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Marital cruelty: reconsidering layattitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850Joanne Bailey a & Loreen Giese ba Oxford Brookes University , Oxford , UKb Ohio University , Athens, Ohio , USAPublished online: 17 May 2013.
To cite this article: Joanne Bailey & Loreen Giese (2013) Marital cruelty: reconsideringlay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850, The History of the Family, 18:3, 289-305, DOI:10.1080/1081602X.2013.779292
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2013.779292
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Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England, c. 1580 to 1850
Joanne Bailey1* and Loreen Giese2
1Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK; 2Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA
(Received 8 January 2013; final version received 20 February 2013)
The mid-eighteenth century is seen as a turning point after which English legal and layattitudes to cruelty expanded from life-threatening violence to include a wider range ofbehaviours. This article reconsiders this chronology of changing ideas about maritalcruelty. It follows the lead of recent scholarship that challenges the thesis of a‘civilising’ process in attitudes towards state-violence and inter-personal violence anddraws on new conclusions about marital relationships, spouses’ gendered roles, andearly modern manhood, which complicate simplistic views of patriarchal unions.Focusing upon the full array of acts – not just life-threatening ones – discussed incruelty cases from c. 1580 onwards, this article questions the convention that socialtoleration for husbands’ use of violence against their wives declined from the 1750s aspart of an overall civilising process.
Keywords: marital cruelty; wife beating; inter-personal violence; patriarchy
Susey Smirthwaite turned to York Consistory Court in 1831 to obtain a separation from
her husband on the grounds of cruelty. Her Libel explained that after her marriage to David
Smirthwaite in 1818 he had treated her with severity and cruelty:
by sometimes cursing her and using towards her contemptuous and insulting language in thepresence of her servants and visiters [sic] and by using lewd and licentious language to hisfemale servants in her presence and by stating to her that he would do as he pleased with them –At other times by using towards her dreadful and alarming language such as threatening to flogher and threatening to strike her and by ordering her to leave his house and by attempting to turnher out at other times by compelling her to do the work of a menial servant. At other times bysnatching from her hands religious books in which she was reading and throwing them into thefire. At other times by reading to her aloud bad licentious and profane Books. At other times byrepeatedly striking and kicking her and pinching her arms and neck and by seizing her by thethroat which was in a diseased and enlarged state in consequence of his ill usage with suchviolence as to leave the impression of his fingers thereon and attempting to choke her and atother times by throwing his shoes at her at other times by throwing water over her and at othertimes by tearing her hair and pulling her cap off her head.1
In this long list of acts, cruelty constituted both words and deeds, ranging from the
humiliating and contemptuous to the bruising and murderous. This Libel provides
evidence, then, that with the Victorian era on the horizon, lay people and the courts
considered a range of husbandly behaviours to constitute cruelty; one of the final stages of
an evolution in understandings of marital violence.
This scholarly narrative of change focuses upon tracing changes in the presentation of
evidence of life-threatening violence brought before the ecclesiastical courts, one of the
venues that women facing violence used to remedy their situation from the medieval
q 2013 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author: Email: [email protected]
The History of the Family, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 3, 289–305, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2013.779292
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period onwards.2 It is all too easy to take these legal formulas at face value. Shannon
McSheffrey observes, for example, in her study of marriage in London in the second half
of the fifteenth century, that ‘a wife could obtain a legal separation from her husband’ only
in cases ‘where the abuse had become life-threatening’. Since, McSheffrey says, ‘only the
most serious physical abuse would warrant a separation’, therefore, ‘Depositions in cruelty
suits . . . emphasize the shedding of blood and the threat to life’ (McSheffrey, 2006, p. 139).
By the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, matrimonial litigation included
some cases that did not centre on acts which could kill a wife, but on acts that were less
physically damaging. Thus, an overarching account of changing judicial attitudes towards
marital cruelty has emerged. The lengthier detailed accounts of abuse in separation cases
in the eighteenth century have encouraged historians to conclude that the church courts
were willing to allow wives to include a wider range of husbands’ behaviour in separation
cases from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The inference is that more acts were being
newly categorised and condemned as cruel (Bailey, 2003; Foyster, 2005; Leneman, 1997).
Such a trend fits into a wider account of increasing societal intolerance of inter-personal
violence in general; a shift attributed to changing manners and mores with the growth of
politeness, sensibility, and humanitarianism and a growing intolerance of violent forms of
discipline at all levels of society (Shoemaker, 2000; Shoemaker, 2001; Shoemaker, 2002).
In fact, the category of martial cruelty in England remains an elusive subject. Although
English ecclesiastical marriage law offered spouses the opportunity to separate from a
spouse on the grounds of cruelty, it did not define precisely what behaviours fell within
this category. Broadly speaking, cruelty was the term applied to behaviour which
exceeded correction. Canon law granted husbands the right to correct moderately
disobedient wives. In the twelfth century, Gratian decreed that husbands had a legal
right to enforce their commands over their wives and could do so by force if necessary
(Brundage, 2000). Medieval church courts also offered some protection to wives with
violent husbands, acting as mediators, fining husbands, and obliging men to enter bonds
swearing not to harm their wives. It is unclear when canonists introduced separation on the
grounds of cruelty, and when church courts first began hearing such cases; some schools of
canon law accepted its legitimacy by the mid-thirteenth century. In Charles Donahue’s
opinion, however, English mainstream canonists only agreed about cruelty separation
after the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and this consensus only became mainstream
opinion in the sixteenth century; though cruelty was an acceptable defence against a
husband’s restitution for conjugal rights in the fourteenth century (Brundage, 2000,
pp. 189, 193; Donahue, 2007, pp. 522–523; Ingram, 1988, pp. 184–185; Wieben, 2010,
pp. 2, 5). So, while canon law broadly understood cruelty as behaviour that threatened life
and limb and caused a woman’s life to be burdensome, it supplied definitive answers on
neither the point at which correction became cruelty nor what acts comprised either.
As R. H. Helmholz explains, defining ‘Cruelty depends largely on the attitude of the
parties themselves. How do they regard each other? Do they understand fully the duties
involved in marriage? What does it seem likely they will do in the future?’ (Helmholz,
1974, p. 101). Legal practitioners intended this lack of precision to allow individual
circumstances such as social rank to be considered. The flexible definition of cruelty
continued into the later eighteenth century and beyond since legal officials defined acts as
cruel according to the social status of the plaintiff. A higher-ranking and thus presumably
more sensitive wife would be endangered by less physically harsh abuse than a stout,
robust wife of the lower classes (Foyster, 2002; Leneman, 1997, p. 50).
