Suchergebnisse

Art historian Barbara Kellum's 1973 article on child murder in medieval England paints a picture of a world replete with ruthless and murderous single mothers who escaped the legal consequences of their actions due to an indifferent court system that chose to turn a blind eye to the deaths of young children. Despite the overstated tone of her work, it remains the most systematic study of child murder in the medieval English context. Employing a sampling of 131 instances of child murder (including 144 victims), drawn from royal and ecclesiastical courts from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, the current investigation asks us to rethink these early conclusions. Infanticide was a felony in the Middle Ages and neither jurors nor royal officials treated child murder with indifference. Nevertheless, it is clear that both gender and marital status guided the courts in their decisions throughout the legal process in terms of indicting, prosecuting, and sentencing defendants in cases of child murder.

According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the first trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male jurors were loath to impose the death penalty. A reexamination of the material notes that while conviction rates for assault on pregnant women were low, the English believed such assaults were felonies. Moreover, the role played by husbands as plaintiffs makes it clear that this was not merely a women's issue. Abortion by assault was never an easy judgment for jurors to deliver. In particular, the medical expertise required to pass judgment on such a case presented jurors with difficulties that may have prevented conviction of abortion by assault in many cases.