P 50 According to the historian Barbara Hanawalt, who focused on a sample of 575 homocides in Northamptonshire occurring in 70 years of relatively complete records,between 1300 and 1472, murder remained not only sn almost ubiquitous activity but an overwhelmingly male one; 99% of the accused and 94% of the victims were men. (interestingly though in London during the same period, Hanawalt established that women appeared more frequently as perpetrators (7%) and as victims (10%). The Northamptonshire killers tended to come from the middle ranks of society and contained a high number of what might be called ‘ middling peasants’, along with tradesmen (tailors, brewers, porters) a fair number of clergy, and more than a sprinkling of servants. .. dominated by killings outside the family, a quarter of which were committed during thefts or burglaries.”
p. 51 One well-documented (and not untypical) case from 14th-century London, Walter de Benington and 17 companions came to the brewhouse of Gilbert de Mordone, refused to leabe when asked to do so having consumed four gallons of beer, made it clear that they intended to carry on drinking, molested a young girl and then assaulted Gilbert de Mordone and his brewer. The brewer took up a staff and killed Walter. The inquest jury returned a verdict of self-defence.”
p. 127 From around 1725, men from more humble stations in society no longer carried the formidable staffs, sometimes iron-tipped, that had been regarded as essential implements of self-defence in the 16th and 17th centuries. True, gun ownership had become more widespread, but guns were rarely employed in the kinds of quarrels that had once claimed lives. And while a large number of men continued to carry knives (which, one should remember, were essential work tools for many) they were less inclined to draw them in anger than their ancestors had been. Now it was far more likely that a quarrel would end in a fist fight rather than a stabbing,
p. 183 a couple of married in middle age. Catherine was 40, a spinster and a woman of property when in 1792 she married Robert, a widower in his 50s. First all went well , but … Robert was suffering from ‘family concerns’, presumably financial, and it seems likely that Catherine had granted him property to help him out. Thereaftter, so far as we can tell, Robert became fixated on acquiring as much of his wife’s property as possible… he had her locked up in an attic, though he did at least instruct the servants to pass food to her. In desperation, she knocked a hole through the wall of the attic into an adjoining house, and managed to make contact with a servant there. The servant go a message to her friends and they rescued her … our sources dry up at the cliff-hanging moment.”
p. 185 In 1670, Lady Grace Chatsworth complained that when she had been lying in bed, heaviuly pregnant, ill and suffering from a fever, her husband had deliberately brought “a company of musicians” into the chamber nest to hers and “caused them to strike and play very loudly to the danger of her health”. She had asked her husband to send them away, she said, but he had refused to do so, and they say “drinking & making a grievous noyse and caused the music to play until 12 o’clock at night.”
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