A further difficulty in understanding attitudes towards marital cruelty is establishing
what degree of force was understood to disrupt household and marital relationships. Some
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research has begun to detail the degree of force the law entitled husbands to use against
wives. Sara Butler’s work on medieval Yorkshire and Essex, Hannah Skoda’s on medieval
Paris and Picardy, and Julie Hardwick’s on seventeenth-century France investigate
descriptions of abusive behaviour in court cases to determine where correction ended and
cruelty began (Butler, 2007; Hardwick, 2006; Skoda, 2009). Both Lizabeth Johnson’s
study of medieval Wales and Jonas Liliequist’s exhaustive study of pre-reformation
Sweden examine legal, didactic, and popular rhetoric (Johnson, 2009; Liliequist, 2011).
Though the law and local conditions differed in all these regions and cities, legal authorities
and communities restricted husbands’ rights to correct wives and imposed some limits
which enabled judgement over whether its exercise was appropriate. Generally law and
popular understandings condoned correction when wives committed demonstrable
offences, including verbal challenges and adultery (Hardwick, 2006, pp. 11–12). Thus,
men’s actions were closely scrutinised to determine whether they fell outside the
conventions for correction. Husbands who acted angrily and irrationally, or when drunk,
repeatedly used force, wielded a weapon, or drew blood were abusive not corrective
(Johnson, 2009, pp. 107–109; Hardwick, 2006, p. 12; Skoda, 2009, pp. 13–14). Still, as
several of these studies indicate, some degree of ambiguity remained about when discipline
became abuse, suggesting some ambivalence about the right of men to use force to correct
wives from the medieval period onwards. These attempts to distinguish between types of
violent gesture in pre-modern Europe do not fit particularly well with a model of changing
attitudes towards marital violence from tolerant in early modern England, acting to protect
women only when abuse was life threatening, to less accepting from the mid-eighteenth
century. Indeed print culture indicates that the acts comprising correction in England were
equally imprecise. For example, in the flourishing genre of advice on marriage from the
sixteenth century only a handful of commentators advocated mild physical punishment as a
very last resort in cases of wives’ heinous disobedience; most rejected the right to use any
physical force (Amussen, 1995, p. 13).
A further thesis linked to this chronology of change argues that as marital violence
became less socially acceptable or justifiable it was perpetrated behind closed doors and
away from public intervention by the end of the eighteenth century (Hunt, 1992;
Shoemaker, 2001). A range of scholarship illustrates that this chronology is problematic.
Studies of early modern concepts of public and private spheres reveal that late sixteenth-
and early seventeenth-century households expected some degree of privacy, both
physically and ideologically (Longfellow, 2006; Nugent, 2010). These barriers would only
be penetrated under certain conditions. In Scotland, for instance, Kirk leaders supported
the concept of household privacy as part of their reformed agenda, breaching the familial
and personal realms only when the godly community was threatened (Nugent, 2010,
pp. 221, 223, 226). Thus no substantial evidence exists that marital violence was
specifically a public spectacle before c. 1700. Nor is there much physical evidence that it
disappeared from view by c. 1800. Historians of wife-beating find instead that marital
cruelty was temporally and spatially fluid in the second half of the eighteenth century,
occurring over long periods of time and in several places both inside and outside the home
(Bailey, 2006). It continued to be open to the view of members of the community and
household into the nineteenth century regardless of the couple’s social rank (Foyster,
2005, chapter 4). While the thesis of a decreasing visibility of marital violence has been
questioned, the contention that attitudes towards marital violence in England hardened
from the mid-eighteenth century remains intact. For example, a recent and otherwise
nuanced overview of interpersonal violence concludes from recently published research
that definitions of marital cruelty ‘were widened’ during the late eighteenth century ‘to
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include ideas of economic deprivation and mental cruelty within marriage’. Such
statements infer that before this point in time such types of male aggression were not
considered to be cruel (Skipp, 2007, p. 586).
Thus, this central orthodoxy that English society’s attitudes towards marital cruelty
hardened from the early modern to modern period is ripe for reassessment. In the first
place, the chronology of a shift from a far more brutally violent medieval to enlightened
and therefore less violent modern world has been shown to be too simplistic (Carter, 2006;
Mucchielli, 2010). Indeed, the focus on wife beating is central to correcting the thesis of a
steady, universal decline in toleration of inter-personal violence over time. Hannah Skoda,
for example, reveals that definitions of marital violence in medieval Paris and Picardy
did not simply declare support for men’s rights to correct physically their wives. Instead
canon law, legal prosecutions, and literature all displayed ‘widespread contemporary
ambivalence about the morality of domestic discipline’. Recognising the nuanced attitudes
towards correction and cruelty, she observes, is an ‘important corrective to teleological
models of progress from an uninhibitedly brutal medieval period’ to a civilised modern
one (Skoda, 2009, pp. 10, 21). At the other end of the chronological scale, Annemarie
Hughes’ study of wife-beating in Scotland between 1800 and 1949 shows rather more
continuity than change in attitudes, with ‘members of the press, juries, employers and the
judiciary’ seeing wife beating ‘as either a “non-criminal” act or an unpremeditated minor
infringement of the law’ caused by men’s drunkenness and wives’ provocation (Hughes,
2010). James Hammerton also demonstrated that while patriarchy in marriage was coming
under scrutiny in the nineteenth century, elements of it persisted in the new model of
egalitarian, companionate unions (Hammerton, 1992, pp. 6–7). This article proposes that
the history of martial cruelty in England is equally complex and resistant to models of
uncomplicated change. In effect, attitudes towards marital violence must be carefully
contextualised before broad conclusions are drawn. As Jenny Skipp observes, male ‘acts
of aggression’ are persistent though subject to change in ‘the various ways in which the
expressions of this aggression became manifest, shifting over time according to socio-
cultural influences’ (Skipp, 2007, p. 567).
Another imperative to reconsider the existing chronology of change in attitudes
towards marital violence is that it is incompatible with the current consensus about early
modern English household relations. In fact, a major problem with focusing upon lawsuits
alone is that they illustrate marital life at points of crisis and collapse. When historians
concentrate on quarrelling couples and life-threatening violence in cruelty separation
cases, they risk portraying the marital relationship simplistically in terms of male reactions
to female obedience or disobedience (Bailey, 2003, pp. 112–114). In this reading, men
exerted legitimate patriarchal government by physically chastising their disobedient
wives. Too little attention is paid to the responses of early modern deponents who
criticised accused husbands as mad and raging, not rational (Gowing, 1996, p. 219). The
failure to analyse all parties’ comments on the husbands’ behaviour and its full range can
lead to an account that normalises wifely submissiveness and husbandly dominance. Such
a depiction of household authority in England is coming under strain from other evidence
emerging from research on gender identities and marital relationships.
