1. Shakespeare’s London 4: Crime and Punishment
Jane Stevenson
Campion Hall

3. Petty crime
William Smith of Ewell stole four towels (10d) in April A week later he made off with a pewter candlestick and dish (4d each). Twenty years earlier, John Forde had made off with a pair of sheets (4d), a shirt (3d), a table- napkin (2d) and two aprons (2d). This sounds like a spread of washing hung out to dry. Autolycus in The Winter's Tale: 'The white sheet bleaching on the hedge With hey, the sweet birds, O, how they sing! Doth set my pugging teeth on edge, For a quart of ale is a dish for a king’. Forde’s haul would have bought him about 20 quarts, if he'd found a fence willing to turn it into cash at the market rate. Clothing was by far the most commonly reported item in thefts. A reminder of how much human labour it took to produce even a napkin.

4. Begging and vagrancy: criminal offences
From the Court Book of Bridewell: ‘Frances Palmer, a vagrant sent in by Mr. Dale's warrant out Southwark, having two children begotten and born in whoredom, says that one Thomas Wood, servant with Sir Edward Wotton, is the father of them, and the place where she was delivered was openly in the street, two or three doors off from the Cross Keys [public house] and they died and were buried in Allhallows parish in Gracious [Gracechurch] Street, and she was after her delivery taken into the Cross Keys. Ordered to be punished and delivered [from Bridewell].
woodcut-16th-century-gentleman- giving-alms-to-beggar html

5. The unlucky
‘Bridewell’s Court Books leave no doubt that by 1600, London’s streets were filled with vagrant young men. They begged; sold ballads, brooms, and pamphlets; shined shoes; and hung around the streets, shops, and market stalls. They were caught stealing from shops and stalls, from the purses and pockets of passers-by; taking lead from roofs, including St. Paul's; and being idle and ‘masterless’. Persons in need and out of work through no fault of their own were ‘packte up and punnyshed alyke in Brydewell with roges, beggers, strompets and pylfering theves.’ They lost their good name: ‘the very name of Brydewell is in the eares of the people so odyous that it kylleth the creadit for ever’

6. London hazards
The crowded nave of St Paul’s Cathedral was a favourite with pickpockets and thieves, where innocent sightseers mixed with prostitutes, and servants looking for work rubbed shoulders with prosperous merchants. A visitor up from the country might be accosted by a ‘whipjack’ with a sad story of destitution after shipwreck, or a woman ‘demander for glimmer’ begging because she’d been burned out of house and home. Just keep walking, pay no attention. If you hear someone shout ‘look to your purses’, remember, he just wants to see where you keep your purse when you automatically clutch your pocket. There was a training school for young thieves near Billingsgate, where graduates could earn the title of ‘public foister’ or ‘judicial nipper’ once they could rob a purse or a pocket without being detected. Which is why a lady kept her purse hanging underneath her skirt, accessed via a slit called a placket.

7. Scams and deceptions of Elizabethan criminals
dekker-1608

8. Professional crime
Animals come up a lot. Horses were worth anything from £1 to £10; cattle £1 or £2 apiece; lambs were 2/6d, and sheep about twice as much. The background to animal theft is not very clear, but it was evidently something much more organised than the traditional picture of a hungry labourer singling out a sheep from the flock and trying to hide and cook the carcase. The haul on a single occasion could be very large. Henry Denman of Southwark was responsible for the theft of 49 sheep from Ewell on one day in 1584, along with his accomplice, a butcher. You can't secretly make away with four dozen sheep; he must have hijacked a flock being driven legitimately to London, unless the prosecution is simply a cover for a civil case, and Denman had contracted to buy the sheep and then defaulted on payment. Court records don’t tell you everything.

