History's Deadliest Women: The Husband Killer

Until the 19th century in Britain, a woman killing her husband was guilty of worse than murder, she was guilty of petty treason. So what is petty treason? What is its very harsh punishment? And why was women killing their husbands so terrifying? Kate is joined by Rose Wallis, a social historian of crime, criminal justice and social protest at the University of the West of England. They discuss the particular case of Elizabeth Herring, and why she ended up at the stake. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwixt the Sheets. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to let us witter on in your lug holes. But before we can do any of that, I have to make sure that you're safe and that you are secure and that you're not going to be upset with anything that might assail the aforementioned lug hole. And here it is. This is an adult podcast, pucker by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair dudes warning, because if you listen to that and then if you keep listening and you get offended, well, tough tits, that one was on you, because fair dudes, we did tell you. Right, let's crack on.

• 1:16Kate Lister?

  It is 1773 and we are in central London, heading out for a family day at the executions home. Fun for all the family, the good old days, eh? It's actually quite a big case today, that of Elizabeth Herring, a woman who was controversially sentenced to death for the murder of her husband. Now, that wasn't the controversial bit, by the way, she definitely killed him, definitely did that, there were loads of witnesses and everything. The controversial bit is how she's going to be killed, because Elizabeth has been found guilty not just of murder, but of petty treason, as could all women be who would oft their husbands. And how did the refined and genteel 18th century deal with such a crime?

• 2:01Kate Lister?

  Well, they burnt them to death, of course they did. I'm ready to find out more, if you are.

• 2:30Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. For several hundred years, under British law, if a woman killed her husband, she wouldn't be charged with murder or manslaughter, she would be charged with, drumroll please, petty treason. So what is that crime? Would a man killing his wife get the same charge? Spoiler alert, no. And why did this crime warrant being burnt at the stake, which felt outdated even in the 18th century? Well, today, I'm joined by Professor Rose Wallace, a social historian of crime, and she is going to tell us all about petty treason and the case of Elizabeth Herring. Are you ready to do it? Well, let's crack on.

• 3:19Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Rose Wallace. How are you doing, babes?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I'm very good, Kate. How are you?

• 3:28Kate Lister?

  Oh, thrilled to be talking to you. I think the last time I saw you was at Sheffield, wasn't it? We were doing the Crosswise Podcast Festival with the awesome Lucy, Lucy Wolsey.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, all sex and crime and ranting.

• 3:41Kate Lister?

  Sex and crime, yes, yes. That was good fun, actually. That was a hot day, if memory serves.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:48Kate Lister?

  So it's fab to have you back. Not only did I, we worked together on the podcast thing, but we also worked together on Lucy Wolsey's Murder Club. We were the murder club, you, me and Nadifa.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. That was a great, great one to be involved with.

• 4:03Kate Lister?

  That was good fun, wasn't it?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  More ranty chats, actually, about horrible things.

• 4:07Kate Lister?

  It was. A behind the scenes fact about that shoot is that I had the worst flu in my entire life, which, do you remember, you were so nice to me and so patient. Like, I honestly thought, I was so ill, I thought I was drunk.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  But you honestly, you wouldn't have known, you wouldn't have known, Kate, you'd absolutely soldiered to, I think there was quite a lot of ginger shots, if I remember rightly.

• 4:26Kate Lister?

  Yeah, lots of ginger shots. And the lovely runners on the show were like standing by with like backup Lemsips of every time, like it's sort of counting down to the four hour mark, they're like, drugger, drugger, get more drugs into her.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Ice packs up the skirt, ginger shots, yeah.

• 4:41Kate Lister?

  I was so proud.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  There we go, that's how we roll, isn't it?

• 4:43Kate Lister?

  It is, and it all came together. I remember watching it, thinking, no, this looks really good, this absolutely looks like we really know what we're talking about. So you are Professor of Crime, Criminal Justice, Social Protest at the University of West England. So Rose, how did you get into that?

• 5:00Speaker 01

  So I've always been interested in crime, I suppose, and crime stories. I loved reading thrillers and novels like that when I was younger. But when I came to university, I was very much kind of into international political history. And then I did one amazing module called Crime and Protest with two wonderful historians, Professor Steve Paul and Dr Moira Martin. And that just changed everything, because it was not so much about the who done it, like what I'd been reading, but actually thinking about the way that investigating crime and the courts and criminal justice is this extraordinary insight into ordinary people's lives, into the way that society works. And it really, really matters.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  So that's kind of what got me hooked.

