I Dye [sic] by Inches': Locating Wife Beating in the Concept of a Privatization of Marriage and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England

'I Dye [sic] by Inches': Locating Wife Beating in the Concept of a Privatization of Marriageand Violence in Eighteenth-Century EnglandAuthor(s): Joanne BaileySource: Social History, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Aug., 2006), pp. 273-294Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4287361 .

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Social History Vol. 3 No. 3 August 2006 Routledge I Taylor & Francis Group

Joanne Bailey

'I dye [sic] by Inches': locating wife

beating in the concept of a

privatization of marriage and violence

in eighteenth-century England*

Scholars argue that while men's violence against their wives can be found in all periods, attitudes towards it have changed over time and as a result so too has its location, with a shift from an earlier 'public' form of marital violence to a later 'private' one behind closed doors. This coincides with a historiography of the family that charts its evolution over the eighteenth century into a more private institution in which neither state nor community could intervene.1 This chronological model of change in the location of marital violence also serves as additional evidence to support the thesis that the nature of interpersonal violence changed from public to private in the same century as it moved indoors and off the streets.2 Given the

significance of the spatial dimensions of wife beating to several areas of historical enquiry, this article undertakes an in-depth mapping of its sites over the long eighteenth century.3 It reveals that the terms 'public' and 'private' cannot be simplistically equated with outdoors and indoors when applied to the locations of marital violence. There was no clear and consistent move over the course of the century from one to the other because wife beating was temporally and

spatially fluid, occurring over long periods of time and over several places, moving from inside to outside and back again.

*This article originated as a paper delivered to the Anglo-American Conference on 'The Body' at the IHR, 2003. Many thanks to all those who have read and commented upon it in its various stages of development: Michael Baker, Chris Brooks, Elaine Chalus, Anthony Fletcher, Elizabeth Foyster, Adrian Green, David Nash and John Stewart. I am also grateful to David Turner whose comments about the privatization of marriage in his review of my book helped me to formulate a framework for my research presented here.

1L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 150o-1800, abridged edn (London, 1977); R. Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of

Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748-1818 (Cambridge, 2004).

2R. Shoemaker, 'Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London', Social History, xxvI (200I).

3This dimension of wife beating has only been considered briefly in order to explore the gender- ing of the home and as the possible cause of some lower-ranking violence. S. D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women

(London, 1998), 75-6; A. J. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-century Married Life (London, 1992), 38.

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN I470-I200 online © 2006 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 0. Io80/o30o71206007636 5



This study also contributes to analyses of contemporary understandings of 'public' and

'private' by demonstrating that, where wife beating was concerned, contemporaries equated 'private' with secret or hidden abuse and 'public' with open or witnessed abuse, rather than home and not-home. However, there was no simple move from overt to concealed ill- treatment. Wife beating could both be hidden and detected in all social ranks, though for different reasons, since its visibility appears to have been connected to social status and

masculinity through material environment and male reputation. This article therefore also

responds to current calls from historians of masculinity for a focus on eighteenth-century men in the household, on the interaction of masculinity with class, and on the way cultural codes

shaped experience.4 Overall, this analysis makes it clear that we need to exercise caution when

applying the term 'privatization' to various historical phenomena such as marriage and violence.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PROBLEM

Historians often plot a shift over time in attitudes towards wife beating. In this model, early modem men's violence against wives was tolerated when carried out as a form of rational chastisement to correct a fault, though a husband who beat his wife in anger was perceived to abuse his status.5 By the late Stuart period, however, wife beating was becoming associated with irrational behaviour, even madness, and therefore excessive violence risked dishonour for men.6 Eighteenth-century politeness and sensibility strengthened any existing disquiet over men's aggression towards wives, and husbands generally denied accusations of cruelty, pointing instead to their self-control.7 These notions are frequently linked with the sites of marital violence. Thus, Margaret Hunt observes that marital violence in the early modem period was carried out as if it were theatre or a spectacle, occurring in more 'public' places in front of witnesses.8 By the end of the eighteenth century, on the other hand, it was becoming more

'prvate'. Robert Shoemaker, for example, proposes that a society more critical of aggressive behaviour pushed wife beating 'indoors or out of sight'.9 He speculates that 'the new

expectations of more refined conduct by men in public life were perceived as blurring the differences between the sexes, leading men to feel a continuing need to assert their masculine

superiority through private violence'.1° The notion of less visible wife beating complements Lawrence Stone's much criticized view of the rise of the 'companionate marriage' and more

4K. Harvey, 'The history of masculinity, circa I650-I800', Journal of British Studies, XLIV (2005), 309; K. Harvey and A. Shepard, 'What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British history, circa I500-I950',

Journal of British Studies, XLIV (2005), 276. 5S. D. Amussen, '"Being Stirred to Much

Unquietness": violence and domestic violence in

early moder England', Journal of Women's History, Vl, 2 (1994), 83; L. Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modem London

(Oxford, 1996), 219-20. 6E. Foyster, 'Male honour, social control and

wife beating in late Stuart England', Transactions of

the Royal Historical Society, vi (I996), 2 5; J. Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in

England, 166o-1800 (Cambridge, 2003), 115-I7.

ibid., 120-2.

8M. Hunt, 'Wife beating, domesticity and women's independence in eighteenth-century London', Gender and History, iv (1992) 23; R. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (Hambledon and London, 2004), 158. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Gowing, op. cit., 215-16.

9Shoemaker, 'Male honour', op. cit., 206, 208;

Hunt, op. cit., 26. l1Shoemaker, 'Male honour', op. cit., 208.

Social History 274 VOL. 3 I: NO. 3



Wife beating, marriage and violence

recently Ruth Perry's 'privatized marriage', both of which see the closing off of the married

couple from kin and community.11 There are two broad sets of explanations for the transition in attitudes towards wife beating.

First, they are assumed to have been influenced by the 'civilizing process', experienced in

widespread shifts in the acceptability of state and personal forms of violence during the

eighteenth century.12 Historians of crime have identified a general move from 'public' to

'private' in state-administered physical punishment.13 Punishment of non-capital crimes moved

away from the spectacle of humiliating public corporal punishments to private confinement.'4 The execution rate declined over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and transportation was introduced as secondary punishment for felonies.'5 Quantitative analysis also demonstrates that levels of prosecuted interpersonal violence declined.16 Moreover, its nature and location

changed. From a study of London homicides, Robert Shoemaker argues that a 'privatization' of violence occurred. He found that violence leading to death moved from outdoors to indoors so that by the end of the century over half of reported homicides occurred 'in private houses, taverns, coffee houses and shops'.17 Making this transition from 'public' to 'private' even more

striking is his finding that wife beating ending in death made up an increasing proportion of

reported homicides by the end of the century.18 Second, views about marital violence are considered to have been influenced by changes in

masculinity and reputation which were remodelled under the impact of the codes of politeness and sensibility, which respectively prized self-control, refined deportment and humane behaviour towards the weak.19 Both are seen to have influenced ideas about appropriate conduct for men.20 Early moder men were permitted to respond aggressively to any physical or verbal challenge to their reputation.21 Traditional forms of manhood, however, came under attack in the long eighteenth century as civility made its mark.2 Several genres of print criticized male aggression, deplored unrestrained anger and passion, and celebrated stoicism,

1Stone, op. cit., chap. 8; Perry, op. cit., chap. 5. 2Amussen, op. cit., passim. J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England

166o-8o00 (Oxford, 1986), 133; P. Spierenburg, 'The body and the state: early modem Europe' in N. Morris and D. J. Rothman (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford, I995).

14Beattie, op. cit., chaps 9 and io; Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., chap. 4; P. King, 'Punishing assault: the transformation of attitudes in the English courts', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxvii, I (1996), 43-4-

15C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 175- 1900 (London, 1987), chap. 9.

16For an overview of the debate on changing levels of crime see S. Hindle, 'Crime and popular protest' in B. Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003), 132-3.

17Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., I75-6; idem, 'Male honour', op. cit., 206.

'8Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., 176. 19P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People:

England 1727-1783, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989),

500-5; idem, 'The uses of eighteenth-century politeness', Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society, xnl (2002), 326-7. 20Shoemaker, 'Male honour', op. cit., 192. 21A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early

Modem England (Oxford, 2003), 132; Shoemaker, 'Male honour', op. cit., 197.

22Some works tracing the evolution of manhood from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries: S. D. Amussen, "'The part of a Christian man": the cultural politics of manhood in early modem England' in S. D. Amussen and M. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modem England (Manchester, 1995), 2I3-33; P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society (Harlow, 200o); A. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (London, 1995), 322-46; E. A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modem

England. Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999). For a review of the chronology of masculinity see

Harvey and Shepard, op. cit., 274-80.