More than a decade of research into early modern masculinities complicates this
simple characterisation of masterful husbands and heads of households. It confirms
that ‘dominant’ or ‘patriarchal’ manhood was vested in heading a household, economic
autonomy, and self-control; a form of government that rested upon the capacity to exercise
physical force to punish disobedience and to utilise its threat to maintain order. Yet, at the
same time it demonstrates that men’s grasp on the position was so precarious that
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manhood should not be assumed to be synonymous with patriarchy. Alexandra Shepard,
for instance, shows that many early modern men could not attain ‘patriarchal’ manhood
and adopted alternative forms (Shepard, 2003; Tosh, 2005, p. 35). Though some
alternative masculine identities valorised violence, others explicitly abjured it. Following
the Restoration, for example, Quakers constructed a pacifist masculine identity by
rejecting both violence in war and ‘gendered violence in the home and local community’.
As Erin Bell points out, rejecting physical violence does not mean Quaker men gave
up their claim to exercise discipline and control; they simply did so via restraint and
rationality (Bell, 2011, pp. 283, 288, 293). Such moderation was not restricted to religious
dissenters. Elizabeth Foyster shows that middling-sort male power in the seventeenth-
century household was primarily to be asserted through self-control (Foyster, 1996). Lack
of reason in exercising household government thus undermined early modern as much as
polite eighteenth-century male public reputation (Bell, 2011, pp. 293, 295).
Scholars’ understanding of marital and household authority has similarly been
nuanced in the last decade through a model of marital ‘interdependence’ (Bailey, 2002,
2003, chapters 4 and 5; Flather, 2007; Hurl-Eamon, 2008). Its key features are difficult to
reconcile with the linear depiction of diminishing toleration of marital violence set out
above. Crucially, it shows that the marriage relationship was not inherently oppositional
and prone to patriarchal conflict, as some accounts of early modern gender relations
suggest (Gowing, 1996). Spouses worked towards the same objectives: to manage their
households and economies efficiently and to protect their individual and household
credit and creditworthiness. To this end, they pooled their labour, interests, and resources,
which prioritised familial interests over individual concerns and united spouses in
collaborative – though not necessarily the same – endeavours. It also recognises the
profound economic value of women in marriage, the result of some degree of agency in
financial and credit matters. They contributed invaluable goods, cash or property at
marriage, contracted both to purchase household necessities and to undertake business
activities, and carried out paid or unpaid labour during wedlock. Married women
constructed public reputations and self-identity from such activities (Bailey, 2003, chapter
5; Bailey, 2003; Hunt, 2000; Hurl-Eamon, 2008). Indeed, from the early modern period
through the long eighteenth century, metropolitan and provincial wives saw such
household and economic functions as affording them basic marital rights and respect from
their husbands (Johnston, 2009). One of the most fundamental of these was a wife’s right
not to be ill treated by her husband; her indispensability in managing the household no
doubt helping to secure this privilege (Bailey, 2003, pp. 194–195; Hunt, 2000). After all, a
husband’s aggression undermined the smooth running of a marriage and disrupted
household order: a risk to the individual, the family, and society.
Wives’ economic and domestic activities brought numerous benefits for men too. In an
interdependent marital relationship, men relied upon their wives for essential tasks that
facilitated the smooth running and financial probity of their household, as well as the more
abstract public qualities of status and credit-worthiness, freeing them up for pursuits
elsewhere (Agren & Erickson, 2004). Yet, marital interdependence also had the potential
to destabilise patriarchal authority. For men’s superior legal and economic autonomy
could be undermined by their wives’ material contributions and property ownership and
participation in provision and consumption (Shepard, 2000). Interdependent spouses’ hold
on authority was thus contingent, partial, and, for women, crucially, informal. Both
spouses’ positions were secured or undermined by the other’s actions and goodwill. This
dynamic picture of patriarchal wedlock in practice prompts some rethinking of the
narrative of attitudes towards marital cruelty.
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The ecclesiastical marital cruelty cases themselves do not offer an easy answer to the
question of what people viewed as marital cruelty. After all, the church courts were not the
only forum which tackled marital violence and might be argued to be unrepresentative as
a consequence. Still, where detailed accounts of marital violence survive from other
sources, such as Justices of the Peace notes and petty and quarter sessions bundles, they do
not differ substantially from those reported to the church courts. Also problematic is that
church court separation cases offer varying levels of detail about marital violence. Even
when complete, the Article statements forming Libels reveal a range of types of men’s
behaviour. On the one hand, they were structured to describe the behaviour that
endangered a wife’s future life and limb and therefore offered the grounds upon which
separation was likely to be granted. On the other hand, men’s abusive words and deeds
were also included as evidence of their cruelty, intended by the plaintiff’s proctor to
demonstrate the extent to which a husband caused his wife’s everyday existence to be
burdensome. Unfortunately, many studies of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century attitudes
towards marital violence address only those acts which threatened women’s lives and the
descriptions of more minor forms of abuse are therefore neglected. Problematically, the
statement that severe abuse was required in law to obtain separation can get elided into
claims about wider attitudes towards husbands and marital relationships in general. Thus,
in her examination of marriage in London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, Laura Gowing maintains that ‘only the proof of life-threatening violence made
men unfit husbands’. Yet, as she explains, ‘Although canon law restricted the definition of
cruelty to physical violence, plaintiffs and their witnesses, especially women, attended
with as much care to the economic, mental, and verbal cruelty that gave violence its
context’. In her view the ‘economic, mental, and verbal cruelty’ was the context in which
physical violence occurred (Gowing, 1996, pp. 206, 210). This article argues, in contrast,
that while obtaining legal separation from a husband might require proof that his cruelty
endangered a wife’s life and limb, this is not incompatible with society’s view that other
forms of men’s behaviour towards their wives were also deemed cruel and unacceptable.
