London, 2004), 23Google Scholar. As will become clear, my reading restores both Binnington’s agency and the combativeness that likely accompanied it.

7 Marshall, Peter, Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story (Oxford, 2007), 217Google Scholar.

8 In its record for this pamphlet the English Short-Title Catalog suggests London as a place of publication, which is perhaps a reasonable speculation but a speculation nonetheless. As Malcolm Gaskill notes, popular interest in printed accounts of murder was “inversely proportional to its incidence” (Crime and Mentalities, 206).

9 Lake, Peter, “Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Sharpe, Kevin and Lake, Peter (Stanford, CA, 1993), 257–67Google Scholar; Peter Lake with Questier, Michael, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002)Google Scholar. In an extensive reading of pamphlets depicting murdering women, however, Randall Martin has recently argued that popular print offered a much broader spectrum of opinion on such matters. See his Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

10 Calamy, Edm., The Bloody Husband, and Cruell Neighbour (London, 1653), 1Google Scholar.

11 An Exact Relation of the Barbarbous Murder (London, 1661), 1Google Scholar.

12 Sad and Bloody Newes from Yorkshire. Being A True Relation of a most Strange Barbarbous, and Cruel Murther, committed near Ferry Brigs (London, 1663), 3Google Scholar.

13 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 1r.

14 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, cap. 13; and 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, cap. 10. Langbein, John, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge, MA, 1974), 11–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cockburn, J. S., A History of English Assizes (Cambridge, 1972), xiiGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, J. A., Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750, 2nd ed. (London, 1999), 52Google Scholar.

15 The inscription also suggests that, despite its similarities, the Folger manuscript is not simply a scribal copy (however abbreviated) of the York pamphlet.

16 Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 703, 713–15Google Scholar. See also Houlbrooke, Ralph, ed., Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; and Marshall, Peter, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Handley, Sasha, Visions of an Unseen World (London, 2007), 49Google Scholar.

18 Marshall, Mother Leakey, 218.

19 Glanvill, Joseph, Saducismus Triumphatus (1689), intro. Coleman O. Parsons, facsim. (Gainsville, FL, 1966), 267Google Scholar.

20 For Henry More see, among others, Antidote to Atheism (1653); Bromhall, A Treatise of Specters (1658); and Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691).

21 Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, 23.

22 Bostridge, Ian, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 1997), 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 198 (February 2008): 40–41.

23 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 254.

24 As the author of a 1690 pamphlet account of another Yorkshire murder explained, “so certainly does the Revenge of God pursue the Abominated MURDERER that when Witnesses are wanting of the Fact, the very Ghost of the Murdered-Parties cannot rest quiet in their Graves, till they have made the Detection themselves.” See A Full and True Relation of the Examination and Confession of W. Barwick and E. Mangall, of Two Horrid Murders (London, 1690), 1Google Scholar. The most famous of such ghosts, of course, is that which informs Hamlet of his father’s murder.

25 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 233.

26 A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery, 5. The text simply maintains a small blank section at this point, which I have rendered in brackets.

27 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 1r.

28 Gladfelder, Hal, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore, 2001), 48Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 49.

30 While The Examination’s title page does note that material has been added, this notation refers only to an additional set of letters included as a separate supplement to the main text. As I detail later, this material plays a crucial role in the pamphlet’s overall argument.

31 There are at least eight occasions where the document, after noting a new date, states “this examinate sworn and examined, further saith,” suggesting the beginning of a new session. At other points the document simply notes a new date, suggesting that the event was related to the JP in the same examination as the events that precede it.

32 Though her focus lies with individual moments of speech, Garthine Walker has similarly suggested that deposition testimony is shaped by “the anticipation of how the law will act and needs to be accommodated.” See her Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), 7Google Scholar.

33 Peter Marshall notes a similar dynamic in the repeated testimony by Elizabeth Leakey regarding the ghost of Mother Leakey (Mother Leakey and the Bishop, 214).

34 East Riding Archives, parish registers PE10/2.

35 All data are from Harrison, Stephen, The History of Driffield: From Earliest Times to the Year 2000 (Pickering, 2002), 149–56Google Scholar.

