Ashleigh McNamara explores how maternity and poverty intersected in early modern English cases of infanticide.
In December of 1680, Margaret Adams was executed for the crime of infanticide at Tyburn Tree, London. According to the court records, she had concealed her pregnancy and delivered alone. Whilst Adams claimed the child was stillborn, the courts “conjectured that she had smothered it with the Bed-cloaths”.
As an unmarried, pregnant domestic servant, Adams was in a precarious social position. She could not openly acknowledge her pregnancy, as it was evidence of her ‘lewd’ behaviour. If discovered, she would certainly lose her employment and her status as an immoral woman would bar her from accessing the alms provided to London’s poorest citizens.
After the discovery of the deceased infant, Adams was brought before the courts. The cause of the infant’s death was irrelevant. Under contemporary English law, any death of an infant was considered infanticide, unless a witness could testify that the child was born deceased. Adams was sentenced to death.
In February of 1681, Mary Naples was similarly indicted for infanticide. Unlike Adams however, Naples was a married woman, and in seventeenth-century England, only unmarried women could legally be guilty of infanticide. In Naples’s indictment, this is explicitly stated:
“it being proved she had a Husband, it was not comprehended in the Statute of King James, provided for the preventing lude women from Murthering their Bastard Children, so she was found not Guilty”.
Comparison between the cases of Adams and Naples reveal that the crime being punished by this legislature was not necessarily the act of infanticide. Instead, it was the crime of poverty and the ‘wrong’ type of maternity.
Poverty and Maternity
The relationship between marriage and service is pivotal to understanding the criminalisation of poverty-afflicted mothers. For those in service, marriage was atypical. Domestic servants required the permission of their employers to marry and could usually only do so after their contract had concluded. Service was a method for women of little economic means to save money for marriage; consequently, after marriage, women typically did not return to service.
As such, women in domestic service were largely young, unmarried, of middling economic means and, as they generally lived in their employer’s house, vulnerable. It is no surprise that domestic servants made up the majority of women accused of, and executed for, infanticide.
The legal retaliation against unwed mothers emerged from two different but complementary ideologies – one moral and one economic. Economically, England underwent a series of economic crises throughout the sixteenth century brought upon by rapid population growth, urbanisation and technological advancements.
A result of these crises was the growing prominence of the poverty stricken, and a series of statutes, known collectively as the Elizabethan ‘Poor Laws,’ were enacted to provide alms to those unable to work. These laws allowed parishes to collect taxes from landowners to create relief funds for the poor and infirm.
In 1576, a statute was introduced that addressed unwed mothers claiming these alms, stating that these women were “defrauding [the parish] of the Releife of the impotente and aged true Poore”. Instead of receiving alms, unwed mothers were forced to pay a weekly sum to the parish. If they were able to name the father of the child, the father was instead held liable for this money. In cases where the mother or father were unable to pay, they would be imprisoned.
Given the existence of the statute, there was clear concern over the financial responsibility of parishes to support illegitimate children. The form of bastardy being criminalised was only that of poor bastardy. While unwed mothers of financial means may still be subject to moral shame, their ability to monetarily support their illegitimate child removed the legal ramifications.
Morality and Religion
Morally, England’s criminalisation of infanticide was both a continuation of its condemnation of illicit sex and a response to growing religious tension throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The 1576 statute may have dealt primarily with the financial repercussions of illegitimate births, but it additionally stated that those punished under the statute were providing an “evell Example and Encouradgement of a lewde Lyef”.
The cornerstone of English society was that of the godly family – a husband and wife, with children conceived within the bonds of marriage. This form of domesticity was understood as a microcosm of English political and religious authority. By engaging in illicit sex and bearing illegitimate children, unwed mothers were perceived as undermining not only their immediate household hierarchies, but the hierarchies of England itself.
Historically, the crime of infanticide within England had been met largely with ambivalence. Behavioural historian Gregory Hanlon explains that “in most cases, infanticide was a crime leaving no aggrieved party seeking revenge if it was committed right away. It could be overlooked and forgotten with the passage of time”. If committed before baptism, the death of an infant was comparable to that of stillbirth.
Whilst illicit sex and unwed mothers were still targets of shame and social exclusion, it was only during the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century England that infanticide became associated with similar perceptions.
In particular, the rise of Anabaptism – made prominent in the collective consciousness by the Münster Rebellion in the 1530s – brought infant mortality to the forefront of people’s minds. Whilst only a minor heretical sect in England, the Anabaptist belief in adult baptism, rather than infant baptism, was considered highly immoral.
Their controversial beliefs and their connection to violence were prominent topics in English print media. These ranged from the desire to protect “innocente infantes” from “mourderynge Anbaptistes,” to depictions of Anabaptists choosing to murder their own children rather than have them baptised. This was represented in the 1647 pamphlet Bloody Newes From Dover. The growing association of infanticide with heresy, particularly with violent heretics such as the Anabaptists, contributed to its shift from unacknowledged social reality to monstrous behaviour.
The Infanticide Act of 1624
The punishment for bastardy following the 1576 statute was severe, not only financially, but socially. The stigma that existed towards women’s sexual immorality was harsh, effectively barring unwed mothers from societal participation, and concern grew that, in order to avoid the shame of an illegitimate birth, unwed mothers would instead hide their pregnancies and dispose of their newborn infants secretly.
This led to the creation of the 1624 statute, ‘An Acte to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children.’ Also known as the ‘Infanticide Act,’ it created a legal presumption that an unwed woman who concealed the death of her illegitimate child had committed murder. Further, the statute being specifically directed towards “lewde women,” meaning unwed women, as well as its roots in the economic legislation of the Poor Laws, created a targeted ‘type’ of woman.
The fervour of condemning unwed mothers would wane in the early eighteenth century, with more sympathetic juries electing not to pursue capital punishment unless the infant had been undeniably murdered. Yet, the connection between negative perceptions of maternity and poverty would remain.
Emerging ideas regarding the ‘cult of motherhood,’ which emphasised that a woman’s sole duty was to bear child and disparaged working mothers, had identifiable roots in the same condemnations of unwed, working mothers that formed accusations of infanticide. After all, the Infanticide Act was not created to punish the murder of infants, but rather, to control and punish unwed, poverty-stricken mothers for believed shameful behaviour.
Ashleigh McNamara recently completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at University of Queensland. Her thesis focused on the interaction between narratives of infanticide, specifically the concealment location of the body, and perceptions of the domestic house in seventeenth-century England. Her research examines female criminality, ideas of maternity, and how gendered perceptions are conveyed through physical space.