Thus, this article addresses four forms of words and deeds frequently recounted by
litigants and witnesses: marital neglect, mistreatment of clothing, verbal abuse, and
abusive bodily acts, all of which conveyed intimidation and contempt. Rather than
dismissing these behaviours as a less significant part of the process of demonstrating in
detail that a husband’s cruelty rendered insupportable a wife’s life, it is proposed that they
are worthy of closer attention. As Susan Amussen states, when discussing the social
meanings of early modern violence: ‘Actions and ideas in one arena were interpreted and
given meaning by reference to other more familiar ones. This makes it important to
examine a range of violent behaviours: in separating them, we reject the habits of mind of
those we study’ (Amussen, 1995, pp. 4–5).
Two discrete bodies of matrimonial litigation underlie this research: 23 cases of
matrimonial cruelty heard by the London Consistory Court from 1586 to 1611 and 51 that
came before Durham Consistory Court and York Church Courts between 1660 and 1857.3
While the legal procedure of a separation suit on the grounds of cruelty before these church
courts was largely the same, terminology varied. Thus, for example, the earlier London
cause papers use ‘kindness’ to describe appropriate marital conduct, while the later York
and Durham cause papers use the term ‘respect’. Nevertheless, the language in all cause
papers testifies to some broad similarities in attitudes towards behaviour considered cruel
within marriage from the later sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This similarity can be
characterised as the concept of marital respect, a component of broader social standards
relating to civil and moral behaviour. Martin Ingram has identified the wide social reach of
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qualities of civility in early modern England: ‘Approaching the topic of civility through
court records is of considerable historical interest. It shows that, far from being the preserve
of elites of gentle or aristocratic status, versions of the concept did have resonance, indeed
utility, for people from a much wider social spectrum. The particular face of civility that is
exposed here is less to do with the niceties of polite behaviour than with conduct and
qualities that a later age would term respectability, propriety, and decency’ (Ingram, 2000,
p. 108). In the legal records used in this article, deponents use the notion of marital ‘respect’
as a way to measure and identify unacceptable acts that strained civility within matrimony.
Respect was, after all, a crucial element of a successful marital relationship. Its lack, as the
kinds of acts in the legal records represent, illustrated cruelty and was central to marital
cruelty cases.
This initial comparative study indicates that litigants and witnesses, regardless of
gender, in the later sixteenth as well as the later eighteenth century identified a
combination of intimidating and contemptuous acts – such as physical violence, marital
neglect, and verbal abuse – as forms of marital cruelty. As such, this pattern in itself
indicates that many individuals in early modern England defined marital cruelty as more
than life-threatening violence towards a spouse. Lacking food or suffering a physical
assault are more physically and emotionally damaging than having a spouse frown or
speak unpleasant words. Yet, witnesses neither defended acts of marital cruelty nor
claimed a behaviour was a ‘gateway’ to life-threatening violence. This stance was made
explicit in cause papers in the later eighteenth century. For example, the definition of
‘cruel use’ applied in Francis Spence’s defence, in 1782, was that his wife and sons [at her
direction] took ‘all the Pains in their power to make him unhappy and thereby to render his
life miserable’ and to shorten his days.4 This study proposes, however, that early modern
English litigants and deponents held an equally wide view of cruel usage.
Studies of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marital separation have revealed
that one of the most frequent complaints made in cruelty cases before the ecclesiastical
courts was that husbands economically deprived their wives (Bailey, 2003, pp. 62–76;
Foyster, 2005, pp. 46–54). This marital neglect took the form of men refusing to maintain
their wives with basic necessities (food, clothing, shelter, and medical care). For example,
30 of the 51 cruelty cases heard by the northern ecclesiastical courts included the
complaint that a husband denied his wife provision (Bailey, 2003, p. 65). This kind of
complaint was not a recent development, however, as the late sixteenth-century separation
cases indicate.
In some cases, the husband’s provision of unwholesome or insufficient food was part
of the complaint. To cite two representative examples, in a case from 1608, John Beverly
testified how Thomas Dighton ‘wroung’ his wife Anne’s hand with ‘great fury &
violence’; threatened to chain her to a post, give her a little straw to lie on, and feed her
‘worse then . . . men would feede a dogg’; and ‘gave her suche a blowe with his elbowe on
her syde as he Constrayned her to goe out of the bed’.5 John stated his belief that ‘Thomas
Dighton is so Cruell & violent in his fearce & uncivill behaviour towardes his wief . . . and
so Comonly accompted that she . . . dareth not by any meanes lyve with him’, a belief,
according to John, that was shared by ‘every body ells that knowethe them bothe’.6 For
John the marital neglect was as much evidence of Thomas Dighton’s ‘fearce & uncivill
behaviour’ as his physical violence and threat of physical abuse. In an earlier case from
1602, in a suit brought by Anne Frier alias Fisher against her husband John Frier, Ursula
Fisher, Anne’s sister, explained that during a seven to eight month stay with the Friers,
John ‘used’ Anne ‘cruelly in her diett’ for this witness ‘knowethe of her owne knowledg
that’ Anne ‘had not sufficient meate & oftentimes that which was not fitt to be eaten of any
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Christian man or woman as namely he kept . . . salt fishe in a seller which was not fitt to be
eaten & that he kept for her & . . . the servantes to eate & no other by reason whearof
bothe . . . Ann & she . . . & the rest weare constrayned to provide for better diett for them
selves ells wheare’.7 In addition to John treating Anne ‘cruelly in her diett’, he also used
Anne ‘most Cruelly’ by beating her: ‘her lypps weare bothe Cutt . . . which seemed to be
with a blowe given her on the mowthe & one of her teethe broken and one . . . of her eyes
all black & blew & sweld’.8 Whilst the ‘most Cruelly’ differentiates the physical abuse
from the marital neglect, this witness labelled both behaviours with the same term, thereby
indicating her belief that marital neglect as well as physical violence was evidence of
marital cruelty.
More cases from the London cause papers include a husband’s failure to provide basic
necessities as part of the cruelty complaint. A witness’ testimony in a 1589 suit in which
Margaret Phillippes sued her husband William for cruelty highlights the dire
circumstances she was in due to her husband’s neglect: Margaret ‘mighte have starved
for anie releefe or comforte that she hath had of the said Phillippes towchinge her meate
and drincke If so be that this deponente and . . . Richard Bartlee had not releeved her with
meate and drincke accordinge to theire poore habletyes for Phillippes tooke awaye one
thinge after an other untill he had taken awaye . . . all . . . And left nothinge but bare
walles’.9 In a latter case from 1599/1600, Sara Porthowse v. William Porthowse, while all
five witnesses testified that William abused his wife, four of them identified his lack of
provision for her as evidence of his marital cruelty. John Michell, for instance, deposed
that Sara was in ‘great want and necessitie’ due to her husband ‘misusing’ her ‘with
strokes’ and ‘for want of meate & drinck & other necessaries’.10 Although these examples
include physical abuse along with marital neglect, they should not suggest that all
deponents cited physical violence when providing evidence of marital cruelty. 21.6% of
the deponents who offered specific examples of marital cruelty in the 23 marital cruelty
cases from the London Consistory Court examined for this article did not mention physical
violence.