• 5:47Kate Lister?

  I love origin stories like that, when people could kind of pinpoint it, like it was this one course that I did, it was this one person, and then it was literally just like, my eyes were opened and that was it, it was it for me. We could talk to you about so many things, but we're actually here to talk to you about this crime, which I was aware of, but I've never looked that deeply into, of petty treason or petite treason. What is that, Rose?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So as petite, being from the French, and petit being a corruption of that.

• 6:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, is that right? So it could be petite or petty, and it both means like little?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Variant spellings, and it means little. So we are talking about a kind of lesser or inferior type of treason.

• 6:31Kate Lister?

  I'm learning already.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  The high treason, which we may have heard of, so if you're planning to do in the monarch or head of state, that's legislated against, in this context, we're looking at anyway, under the Treason Act of 1351. It also creates this inferior offence of petty treason, an inferior sort of thing, which is where you're killing someone, not you specifically, obviously, but the person, the perpetrator, yeah, is killing someone to whom they owed faith and obedience. So it's quite specific. So if a servant kills his or her master or mistress, that's petty treason. If a clergyman kills his superior, that's petty treason.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  And if a woman kills her husband, that's petty treason.

• 7:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, fuck off.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  And that's basically the majority of cases, certainly in the kind of early modern period, up until 1828, when it ceases to be an offence.

• 7:32Kate Lister?

  1828.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's technically a kind of separate offence until 1828. So

• 7:42Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  We are talking predominantly, and guess what, predominantly working women, who are the ones, you know, it's not like you see them every day, these cases, but it is working women and women up for husband murder that constitutes most petty treason offences.

• 7:59Kate Lister?

  Wow. So would this also cover, like, if you wanted to kill your boss at work?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yes. So if you are servant to your mistress or master and you killed them, then that would constitute petty treason. The other way around, it's just murder.

• 8:15Kate Lister?

  Of course it is.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Just murder in massive inverted commas. Sometimes we talk about it as being a kind of species of murder, but it's actually quite different, because there are slightly different rules of evidence, as it's kind of legally constructed.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  I was just about to ask that.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  Because it can't be that, like, every time a wife has bumped off her husband and she's got caught, they've done her for petty treason, or maybe it is, I don't know.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Well, technically, it could be prosecuted as such, but you have to have two prosecution witnesses to make a case of petty treason.

• 8:43Kate Lister?

  Hope everyone's taking notes about this, right? Okay.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  If you're the accused, then they are interested in your intention to kill someone. You can't use what we might think of as a positive defence, so you can't say there were mitigating circumstances, I was provoked. In its original legal construction, it's all about intent. So this is where it is kind of really different from murder, where they would look at malice intention, but also provocation, circumstances that might mitigate the offence. That's in its original construction. By the point that we're looking at today, so by the time we kind of get to the mid 17th century into the 18th century, the courts start to treat it more like murder. They are more interested in whether, for example, a woman was provoked to attack her

• 9:30Speaker 01

  husband, whether there was malice, whether it was premeditated, so.

• 9:34Kate Lister?

  Wait, so if there is, so if, let's say I bumped off my husband, and now I think that most people would go, fair enough, I don't even need to know what happened, but like, they would be looking at, so if there was malice of forethought, and if there was witnesses, then it could be petty treason. But if I'd done it in the spur of the moment, like, if I'd just hit him around the back of the head and killed him, then that wouldn't be petty treason.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Well, if it's a spur of the moment and you'd been provoked, then it might be that you could be tried for a lesser charge of murder, although what tends to happen is that if they're kind of in the thick of this discussion, actually, what we're looking at is whether they'll acquit you because it was self-defence, for example, or they might do you for manslaughter, which isn't a capital offence at this point. And for that, you would, it's accidental killing, you were provoked, you know, he came for you, you hit him around the head, yeah? Then it could be found to be manslaughter, in which case then you would be branded on the hand, potentially, as a kind of mark, though, that you couldn't do it again and get away with it.

• 10:44Kate Lister?

  That seems like a rather light sentence, Rose, I've got to say.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  By the time we get to the 18th century, you might, or certainly the end of the 18th century, they might say, oh, well, we'll send you to prison for, not necessarily very long, you might receive a fine as well. So there is a huge distance between murder and manslaughter. And we haven't even got on to the fact that if you're done for petty treason, the punishment is different to murder as well.

• 11:09Kate Lister?

