Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
5 - Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Author’s notes
- 1 Losses, Lacunae and Liminality
- 2 European and Medieval Contexts of Infanticide
- 3 The Liminal child and mother
- 4 Love, Law and Liminality
- 5 Constructing Outsiders, Constructing Killers
- 6 Not the Usual Suspects: Communities and Accomplices
- 7 Not the Usual Suspects: Married Women
- 8 Not the Usual Suspects: Men
- 9 Interlude: Infanticide 1700–1950
- 10 Epilogue: Echoes of the Past
- Appendix 1 The 1624 Infanticide Act
- Appendix 2 Note on Sussex Coroners’ inquests
- Appendix 3 Sussex Cases of Violent, Unnatural, Unexplained Infant Death 1547–1686
- Appendix 4 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Water
- Appendix 5 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Throwing
- Appendix 6 Sussex Infant Deaths Involving Bloodshed or Extreme Violence
- Appendix 7 Sussex Infant Deaths Showing Direct Involvement of Men
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Fines for those who helped unwed pregnant women, unwilling or hostile attendance in the birth chamber, and the ability to deny birth-related customs such as baptism and churching to women who had given birth outside marriage, reinforced their outsider status. Life as a bastard bearer continued to be difficult as the provision of housing and most work was forbidden. One possibility was brazening it out including duping unsuspecting men into marriage, a situtation represented in ballads. Other possibiities were vagabondage or prostitution. Infanticide thus became one of the options for managing a desperate situation. Pamphlet narratives of women who followed this route used animal imagery, described them as monsters, and related them to devils, comparisons which link them to liminal worlds as well as vilifying them.
Keywords: Social restrictions on bastard bearers; Surviving unwed childbirth; Vilifying infant killers
When once I felt my belly swell,
no longer might I abide,
My mother put me out of doores,
and bang’d me back and side.
Then did I range the world so wide,
wandering about the knoes,
Cursing the Boy that helped me,
To fold my dadyes Ewes.
The previous chapter noted that late marriage, and the belief that a simple, unwitnessed ceremony was an adequate manner in which to form a binding union, was a combination which could put a woman in a perilous situation. If she became pregnant, it was easy for an unscrupulous man to deny that a ceremony had taken place and desertion offered him an easy escape. For many unwed women, finding themselves with child was a problem which they would have to deal with alone, though importantly this was not the case for all women. Many couples married after the woman's pregnancy was apparent, suggesting that they had merely anticipated the formal ceremony, but this moral lapse did not preclude women and men from being presented to Archdeacons for ‘incontinency before marriage’. This chapter looks at the kind of lives which unwed pregnant women faced. It shows that the restrictions which were placed on those who bore children outside marriage were so difficult to survive that they led some women to attempt to conceal the evidence of promiscuity by killing the infant.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Infanticide in Tudor and Stuart England , pp. 151 - 190Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019