In a few cases, marital neglect was sufficient to bring a cruelty separation case and
presumably to reach a result acceptable to the plaintiff. Abigail Moor sued Henry Moor of
Leeds for a separation on the grounds of cruelty in 1707. The Libel stated that he had been
barbarously cruel since their marriage in 1705. Although the articles referred generically
to him beating her, the description of the events focused upon property and refusal to
maintain. When she left home to visit a friend; he ‘bid the Devill goe with her and the
Devill break her neck, and bid her looke att the Dogg and then said I love the Taile of that
Dogg better then thy face, and said God damne thee if ever thou come in my house againe’.
On her return that evening she went to bed where he cursed her and locked her in the
chamber, threatening he would knock her brains out. No physical force is described,
however. The Libel recounts that the next morning he locked her out of the house to
prevent her getting access to her clothes. He swore she would get neither clothes nor
maintenance. The suit did not proceed to sentence and was halted after a couple of months,
following Henry’s Personal Response to the Libel. It is unlikely that it was abandoned
because the evidence of marital cruelty was inadequate. Henry denied that he had
abused his wife, though he pointed out that he had heard she was unkind to her previous
husband and was provoking. He also agreed to his obligation to fulfil a covenant he had
entered before marriage not to meddle with the estates of Abigail’s previous husband and
father, leaving their rents and profits for her five children. It seems likely that once Abigail
had this promise she could drop her case.11 Denial of food and clothing and the provision
of tainted or inadequate food signified ill treatment because men were rejecting a key
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component of the marriage union. Food, drink, decencies, clothing, warmth, and shelter
conveyed and embodied husbandry, care, and love. Therefore, the denial of material
necessities and comfort made manifest the husband’s lack of love. As Jane Ballantine, of
Crookdale, Bromfield, Cumbria, told the Consistory Court, she berated James Currie in
1729 for taking his wife’s plate and clothes and for taking command of the house from her,
giving the keys and management to his servant. This usage was she told him ‘too cruel and
unbecoming a Husband’.
Further disrespectful acts which litigants and witnesses from both sets of records
considered forms of marital cruelty were damage to clothing, verbal abuse, facial gestures,
and spitting. Along with marital neglect, they indicate that early modern Englanders
considered more than life-threatening violence as marital cruelty.12 Attacks upon a
spouses’ clothing or linen were acts included in the broad category of marital cruelty
(Leneman, 1997, p. 38). James Clerk’s personal response in 1608 to his wife Alice’s
allegations of cruelty included an explanation of who tore her petticoat and how he ended
up with her hat. He explained that after Alice, who was at one Belche’s house, refused his
‘freindly’ request for her to go home with him and ran away from him, he, whilst running
after her, fell to the ground, grabbing her petticoat in the process and taking her down with
him. Despite his helping her up and again entreating her to go home with him, this time by
taking ‘her by the middle in kynde manner’ and offering ‘to lead’ her home, James
recounted that she ‘verie unkindely denied and strived to goe from him’ whereupon he
took her hat. He denied being the cause of the torn petticoat. Instead, he blamed the torn
petticoat on the ‘little Children’ who ‘were with her and houldinge her by the kirtle or
petticoate’ and ‘her owne frowardnes and rashenes to goe from him’. He admitted to
taking her hat, which was of particular issue in this case since she went ‘with owte a hatt to
Engfeild’ on a ‘Rayney daie’.13 His detailed explanation of the circumstances surrounding
the torn and taken clothing indicates that a spouse’s attack on clothing was not condoned.
In a further example, in a 1682 case heard by York Consistory Court, Timothy Brooke
was accused of cruelty from their wedding in 1662. Articles two to ten alleged his
adultery; articles ten to fifteen dealt with his cruelty. Article thirteen stated that he beat her
inhumanely so that she needed poultices, plasters, and ointments and was confined to her
chamber for a month. It continued that he often pulled her head clothes from her head, tore
them, drew his knife, and threatened to cut her clothes off her back and put her out of
doors.14 Clothing bore the brunt of fury when Robert Shaw was searching for his wife who
had fled from him after an argument in 1690. Finding only her shoes and a red petticoat he
cut and tore them to pieces.15 In his Allegation, he defended himself by declaring that his
wife was perverse in nature, quarrelsome, and a scold. To provoke him she would tear his
cravat and pull his hair.16
We should not dismiss such acts, but realise why they were so serious to
contemporaries. Clothing was a primary means by which people constructed identities and
social status and represented themselves in public (Reinke-Williams, 2011; Rublack,
2011; Styles, 2008). Thus, for contemporaries, acts which literally tore and damaged
clothing figuratively damaged spouses in crucial ways. As Julie Hardwick comments
about seventeenth-century France, witnesses to marital violence remarked on torn clothes
and headdresses because ‘A married woman’s honor and reputation could hardly be more
seriously impugned than by the uncovering of her hair’ (Hardwick, 2006, p. 14). Similar
forms of humiliation occurred a century later in the very different fashions of 1779.
Elizabeth Finch claimed that her husband Samuel, a Durham house carpenter, ‘being
unmindfull of his conjugal Vow did pull off her the said Elizabeth Finch’s cap and Hair’
and threatened to burn them.17 Samuel admitted that during some differences that arose
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between them on 29 December, he did ‘by way of mortifying her intolerable Pride pull off
her Cap and false Curls which were improper for one of her age and of her Rank and
Situation in Life’.18
In both sets of ecclesiastical records, witnesses and litigants identified verbal abuse by
both men and women as a form of marital cruelty. The research of many scholars points to
the great concern early modern Englanders had concerning uncontrolled tongues. Because
words could damage personal and public reputations, they could be the basis of an offence
prosecutable in ecclesiastical and secular courts. As scholarship on defamation and
scolding amply demonstrates, lay attitudes often associated women with this form of
abuse. Not surprisingly, some husbands cited the verbal abuse of their wives as the impetus
for their correction. William Phillippes recounted in 1589 that after he found ‘some falte’
with his wife Margaret she then called him a ‘roge rascall whorehunter Thiefe’, upon
which he then ‘gave’ her ‘one or two blowes with the backe of his hande upon her
cheeke’.19 Although he named her verbal abuse as the cause for his physical violence to
her, he failed to recognise his own ‘falte’ finding of her as the inciting provocation. In 1696
Robert Shaw declared that his wife deliberately provoked him by calling him names such
as ‘Bastard, foole, Rogue, beggarly Rogue, murthering Rogue, and pocky rotten
whoremasterly rogue’.