  All right, so you're not going to get a branded hand or a couple of months in prison for this? If they've managed to get you on petty treason, which sounds like they're going to have to prove that this was, it sounds like what they're after is premeditated murder, it's just like, he was an asshole, I decided I wanted to kill him and I did.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So with the punishment for petty treason, we're talking about a traitor's death, basically.

• 11:32Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  If a man was found guilty of petty treason, he could be hung, drawn and quartered. So quartering being basically disembowelling. But for a woman, she'd be burned at stake.

• 11:49Kate Lister?

  What the fuck? Burnt at the stake? And this was on the books until 1828.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  So we stopped burning women at stake in 1790. So they make that legislative change earlier marginally, and then they consolidate it in 1828. But yeah, so right up until 1792, women could be burnt at the stake as traitors.

• 12:15Kate Lister?

  Fuck. Why, why the difference in the two styles of death?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  This is where it kind of gets really, really perverse, actually, because it's almost kind of chivalrous. So rather than exposing the bodies of women to this process of being drawn to the place of execution, hanged and then disemboweled, you know, they don't want to expose women's bodies in that way.

• 12:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, right. Yeah, of course, we wouldn't want anything obscene to be, to be witnessed.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  So what Earl do is draw a woman to the place of execution and then burn her at the stake instead.

• 12:51Kate Lister?

  Well, thanks for that.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  By certainly the end of the 17th century, there's a further sort of mercy, if you want to call it, which is that most women were strangled before they were burned. So they aren't alive when they're set on fire.

• 13:09Kate Lister?

  My brain, I just, wow, that, it's just wild. Just for the longest time, I thought that hanging, drawing and quartering, I thought the drawing bit was the pulling out of the entrails, which I'm just on a bit of a side quest now, but that's not quite right, is it?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  No, the drawing is the drawing kind of, you know, you'd be dragged to the place of execution. So this would be kind of on certainly about the 18th century, like a hurdle or kind of a sledge and you're dragged and it's about kind of the exposure.

• 13:37Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rose after this short break.

• 13:50Kate Lister?

  In case you weren't aware, World Mental Health Day takes place in October. And I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a reminder to practise some proper self-care, saying no to plans I don't want to go to, guilt-free snacking and Halloween movie marathons. It's also the perfect time to check in with yourself and your mental health. For many, it can mean taking that step and speaking to a professional who can help and guide you through any difficulties you're having. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy platforms don't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket or signing up for an expensive monthly subscription.

• 14:34Kate Lister?

  This is where Rula comes in. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Because the whole point of World Mental Health Day is making sure people actually get help, not just think about it. And Rula sticks with you throughout your journey, checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. With World Mental Health Day this October, it's a good reminder that taking care of your mental health can start with one step. Visit rula.com/shets to get started. That's R U L A dot com slash S H E E T S.

• 15:16Kate Lister?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 15:23Speaker 02

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• 16:33Kate Lister?

  How many people were got for this crime of petty treason? Do we know?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Well, they're very few. And the period that we're looking at today, sort of from the mid 18th century to when they stopped burning women at the stake for petty treason, there's 13 women who are tried for that, but only one of them is executed. Certainly as we kind of go into the 18th century and beyond the kind of legislative change, you see fewer and fewer women being prosecuted in the jury courts, fewer and fewer women being executed and very few numbers facing these sort of extraordinary charges and being condemned.

• 17:11Kate Lister?

  Why do you think that was? I mean, the 18th century, as far as I understand it, they're not known for their merciful court proceedings. In fact, wasn't this like, like the great bloody time or something? Because they were executing the bloody code. That's the one.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  You know, your lovely Victorian historians love talking about this, you know, the beginning of the 19th century, there's like over 200 capital statutes for which you could lose your life. But we know that very few, relatively speaking of those are actually used. And what happens is you might be charged with a capital offence, but fewer and fewer people are being executed. And this is through the use of discretion within the courts, which is another lesser known hallmark of the 18th century criminal justice system. You can't just go around hanging everybody if you didn't.

• 17:59Kate Lister?

  No.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Everyone would kick off, right?

• 18:01Kate Lister?

  Because like the sheer numbers of that, I mean, if they're trying to burn every single woman who's bumped off her husband, it's like the fires would never go out.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  So this is the thing, it's about the discretionary use of justice. And, you know, historians like Douglas Hay have talked about this being a kind of really carefully calculated decision-making process, where you make particular sorts of examples of people.

• 18:23Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  So there are examples in the 18th century where you have people who are of much higher social status being executed. So Earl Ferrars, who kills his steward. Now, that's not petty treason, because he's the boss and the steward is the servant. But he is still found guilty and executed as a murderer at Tyburn in London, in front of a huge concourse of people. And that's one of those examples that communicates, nobody is above the law.