August 2006 275



elevating self-control as the armoury against such outbursts.23 Instead of physically attacking those who challenged their reputation, men were expected to restore it through non-violent

means such as litigation or forgiveness.24 Shoemaker argues that 'definitions of individual

honour came to be less dependent on publicly established reputations' as male honour was

'internalized' for a variety of economic and cultural reasons.25 With the weight of Evangelical fervour behind it, 'domesticity' continued to mould first middle-class masculinity and then the

'respectable' working classes as they attempted to gain formal political participation.26 By the

mid-nineteenth century, the relation of violence to manliness was 'losing its traditional

commonsensical quality' and attempts were made to impose 'new "bourgeois" standards of

physical restraint upon men beneath the middle class'.27 The Victorian period is identified,

therefore, as the next crucial step in the attempt to civilize men, because it heralded greater state involvement in reducing levels of crime and because 'attention turned to [husbands'] violence against wives'.28

The overall reduction in reported violent behaviour and the increase in violence within the

family (as measured by homicide rates) is perhaps revealing of social and cultural shifts.29 Yet

the assertion that a growing abhorrence of violence pushed wife beating behind closed doors in

the eighteenth century is conceptually and methodologically problematic. First, this area of

study applies the terms 'public' and 'private' without much sophistication and with the

assumption that their meaning is both fixed and obvious. Historians of violence crudely

equate 'public' with outdoors and 'private' with indoors as sites of violence and, where marital

violence is concerned, specifically with the home or 'domestic' sphere. For example, Shoemaker categorizes violence between men as 'public' because much of it occurred outdoors.

He contrasts this with violence that occurred indoors which he categorizes as 'private'. He also

defines the role of witnesses in similar ways: violence in front of witnesses who were unknown

to the participants is deemed public whereas violence in front of onlookers who were known to

them is 'private'. Thus he is able to classify violence indoors in coffee houses or shops as 'private' because it often occurred in private rooms in front of known witnesses.30

23Carter, op. cit., 70-2, I02-4; E. Foyster, 'Boys will be boys? Manhood and aggression, 166- 1800' in T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds), English Masculinities, 166o-i8oo (London, I999), 152, 154-5, I59.

24Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., 61; J. Gregory, 'Homo religiosus: masculinity and

religion in the long eighteenth century' in Hitch- cock and Cohen, op. cit., 92.

25Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., 176; idem, 'Male honour', op. cit., 207; Carter, op. cit., 98-9. For the effects of Evangelicalism, see L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the

English Middle Class, 178o-1850 (London, 1987), 21

and passim. 26. Tosh, 'Gentlemanly politeness and manly

simplicity in Victorian England', Transactions of the

Royal Historical Society, xll (2002), 463; A. Clark, The Strugglefor the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995), passim.

27M. Wiener, 'Domesticity: a legal discipline for men?' in M. Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain (Aldershot, 2000),

58, 165. 28M. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness

and CriminalJustice in Victorian England (Cambridge and New York, 2004), 5, 35, 151-2, 171.

29Some historians have questioned the thesis of a

long-term decline in violence. For example, John Gillingham found no evidence that the secular elite of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England were more prone to violence than their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts; only that 'the image of aristocracy was less martial than in

previous centuries'. J. Gillingham, 'From civilitas to

civility: codes of manners in medieval and early modem England', Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society, xln (2002), 287-9. 30Shoemaker, 'Male honour', op. cit., 200, 206.

When analysing defamation he likewise argues that

Social History 276 VOL. 31 : NO. 3




This simplistic use of private and public is not found in other fields. Studies of gender and women have moved far beyond such anachronistic dichotomies. It has been shown that women's activities extended into the 'public' spheres and work on masculinity reveals that the

'private' sphere played its part in shaping manhood from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.31 Moreover, though useful shorthand for historians, the terms were far more

ambiguous and overlapping in contemporary meaning. This is hinted at in the oft-drawn conclusion that men were favoured because they inhabited both public and private spheres, but most fruitfully in Lawrence Klein's subtle linguistic analysis of contemporary usage of the terms.32 He comments that this 'binary opposition does not adequately explain the

complexities of discourse, let alone those of human experience in practice'. Through an examination of 'both space and language' he identifies several major 'public' spheres and their

multiple and often contradictory meanings: magisterial, civic, economic and associative, where

public connoted 'sociable' to contemporaries. Thus, in the eighteenth century, 'the distinction between the private and the public did not correspond to the distinction between home and not-home'.33 Indeed, our tendency to see 'private' as synonymous with 'domestic' is partly the result of the nineteenth-century middle-class invention of the concept of domesticity: a 'state of mind as well as a physical orientation', which has coloured our ways of conceptualizing the home.34 As Michael McKeon observes, the domestic sphere has come to connote modem ideas about privacy and the separation between private and public.35

In the eighteenth century this distinction did not have much meaning. Thus we should

reject the term 'domestic violence' as anachronistic for this period. As will be shown, husbands' violence against wives was not solely home-based, and when it was located in the

couple's dwelling it is unwise to view this space as purely domestic and private. As such, the terms 'marital violence' or 'wife beating' are employed here. It should be noted that

contemporaries used neither since these coinages are names for a criminal act. In this period the correction of a wife was legitimate and thus the severity and type of violent act was addressed using descriptions such as cruelty, ill usage or abuse.36 None the less, both have the virtue of being free from locational characteristics.

Second, the chronology of changes in attitudes towards marital violence is flawed. After all, the attempt to civilize men can be found in several centuries and the 'civilizing process' itself

insults 'became less public', moving indoors from streets and markets and therefore fewer people heard them. See his London Mob, op. cit., 69-70.

31Just to take a few examples from a burgeoning field: A. Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (London, 1998); J. Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999), passim.

32ibid., 2-3; R. Shoemaker, 'Separate spheres? Ideology and practice in London gender relations, I66O-1740' in M. C. McClendon, J. P. Ward and M. MacDonald (eds), Protestant Identities: Religion, Society and Self-fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford, CA, I999); L. E. Klein, 'Gender and the public/private distinction in the eighteenth century: some

questions about evidence and analytic procedure', Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxix, I (1995), 97-109.

33ibid., 98, I02, 103-4, 105. 34Tosh, A Man's Place, op. cit., I, 4. 35M. McKeon, 'The secret history of domes-

ticity: private, public, and the division of knowledge' in C. Jones and D. Wahrman (eds), The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 171, I80-I.

36or example, see Anon, A Treatise of Feme Coverts: Or, the Lady's Law containing all the laws and statutes relating to women (London, 1732); 81, J. P. Bishop, Commentaries on the Law of Marriage and Divorce and Evidence in Matrimonial Suits (London, I852), 452-76.

August 2006 277



had long antecedents.37 Moreover, the links made between changing forms of state violence and increasing condemnation of wife beating are difficult to sustain since there are plenty of

examples of a long vein of criticism of wife beating. Daniel of Beccles' Urbanus Magnus, a Latin verse of the twelfth century, for example, warned men not to beat their wives.38 Early modem conduct literature, as well as other prescriptive material like the Book of Homilies, which was

regularly read out in church, almost unanimously condemned men who beat their wives.39

Diaries from the period also suggest that wife beating was rarely practised or condoned.41 As Elizabeth Foyster's most recent in-depth study of marital violence from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries demonstrates, it was the ways of condemning wife beating that changed rather than the condemnation itself.41

The eighteenth century did witness some changes in legal definitions of cruelty. In the second half of the eighteenth century, more 'minor' forms of abuse were now categorized as male cruelty.42 In the I76os, for example, William Ettrick was considered cruel by witnesses and by the church courts because he insisted that his wife ride a horse close to a windmill when he knew that it was frightened and would bolt.43 Polite codes of behaviour may have influenced this trend. Foyster shows that verbal abuse against middling-sort wives was redefined as a more serious form of male abuse and the confinement of wives in the home or isolation in the countryside away from town was categorized as cruelty, since both attacked standards of sociability and conversation.44 Yet we still do not know how influential politeness was outside the upper middling ranks.45

The unsupported assertions about the sites of wife beating make it imperative to map its

spatial dimensions. The term 'space' is employed here in the sense of a dynamic 'field of

action', which is related to 'place' in the sense of a physical location.46 Space is significant for two reasons. First, it helps us illuminate marital power relationships. As Jennifer Melville

concludes, space 'plays an active part in reproducing social structures in so far as its

organization produces the context in which power relations will be played out'.7 Second, recent studies demonstrate that space facilitates and constructs violence. As John Wood

observes, 'violence is both produced (i.e. shaped into particular forms) and constructed (i.e.

interpreted in relation to an underlying mentality)' by the built environment. He shows, for

example, how the Victorian working-class built environment 'created numerous opportunities for disagreements over common resources, boundaries, privacy, borrowing and noise'. Class

37For the sixteenth century see Amussen, 'Part of a Christian man', op. cit., 222-3, 227. Also, more

generally, see J. Tosh, 'Introduction', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xii (2002), 264, 265.