What may be surprising in light of this spate of scholarship is that witnesses and
litigants cite many examples of husbands’ verbally abusing their wives as evidence of
marital cruelty. Crucially, witnesses and litigants roundly condemned a husband’s verbal
abuse as a form of cruelty in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- as well as in the eighteenth-
century records. In 1586/1587, several witnesses in Margaret Bradforth alias Farmer v.
John Farmar pointed to John’s ‘cruell and vehemente wordes’ towards his wife as
evidence of marital cruelty.20 In a different later case, Richard Bartlett cited both general
and particular memories of William Phillippes verbally abusing his wife Margaret. He, a
glazier from St Martins in the Fields aged 40, testified that ‘many & sondry tymes he hath
byn disquieted with the cruell and raylinge wordes . . . and brawles of . . . William
Phillippes with his wife’ and, in one instance, William called Margaret ‘old whore and
haggerdlye whore and witche and saied she had bewitched him’.21 David Jenkins alias
Jenkinsen was another husband whose cruelty toward his wife included verbal abuse.
Deposing in 1602/1603, Humfrey Bull cited part of the ‘Crueltie offered & don by the
same david Jenkins unto his sayd wief’ Martha as David using her ‘very Cruelly in wordes
miscalling her as whore & arrant whore & suche like filthie termes’.22 In an earlier-cited
case from 1608, John Beverly testified that Thomas Dighton ‘misused’ his wife Anne
Dighton alias Hardy ‘bothe by wordes and deedes’ and ‘chided and rayled’ at his wife.23 In
1688 Anthony Fletcher’s wife alleged that he ‘belch out against her imp[re]ca[ti]ons’ as
evidence of his disaffection and cruelty towards his wife for the previous two years.24 In
1718 the fifth article of Esther Bowes’ Libel stated that in 1717 her husband had ‘with
great disdain and outragious Cruelty behaved himself towards his wife by beating her and
Calling her by Sev[er]all Unchristian and Reproachfull Names as Whore, Whitch [sic],
Bitch’.25 This behaviour was recognised to have a serious impact on women. As Katharine
Arthur, a 35 year old spinster of Doncaster, deposed in 1721, John Laughton’s cursing and
chiding of his wife made her life uncomfortable.26 The surgeon, John Greenwell, of
Corbridge, Northumberland, for example, was accused of treating his wife ‘on all
Occasions with great Indignity’, calling her a hussy, drunken whore, and toad.27
In addition to verbal abuse, spouses also conveyed disrespect through such violent
gestures as angry facial expressions. Fay Bound has shown that proving defamatory words
were spoken in an angry manner was ‘fundamental to the legalistic definition of slander’ in
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the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Bound, 2003, p. 61). Similarly, the display of
anger would seem to have been central to understandings of marital cruelty. In these
records, husbands expressed tyranny, or the abuse of power, in angry looks as well as
words and acts. This expression similarly indicated the antithesis of marital love.
Deponents cited husbands’ threatening facial expressions in three of the London cases
spanning the years 1589 to 1602. The witnesses in these cases did not cite a particular look
as more cruel than another. Three witnesses in two cases used the non-specific term of the
husband’s ‘lookes’ to identify a husband’s expression that caused fear in his wife.28 Five
witnesses from three cases who labelled the kind of countenance that caused fear used a
variety of terms including ‘stearne,’ ‘sterne and fearfully,’ ‘frowning,’ ‘furious,’ and
‘cruellye and furiouslye’.29 This pattern indicates that it was the act of showing a wife a
threatening countenance, rather than the exact facial expression, that made this behaviour
one of marital cruelty in the eyes of both wives and witnesses.
In Margaret Bradforth alias Farmer v. John Farmar and Margery Percye v.
Christopher Percye, three witnesses in each case included a husband’s facial gesture
alongside verbal abuse and physical threats as behaviours of extreme threat. In 1586, for
instance, Margery Alyver testified that John Farmar‘s ‘furious manner’, ‘madlike
behaviour’, and ‘stearne countenaunce soe fearfull’ caused her and his wife Margaret
‘greate feare’.30 Likewise, Joan Grene deposed that Margaret was ‘in greate feare of
her . . . lyffe’ as a result of her husband’s stern look, cruel speech, and grevious swearing.31
John Kindlemarshe also equated John Farmar’s ‘lookes and his gesture and behavior in
swearinge’.32 In the 1590 case of Percye v. Percye, Katherine Stokes recounted that whilst
several people were sitting together, Christopher ran up the stairs ‘with his naked sworde
& his buckler in his hande loking so sterne and fearfully as frighted all the company’.
Clearly, running into a group of people with a drawn sword was an abusive act since it
held an emanate physical threat, but so was his face as the indicator of his intent.
Evidence exists in the London records that deponents considered husbands’ aggressive
facial contortions violent as well as cruel in their own right. Christopher Percye’s raging
antics with sword and buckler were a threat in themselves, yet the same witness cited his
‘furious lokes’ in addition to his ‘violent manner’ as similarly cruel.33 Though the three
witnesses who mention Christopher’s facial expressions differed slightly about the
severity of his ‘sterne looks’, they all described them as cruel.34 In the above-mentioned
1602 case brought by Anne Frier alias Fisher against her husband John, Anne Cottle
identified John’s facial expressions as equal to verbal and physical abuse. She recalled that
when she and her husband dwelt with the Friers for a week or two in Mark Lane, she ‘did
see and here the same John ffrier offer muche violence unto his sayd wief . . . as namely
often times . . . and almost alwayes he would Come into his howse with a frowning
Countenaunce on his wief & use some ill wordes to her’. For this witness, John Frier’s
countenance was crucial evidence, since she was ‘somwhat deafe’ and ‘Could not well
understand’ the ‘wordes’ he used. Nevertheless, she could ‘alwayes percyve him to have a
very angry Countenaunce to his sayd wief Ann’.35 The behaviour that she labelled as
‘muche violence’ was his ‘frowning Countenaunce’ and ‘ill wordes’.36 The fact that this
witness referred to John’s ‘angry Countenaunce’, ‘ill wordes’, and the physical violence of
kicking his pregnant wife with the same label of ‘muche violence’ points to her opinion
that these behaviours were all measures of cruelty.