36 The Borthwick Institute does contain a 1668 will for John Bennington, a grassman of Great Driffield. In it he leaves one shilling to the daughters of “my brother William Bennington.” The will otherwise offers little connection to the Binningtons (or perhaps Benningtons) of this story.

37 This is the last piece of significant information in A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery.

38 In terms of the examination texts themselves these are essentially the same point—the difference stems from the fact that The Examination of Isabell Binnington proceeds much further into October.

39 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 11; A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery, 6, emphasis mine.

40 A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery, 6.

41 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. lv.

42 The historical literature on the images and social representation of women in crime is extensive. For a representative sample, see Dolan, Frances, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1994)Google Scholar; Clark, Sandra, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England. Particular attention should also be paid to Randall Martin’s Women, Murder, and Equity, which provides an especially detailed analysis of the bulk of this literature.

43 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 14.

44 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 208. Matthew Stretton has similarly noted that in early modern England, litigation “was a combative act performed in public before an audience of lawyers, judges and witnesses and set down in ink by scribes” (Stretton, Waging Law, 45). Since they were taking the first step in possibly initiating such combat, deponents would likely be particularly attentive to their construction and reception.

45 A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery, 4.

46 Ibid., 5.

47 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 1r.

48 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 12–13.

49 Griffiths, Paul, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008), 181–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Griffiths centers his argument on the need to identify suspects rather than victims, but I think the same principle holds.

50 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 13.

51 Ibid.

52 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 2r.

53 Lambarde, William, Eirenarcha, or Of the Office of the Justices of Peace (London, 1581), 57Google Scholar. William Perkins would similarly argue that “magistrates in towns and corporations carry the sword for the maintenance of peace and civic order,” but that a magistrate also “beares the sword specially for the good of men’s souls.” Quoted in Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 215. Local divines, of course, had long held judicial functions as well, especially through church courts. In A Priest to the Temple, George Herbert explains that a country parson must also be a sort of lawyer among his parishoners, and thus “to this end, he hath gotten to himself some insight in things ordinarily incident and controverted, by experience, and by reading some initiatory treatises in the Law, with Dalton’s Justice of Peace, and the Abridgements of the Statutes.” Herbert, George, A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life, in The Country Parson, the Temple, ed. Wall, John (New York, 1981), 87Google Scholar.

54 Lambarde, Eirenarcha, 311.

55 Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 241.

56 The Wonder of this Age: Or, God’s Miraculous Revenge Against Murder (London, 1678), 5Google Scholar.

57 Strange and wonderfull News from Lincolnshire (London, 1679)Google Scholar and A Full and True Relation of the Examination and Confession of W. Barwick and E. Mangall.

58 Handley, Visions of an Unseen World, 65.

59 Malcolm Gaskill, by contrast, emphasizes “the apparent willingness of magistrates and coroners to record fictionalized narratives,” suggesting that these magistrates “accepted their validity, and at times possibly even colluded in their composition” (Gaskill, “Reporting Murder,” 28).

60 Sir Geoffrey Gilbert, The Law of Evidence (1756). Quoted in Shapiro, Barbara, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 182Google Scholar.

61 Dolan, Frances, “Hermione’s Ghost: Catholicism, the Feminine, and the Undead,” in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Callaghan, Dympna (New York, 2007), 213–37Google Scholar. See also Stallybrass, Peter, “Hauntings: The Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage,” in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, ed. Finucci, Valeria and Brownlee, Kevin (Durham, NC, 2001), 287–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, esp. 265–308.

63 As Marshall notes, “more than any other manifestation of popular religious culture, belief in ghosts challenged the Protestant maxims that the dead had no interest in the affairs of the living, and the living no role to play in securing the happiness of the deceased” (ibid., 234).

64 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 18.

65 Ibid.

66 “Mr Crompton wished her / to aske it what religion it was of and she asked it, whether it / was for King or Parlament, ye said Mr Crompton bad her aske it / whethere it whether it was a papist, a quaquer, or a protestant, it said a protestant.” Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 2r. On the Protestant insistence that only hell and heaven existed to receive the dead, see Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 189–94.