38Gillingham, 'From civilitas to civility', op. cit., 275.

39Book of Homilies, The second Tome of Homilies, of such matters As were Promised and Entituled in the

former part of Homilies (London, 1633), 24I-2. 40K. Wrightson, English Society 158o-1680

(1982), 98. 41E. Foyster, Marital Violence. An English Family

History, 1660-1857 (Cambridge, 2005), 68-71. 42Bailey, op. cit., 124; J. M. Biggs, The Concept of

Matrimonial Cruelty, University of London Legal Series (London, I962), vol. vl.

43B[orthwick] I[nstitute of] H[istorical] R[esearch], Trans.CP.1765/4, article io of Libel, Ettrick v. Ettrick.

44E. A. Foyster, 'Creating a veil of silence? Politeness and marital violence in the English household', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xni (2002), 395-415, 401-6, 409-12.

45Harvey, op. cit., 306-8. 46Adapted from the definitions employed by

Michel de Certeau by J. Melville, 'The Use and Organization of Domestic Space in Late Seventeenth-century London' (D.Phil., Cam- bridge, 1999), 6.

I ibid., I .

278 Social History VOL. 31 : NO. 3




also interacted with spatial contexts to forge 'imagined' spaces, where specific locations were associated with particular kinds of legitimate and illegitimate violence. Wood concludes that this helped reconstitute a varety of types of 'customary' violence as working class and therefore unacceptable in the opinion of those involved in the nineteenth-century middle- class civilizing offensive.48 These wider theoretical frameworks of space can be used in order to determine more about the location of wife beating over time, to explore further contemporary understandings of 'public' and 'private', and to examine the class-related aspects of men's

cruelty against wives through the prisms of lifestyle and reputation.

SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

These themes will be tackled by examining sites of marital violence in a variety of court cases

brought against cruel husbands. The 172 cases analysed in this article have been selected from a wider study of approximately 600 incidents of husband to wife violence between the I670s and

I8oo derived from three types of legal venue: cruelty separation cases heard in church courts, breaches of the peace dealt with by quarter sessions and wife murders reported in the

proceedings of the Old Bailey.49 Both wife beating and wife murder cases have been selected for a number of methodological reasons. First, this ensures that the physical locations covered are diverse, embracing urban and rural areas in the north and south of England, as well as London. This is useful given the focus on the metropolis in the study of the changing location of interpersonal violence. Second, this approach includes a wide cross-section of social and

occupational groups from a small number of gentry couples, through middling groups, to the

very poorest wage-labouring spouses. Thus, though the subject needs more sustained research, some insights into the relationship between social status and wife beating can be gained.50 Third, the courts utilized a variety of recording methods and therefore offer a diversity of

descriptions of violence. Separation cases offer the most detailed accounts of violence because church courts recorded evidence in writing, while cases of misdemeanour dealt with by the

quarter sessions are less elaborate and generally most useful where examinations survive. Marital violence before these secular courts was drawn predominantly from lower-ranking couples and thus reported wife murder trials from London have also been included to

compensate, since they provide substantial levels of detail of wife beating among the poor labouring ranks.

Still, it is necessary to justify the use of cases of wife murder in a study mapping the locations of wife beating. Although the murder of a wife was hardly typical of most marital violence,

many of these cases share enough features of wife beating ones to allow for their analysis here.

48J. Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in which were printed in the Proceedings of the Old Nineteenth-century England: The Shadow of Our Bailey (drawn from Old Bailey Proceedings Refinement (London and New York, 2004), 98, Online: www.oldbaileyonline.org), and 29 com- I00-I, 103, I05. piled from twelve newspaper titles from Newcastle,

49Specifically: 47 separations on the grounds of York and Oxford, sampled every fifth year. For cruelty that came before the Durham and York information about the church courts, quarter church courts; c. 450 incidents of wife beating sessions and newspapers see Bailey, op. cit., chap. 3. before Northumberland, Newcastle, Durham, 50I will not undertake an occupational analysis North Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxford- since I have shown elsewhere that this is a fruitless shire quarter sessions; 105 wife murders, 76 from line of enquiry for the eighteenth century: Bailey, trials of London men accused of killing their wives, op. cit., 95-7.

August 2006 279



Jim Sharpe proposed some time ago that 'the investigation of domestic homicide is the best way of obtaining solid evidence about violence within the family' in the early modem period.51 The same can be said in at least half of the eighteenth-century homicides studied here, because many of them were preceded by a history of marital violence, as is powerfully conveyed by Mary Ray who told her neighbour Ann Jones in 1734 that 'she dy'd by Inches', shortly before her husband killed her.52 Using descriptions of the events leading to the killing of the wife where both

prosecution and defence broadly agree, the killings can be broken into three types.53 Thirty of the Io5 murders (28.5 per cent) were the result of a beating which went too far and culminated in the death of the wife, and in another 22 homicide cases (20.9 per cent) there was also a history of fighting or quarrels, although the final attack was qualitatively different either because it was more premeditated or a specific weapon was selected. The descriptions of previous violence resemble the most severe cases of wife beating that were reported to the quarter sessions.

Indeed, some of the killers had been previously bound over for violence.54 Even cases with apparently atypical forms of barbarity echo reports of wife beating in other

legal arenas. Corbet Vezey, for example, departed from his more usual 'mundane' forms of abuse by confining and systematically starving his wife to death in I732.55 Undoubtedly a

grotesque act of cruelty, it nevertheless mirrors the frequent complaint of other mistreated wives that their husbands denied them necessaries.56 In another example, from 1761, the long- violent Richard Parrot used a knife to hack out his wife's tongue.57 This atrocious deed

eventually killed her, yet it is not unusual for wives' complaints to justices of the peace to detail men's use of weapons to terrorize them. For instance, Sarah Plumridge was in bed with her husband in 1799 when she discovered that he had a clasp knife. She reported that she was terrified because that day he had already threatened her with the words: 'I shall never be at rest 'till my knife is in her Hart and be Damn to her'.58 This is not to say, however, that all men who came before the quarter sessions were violent enough to go on to kill their wives. As studies of Westminster quarter sessions and several north-eastern and southern sessions show,

many wives complained of far more 'minor' abuse and of the threat of violence.59 In 45 (42.8 per cent) homicides, however, the killings were not the consequence of habitual

wife beating. Some were triggered by a singular event like adultery. In a handful of cases the

5J. A. Sharpe, 'Domestic homicide in early modem England', HistoricalJournal, xxlv (I981), 33.

520[ldl B[ailey] P[roceedings], 30 June I734, trial of William Ray (tI734o630-15).

53This is a subjective system of classification based on extensive reading of eighteenth-century cases of wife beating. It is not entirely directed by the category of killing assigned by the grand jury of murder or manslaughter, though it does sometimes coincide with the verdict of accidental killing, unintentional death or murder. Not enough information was given in eight cases of the o15 homicides (7.6 per cent) to classify them.

54For example, see OBP, ii September 1745, trial of Thomas Morgan (t174509II1-32), Thomas

Morgan's (no relation to defendant) evidence. 55OBP, 14 January 1732, trial of Corbet Vezey

(tI73201 I4-12). This case shocked contemporaries

and was included by the anonymous writer of The

Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (London, 1735) as proof of the atrocious legal status of women.

56These women were, however, able to seek

help from neighbours and family or leave their husbands and work to maintain themselves.

57OBP, 21 October 1761, trial of Richard Parrott (t71 1021-34).

58C[entre for] B[uckinghamshire] S[tudies], QS Rolls, 1799.

59. Hurl-Eamon, 'Domestic violence prosecuted: women binding over their husbands for assault at Westminster Quarter Sessions, i685- 1720', Journal of Family History, xxvl, 4 (2001), 435-54; Bailey, op. cit., II4.




August 2006 Wife beating, marriage and violence 281

couple were already separated and the husband lured the wife to meet him in order to murder her and be free to pursue a different relationship, and in one case to punish a wife after quarrels about property. A few of these homicides occurred because of the husband's temporary or long- term insanity, sometimes following a happy relationship. In 1784, for instance, William Walker stabbed his wife after suffering delusions.60 These cases have been included none the less, because they still give valuable insights into the location of marital violence leading to murder. A number of other incidents included in this category also display the men's propensity to be violent towards their wives during marital conflict, even though the death was ostensibly the result of an 'accident'. Witnesses said Isaac Ingram, for example, was 'very good natur'd, and liv'd very lovingly with his Wife till this Accident'. Yet in 1722, when he quarrelled with his

wife, he 'randomly' threw a poker at her which hit her head and caused injuries from which she died three weeks later.6' In 1762 the drunken couple Richard and Rose M'Gee were

standing at Sparrow's Corner, Little Tower Hill. Richard responded to his wife's cursing and

swearing with a blow. She fell under a cart and was killed.62 The combination of cases therefore offers excellent opportunities for comparative analysis of a range of degrees of marital

violence, social groups and of the sites in which the violence occurred.