The contrast in descriptions when witnesses referred to wives’ facial expressions
highlights the role of husbands’ facial expressions as markers of physical threat. The
abused wives’ countenances responded to the husbands’ behaviour and marked his cruelty.
In Margery Percye v. Christopher Percye, Isabella Dartnole and Walter Gower testified
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that Margery looked ‘soe fearefully & piteously’ and ‘very gastlye & wilde as yf she hadd
bynn scared’.37 Isabella Dartnole added that, because Christopher ‘used’ his wife ‘so
badly’, she thought Margery ‘coould have lost her wyttes’.38 In Anne Frier alias Fisher v.
John Frier, Alice Andrewes reported that Anne ‘would looke wane & pale’ due to John’s
‘Cruell usage’.39 Regardless of the description the deponents used, their testimony
suggests that they condemned a husband causing fear in his wife.
Husbands’ faces continued to be markers of cruelty in the later seventeenth century in
the north of England. Anne Shaw’s Libel listing her husband Robert’s cruelty in 1696
detailed one incident when he suddenly began calling her opprobrious names, which left
her ‘frighted at his words and the furiousnesse of his countenance’ so that she ran out into
the yard. He pursued her and drenched her with water and pushed her over. Robert denied
the accusation by claiming that he always behaved ‘respectfully’ to Anne.40 Charles
Arthur, a cleric of Wadworth, deposed on behalf of Elizabeth Laughton in 1721 that when
he attempted to reconcile her and her husband, John Laughton, a gentleman of Tickhill, he
found that John was ‘disturb’d in his temper and look’t angry’. The deponents obviously
thought John intimidated his wife thus. Elizabeth’s midwife reported how John ‘spoke
angrily to and look’t angrily at’ his wife following the birth of their baby.41 Interestingly,
neither case turned on life-threatening violence. Instead, they catalogued diverse
intimidating and aggressive behaviour and some blows.42
Spitting was a further mark of disrespect, and both spouses were accused of it in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1699, a deponent observed that Peter Day called
his wife a whore and a ‘Mucky nasty Bitch,’ spat at her, and kicked her about the house.43
As in the earlier cases, this deponent defined all the acts as cruelty. Husbands’ defences
occasionally accused wives of spitting. Robert Shaw defended himself by pointing out that
his wife would spit in his face.44 A quarter of a century later, James Currie’s defensive
allegation stated that any good treatment he gave his wife was usually returned ‘with
spitting on his . . . Face and with most scurrilous reproachful and provoking words and
Expressions, Gestures and Actions’. One deponent confirmed that Jane would spit in her
husband’s face and ‘turn from him in a scornful manner’ another that she ‘seldom looked
at him but She spit on the ground in contempt’.45 This husband accused his wife of several
acts of violence from kicking him when she was astride a horse to throwing burning
candlesticks at him when he lay in bed. For these husbands their wives acts also denoted
lack of respect, or contempt, and thus was provoking behaviour.
Furious faces and spitting may all have marked unacceptable cruelty because they
indicated that spouses were not acting with self-control. As Susan Amussen points out,
violent acts have contested meanings. Violence was used as a disciplinary tool, a
legitimate way to punish those who did wrong. Yet people also used the term violence [or
here cruelty] to ‘deny the legitimacy of actions against them’ (Amussen, 1995, pp. 2, 3).
In these cases, witnesses did not consider husbands’ aggressive disrespectful acts to be
legitimate violence because they could not be categorised as a disciplinary tool. Therefore,
such acts were illegitimate and considered marital cruelty.
Moreover, possessing the right to correct was not a licence to exercise it. Jonas
Liliequist’s study of marital cruelty in Sweden shows that correction could be permitted
but rarely condoned. Unlike England, early modern Swedish law did define the terms of
moderate correction. Even so, as Liliequist shows, didactic literature emphasised that it
should be avoided. Thus he concludes, ‘marital violence, in both its tyrannical and legal
forms as chastisement, is depicted as a failure – a sign of lapsed personal authority with its
roots in the poor raising and supervision of the wife, the husband’s own lack of self-
discipline, or quite simply a poor choice of mate’ (Liliequist, 2011, p. 10). The situation
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was similar in England. In his magisterial survey of English law from the late fifteenth to
mid-seventeenth centuries, Christopher Brooks concluded that practice and the law limited
the acceptable parameters of heads of households’ entitlement to use corporal punishment
to correct the biological and social family. For example, William Lambarde’s well-known
guidebook for JPs explained that a husband could chastise his wife ‘if not outragiously’ but
a page later reminded husbands to behave ‘honestly’ and treat their wives as though they
were their own flesh (Brooks, 2007, p. 360). No wonder, then, that the area between
correction and cruelty was ambiguous and contested.
A comparison of behaviours cited in matrimonial causes from different times and
regions offers insights into the development of the definition and understanding of marital
cruelty in the context of contemporary marital roles, behaviours, and attitudes. The cruelty
cases discussed here shed some doubt on the thesis that a greater number of acts by
husbands were considered cruel after the 1750s. In the sixteenth as well as the nineteenth
century, ‘cruelty’ in marriage, at least in lay people’s eyes, included acts encompassing
minor intimidating words and gestures as well as life-threatening violence. This article
does not, however, suggest that the origins of the ‘civilising’ process should simply be
pushed back to an earlier date. As Susan Amussen observes, violence was common in
early modern England, ‘part of the everyday vocabulary of social relations,’ although
‘people expected its use and extent to be limited’ (Amussen, 1995, p. 32). Equally, Greg
Smith’s survey of domestic violence in Hanoverian London reminds us that even though
intimate violence was increasingly ‘monitored and prosecuted in a larger cultural world in
which other forms of violence were losing their former claims to legitimacy’, its persistent
nature and incidence should make us cautious about any steady civilisation of society
(Smith, 2007, p. 49). Thus, in both the nineteenth century and the sixteenth century, cases
existed that centred on horrific physical abuse, which disabled women and endangered
their lives. What is perhaps more surprising is that in the sixteenth as well as the nineteenth
centuries cases existed that were permitted to come before the courts and successfully
resolved which did not contain life-threatening physical violence, but turned instead on
acts of contempt and disrespect and marital neglect. Far more comparative work needs to
be done to establish long-term patterns in attitudes, while at the same time locating them in
their specific context of place, time, culture, and society to understand their meaning over
time.