9. Justice
Twice a year, in every county town, the judges arrived, riding on fine horses, richly dressed in ermine and scarlet. They came with the power of life and death to punish offenders against the peace of the realm. Assizes tried the most serious crimes in England from the late Middle Ages up until 1972, when they were replaced by the Crown Court. Pairs of judges were sent round the country, each having a circuit to cover; Surrey lay in the Home Circuit, which has the earliest surviving set of indictments, listing details of people before the court, the crimes of which they stood accused, and what happened to them. Two calendars of these have been published, covering the reigns of Elizabeth and James I ( )
thew_Hale_(jurist)#/media/File:P ortrait_of_Sir_Matthew_Hale_Kt.j pg

10. A constable or night-watchman
london-cries/ html

11. Justice in action according to Shakespeare: the constable Dogberry and Verges, his  compartner 
Enter Dogberry and Verges with the Watch Dogberry: Are you good men and true? Verges: Yea, or else it were pity but they should suffer salvation, body and soul. Dogberry: Nay, that were a punishment too good for them, if they should have any allegiance in them, being chosen for the Prince’s watch. Verges: Well, give them their charge, neighbor Dogberry. Dogberry: First, who think you the most desartless man to be constable? First Watchman: Hugh Otecake, sir, or George Seacole, for they can write and read. … Dogberry to Seacole: You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch; therefore bear you the lantern. This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince’s name. (Much Ado about Nothing Act III, scene 3)

12. ‘The Poor Prisoners’: imprisonment for debt
‘The Lawyers they go ruffling in their silks, velvets, and chains of gold … it grieveth me (walking in the streets) [to hear] the pitiful cries and miserable complaints of poor prisoners in durance for debt and like so to continue all their live, destitute of liberty, meat, drink …. lying in filthy straw.’ Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses [We] most humbly beseech your good worship, we the miserable multitude of very poor and distressed prisoners in the hole of Wood Street Competer, in number 50 poor men, or thereabouts, lying upon the bare boards, still languishing in great need, cold and misery …. and hunger-starved to death….’ Men walked about London begging for ‘food for the poor prisoners’ as an act of charity: prison warders had no duty of care.

13. Stocks
too-brutal-the-big-interview-jon-ronson-part-two/ punishment-for-crime-in-english-village html

14. The pillory

15. Humiliated (for heresy) by being made to ride facing backwards
englabd

16. Whipped through the streets

17. Mutilation: appropriate response to sedition?
John Stubbs was profoundly opposed to Elizabeth’s proposed marriage with the Duc d’ Alençon, and wrote a critical pamphlet, The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf. On 27th September 1579 a royal proclamation was issued prohibiting the circulation of the book. On 13th October Stubbs, Hugh Singleton (the printer), and William Page (who had been involved in the distribution of the pamphlet) were arrested. Elizabeth wanted to be immediately executed by royal prerogative but eventually agreed to their trial for felony. The jury refused to convict, and they were then charged with conspiring to excite sedition. William Camden writes in The History of Queen Elizabeth (1617): ‘Stubbs and Page had their right hands cut off with a cleaver, driven through the wrist by the force of a mallet, upon a scaffold in the market-place at Westminster... I remember that Stubbs, after his right hand was cut off, took off his hat with his left, and said with a loud voice, 'God Save the Queen'; the crowd standing about was deeply silent: either out of horror at this new punishment; or else out of sadness.’

18. On 21st August 1553, only weeks after the accession of Mary Tudor, John Daye, parson of St Ethelburga’s church in Bishopsgate Street, together with another man, a surgeon, had their ears nailed to the pillory in Cheapside, though after three hours ‘the nayles were pulled out with a payre of pinsers and they were had to prison again’. Daye’s crime had been ‘seditious words speaking of the Queen’s highnes’.

19. Peine forte et dure

20. Hanging: the normal form of execution
elizabethan-england

21. Crimes carrying the death penalty: normally hanging
Murder and manslaughter Buggery and sodomy Rape Felony Treason and deserting the field of battle Highway robbery and piracy Stealing hawks Witchcraft and heresy The letting out of ponds.
09/03/30/tudor-justice-the-horrors- of-execution/