THE LOCATION OF WIFE BEATING

A total of 172 cases is detailed enough for a basic analytical scheme to be applied to them to establish where marital violence took place and whether it changed over the period. For ease of initial sorting, sites have been simply categorized as 'indoors' or 'outdoors': 74 per cent (I27)

occurred indoors and 26 per cent (45) outdoors. One might point out quite prosaically that more male to female violence took place indoors because that is where married couples were more likely to be together. This is where simplicity ends, however, for it becomes immediately apparent that there is no simple equation of public with outdoors and private with indoors or domestic.63 This will be elaborated later, but it is worth stating here that marital violence often occurred in several overlapping locations. Thus cases where most violence occurred inside are classified as indoors, though in many of them some aspects of the conflict also took place outdoors because it was common for husbands to turn their wives out of doors at the end of an attack. John Walton whipped his wife out of the house with a horsewhip in July I718,

saying that she 'and her Kitlings' [children by her former husband] 'shou'd never come there or into... [his] house again'.64 Thus if the worst physical abuse was not witnessed, the extreme state of the marital conflict might be. In cases where significant violence occurred outside, they are categorized as outdoors, although in most instances additional cruelty had often happened indoors as well.

Close inspection of the sites of marital violence demonstrates the flaws in the assertion that wife beating changed from 'acts designed specifically for an audience' to those occurring behind 'locked doors' due to the declining legitimacy of wife beating.65 There is no linear

6"OBP, 21 April 1784, trial of William Walker 63This has been briefly noted for the nineteenth (t17840421-13). century. See D'Cruze, op. cit., 76.

6OBP, 28 February I722, trial of Isaac Ingram 64U[niversity] O[fl D[urham], DDR/EJ/PRC/ (ti7220228-I0). 2/1718/I3, Walton v. Walton.

62OBP, 14 July I762, trial of Richard M'Gee 65Hunt, op. cit., 23, 26; Shoemaker, London Mob, [sic] (t17620714-I9). op. cit., 58.



movement from visible to hidden violence over the period. Violence outdoors is distributed across the long eighteenth century regardless of rank, with no particular clustering in the earlier

part of the period. Cases where brutality was deliberately made a 'dramatic spectacle' exist, but

they occur as much in the later part of the century as earlier.66 For example, William Rogers, a

clothier of Holbeck, Yorkshire, followed his wife into a neighbour's house in 1793 and struck

and kicked her in front of the neighbour, his wife and his sister.67 Contemporaries used such

instances to display men's irrationality. In I790 Eleanor Burke, who lived in Bloomsbury, recalled with horror how Edward Welch repeatedly stabbed his 'wife' in front of her. She

found Edward standing in front of Margaret with a candle in his left hand and a knife in his

right hand 'and he was stabbing her in my sight, all the while before me, and also before I got into the room; I saw him stabbing her'.68 Where extra evidence is available, one can speculate that 'theatrical' savagery in some incidents was targeted at an audience of family members

because of long-standing arguments between them and the men. In 1784, for example, Thomas Hogg was charged to the custody of the constable by his mother-in-law after

becoming drunk and disorderly in her home. Thomas was perhaps embittered towards his

widowed mother-in-law because he was kept and maintained by her after he lost his

property.69

Indoors

Wife beating occurred predominantly indoors in 74 per cent of the cases examined. The

indoor sites can broadly be defined as dwellings, ranging from shared lodgings to solely lived-

in houses. Within them violence occurred in several rooms, including bedrooms, kitchens,

sitting rooms and dining rooms - although in many dwellings this is difficult to categorize since rooms were multi-purpose - as well as in stairs and passages. Shani D'Cruze noted that

Victorian working-class men's abuse of their wives progressed throughout the living and

cooking areas of homes, as well as bedrooms, signifying their attempts to take back control of

space that was both a source of female power and identity and a symbol of female

subordination.70

Though marital violence primarily took place in dwellings, it should not be defined as

private or 'domestic' violence. Descriptions demonstrate that the access of the community to

houses nullifies what we have constructed as 'private' from later meanings.7' For one thing, wife beating sometimes happened in other people's homes. In 1725, Vincent Davis pursued his

wife into their landlady's room and stabbed her in the breast with his butcher's knife.72

Moreover, most homes were not private in terms of being separated from 'public' areas.

Melville's examination of domestic space in late seventeenth-century London demonstrates

that its uses fluctuated along a 'continuum of public to private'. Dwellings had complex and

multi-faceted uses which make distinctions between living, working and leisure space

pointless.73 This spanned a broad section of social ranks. In the I790s Joseph and Ann Watson

66Quote from Hunt, op. cit., 23. 7°D'Cruze, op. cit., 75-6. 67BIHR, CP.I/2305, Rogers c. Rogers, 1793. 71Melville, op. cit., 126; Wood, op. cit., 98. 680BP, 8 December 1790, trial of Edward 720BP, 7 April I725, trial of Vincent Davis

Welch (ti790 2o8-i). (t1725o407-9). 69N[orth] Y[orkshire] A[rchives], Richmond 73Melville, op. cit., chap. 3.

DC/RMB III 3/1/3/002227.





lived in a successful inn which they ran in Wolsingham, County Durham. Joseph's violence

was overheard or seen by their servants and ostlers, by a gentleman who frequented their house

when he went to market at Wolsingham, and by a butcher who visited to kill a sheep for

Joseph.74 Nevertheless, the extent of public scrutiny of a couple's marriage seems to have been

differentiated according to social class, with poorer labouring people subject to greater scrutiny due to their cramped and densely populated living and working environments. The very

poorest couples in this study often had only one room in which they both lived and scraped a

living by selling food or drink. William and Mary Ray slept on straw behind the counter of

their shop in Lincolns-Inn-Fields, where they sold spirits.75 The Carters, who sold milk, in

King Street, Westminster, rented three rooms: a shop, a back kitchen and a garret, and slept in

the back kitchen of their shop. Predictably, this made William Carter's abuse of his wife

intimately known to neighbours and customers. Eventually, Elizabeth Carter's body was found

in the water tub, which stood in the shared stairs of the house and served the house with water.76

The buildings in which urban labouring people lived were themselves insubstantial.

Numerous witnesses to male violence against wives in London stressed the thinness of walls

and partitions. Mary Jeffery lived next door to the lodging house where Vincent Davis lived.

She was drawn into the bloody aftermath of Davis's attack on his wife, having overheard it

because 'there's only a thin Partition betwixt their stair-Case and mine'.77 Ann Anderson was

called on to give evidence about the night in 1731 when Robert Hallam, a waterman of St

Ann's, Middlesex, threw his heavily pregnant wife out of the window. She pointed out: 'there

is but a thin Deal-Partition betwixt his Room and ours, so that one may hear in one Room

what passes in the other, very plainly'.78 People who lived in such close proximity were

spectators, willing or not, to each other's lives. The partitioning was, of course, due to the fact

that most of the labouring ranks who predominate in the homicide cases that came before the

Old Bailey lived permanently in lodgings, dwelling in one or more rooms in houses shared with several other families and including collective spaces such as stairs and passages. It should be noted that people of other social ranks in provincial areas also lived in lodgings at various

times, though these were more substantial according to levels of wealth.79

Lodgings increased the number of witnesses to marital violence since they facilitated

intimacy, with people dropping in and out of each other's rooms to share food, tools or

sociability. Frances Cotterill lodged in the same house in St Giles's Cripplegate as John Dennis, a labourer, who killed his wife in 1729. She remembered that she was in bed when John came

up to her room and asked for a light for his candle, and then came a second time and asked her to lend him a candle. The third time he told her that he thought he had killed his wife.80 The

arrangement of the courts in which lodgings were taken also encouraged people's knowledge

74UDO, DDR/EJ/CCD/3/I8So/Is, Watson v. 770BP, 7 April 1725, trial of Vincent Davis Watson. (t 17250407-9).

