'For to hide her shame': Three hundred years of infanticide

Last week I talked briefly about the ways in which attitudes towards the crimes and execution of women changed over time. The crime of infanticide, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the crime of a mother killing her child when it is less than one year old, is a useful lens for looking at those changes. This post is based in part on my MA dissertation, which looked at the options available to unmarried mothers in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

In 1624, Parliament passed a piece of legislation called the 'Act to prevent the Destrouing and Murthering of Bastards'. The full text reads

Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their Shame, and to escape Punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children, and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do alledge, that the said Child was born dead; whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly it is to be proved) that the said Child or Children were murthered by the said Women, their lewd Mothers, or by their Assent or Procurement:

II For the Preventing therefore of this great Mischief, be it enacted by the Authority of this present Parliament, That if any Woman after one Month next ensuing the End of this Session of Parliament be delivered of any Issue of her Body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Laws of this Realm be a Bastard, and that she endeavour privately, either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other Way, either by herself or the procuring of others, so to conceal the Death thereof, as that it may not come to Light, whether it were born alive or not, but be concealed: In every such Case the said Mother so offending shall suffer Death as in Case of Murther, except such Mother can make proof by one Witness at the least, that the Child (whose Death was by her so intended to be concealed) was born dead.

 
This law effectively made concealment of a birth a capital crime; murder would be assumed in any case of infant death whereby the mother was unmarried and pregnant, and had not informed anybody of the impending event. Despite the depths of desperate poverty to which some married women sank, and the potential solutions they found to limit the numbers of mouths they had to feed, the law specifically targeted women who bore illegitimate offspring. Not only that, but no evidence of actual violence was required to convict - she merely had to have attempted to hide her predicament.

Broadside Ballad: The Norfolk Tragedy, c. 1790 (Bodleian Ballads Online)

The Old Bailey records contain numerous cases where this element of the law is explicitly referred to. In one, which was heard on 12^th May 1687, an unnamed woman is put on trial for the murder of her newborn illegitimate son. The court hears, however, that ‘she not attempting to conceal it, but on the contrary had been to bespeak a Midwife, at whose house she intended as she said to Lye in'. Thus, no other evidence is seemingly necessary – the mother is first placed on trial because her illegitimate child has died, and is then subsequently found not guilty for reason of lack of concealment. The reverse situation is found in a case from April 25^th 1677, reproduced below

A woman, whose age might have promised more Chastity and prudence, being privately delivered of a Bastard-childe, made shift, by her wickedness, to deprive the poor Infant of that life she had contributed to by her wantonness . She pretended it came by its untimely end, by falling from her body on the floor whilst she unhumanely went from the bed towards the door; but she concealing it above a week under her Pillow, the Law justly Condemn'd her as a wilful Murtheress.

In this particular case, no attempt was made to prove that any violence was done to the infant, nor indeed that it had in fact ever lived. The only thing that mattered in court was that the child’s body was concealed for a week without the mother ever telling a soul of its existence. That she hid the baby under her pillow was not unusual; 'disposal sites', for want of a better phrase, were usually in the home. In fact, very few corpses ever left the mother's own house, kept instead either in the bed or else in a trunk or box in the bedroom. Discovery for these women (who make up a little below half of those tried for infanticide at the Old Bailey in the period 1674-1751), was inevitable. These were not devious women intent on disguising their actions, and the places where they concealed their children's bodies were actually anything but disposal sites - they are places of figurative safety. When babies were not hidden in the mother's bedroom, they usually ended up in the House of Office (the toilet), which is hardly surprising since a labouring woman may well have taken herself to the privy for either privacy, relief, or even, in some cases, through sheer ignorance of her condition Very few of the mothers in these cases appear to have deliberately murdered their children – in only one case is it stated that the defendant ‘pusht it down with a stick’ or anything similar. 