22. Tyburn
rn.jpg

23. Execution Dock
Wapping was the place where nautical justice was seen and put on display, in order to warn others of the omnipotence of the English Admiralty. A representative of the Lord Admiral led the condemned to the gallows, which was out in the Thames, at low tide. and their bodies remained on public display, often for three tides. John Stow, in his Survey of London, says its full name is Wapping-in-the-Wose (Wose = ooze/mud), and adds that it was ‘ the usual place of execution for hanging of Pirats & Sea Rovers’. ‘For though Pyrates exempted be From fatall Tyburne’s withere’d tree, They have an Harbour to arrive Call’d Wapping, where as ill they thrive As those that ride up Holbourne Hill, And at the Gallows make their Will’ Samuel Rowlands, The Knave of Harts (1612)
media/File:Rocque_x1746.jpg

24. Clinton Atkinson; Elizabethan pirate
Clinton had a career as both a pirate and as a privateer. In November, 1580, he was arrested for piracy and imprisoned in Exeter jail in Devon. He tried to negotiate a pardon but then managed to escape. By 1582 he was operating as a privateer attacking Spanish shipping, but by 1583, he was a pirate. At his arrest with three others in 1583 he was tortured in The Tower. Along with eight other pirates, he was found guilty and condemned to death. They were hung on the shoreline between low and high tide marks at Wapping on 30 August Their bodies were left on public display for three tides. Their bodies were smeared with pitch and gibbetted as a warning to others. Stowe: ‘Atkinson had before given his murrey velvet dublet with great gold buttons, and his like coloured venetians laid with great gold lace (apparell too sumptuous for sea rovers) which he had worne at the seas, (and wherein he was brought up prisoner from Corfe castell in the ysle of Porbecke to London) unto such friends as pleased him’.
s-stage-and-sea

25. Popular literature
Anonymous, Clinton, Purser & Arnold, to their countreymen wheresoeuer. Wherein is described by their own hands their vnfeigned penitence for their offences past: their patience in welcoming their death, & their duetiful minds towardes her most excellent Maiestie, London, John Wolfe, 1583 Thomas Heywood, William Rowley, A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of the two most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton; who lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth, London, John Oakes, 1639 (the source of the Wapping execution woodcut)

26. The murder of Arden of Faversham

27. The true life drama Arden of Faversham was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 3 April 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White. It depicts the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife Alice Arden and her lover, and their subsequent discovery and punishment. The play is notable as perhaps the earliest surviving example of domestic tragedy in English
en_of_Faversham#/media/File:Ar den_of_Faversham_first_quarto_t itle_page.jpg

28. Petit treason
An eyewitness description of executing a woman by burning from 1662: ‘On the 1st of June we saw a young woman, who had stabbed her husband to death with a tobacco pipe, being burned alive at the stake at Smithfield. She was put with her feet into a sawn- through tar barrel, and made fast behind to the stake with an iron chain under her arms and round her breast. A clergyman spoke to her for a long time and reproved her, and said the prayer. Then faggots were piled up against her body, and one laid on her head, and these were covered with rushes, and finally set alight with a torch, first at the back, and soon as it was ablaze all round, with the hangman poking the fire with a long rod with an iron hook on it. Nobody could see whether she had any gunpowder round her, neither was she strangled nor otherwise. Journal of William Schellingks
Alice Arden was executed by burning at the stake, because the murder of a husband counted as petit treason, an offence under the common law of England the betrayal (including murder) of a superior by a subordinate. The element of betrayal is the reason that this crime was considered worse than an ordinary murder; medieval and post- medieval society rested on a framework in which each person had his or her appointed place and such murders were seen as threatening this framework. On 1 March 1590, ‘a wench was burned in St George’s Field … for poisoning of her mistress and others’.

29. Religious dissenters: burning for heresy
1572: ‘two Dutchmen anabaptists were burnt in Smithfield who died in great horror with roaring and crying’. book-of-kings-queens-is-now-on-sale/

30. Puritans under Elizabeth
John Udall, formerly a controversial puritan preacher at Kingston on Thames, had died near the end of 1592 in London’s Marshalsea prison after two and a half years of imprisonment. When James arrived in London in 1603, the first of his English subjects he supposedly asked about was Udall: hearing his fate, James exclaimed, ‘By my soul, then the greatest scholar in Europe’s dead’. Udall, a superlative Hebraist, had been tried and convicted by the English Crown under the charge of writing seditious polemical tracts as well as for his suspected part in the Martin Marprelate writings. In 1586, he was first suspended from, and then deprived of, his curacy at Kingston for failing to subscribe to new articles designed by Archbishop Whitgift to identify and remove puritan preachers. He was imprisoned in 1590 and remained in prison until his death.