750BP, 30 June I734, trial of William Ray 78OBP, 14January 1732, trial of Robert Hallam

(t1734o63o-I 5). (t 7320114-9). 76The jury decided that Elizabeth had 79The upper ranks might live temporarily in

committed suicide by getting into the tub. lodgings early in marriage or when travelling. OBP, 15 July 1787, trial of William Carter OBP, 3 December 1729, trial of John Dennis

(t178707 I 1-88). (t 729I203-7).




of each other's lives.81 Thomas Morgan, a pipemaker, lived in Bedford Bury by Covent Garden and was tried for repeatedly stabbing his wife in their chamber. At his trial he claimed that Mary Ann Moody knew 'no more of me than the farthest woman in this court' in order to undermine the veracity of the detailed evidence that she provided about his previous abuse.

Mary Ann, however, firmly stated that: 'All the people in the Bury will say the same as I say'.82 Higher up the social scale, married life still had numerous witnesses, but they were from a

more circumscribed circle since additional dwelling space facilitated separation. Neighbours were unlikely to be quite so intimate with each other's lives in more substantial dwellings, though such homes were still shared by a variety of people. The make-up of the 'household-

family' did not differ significantly through the period, with servants or apprentices omnipresent in middling and genteel dwellings.83 As well as servants, the households of lower craftsmen and tradesmen contained relatives and were close to neighbours. Samuel

Finch, a house carpenter from Durham, was seen fighting with his wife by her daughter-in- law and three neighbours.84 More extensive middle-class households had servants who observed male cruelty. In the 1790s the maids of the warehouse and factory ownerJames Lees, of Saddleworth, Manchester, monitored the ill-treatment of his wife Mary and intervened when necessary. The urban environment, however, even in the higher-ranking cases, seems to have encouraged more widespread awareness of violence. James's abuse drew attention from

neighbours and passers-by. Mary Ball, a servant to the Lees family, was returning one morning from fetching milk and found a group of neighbours talking together near the house. They told her that Mr Lees had been calling and abusing his wife most 'shamefully'. When they had lived in Lever Street, Manchester, Mary Brisco was standing opposite their house while

waiting for the mantua maker upon whom she was calling to answer the door. Glancing across the street through the window, she saw James throw his wife on the floor. The mantua maker's two apprentices also recalled sitting in their rooms and seeing and hearing Mr Lees abuse his wife in his front parlour.85 In aristocratic households, however, the potential for witnesses to overhear violence was perhaps narrower again. In the 1780s Andrew Robinson

Stoney Bowes's ill-treatment of his wife, Mary Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore, seems to have been mainly overheard by her maids when it took place in other rooms or when they witnessed it while serving their mistress.86

Having examined the impact of the built context on the visibility of marital conflict, it is

necessary to consider marriage's 'imagined' spatial context.87 Did an increasing emphasis on

'domesticity' and separate spheres create an imagined state of privacy surrounding the home that made people reluctant to rupture it by coming between warring spouses? There are

examples of people who justified their decision not to intervene in marital violence as

81Wood, op. cit., IIO. 86'Trial between Countess of Strathmore and 82OBP, I September 1745, trial of Thomas husband Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes' in A

Morgan (tI74509II-32). New Collection of Trials for Adultery: or, General 83N. Tadmor, 'The concept of the household- History of Modem Gallantry and Divorces containing a

family in eighteenth century England', Past and variety of the most remarkable Trials heard and Present, CLI (I996), II1-40. determined in the Courts of Doctors Commons, the

84BIHR, Trans.CP. 779/I, Finch c. Finch. King's Bench etc.for Adultery, Fornication, Cruelty and

85Mary Brisco then attempted to help Mrs Lee other Criminal Conversation etc. to obtain Divorces or

by distracting Mr Lee. See also the depositions Damages from the year 1780 to the present time of Ann Hall and Ellen Rushton. BIHR, (London, J. Gill, I799). Chanc.CP.I803/3, Lees c. Lees. 87Wood, op. cit., I07.




reluctance to get involved in family matters. Richard Priest told the Old Bailey that he did not

'interfere' when Albert Lowe, his next-door neighbour, attacked his wife in March 1780, because he 'thought it a family affair'.88 However, on closer examination, it seems that such

unwillingness was usually due to the more prosaic reason that intervention was pointless, rather

than to an ideology that the family was an isolated entity which broached no intrusion.

While the aim of resolving marital difficulties was to get couples to live quietly together, once people recognized that this was impossible they recommended that the beaten wife leave

her husband.89 When this did not happen, the neighbour, relative or friend was less likely to

intervene in future. This situation is captured by Richard Horseford's reply to his friend James Furnell when they were walking through the streets of St Ann's, Middlesex. Hearing Robert

Hallam beating his wife, James warned Richard: 'This Fellow will kill his Wife'. Richard

replied: 'No... 'tis only a Family Quarrel, and they'll be good Friends again by and by'.90 Of

course, only women with access to separate funds, work or assistance were able to leave their

abusive husbands. In the 175os the inveterate wife beater Abraham Ward cursed his wife and

told her to go about her business. She replied, 'You rogue, I have no where to go, you have sold my things, where must I go? And besides I am not able to move, you have beat me till I am not able to stir'. Tragically she maintained a chilling optimism; shortly before he killed her she told a friend after a beating that it 'was one of his mad fears, but she hop'd he would be a

good boy, and go to work'.9 Another reason not to get involved in marital violence was self-preservation. Rebecca

Bishop went to her lodgers' room in 1793 when she heard a fight between the Ruddles. She told John Ruddle that he should be ashamed to use his wife so ill. John told her it was none of her business and that if she did not go downstairs he would kick her back-side down the stairs. Rebecca left, but only 'to save' the young infant in her arms, since Ruddle looked 'so spiteful and malicious'.92 Several reported homicide trials give the impression that people were too

frightened to intervene because the husband was so vicious. The trial of Joseph Bull, who killed Catharine Guy, a washerwoman with whom he lived as husband and wife, on Christmas Eve 1776, reveals the extent of his neighbours' fear. Sarah Carr, his landlady, testified that a woman called on her pleading: 'Mistress, for God's sake go up, for that woman is certainly dying, but do not go into the room for fear the fellow should use you ill'.93 In 1780 Thomas

Bull, an acquaintance of Dennis Reardon, heard it reported that Alice Reardon had been killed. Bull said he made to run upstairs to break down their door, but a woman 'laid hold of

my coat and pulled me back, and desired me to have more regard to my life, for that the

prisoner was a bloody-minded man, and might run a knife into me'. After one man refused his

request for assistance he eventually found two willing men and all three broke down the door and entered the room where the victim had been killed with a saw.94

In general, however, the court cases give the overwhelming impression that an outright refusal to arbitrate in wife beating was rare. Most suggest that people's willingness to try

83OBP, Io May 1780, trial of Albert Lowe 92OBP, 20 February I793, trial ofJohn Ruddle

(tI78005 I -58). (t 1793022-3 7). 89Bailey, op. cit., chap. 3. 930BP, 9 January 1776, trial of Joseph Bull 9OBP, I4 January 1732, trial of Robert Hallam (tI 7760 I9 -6).

(tI7320114-9). 940BP, 28 June 1780, trial of Dennis Reardon 910BP, 6 December 1752, trial of Abraham (tI7800628-7).

Ward (t17522206-41).

285 August 2006



and stop violence took precedence over an abusive husband's claims that his treatment of his wife was a personal matter. After midnight in 1732, in an alley in Chick Lane, London, Richard Lamb beat and kicked his wife Christian Lamb. Mary Wood, a neighbour, was

prevented from helping Christian, but retreated to keep watch out of her window. When a man came up the alley who 'took her [Christian's] Part', Richard demanded of him: 'What Business he had betwixt a Husband and his Wife?' At this point Mary offered her support by calling out: 'Master, don't mind him; he beats his Wife every Day, and if you stand by her I'll stand by you'.95

When people got involved in marital violence they had the common motivation of self- interest as well as altruism since wife beating impacted on households and communities because it threatened reputation, businesses, credit and peace, and endangered bystanders. In

I761 Elizabeth Walker, the wife of a Yorkshire glazier, complained to the justice of the peace that her husband frequently attacked her at night, indoors and outdoors. A supportive statement by William Elleker pointed out that his family and other neighbours 'cannot sleep

quietly in yr Beds for Disturbances w[hilch the said George Walker raises by Night'.96 Intervention was expected by the courts and they queried any lack of assistance. Barbara Aston, the servant of James and Mary Bannan, was cross-examined in I769 during the trial ofJames for murdering his wife. After stating that James ferociously kicked his wife for around twenty minutes, she was asked, 'How came you to let him beat her?' Barbara replied that she was too

old to help, for any stray blow would 'have knocked my old carcase to pieces'. Shoemaker points out that in London the willingness of people actively to participate in

suppressing or prosecuting crime declined in the second half of the eighteenth century as they turned increasingly to thief takers and magistrates.98 Nevertheless, provincial and metropolitan

people continued to get directly involved in marital violence in order to preserve local order.99