In some cases, it would seem that the law was misunderstood or at least misapplied. In September 1679, for example, ‘a poor young wench' went before the court following an unusually tragic series of events. She had been betrayed by a lover who had promised to marry her but who had instead left her pregnant with his child. She subsequently lodged with a woman who, upon realising that the defendant was in labour, ‘cruelly turned her out of doors, and set her in another Parish, and there left her in pains’. When the defendant was discovered by the watch, the child was dead, though not fully separated from her body. She confessed easily that the child had cried when it was first born, though she did not say that she had then caused its death. Despite her being ‘an object of Compassion to most People present,’ the woman was found guilty and sentenced to death. The reasoning for this was it ‘being a Bastard Child, and the law makeing it death in that case for any woman to be delivered alone without calling help’. The first part of this certainly does correlate with the law, but as for it being against the law to deliver alone, this is not strictly true. 

Not only, then, was the law sometimes unreliably applied (one defendant, Mary Stanes, was acquitted in 1684 on the grounds that witnesses spoke favourably of her), but in some cases there was little a woman could have done to ensure that she had witnesses to any potential stillbirth. The defence that the baby was stillborn was attempted so commonly by defendants that it was referred to in some court records as ‘the common Plea’, though it was a useless one since the law did not require an evidential standard comparative to murder. Usually, the only instances where the stillbirth defence was successful was when a midwife attested to the fact, although there was at least one exception to this rule, such as in the 1677 trial of a young woman who was found not guilty on the basis of ‘the Jury not believing that she had actually murdered the Infant’. The exceptions to the general trend shown here suggest that regardless of whether or not women were properly informed of the law (and there is insufficient evidence to judge the likelihood of whether they were or not), even abiding by the stipulations would not have been enough to guarantee a woman’s safety in the case of a stillborn baby born in secret.

From 1715 there was a shift and in the first half of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of women tried for infanticide at the Old Bailey were found not guilty; in a great many cases the basis for the acquittal was, in terms of following the word of the law, flimsy at best. Most women were found not guilty on the grounds that they had made some sort of provision for their delivery or for the care of the baby subsequently. The provision sometimes amounted to little more than the acquisition of some linen. For some of the women, their claim to have made provisions (however limited) were bolstered by claims of a bout of illness or a fall, which was taken to have been the cause of death of a baby then stillborn. There has been some suggestion that jury nullification, or “pious perjury”, was present in some infanticide cases, and that juries sometimes found defendants not guilty in protest at the unfairness of the law. In any case, attitudes were slowly beginning to thaw.

The Angel of Mercy, Joseph Highmore, c. 1746

In 1803, the law was changed so that the presumption of guilt associated with a concealed birth no longer applied. The new law was still, however, exclusively targeted at unmarried women. Arlie Loughnan, a law professor at the University of Sydney, points out that the law 'was designed not to reduce the harshness of the previous statute, but to ensure more convictions of women who killed their children by reigning in the latitude of the courts in dealing with suspects'. It did this by ensuring that women who were not found guilty of the murder of their child could still be prosecuted for the concealment of the birth, separately, a charge which carried with it a sentence of up to two years imprisonment. A degree of leniency continued, however, especially as alienists (forerunners to mental health practitioners) began to feature more prominently in trials. The diagnosis of puerperal insanity, what we would now call post-partum psychosis, led to an increasing number of women being committed to asylums when they killed their infants, rather than facing the noose. 

Western Daily Mercury, 1863

The Cornish Telegraph, 1883

West London Observer, 1885

South Wales Daily News, 1895

Northants Evening Telegraph, 1901

By the middle of the 19th century many were of the opinion that infanticide had had become an epidemic. Judging by the newspaper reports from the 1860s onwards, it certainly feels as though that were true. Dead infants were found in basements and lofts, in hat boxes, railways carriages, village ponds, and under hedges. It was commented that some people refused to interfere with any strange parcel that they discovered lest it turned out to contain yet another newborn corpse. The scale of the issue was explored in a series of annual reports written by Middlesex coroner, Dr Edwin Lankester. In one 1863 inquest concerning a child found dead from exposure beneath some railway arches, Lankester used the opportunity to criticise the work of the police, whom he claimed were so used to infanticide cases that they seldom took even basic steps to ascertain the identity of the perpetrator. A policeman who happened to be present spoke in defence of his profession, arguing that they did what they could, but that the arches 'were so frequently used to deposit bodies that special watches were set, but upon one occasion, within two hours after a search had been made, the body of a murdered child was deposited there'. In 1863, Dr Lankester was anxious that the public might soon stop seeing infanticide as a crime, but by 1869 he was arguing for an end to the death penalty in such cases, at least half a century before his time, although part of his reasoning was that the removal of the death penalty was more likely to result in convictions and would thus better serve as a deterrent. He fully believed that the situation was entirely out of control, estimating that there were roughly 12,000 women in the city who had done away with their own babies, with three hundred such infants murdered every year. Lankester wanted a public inquiry into the scale of and punishment for infanticide, and he also advocated for greater scrutiny of the fathers of the babies, considering it to be markedly unfair that they were so easily able to escape responsibility.

