Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

Product Information

Throughout history crime has been both private and public, in this book Adams reflects that our current obsession with true crime is actually centuries old. It's no surprise that many women hid the results of these pregnancies, even when no foul play was committed.

We see a mother trying to clear her dead daughter’s name while other women faced the accusations – sometimes true and sometimes not – of murdering their own children. This was hugely shocking in some areas, particularly how segregated certain groups of women were and the injustice of how the process was dealt with, which were at times literally based upon class and gender. Elizabeth was a young girl sent as a maid to a man who repeatedly raped her then threw her out when she became pregnant. Baby farms, political crimes, religious mania – these and many more aspects of crime and justice are also covered in this fascinating book. This was a passable read - short tellings of various different murders in the 16th and 17th centuries in England.In terms of our thirst for knowledge for all things grisly, it seems like we haven't changed much in 500 years.

I was so excited to see a true crime book relating cases from the Early Modern era and I certainly was not disappointed. It's harder to do true crime from so long ago and stay connected to the people involved, but this sometimes felt like a simple retelling of a trial as opposed to the dissection of true crime in the early modern period.And her style is very good – not nearly as dry as is sometimes the case with this kind of true crime/social history. A couple of the stories involve suicide, and Adams shows the inhumanity of the laws surrounding this subject. But as this book shows, humans have been obsessed with death and murder for centuries (likely millennia). I’m interested in that period too from a historical perspective, but so often history only deals with the monarchs and the aristocrats so it’s always great to get a bit of insight into the social history, and this book really does that very well, I felt.

The most prominent theme is that of suicide (or 'felo de se') - the early moderns had different ideas about suicide which carried its own sentence and had very negative social consequences for the remaining family (e. I always like when an author can use true crime as a jumping off point to discuss aspects of the wider society and culture of a specific place and time.And certainly her storytelling skills made this a fascinating read, humanising the history in a way that makes it more effective than a dry recounting of facts and statistics ever could. Of course I was aware that suicide was taboo and viewed as a sin by the church, but it also had very strong legal ramifications -- a person who took their life could actually be posthumously convicted of a felony, and their lands and fortunes seized. Adams explores the period 1500-1700 as the true beginning to a true crime obsession in Britain - where the public still took a vested interest in grisly crimes and their inhumane repercussions, but with the interesting nuance of society’s shift to empirical evidence ushered in from the Enlightenment period. As someone who is a bit obsessive about true crime it was kind of reassuring that far from being a new phenomenon it is, in fact, a very old one.

I found it interesting about how suspicious deaths were investigated and what type of 'forensics' were available to them at the time. From early 'baby farms' to political deaths to the consequences of suicide, the cases all vary and take the reader back to this time when social mores and laws were quite different to today and where we see the beginnings of forensic science. I knocked my rating down from 5 stars because quite a few of the examples were about suicide, and it'd have been nice to have a bit more variety. Adams uses each of the nine cases to highlight one or more aspects of the justice system and of the society of day. Because it’s nine quite separate stories each in its own self-contained chapter, I found that I could read one a day and then turn to something else for the rest of my daily reading, and that meant it never became too overwhelming.Many people were convicted on flimsy evidence, and who you were, or weren't could determine your guilt. That particular episode definitely made me both angry and sad, though it also cheered me up a bit that she was found innocent in the end – I wouldn’t have expected justice to work for a poor woman in those days. Adams tells us about Cheapside and the traders who worked there, specialising in luxury goods like gold and silk. explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar. What I especially like is that it seems to give a really interesting perspective not just on the crimes, but on what they mean within the larger society and how each influenced the other.