The homicide cases show that people were also more formally active in the aftermath of

particularly savage incidents of wife beating. They assisted an attacked wife and could do so in

such substantial numbers in London that a 'mob' might be described as gathering. A 'mob' was

attracted to the Rays' shop in April 1734 when William Ray's wife cried out 'murder' as he

rained violent blows on her breast. It drew out William and therefore stopped his violence,

though it was too late for Mary Ray who later died of the wounds.l'" After attacks, neighbours called for apothecaries or surgeons, searched for weapons and

sought to establish what had been the cause of death when women were fatally injured. Most

seem determined to ensure that the husband was taken up by the authorities. James Bannan, a

porter, knocked his wife down and then kicked her repeatedly on Sunday 30 July 1769; a

neighbour tried to prevent him leaving, shouting: 'You have killed your wife today, and you shall not go [out], for she is dying'. Mary died some hours later.101 The women who lived in

950BP, 12 September I733, trial of Richard mid-nineteenth century as a matter for the police, Lamb (tI7330212-56). doctors or magistrates rather than kin and com-

96NYA, QSB/I76I/0730 and 0734, reel I281. munity. Foyster, Marital Violence, op. cit., chap. 5. 970BP, 6 September 1769, trial of James "H'OBP, 30 June 1734, trial of William Ray

Bannan (t17690906-52). (tI734063- 15). 98Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., chap. 2. "0'OBP, 6 September 1769, trial of James "9The real innovation was that intervention in Bannan (tI769ogo6-52).

marital violence was coming to be regarded by the





the same lodging house as Dennis and Alice Reardon raised the alarm when Dennis murdered his wife in June 1780. After an hour, a crowd had formed and once three men had braved

entering the room, two male neighbours prevented Reardon from escaping while the murder was reported. Neighbours took the murder weapon before the justice and the coroner and 'a

press-gang' came to take the killer to the justice.102 In sum, the involvement of kin and

community in marital conflict makes it almost impossible to accept sweeping narratives about the privatization of family. Marriage in lived experience, as opposed, perhaps, to its cultural

representation, never became a detached entity during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Outdoors

Approximately a quarter (45/172) of the main attacks in these detailed wife beating cases occurred outdoors. The 'outdoors' category contains a range of sites. Husbands attacked their wives in town streets, perhaps the most unambiguously 'public' place, throughout the period. Ill-treatment might take several forms, from humiliating verbal abuse to a beating. Jonathan Bowes pushed a 'turd' into his wife's mouth in I717 in the town street of Walkerfield,

Staindrop, County Durham.103 Other incidents involved threats and attacks. In 1755 a lace-

buyer of Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, who carried lace to sell in London, returned home to demand extra money from his wife, Susannah. When she refused he tried to attack her in their dwelling, but she escaped and took refuge in other people's houses. The following week she was at their house, hanging washing in the garden, when he struck her and threatened her again. A few days later she was walking along the street when he laid hold of

her, dragged her to their door and threatened her. She told Buckinghamshire quarter sessions that she was now afraid to walk alone in the 'public streets'. The description of Robert Rigby's violence against his wife emphasizes the difficulties in classifying marital violence as occurring in any one place, either public or private.104

Wife beating that occurred 'outdoors' demonstrates further that the simplistic equation of

public with outdoors and private with indoors is inadequate. Some of this violence was committed in rural, isolated or anonymous areas which indicates that, although outdoors, it was intended to be concealed from witnesses. When Catherine King was riding behind her husband Thomas King, a dairyman, on his horse, returning from a neighbour's house at Middle Claydon to their home in Steeple Claydon in 1793, he rode into lonely marshes and

proceeded to terrorize her. After managing to throw her off the horse, he rode away and left her.l05 In this sample's few cases of premeditated wife murder, distributed across the long eighteenth century, it is obvious that the husband sought a location which would facilitate both the murder and its non-detection. Edward Kirk, who lived near Smithfield, visited his wife at her workplace in 1684 and persuaded her to visit his cousin who lived on 'the Fields-side'. Joan Kirk was later found dead in the fields near Paddington, with a beaten head and a cut throat. Over a century later, William Woodcock persuaded his estranged wife to

102OBP, 28 June 1780, trial of Dennis Reardon 14CBS, QS Rolls, 1755, un-numbered. (tI7800628-7). 105CBS, QS Rolls, exhibit dated 14 January

'03UOD, DDR/EJ/PRC/2/I717/2, Bowes c. I796. Bowes.

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come into London in order to view a lodging house. The next day his wife was discovered in a ditch in a lane near Chelsea, with severe head injuries caused by a stick. A few days later William married another woman.1'6

Given that some of the incidents of marital violence that happened in dwellings were open to considerable scrutiny, and that some of those that occurred outdoors were unseen, it is essential to try and determine what contemporaries meant when they applied the terms 'public' and 'private' to marital violence. This is directly detectable in some cases. Elizabeth

Spence's libel against her husband Francis, a Ripon gentleman, submitted in 1782, emphasized that he 'ill treat her both privately and publickly' leading her to separate from him for nine

years. The remaining changes do not explain specifically what is meant by public or private, indeed the violence described all occurred within their dwelling. However, the libel specified that some of it was carried out 'in the presence and hearing of divers credible Persons'.107 Thus it seems that abuse was deemed 'public' according to how far it was witnessed rather than its site or the specific nature of the witnesses as known or unknown to the couple. Indeed 'public' was stressed in some cases to illustrate the extent to which the husband had been cruel to his wife and to provide extra weight to her request for him to be bound over or to support her

appeal for separation. This emphasis was not novel to the eighteenth century, for Bernard

Capp concludes that seventeenth-century wife beating 'in public, or even at home in the

presence of company, was generally unacceptable'.108 Even here we could ask whether the distinction was relevant to contemporaries.

'Private' therefore appears to have denoted secrecy and lack of witnesses. In the I730s Mary Ray told a customer, An[n] Beldam, that she was not well because she was married to such a

rogue of a husband and she showed her the terrible bruises on her arm and thigh. An[n] was shocked and said, 'what have you married?' and Mary answered, 'a private Rogue! I dye by Inches - But I see him coming over the Field; for God's sake, take no Notice, for I shall be

kill'd, if you do'.109 To reiterate, then, privacy defined the hidden nature of her violence, rather than its domestic or indoor location. This finding is supported by spatial and linguistic analyses of the term 'private'. Melville's examination of the organization of domestic space notes that 'both separateness and secrecy were referred to by the words "private", "privately" and "privacy"'.l Similarly, Klein's linguistic analysis of the terms 'public' and 'private', concludes:

What people in the eighteenth century most often meant by 'public' was sociable as

opposed to solitary (which was 'private'). ...'Public' matters were those that were

exposed to the perceptions of some others or of people in general, while 'private' matters were generally imperceptible or kept from the perception of others. The 'public' and the 'private' were, thus, aligned with the difference between openness and secrecy, between

transparency and opaqueness. The other specification of this sort of publicness was the

106OBP, 2 July I684, trial of Edward Kirk 1'0B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family (ti6840702-6); OBP, 14 January I789, trial of and Neighbourhood in Early Modem England William Woodcock (tI78901I4-I). See also IO (Oxford, 2003), 107. December I679, trial of John Dell (t167912I- '"9OBP, 30 June 1734, trial of William Ray Io). (t 7340630-I 5).

1°7BIHR, CP.I/20I3, Spence c. Spence, I782. l""Melville, op. cit., 15o.




question of accessibility. 'Public' referred to those matters that were open to participation by some others or by people in general, while 'private' matters were, in some respect restricted or closed."'