Dr. Lankester

Before the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834, parishes dealt with the issue of illegitimate births through bastardy examinations. Any woman who knew she was expecting an illegitimate child was obliged to present herself before two Justices so that they might determine the identity of the father, force him to pay for the upkeep of the child, and prevent the child being a burden on the parish. If you're feeling super nerdy and would like to look at some of these, you can find a collection from Chelsea here. They also include examinations of paupers and vagrants - pretty much anybody who needed financial assistance and could potentially be sent elsewhere for relief. This ceased after the introduction of the Poor Law, and illegitimate infants became their mothers' sole responsibility. The argument appears to have been that this way women had either to support themselves and their offspring or else enter the workhouse. In the latter scenario, the women became an example to others. Some found the idea repellent, arguing that it essentially drove women to commit infanticide, with The Times arguing in 1842 that the man 'escapes all consequences, and throws them upon her; and in a moment of distraction the deserted mother is tempted to destroy the offspring out of poverty and shame.'

The last British woman hanged for the infanticide of her own child was Rebecca Smith in 1849, well over one hundred years before the abolition of the death penalty. Guilty verdicts in infanticide cases became increasingly unusual and were always accompanied by a recommendation to mercy. More commonly, women were charged with the lesser offence of manslaughter or else were charged with concealment of a birth only. 

The Guardian, 31st October 1922

By 1922 it was apparent that the law was not really fit for purpose. An article in The Guardian in the January of that year pointed out that in the 17 years to March 31st 1921, 60 women had been sentenced to death, only one of whom was actually executed. Alongside commuted sentences was the fact that juries were reluctant to convict when they knew the possible repercussion was the scaffold. The new Act abandoned the death penalty in infanticide cases, providing a partial defence in cases whereby a mother's mind was unbalanced through the effects of childbirth or lactation. 

Back in 1805, a seventeen-year-old under-cook named Mary Morgan, who lived in Radnorshire, Wales, was hanged. She had given birth to an illegitimate baby, cut its throat, and hidden the body in her feather bed. Her actions were quickly discovered and she was tried before Justice Hardinge. He was particularly horrified by the crime of infanticide and when the jury returned a guilty verdict, he took the opportunity to make an example of her. Addressing Mary in court, the judge said 'had you escaped, many other girls, thoughtless and light as you have been, would have been encouraged by that escape to commit your crime with hope of your impunity'. Nobody, not even her family, appealed for mercy, and Mary was publically hanged. Mary has two gravestones in St Andrew's Churchyard, Presteigne. The first contains a poem by one of Justice Hardinge's friends and read:

To the Memory of Mary Morgan who young and beautiful endowed with a good understanding and disposition but unenlightened by the sacred truths of Christianity become the victim of sin and shame and was condemned to an ignominious death on the 11th April 1805 for the Murder of her bastard child. Rousd to a first sense of guilt and remorse by the eloquent and humane exertions of her benevolent judge, Mr Justice Hardinge, she underwent the sentence of the Law on the following Thursday with unfeigned repentance and a furvent [sic] hope of forgiveness through the merits of a  redeeming intercessor. This Stone is erected not merely to perpetuate the remembrance of a  departed penitent but to remind the living of the frailty of human nature when unsupported by Religion.

This has been countered by a second gravestone, which reads simply

In Memory of

MARY MORGAN

who Suffrd April 13th 1805

Aged 17 Years.

He that is without sin among you

Let him first cast a stone at her