Children, Homicide and Accidents in Early Modern England and Wales, c. 1600-1730

Abstract

This thesis provides the first in-depth study of the accidental and wilful deaths of children, and caused by children, in early modern England and Wales, c.1600-1730. It establishes that age is a category of analysis that must be taken into consideration when examining early modern crime to form a more holistic understanding of how the law and expectations of childhood operated in practice in England and Wales. Historians of crime and childhood rarely discuss lethal violence by children or homicides against children that were not categorised as murder, such those returning verdicts of manslaughter or misadventure. This topic expands on the vast historiography of neonatal infanticide that is so prevalent in secondary literature about early modern crime, bringing the historiography of crime into closer alignment with the history of childhood, in which historians have already begun to explore agency and children’s relationships with other children and adults. This thesis draws on a range of source material from the underexploited pre-trial depositions from the Court of Great Sessions, records from the Northern Circuit that have been overlooked by historians of crime, the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, popular crime pamphlets and broadside ballads and newspapers to examine the nature and extent of homicides of and by children in the early modern period.