Thus it is equally difficult to utilize Shoemaker's division of onlookers on fighting between men into public and private, categorizing people known to the men as more private than witnesses who were unknown to the participants. He also views witnesses to the exchange of insults in 'quasi-public areas' such as households with servants and lodgings houses as 'less

public' than witnesses on the streets.112 As the above discussion demonstrates, such distinctions are difficult to apply in cases of marital violence, because they drew in a variety of witnesses over a variety of spaces. It might be better, therefore, to adapt John Wood's analysis of the act of witnessing nineteenth-century violence. He argues that such direct experience of violence functioned as a mechanism to reinforce 'mentalities of violence'. Thus the frequency with which the working classes witnessed marital violence due to the peculiarities of their built environment served to confirm their understanding that marriage was subject to some degree of violence. Since the middle classes were less likely to witness working-class marital violence as a result of their increasing spatial segregation, and had fewer opportunities for seeing wife

beating among their own ranks thanks to less densely inhabited living spaces, they were able to

displace wife beating onto the working classes.l3 Though the class-specific perceptions of marital violence were predominantly a feature of the nineteenth century, this suggestion that its degree of visibility legitimizes or de-legitimizes marital violence helps illuminate the

relationship between social rank, masculinity and husbands' attempts to hide marital violence. In five of the wife beating cases it is explicitly stated that a husband attempted to conceal his

abuse and it can be inferred in a handful more. For example, the labourer William Craydon suddenly rose from bed late one night in July 1791 and asked his wife whether she thought all the people were in bed. After looking out of the window to confirm that everyone in the street was in bed, he said: 'Now I will hang you'. When she rushed to the window to call for assistance he threw her to the floor and put one hand in her mouth and pressed her throat with the other. He asked her if she would shout again and she said no, and when he released her she

escaped to a neighbour's house.114 Reasons for hiding violence could be practical. One husband was simply malicious. In August 1753 John Price, a farrier from Chesham, Buckinghamshire, beat his wife Jane with a faggot stick 'having lock'd the door that the

neighbours could not get in to Rescue her'.5ls In 1742 Jane Gomeldon said her husband locked his chamber door when beating her in order to conceal his barbarities and ensure there were no witnesses.l16 From 1712 to I7I1 and in 1744-5 Thomas Wright, of Whitworth,

County Durham, often abused his wife in the night time, in order, she said, to conceal his behaviour and avoid witnesses.117 These men no doubt sought to avoid prosecution for

11Klein, op. cit., I04. "4CBS, QS Rolls 1791, Michaelmas. "2Shoemaker, London Mob, op. cit., 69-70. l5CBS, QS Rolls 1753, 204/28; also see 13Wood, op. Cit., 106-7, 112-17. Elizabeth Q/SM/3.

Foyster also argues that class came to be the key 16UOD, DDR/EJ/PRC/2/1740/6, Gomeldon determinant for the definition of types of marital v. Gomeldon. violence by the mid-nineteenth century as wife 17Between these dates she left him and went to beating came to be seen as a social as well as moral London. UOD, DDR/EJ/PRC/2/1745/9, Wright wrong. Marital Violence, op. cit., 72-9. v. Wright.

August 2006 289



separation or breach of the peace. After all, if there were no witnesses, only the marks of violence had to be explained away. This secrecy fits into the pattern of middling-sort men's

self-defence, which was frequently to deny that they were violent.118 It was also facilitated by their more substantial dwellings, where rooms were available in which attempts could be made to conceal abuse.119

Yet, as the observations about middle-ranking husbands' defences suggest, men's attempts to hide their abuse were also related to their social status. Men of middling and gentry status tried to conceal their violence against their wives since wife beating was criticized and had the

potential to damage their reputation in the locality. Though some historians have pointed to the increasing individualization of reputation in the eighteenth century, public credit remained crucial for many middle-ranking men's successful businesses and households.t20 Their collective family and household reputation played a large part. Testament to this is the regular appearance of advertisements in the local press placed by husbands who announced to

tradespeople that they would not settle any debts run up by their wives. Advertising husbands were attempting publicly to resolve financial problems, prevent further debt, and reassert control over household and personal honour. This action was within their rights, except in cases where husbands' violence had forced wives to leave in order to preserve their lives. Such wives retained the right to use the law of agency and be maintained. A handful of wives retaliated by also using the press to accuse their husbands of violence, one assumes to defend their own reputation and attack that of their husband. In 1782, an Oxfordshire butcher placed an advertisement stating that his wife had eloped from him without the least provocation. Charlotte Minching rejected his claim the following week in the same paper by pointing out

that 'she is very well convinced every one in the Neighbourhood knows to the contrary ... that she had just Reasons for leaving him, not only through his personal ill Usage, but likewise

being debarred of every Necessary in Life'.121 The collective nature of middling-rank household reputation may also explain why, in a

further four of the cases, it appears that it was the beaten wives who tried to conceal their

husbands' abuse. The servants of Grace Allenson deposed in her separation case, brought in

1676, that she tried to hide her husband's cruelty.122 Margaret Lees concealed her husband's

beatings after her marriage in 1796, though the servant who reported this discovered after six

weeks of employment that James Lees was physically as well as verbally abusive.123 Their

actions may have been connected to defending their husbands' reputation in an attempt to

preserve the family livelihood. A 1706 pamphlet claimed that women who were beaten by drunken husbands would pretend that they had walked into a door in order 'to save their

[husbands'] credit'.'24 We should also realize that wives may have concealed violence in order

to maintain their own reputation which was rooted in an orderly and well-run household.'2s

Bailey, op. cit., 120-2. 23Hannah Seddon's deposition. She left em- "9Six- or seven-room houses provided more ployment after seven months because of Lees'

opportunities for achieving separateness from other abuse of his wife. BIHR, Chanc.CP 1803/3, Lees household members. Melville, op. cit., 154. c. Lees.

1'20For the former see Shoemaker, London Mob, 24Quoted in Capp, op. cit., 104. op. it., 176, 297; for the latter, Bailey op. cit., chap. 4. '25Bailey, op. cit., chaps 4 and 5; G. Walker,

121Jackson's Oxford Journal, 27 April, 3 and 4 'Expanding the boundaries of female honour in May, 2, 1782. early modem England', Transactions of the Royal

122BIHR, CP.I/3264, Allenson c. Allenson, 1676. Historical Society, vl (1996), 235-45.

Social History 290 VOL. 31: NO. 3




Of course, in itself, the derivation of female public reputation from household management reminds us that the 'domestic' sphere had yet to become firmly linked with the 'private' as it would with the reign of'domesticity' in the nineteenth century.26

Lower-ranking metropolitan men may have favoured their working reputation over that based in their household and neighbourhood.127 Marital abuse in these ranks was, as noted

above, less amenable to secrecy even when some attempt at hiding violence was made. Mary Ray followed her husband to the alehouse in 1734 and shouted: 'You private murdering rogue! I'll skreen you no longer, for the World shall know what a Rogue you are'.128 This threat was somewhat ambivalent since she had previously informed several female neighbours that her husband was beating her and they were also frequent witnesses to the same abuse.

Mary Ray may well have concealed her husband's cruelty out of justifiable fear of the

consequences rather than for the sake of her household's credit.129 There is an impression that, rather than hiding wife beating to protect their reputation, some of the lower-ranking men

may have beaten their wives because it was threatened by them. A couple of the lower-ranking wife killers excused their actions by explaining that their wives had provoked them by damaging or threatening to damage their reputation. William Taunton, who beat Sarah

Phipps's head (they cohabited as husband and wife) with an axe handle in 1769, informed a local innkeeper that he had killed her 'because she told lies of him ... she said he was not a man sufficient for a woman, and that made the women laugh at him; upon which account he was determined to kill her'.130 The sexual tension at the root of this terrible act may well be related to the way that working men's masculinity 'privileged both aggression and sexual

131 prowess'.

In general, it seems that while these men prized their public persona, it might have been for different reasons than their middle-class counterparts. The trials suggest that London working men adopted one persona at work and another within the home, and it was the former that

they sought to defend violently from challenge. This resonates with Anna Clark's thesis that there was tension between artisans' working culture and their married home life.132 London wife killers were often presented in two opposing ways to the Old Bailey court: at home, violent and aggressive, troublesome and inhumane; at work, hard working, quiet and humane. In 1752 neighbours testified to the brutality of the weaver, Abraham Ward, yet John Head, with whom he had worked and lodged, said he 'behav'd himself like a just man in his way of

dealing; he was as quiet a shop-mate as I have had for I8 years past'.133 Neighbours in Hare-

Court, Aldersgate Street, described Thomas Daniels, who threw his wife out of the window in

1761, as a man who frequently beat his wife. Masters and workmates described him, in

126This may have continued to be the case in 129Though it is possible that disorder might lead working-class women's reputations. See D'Cruze, to working-class families being turned out of their op. cit., 64. lodgings. D'Cruze, op. cit., 72.

'27There is, however, far less evidence to examine I3OBP, Trial of William Taunton, August labouring men's role in the home and household 1769 (TI769090-67). than middling men's. Harvey, op. cit., 310. 131D'Cruze, op. cit., I36.

128The term 'skreen' was probably in wide- 132Clark, op. cit., 75, 87. spread use since it had been used as a political 133OBP, 6 December I752, trial of Abraham term of abuse about Robert Walpole - the Ward (ti7521206-4I). skreenmaster - in the I720S. OBP, 30 June 1734, trial of William Ray (tI7340630-I5).



contrast, as 'a good apprentice, with good words', a 'sober lad ... a good natured affable man' and 'a very civil young fellow'.'34 Though the contradictory characters given for the accused husbands may simply reproduce the format of the published trials, since the contrast lies in the words of the prosecution witnesses and those of the defence witnesses, they may also reflect the reality of a gradual polarization in acceptable models of masculinity for different social groups.