• 18:49Kate Lister?

  I see.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Similarly, you get people being let off, and this is a great act of mercy. And this is there to support the rest of society to go, do you know what? Our English law is just, even if we do have 200 capital statutes.

• 19:02Kate Lister?

  Is this a famous example of that now infamous phrase, death recorded?

• 19:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:11Kate Lister?

  We shouldn't laugh, should we? That's, it's really bad. Some historians have misread that as being the actual death sentence.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  No, that death record doesn't come in until the early 19th century. So kind of well away from what we're talking about. So no, no, these people were fully condemned and then reprieved.

• 19:27Kate Lister?

  Oh, interesting. God, imagine being on that emotional roller coaster. Like you've been nicked, they've got you for petty treason, fuck that, I'm going to be burnt at the sodding stake now. You're guilty, but then the idea is like, well, look, we're going to say that you're guilty, but that's just, but we're actually, we're not really going to go through with it. It's just because we want people to think that we're on this.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And you might get a recommendation for mercy from the jury or the judge, but also if it's murder or indeed, I mean, petty treason might take a bit longer to organise the execution. The window in which a reprieve could be made is actually really small. So it is, it's terrifying.

• 20:01Kate Lister?

  That is terrifying.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Kate Lister?

  Like you wouldn't have been sentenced to like a hideous death, but like you might, is it actually going to happen? Is it not going to happen? And then conversely, like other people might get sent in court for a crime and they'll think, oh, they'll let me off. They don't, they don't really hang people for this. And then some judge, just because actually we are going to make an example of you this time.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I mean, we could start another case at another point where that, that happens, but that's much later. We don't need to talk about that today. But no, this, and again, it's part of that sort of theatre of the law as well. Like I said, it's a really calculated decision-making process. Sometimes it's based on evidence. Sometimes it's based on evidence and they can manipulate that to make a point. And they do, this is very careful. It's all in public.

• 20:44Kate Lister?

  Is it ever influenced by the fact that like the deaths themselves, to hang, draw and quarter somebody and to even to have them drawn and then, and then burnt alive? These enormous hideous spectacles. And I know that like, we often like to think of the past as just, it was just a gory time back then, but that would have been as hideous then as, as it would have been now to actually see somebody subjected to this. Is there perhaps a reluctance in the law to actually go through with this because it's so hideous? I mean, the most like, if a judge is there going, right, that's it, I'm going to burn you to death, there must have been like the underlings of the court going, for fuck's sake. Now we have to go and get the firewood. Do we have to go do the whole thing?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, then you've got to get the parcel. No, absolutely. You're right. Certainly by the kind of end of, well, the middle of the 18th century, particularly when you're looking at places, you're like big urban centres like London, this is a faff and a half. Yeah. If you've got to draw the condemned from Newgate out to Tyburn, so that's where Marble Arch is now, and it's like three miles, but this is through a big urban centre.

• 21:48Kate Lister?

  Huge crowd.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  To be going slow, huge crowds, tens of thousands of people.

• 21:53Kate Lister?

  We've got to get the executioner in.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  This is it. It costs money. It has to be policed. It has to, you know, you have to build it all. So these things are, you know, it's one of the kind of arguments for the end of the procession from Newgate to Tyburn is this kind of the disorder it engenders, both in terms of the crowds, but also the disruption to commerce and trade and traffic. There's the expense of all of these things as well.

• 22:17Kate Lister?

  I love that with the British, it's actually traffic considerations that made us get rid of the death penalty.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  But they are becoming worried as well. This sort of idea, which is pertinent, but perhaps not in the way that it has been argued, you know, now some decades ago. I think most people have got over this, this idea of the civilizing process, the impact of enlightened thought. We are concerned with how it looks to be doing these sorts of things.

• 22:43Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  But this is not something that a civilized nation would be doing. So

• 22:48Kate Lister?