67 Dolan, “Hermione’s Ghost,” 213.

68 Gallagher, Catherine and Greenblatt, Stephen, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 141Google Scholar.

69 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 2r. The York pamphlet records nearly the same phrase: “unless the Country Majestrates write in secret” (The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 15).

70 There are bits of tantalizingly equivocal evidence that suggest that this conspiracy might have in fact existed. A review of the Database of Court Officers (DCO), an extensive listing of court officers compiled by Sir John Sainty and Robert Bucholz, reveals two men who in varying degrees fit the conspirators’ profile. On 27 November 1661, Robert Jenkins, who had previously been clerk of the woodyard, became clerk of the bakehouse, while on 20 April 1671, Phillip Jenkins became a page of the cellar. The first Jenkins, the bakehouse clerk, fits the dateline comfortably well, and though “steward” generally designated one specific household officer (the Lord Steward), in more general usage the term might signify any household officer who, in a position of trust, controlled expenditures and servants, often relating to catering or the table (OED, online edition, first definition). Except for the date—which is of course problematic—the second Jenkins, the page, fits exactly the position of “a Page but not a foote page.” Though it might have been possible for Phillip Jenkins to have served as an unremunerated servant, the nine-year time gap between the manuscript and his appointment is difficult to accommodate. I’m grateful to Prof. Bucholz for his conversation and advice on these data. The searchable DCO is a larger, more accurate, and more complete version of Sainty’s and Bucholz’s two-volume Officials of the Royal Household, 1660–1837 (London, 1997–98)Google Scholar. It can be found at http://www.luc.edu/depts/history/bucholz/DCO/index.html.

71 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 16. The pamphlet records at least one, if not two, examinations prior to this date where, if the manuscript date is correct, Binnington could have revealed the plot but apparently did not do so.

72 Epstein, William, “Judge David Jenkins and the Great Civil War,” Journal of Legal History 3, no. 3 (December 1982): 187–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Contemporary accounts suggest that in the aftermath of the Restoration Jenkins would have been made a judge at Westminster had he been willing to pay for the position. Instead, he seems simply to have retired to his country estate, which had previously been sequestered during the war. See Brooks, Christopher, “Jenkins, David (1582–1663),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online ed., 2007)Google Scholar, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14726.

74 On radicalism in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, see Greaves, Richard, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

75 Keeble, N. H., The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 At the very least, they were certainly not out of the ordinary. In October 1662 the informer Peter Crabb, for example, reported on an assassination plot against Charles II to be pursued by “men disguised in plush jackets with feathery plumes” (Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, 111).

77 Herrup, The Common Peace, 168. Horse theft was made nonclergyable by 37 Hen. VIII, c. 8, s. 2 (1545).

78 Ibid. Also see Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order, 160–96.

79 The accusation of horse theft, however haphazard its introduction seems, also powerfully alters the construction of Burton and her crime, even more so than the manuscript’s lurid depiction of her argument and murder of Eliot. No longer can the murder be considered a crime of passion or perhaps even manslaughter. Rather, Burton has now been subsumed into a criminal category defined precisely by the deliberate and repeated violation of the law for personal gain. Horse thieves were viewed as likely recidivists whose criminal tendencies were unlikely to ever be ameliorated. Herrup’s data show that 94 percent of individuals confessing to horse theft were executed, higher than murder (65 percent) and even infanticide (88 percent). See Herrup, The Common Peace, 168.

80 Hopper, Andrew James, “‘Fitted for Desperation’: Honour and Treachery in Parliament’s Yorkshire Command, 1642–1643,” History 86, no. 2 (2002): 138–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Ibid., 145–46.

82 On the intersection of honor and tradition for side-changers during the Civil War, see Hopper, Andrew James, “The Self-Fashioning of Gentry Turncoats during the English Civil Wars,” Journal of British Studies 49 (April 2010): 236–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The case of the Hothams is specifically explored on pages 253–56.