31. Catholics
‘Be it known to you that we have made a league … cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood.’ Edmund Campion
bliodyssey/ /

32. Persecution of Catholics
7146/

33. The Scavenger’s Daughter
invented during the reign of Henry VIII by the Lieutenant of the Tower of London Leonard Skevington, it was an a frame upon which the victim would be bound before it was pulled tightly together forcing his head down and knees up thereby compressing the body causing him to bleed from both ears and nose.
72_869-e2bn.html

34. Torture of Cuthbert Simpson

35. Effective deterrent?
At his execution in 1606, Henry Garnet prayed at the base of the ladder, then climbed it. He ignored a Protestant minister who came forward, replying to an objectionable member of the audience that he ‘ever meant to die a true but perfect Catholic’. Bishop Overal protested that ‘we are all Catholics’, although Garnet disagreed with this. He once again said his prayers, and was then thrown off the ladder. Before the executioner could cut him down alive, many in the crowd pulled on his legs, and as a result, Garnet did not suffer the remainder of his grim sentence. There was no applause when the executioner held Garnet's heart aloft and said the traditional words, ‘Behold the heart of a traitor’. St John Ogilvie’s last act, as he stood on a public scaffold in Glasgow in 1615, was to throw his rosary into the crowd. By chance, it hit a Hungarian Calvinist called John Eckersdorff on the chest, and so he caught it; but ‘there was however such a rush and crush of the Catholics to get hold of it that unless I wished to run the risk of being trodden down, I had to cast it from me’. Robert Southwell did the same at Tyburn in 1595, and his rosary, again, was kept by a sympathiser.

36. Luisa de Carvajal’s mission to rescue holy bodies (1612)
‘They were dug up on the third night after they had been hung, drawn and quartered and buried to a depth of a man’s height, with two huge thieves thrown on top of them like cattle, as well as a large amount of earth […]. With there only being about four hours of nighttime, and not very dark at that, they found it difficult to work without being seen […]. At almost five o’clock our servant arrived and asked for a coach and two riders to fetch the holy relics, as they were lying about a mile from the pit among some hedges and scrub […]. My companions and I received them in the entrance hall of the house in procession with a cross and burning candles.’
s-Heroes/st-thomas-garnet.html

37. ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church
She joined priests in their cells for literal last suppers at which she proffered resilient spirituality, good humour and pear tarts. On 16 April 1611, she described to Don Pedro de Zuniga her personal encounters with the martyrs Thomas Somers and John Roberts, executed on 10 December 1610, and her subsequent acquisition of their remains:
‘I attended to them as best I could before their deaths. When they took them off to be sentenced, Father Roberts was trembling so much that he could barely tie his shoelaces or button the sleeve of his jacket. He said to me, ‘See how I tremble’ so I replied that he reminded me of the Great Captain, who used to tremble greatly when putting on his armour and would say that his flesh was afraid of his heart. He laughed and lowered his head, as if thanking me for the compliment. As many as could fit sat down to supper [in prison], which was more than twenty, and only two people were not prisoners. I sat at the head of the table […]. I did so to comfort myself by being so close to the two martyrs, who were on either side of me, rather than through wanting to eat so much as a single mouthful.’

38. Bones from the hand of Father John Roberts, a Catholic priest executed in 1611, whose corpse was rescued by Luisa de Carvajal, were placed in a seventeenth-century brass monstrance reliquary now at Downside Abbey. Relics like this became both a public and visible sign of the treatment meted out to Catholics in England and acted as a constant spur to encourage European catholic powers to put pressure on England order to achieve religious toleration, or the re-establishment of the Catholic faith by any possible means.
/publicador/luisa-de- carvajal/gQFzV3zbovSY