  The upticks.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  There are those commentators who feel this, but then, and I think this is probably more significant. And again, we could go side quest, but this is pertinent. Concerns about the crowd. Execution crowds, you know, if you imagine the Hogarth's image of the execution crowds, the execution of Tom Idol, no one's looking at him being taken up to Tyburn. They're all boozing, drinking, they're at pickpockets. It's a fun day out. And there's this erroneous, like incorrect characterization of the crowd being populated entirely by working people, the lower orders, and that they don't care. They don't give a toss. Yeah, they're there for the party that is kind of, you know, they're into this sort of barbaric, brutal kind of

• 23:31Speaker 01

  spectacle. And again, that's not true. People did go and watch. These were spectacles. They were calculated to be so. But the demographic there is much, much broader. It's not all just prostitutes and thieves. Thank you very much. Even though you'll get these commentators who say it is. And people behave in different ways. No one execution crowd is uniform. There will be people who are taking advantage of the trade opportunities or the, you know, picking pockets and things like that. But there will be people there that watch in abject silence. There will be people, Vic Gapswell writes about this, you know, people who might laugh because they're nervous. You don't get over seeing something like that. It might be more normal than it is now because we don't do it. But you don't get over watching someone die.

• 24:11Kate Lister?

  No, and die horribly as well. Do we know the demographic of the women that were charged with petty treason? Is this something like a rich woman might get accused of doing? Or is it, I just sort of get the sense that this is going to be a largely working class women who are condemned for this?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  It is. So most cases that we can kind of dig into, if you're looking, for example, the Old Bailey proceedings, plenty in there to dig into. They're quite often working women or women from not particularly affluent backgrounds. And most of the time, these altercations that result in death happen during some sort of quarrel. There are a minority of quite infamous cases where you have a woman of higher social status who's killed her husband, or if it's a kind of particularly sort of devious and well-planned crime. Catherine Hayes is a really famous example. She was burned at the stake in 1726. And again, there's questions around this, but whether it was an instruction or just

• 25:10Speaker 01

  what happened, but she wasn't successfully strangled before she was burned.

• 25:14Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Her case is considered worse because she has two accomplices who help her. Then they get her husband drunk. He falls asleep and they bludgeon him to death in his sleep and then they dismember the body.

• 25:27Kate Lister?

  It's not an accident, that one, is it?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  So it's not really an accident. It's complicated further by the fact that one of her accomplices is alleged anyway to be both her illegitimate child and her lover.

• 25:39Kate Lister?

  It's definitely not an accident.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And her husband is, you know, a man of some standing, kind of middle class-ish, if you will, at a period where we don't really say that. So it's much, much worse by those kind of social measures of the day. And it, there is much more evidence of premeditation. And as I say, the accomplices as well. So she is written about and held up as a kind of horrendous example. But actually, most of the women we're looking at are, like you say, Kate, working women.

• 26:06Kate Lister?

  Are there cases in there where like you've read, I mean, apart from Catherine Hayes, where it feels like that is kind of like, all right, like that is quite an open and shut case, even by the standards of the time, which is often like from a modern perspective, you're looking at a lot of these cases going, Jesus Christ, like, like the evidence being presented. But sometimes it's like, yeah, that's definitely them. Have there been cases like in there where you look at it and you go, yeah, that was, that's, yeah, she definitely, not that she deserved to be killed like that, but yeah, she definitely did kill him. Or are they all kind of a little bit, he said, she said, there's an argument happening, we're not quite sure what's going on?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I think what tends to happen, certainly in the cases that I've looked at, and one that we could talk about today as well, Elizabeth Herring, who's the last woman to be burned at the stake for petty treason. These things, there is very little doubt that their actions caused the death of their husband. But it's the circumstances in which that occurs that's different.

• 27:00Kate Lister?

  I'm with you.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So that this is in the course of a physical fight. Yeah.

• 27:05Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  So they have lashed out with a weapon or they've hit back. And again, in spousal murder, so husband or wife murders, generally you quite often see instances where there's an injury and it's not immediate that the person dies as well. So again, that sort of question around premeditation, it starts to kind of unravel or get more complicated to answer, I think.

• 27:30Kate Lister?

  Okay. Just before we get on to her, is it true that you could be accused of petty treason for forgery, for defacing the face of the king on a coin?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So coining, counterfeiting gold and silver currency, so kind of your more valuable currency, that's a species of treason. It's not actually petty treason as defined, but it is a species of treason. And this is the thing, Elizabeth Herring is the last woman to be hanged for petty treason in terms of husband murder. But after 1773, we see people who are continued to be burned at the stake for, what, for women being burned at the stake for coining. Again, so nature of traitors' deaths, so male coiners don't get burned at stake. Female coiners do.

• 28:15Kate Lister?

  Who was the last person burnt at the stake then?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  The last person to be burned at Newgate, so in London, is Christian Murphy. And that was for coining in 1789.

• 28:28Kate Lister?