83 Ross, Frederick, Legendary Yorkshire (Hull, 1892), 176–94Google Scholar. Ross suggests that the story is a conflation with or retelling of a story of a twelfth-century nun at the abbey who upon being discovered to be pregnant was imprisoned and left to die once her baby was born. This tale is occasionally referenced in early modern anti-Catholic polemics, suggesting that at least its original elements would have been available to people during the period. See John Bale, The first two partes of the actes or vnchast examples of the Englysh votaryes (1551), lxxxiij–lxxxix; and Thomas Beard, A retractiue from the Romish religion (1618), 20.

84 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 2v.

85 Of course, the occurrences may be a scribal addition designed to increase the believability of the story, but as they are mentioned without any commentary and within the general flow of the narrative that seems less likely.

86 Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, 46.

87 The two woodcuts are presumably meant to represent either Eliot and Binnington or Eliot and Burton, though this is less likely given the general absence of commentary on the female image.

88 Withington, Philip, “Urban Political Culture in Later Seventeenth-Century England: York, 1649–1688” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.

89 Ibid., 184.

90 Ibid., 223.

91 Ibid., 143.

92 Broad’s first imprint in York is dated 26 September 1644. See Sessions, William K., Buckley and Broad, White and Way (York, 1986), 159Google Scholar.

93 Ibid., 160–61.

94 Ibid., 218. Buckley died in 1680, which also seems to have been the last year Alice Broad was an active printer. Her business subsequently passed to John White, who had married Broad’s daughter. Broad and White produced one dual imprint, Poems upon the Death of the Lady Marchioness of Winchester (1680), before the business became fully White’s.

95 “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and a diadem. / I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. / I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out. / And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth” (KJV). Bradley also reads John 5 as an allegory in which the baths where Christ heals a leper represent courts of law. See Bradley, Thomas, A Sermon Preached in the Minster at Yorke (York, 1663), 21Google Scholar.

96 Ibid., 30.

97 Ibid., 7. Bradley offered Moses as Biblical example of the harried magistrate.

98 Ibid., 33. Bradley’s primary reference points are chaps. 3 (the search for and punishment of the naked Adam and Eve), 4 (Cain and Abel), and 19 (Lot and Sodom).

99 Ibid., 35.

100 Walker, Crime and Gender, 215.

101 Forster, G. C. F., “County Government in Yorkshire during the Interregnum,” Northern History 12 (1976): 101–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 The pamphlet’s examination transcript does include near its close a brief account of another murder by Burton committed upon one Gilead Gowge in the same room. This event is not mentioned in either A Strange and Wonderfull Discovery or the Folger manuscript, and one might speculate that Binnington offered it in a further attempt to magnify the importance of the case.

103 The Examination of Isabell Binnington, 17. While the letter from the Rudston pastor is not dated, it must have arrived sometime prior to the 25 September examination that recounts Binnington’s mistake. In his letter the pastor notes that Crompton’s handwritten query arrived just after morning prayer, allowing the pastor to make a thorough canvass of the community. One might wonder whether the investigation by a pastor following morning prayer might have served as a counter to the ghost’s demands that it be prayed for as a wandering soul.

104 Ibid., 19–20.

105 Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus, 404.

106 Bradley, A Sermon, 35.

107 Fish, Stanley, “Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in Law and Literature,” in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, NC, 1989), 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Griffiths, Lost Londons, 139.

109 These differences go largely unremarked upon by Handley, who offers a very brief (and the only) reading of both printed texts I have found, and who also leaves out any mention of the assassination plot (Visions of an Unseen World, 70).

110 Ong, Walter, “Writing Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Baumann, Gerd (Oxford, 1986), 38Google Scholar.

111 G. C. F. Forster, The East Riding Justices of the Peace in the Seventeenth Century, East Yorkshire Local History Series no. 30 (York, 1973), 28.

112 Folger MS X.d.442, fol. 2v. Both inscriptions are in period hand.

113 On the slow decline of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ghost beliefs into folklore, see Marshall, Mother Leakey, 250–60.