ABSTRACT
Women were prosecuted in the secular and Church courts for a variety of offences, but the sensational nature of witchcraft has led historians to focus heavily on this particular crime. Contemporary pamphlets and ballads reveal intense anxieties about witchcraft and other crimes associated with women, particularly the killing of children and husbands, which were seen as both unnatural and as disruptive of social order (Dolan 1994). The murder of a man by his wife, or by any other subordinate, was regarded a form of treason; and in The country justice (1615) the lawyer, Michael Dalton, explained that if a wife maliciously killed her husband she committed petty treason, but if a husband maliciously killed his wife ‘this is but murder’. The reason for the difference was ‘that the one is in subjection, and oweth obedience, and not the other’. The punishment for a petty traitor was burning and John Evelyn recorded seeing ‘a miserable creature burning, who had murdered her husband’ in Smithfield in 1652.