Moreover, several questions remain to be explored before these issues are understood
better. What is the relationship between these findings about people’s attitudes and the
law’s stance on marital cruelty? Five decades have passed since John Biggs’ 1962
publication, The concept of matrimonial cruelty, and a detailed study of legal texts and
English case law in the context of new findings would be welcome. Far more research
needs to be done to extend longitudinally existing work on concepts of female provocation
(Foyster, 2005, pp. 115–122; Wiener, 2004) and on the transition points from correction to
cruelty in legal and popular understandings in England. In addition, this work needs to be
regional. Was London unique? Did its residents have different expectations, ideas, and
experiences with regards to marriage, marital authority, and marital cruelty? Did its legal
institutions offer services different to those in other parts of England? Indeed, patterns of
litigation are also crucial. It may be, for example, that the apparent shift in attitudes
towards marital cruelty is more an indication of the increasing use of the church courts for
matrimonial dispute and therefore apparent because of the greater availability of detailed
cause papers. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that the evidence of a wider range of
behaviours constituting marital cruelty arises from the London Consistory Courts at a time
when society was litigious, and these courts were accessible to a range of Londoners.
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A reconsideration of the lay attitudes to marital cruelty in England c. 1580 to 1850 in light
of these questions will increase our understanding of marital cruelty not only in this period
but also in our own.
Acknowledgements
We dedicate this article to Dr Martin Ingram in appreciation of his generous encouragement, support,and sound critical insight. We thank Dr Marianna Muravyeva for inviting us to contribute to thisvolume, Dr Cassie Watson for reading a draft of this article and guiding us on recent work on inter-personal violence, and our anonymous reader for providing valuable suggestions to improve thisarticle. Professor Loreen Giese would also like to thank Oxford Brookes University for theInternational Visiting Research Fellowship in History and Ohio University for the Baker Fund andHumanities Research Fund Awards that assisted in funding this research.
Notes
1. Borthwick Institute of Historical Research [hereafter BIHR], CONS.CP.1831/5.2. It should be noted that women also sought assistance from friends, family, clergymen, and
Justices of the Peace, with their cases heard also at petty and quarter sessions.3. The north-eastern cause papers often include both Libels and interrogatories which are not
available for the London records. This difference does not affect our broad argument, since layattitudes survive in both sets of records.
4. BIHR, CP.I.2013, 1782.5. London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], DL/C/218/28–29. An ellipsis marks an
omission in manuscript transcriptions. In many instances, the depositions contain multiplereferences to the speaker, such as ‘this respondent’ or ‘this deponent,’ in addition to theappropriate pronouns. For ease of reading, these multiple references have not been transcribed,and an ellipsis marks their omissions. Punctuation and spelling in the quotations have not beenmodernised, except for u/v. Italics indicate expanded abbreviations. In passages from themanuscripts, the names of deponents are transcribed as they appear. In discussions of themanuscripts, the surnames are spelled and Christian names are used as they appear in their firstusage in the heading in the depositions. If either a surname or Christian name does not appear ina heading, the first reference in the first surviving deposition for the case is used. LatinChristian names are anglicised and rendered according to modern usage. Since DL/C/215 andDL/C/216 do not contain folio numbers, all foliation is Professor Loreen Giese’s.
6. LMA, DL/C/218/29.7. LMA, DL/C/216/373r.8. LMA, DL/C/216/374r.9. LMA, DL/C/213/580.
10. LMA, DL/C/215/459r.11. BIHR, CP.I.2741, 1707; Cons.AB.96.12. We acknowledge that women could sue their husbands for both cruelty and adultery. We
recognise that women also saw adultery as a form of marital abuse, but do not discuss thisattitude in this article since it raises issues about attitudes towards the sexual double standardthat we do not have space to address.
13. LMA, DL/C/218/166–67.14. BIHR, CP.H.3516, 1682.15. BIHR, TRANS.CP.1697/2, George Wintringham’s Deposition.16. D/C CP.1696/3, Robert Shaw’s Allegation, Article 5.17. BIHR, TRANS.CP 1779/1, Elizabeth Finch’s Libel, article 5.18. BIHR, TRANS.CP 1779/1, Samuel’s Personal Answers to the Libel.19. LMA, DL/C/213/544–45.20. LMA, DL/C/213/57.21. LMA, DL/C/213/584.22. LMA, DL/C/216/515v.23. LMA, DL/C/218/30 and DL/C/218/28.24. BIHR, TRANS.CP 1688/3.
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25. Durham University Library Special Collections [hereafter DULSC], DDR/EJ/PRC/2/1717/2.See also BIHR, CP. I.88, 1704.
26. BIHR, CP.I.631, 1721. Katharine Arthur’s deposition.27. DULSC, DDR/EJ/PRC/2/1773/4, 1773. Libel, Article 16.28. LMA, DL/C/213/131, DL/C/213/713, and DL/C/213/716.29. LMA, DL/C/213/57, DL/C/213/60, and DL/C/213/713; DL/C/213/722; DL/C/216/381v;
DL/C/213/722; and DL/C/213/57.30. LMA, DL/C/213/57.31. LMA, DL/C/213/60.32. LMA, DL/C/213/131.33. LMA, DL/C/213/722.34. LMA, DL/C/213/713.35. LMA, DL/C/216/381v–382r.36. LMA, DL/C/216/381v.37. LMA, DL/C/213/713 and DL/C/213/733.38. LMA, DL/C/213/713.39. LMA, DL/C/216/377r.40. BIHR, DC.CP.1696/3.41. BIHR, CP.I.631, 1721. Charles Arthur’s deposition; Elizabeth Armitage’s deposition.42. For evidence that a wide range of acts were seen as indicating husbands’ cruelty in arenas other
than the court, see Anne Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne Wentworth, Tending to the BetterPreparing of All People for Her Larger Testimony, Which Is Making Ready for Publick View,London, 1677, cited in Johnston, ‘Prophecy, Patriarchy, and Violence’, 352–3.
43. BIHR, DC.CP.1699/1, Elizabeth Newsome’s deposition.44. BIHR, D/C CP.1696/3, Robert Shaw’s Allegation.45. BIHR, TRANS.CP.1730/6, Depositions of James Sandylands, Catharine Pott, John Grainger.
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