The sins of the fathers

Thus far, this research has focussed mainly on women, but men killed children too. The hundred or so Sussex inquests dealing with suspicious infant deaths include eighteen cases in which men either killed infants or are believed to have had direct involvement the death of a newborn or young child (See Appendix 7). They show that men killed infants in the womb, newborns, and older children. A similar picture is painted in the ballads and pamphlets which describe cases in which men kill infants. This literature suggests that the men who committed these crimes were from all social levels, and they killed for a range of motives.

Francis E. Dolan writes that literary accounts of infanticide ‘scrutinize all of the circumstances, perpetrators, and motives for which the law cannot account’. Certainly, motives are largely missing from the Sussex archival accounts for all crimes, though informed conjecture can go some way toward filling out these lacunae. Just as infanticide by married women appears to have interested the authors of popular literature, so did child killing by men. As with the accounts of the female crime, ballads and pamphlets reveal something of the possible events which led to the killing, and social attitudes toward this kind of infant murder.