Recent work on masculinity traces the development of the various forms of manhood available to men. Alexandra Shepard identifies four in the period I560 to I750: 'patriarchal', 'subordinate', 'anti-patriarchal' and other 'alternative codes'. The patriarchal or dominant form stressed respectability, temperance and hard work. The other types rejected these qualities and revolved around drinking and fighting. Shepard traces a shift during the early modern period from a situation where patriarchal manhood was allotted along lines of age and marital status to one where patriarchal manhood was increasingly class related. Respectability and civility became the marker of the middling sort, instead of applying to all adult married men. The 'counter' codes of masculinity became associated with lower-ranking men.135 This was

expressed in attitudes about appropriate husbandly behaviour. Bernard Capp shows that, in the

I66os, the damage to men's standing from their treatment of their wives was socially polarizing. Artisans, labourers and husbandmen were likely to continue to beat their wives in

anger or correction, while the gentry or upper middling sorts were held in check by their embarrassment and by new expectations.'36 By the early nineteenth century, as Foyster asserts, wife beating was seen as a working-class problem.137 While it is impossible to gauge the incidence of violence according to class or prevailing ideals of masculinity, both seem to have determined the way husbands presented themselves.

Ironically, even middle-class and gentry attempts to hide violence were often unsuccessful, being overheard, overseen or deliberately spied upon through keyholes and cracks. The

gentlewoman Jane Gomeldon, for instance, was heard by her servants when she cried out for

help after her husband locked her in a room.138 The enlargement of the public sphere also

played its part in the failure of attempts to hide elite violence. Jane and Francis Gomeldon's

dispute entered the press in I740 when Francis, a Newcastle gentleman, placed an anonymous advertisement in the NewcastleJournal declaring that his wife had been 'seduced' from him by 'evil advisers'. He asked her to return and threatened to publish her name if she did not. His wife responded in the Newcastle Courant, named them both, and explained that she had concealed her husband's cruel usage from everyone, even her nearest relations and friends, until it was too dangerous, at which point she left him. She stated that she was only revealing his abuse now because he denied misbehaviour. Francis placed a further advertisement denying her accusations and demanding that she prove her allegations in print. As Jane tartly

134In this case, the evidence was against him and Manhood in Britain, circa I5O -I760', Journal of he was sentenced to be executed the following British Studies, XLIV (2005), 281-95.

Monday, his body to be dissected and anatomized. 136Capp, op. cit., 104. OBP, I6 September 1761, trial of Thomas Daniels 137Foyster, Marital Violence, op. cit., 72; Wiener, (t17610916-44). Men of Blood, op. cit., 28.

135Shepard, op. cit., II, 248, 253; A. Shepard, 138UOD, DDR/EJ/PRC/2/I74o/6, Comeldon 'From anxious patriarchs to refined gentlemen? v. Gomeldon.





commented in her second advertisement: 'He seems vastly desirous to appeal and discover himself to the Publick'.139

The role of the press in revealing cases of marital conflict to an interested audience was even

greater forty years later. The Countess of Strathmore's case against her husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes, implies that he sometimes tried to hide his cruelty. Though he would humiliate Mary Bowes, and threaten her in the presence of servants, their depositions show that he often locked them out when he physically attacked her. Mary Morgan deposed that when the family was travelling to France in a coach in 1784 Mr Bowes would 'slily kick and pinch the Countess ... if he thought the witness was asleep, or looking another way, and did not see him'.140 Given the couple's high status and the ensuing scandal surrounding their

protracted legal struggles, his ill-treatment was exposed to national scrutiny. His conduct towards his wife was regularly condemned in the London and provincial press, as well as

forming the subject of ballads and pamphlets.T41 Such evidence raises doubts about claims that a 'veil of silence' was drawn around middling-sort wife beating in the eighteenth century that was only rent apart from the 184os when the desire to protect vulnerable women, the middle- class concept of domesticity and an escalating rejection of violence combined to bring 'acts of violence against women, more often than not taking place in the home, out from the shadows'.142

CONCLUSION

This exercise in analysing the spatial dimensions of marital violence in the eighteenth century adds to our existing knowledge of wife beating by showing that it did not relocate from public to private in terms of outdoors to indoors by the close of the century. It does, however, confirm what historians may well be grasping at when they talk about it retreating behind closed doors, which is that secrecy was the key determinant in defining the nature of wife

beating. In this respect, the argument presented here adds further to our understanding of what

contemporaries meant or understood by the terms 'public' and 'private', following on from the

ground-breaking work of Lawrence Klein. It reveals that 'private' wife beating could occur outdoors and that abuse which occurred indoors could be 'public'. Violence might be

perpetrated outdoors in order to hide it and incidents indoors could take place in other

people's dwellings and in combined working and living spaces as well as in the couple's enclosed home. Also, we need to attend somewhat differently to the role of onlookers and witnesses in wife beating. It is impossible to designate witnesses who were known to the

participants as 'private' and those who were less known to them as more 'public', as is done with violence between men. The spatial fluidity of wife beating meant that it occurred in front of, and away from, a variety of onlookers who were generally, although by no means always, known to the participants.

139Newcastle Journal, 5 July 1740, 3, I9 July, 141The Durham gentlewoman Judith Baker 1740, 3, 2 August I740, 3. Newcastle Courant, 12 collected a cross-section of this material. UOD,

July 1740, 3, 26 July 1740, 3. Baker Baker papers, BAK 71/238-71/248. 4Depositions of Dorothy Stevenson and 142Hunt, op. cit., 27; Wiener, 'Domesticity: a

Mary Morgan, in New Collection of Trials for legal discipline for men?', op. cit., 156; idem, Men of Adultery, I8-20, 26. Blood, op. cit., 3.



The tensions inherent in certain kinds of built environments may well have generated marital violence and, more easily demonstrable, determined how visible it was. Although the

meanings of public and private with regard to marital violence were clearly linked to notions of visibility and secrecy, this is not to say that wife beating became progressively more covert over the century. By incorporating the questions of social rank and male reputation into the

study it can be suggested that the visibility of marital violence was linked to both. It is not

argued, however, that labouring men were more prone physically to abuse their wives, but

simply that their surroundings made such abuse more easily discerned and open to public scrutiny.143 Cruelty occurred in middling-rank homes as well as labouring ones, but in both it

might be hidden and in both it might be detected, though for different reasons and in different

ways. Middle-ranking husbands seem to have been more easily able to attempt to hide their abuse because of their better constructed and less overcrowded living spaces. They may also have sought to do so because their household reputation and thus their business reputation depended upon respectability and family harmony.

The evolution in the acceptability of the display of physical aggression for men is also

significant. As it became less appropriate for middle-ranking men to display aggression or use

physical acts to deal with conflict or to restore their reputation, then they may have sought to conceal those occasions when they did so. Equally, as physical aggression as a sign of 'traditional' manhood was retained by the working classes, then abusive husbands may have been less interested in their home persona and prized their working one. Thus these findings indicate that no straightforward move from seen to unseen marital violence occurred over

time, since the features of rank and reputation were tied in to a range of factors such as

occupation, material living standards, and urban or rural environment. As the recent literature

on industrialization and urbanization in eighteenth-century England amply concludes, all this

varied considerably in time and according to region.l44

Finally, wife beating cannot be accommodated unproblematically into the theory of a wider

privatization of marriage and violence. This study indicates that if historians wish to pursue such concepts, they must attend very closely to the meanings of the categories that they apply. More precise terms of reference may also help nuance historians' application of the theory of a

'civilizing process', which they identify as rendering people less likely to use or tolerate

violence in the eighteenth century. Mapping marital violence helps us realize that any such

process was partial, hesitant and mediated by interrelated factors such as space, class and gender. Oxford Brookes University

143Nineteenth-century working-class wife beat- '44For an overview see M. Berg and P. Hudson, ing remained highly visible. Wood, op. cit., I07; 'Rehabilitating the industrial revolution', Economic N. Tomes, 'A "Torrent of Abuse": crimes of History Review, XLV (1992); for a regional study violence between working-class men and women revealing difference see P. Hudson (ed.), Regions in London, I84o-1875',Journal of Social History, xl, and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolu-

3 (1978), 328-9. tion in Britain (Cambridge, 1989).

Social History 294 VOL. 3 I: NO. 3



Documents

I Dye [sic] by Inches': Locating Wife Beating in the Concept of a Privatization of Marriage and Violence in Eighteenth-Century England