  Just seems alarmingly recent, doesn't it? Coining as well, like that is such a harsh punishment, that one. Like, you know, do a bit of counterfeiting and they're going to chuck you on a bonfire.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  But again, you know, at the risk of disappearing off down a rabbit hole, forgeries, these sorts of crimes are always treated incredibly seriously because it's kind of attacking the root of commerce, you know, and messing with increasingly what becomes increasingly important, the markets and, you know, our economy.

• 28:56Kate Lister?

  All right, let's stay, let's try and stay focused. Let's write, Elizabeth Herring, tell me her story then. Whatever happened, I'm on her side.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I feel a bit like this.

• 29:08Kate Lister?

  This is why I would never be a jury member, ever.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Or why I gave up all hope of doing law at any stage. Yeah. Elizabeth Herring is the last woman to be burned at the stake for petty treason, for murdering her husband. And as I kind of alluded to before, she's a bit of an anomaly really, because in sort of 50 years spanning her trial, 1740 to 1790, she's the only woman who's executed for petty treason. There are others. There are 13 others. And she's the only one who doesn't get acquitted or reprieved.

• 29:41Kate Lister?

  You'd be so pissed off.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  And I think that's why it's worth, you know, aside from the fact it should be worth digging into these people who lost their lives in appalling ways, but actually digging into her story as far as we can, because rather frustratingly, don't know a huge amount about her background. We can infer a bit. So the newspaper reports of her trial and execution say that she was originally from Scotland. She's known her neighbours for a really long time. So either they've all come to London together or she's been in London for some time. And she lived in Wapping, in the East End of London, with Robert Herring, who was her husband. And they'd been living together for about 11 years. So she's been there for some time and she's clearly probably an adult woman. Again, don't know her age.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  You know, she could have been 25, she could have been 35. It's hard to tell. But she's been with Robert for 11 years and he worked as a waterman, so on the water. We don't know what Elizabeth did. There's no kind of occupation listed for her, but we kind of get the sense that they're, they're labouring people. In terms of what happened, it's pretty much like most petty treason cases, really. The accounts vary a little bit, but the kind of, the death resulted from a quarrel. That Robert and Elizabeth had been in the Thistle and Crown pub, which is in King Street in Wapping on the 5th of August, and they were having dinner. There was an altercation, a quarrel, and she stabs or throws a knife that she's using

• 31:14Speaker 01

  to eat with at him.

• 31:16Kate Lister?

  In the pub?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  In the pub, and it wounds him in his throat and she gets him right in the neck and he dies really quickly from blood loss.

• 31:26Kate Lister?

  That doesn't sound premeditated to me.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:29Kate Lister?

  But if you were going to premeditate a murder, you wouldn't do it over a pub lunch with multiple witnesses, would you?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  No, no, doesn't sound right, yeah. But you're right, Kate, this is what the prosecution are focusing on, is this kind of question of premeditation. So they have got two key witnesses, a guy called John Boyle, who had worked with Robert and he'd been with Elizabeth and Robert in the pub. And they've also got the landlady, Anna Darling, who certainly Elizabeth thinks is a bit stuff. They both say that they didn't hear any sort of quarrel. Boyle's asked, did you think she intended to kill him? And he's absolutely adamant that she did, but his reason is because otherwise he wouldn't be dead. So it's not, it's not that convincing.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  The problem is, Hannah Darling comes out with something much more kind of condemning. She says that she heard Elizabeth say earlier that day that she would spill his blood and be hanged for him.

• 32:28Kate Lister?

  Oh, how convenient, Anna. Right, okay.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Not so good. Darling also says that once Robert had been wounded, Elizabeth kind of chucks the knife down, runs out of the pub with her hands clasped together in front of her, crying she'd done it. So again, not looking great.

• 32:44Kate Lister?

  No.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  There's a third witness, Thomas Duncan, who's a bricklayer, he's doing some work at the pub, and he said he heard the herrings jawing together.

• 32:52Kate Lister?

  Jawing? What's that?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Jawing, so it could be talking, but it tends to be kind of a little derogatory kind of, you know, that they were arguing. But then he says she was jawing him. So the implication here is that she's having a go at him, that she's nagging him.

• 33:07Kate Lister?

  Doesn't mean she's going to stab him in the neck, though.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  No, and lovely Thomas is the one who at least tries to stop the bleeding in Robert's neck. He leaves his work, comes over and literally holds the wound together to try and stop it happening. There are also two surgeons who testified for the prosecution, but they're really there just to confirm the cause of death, which is absolutely definitely this wound in the neck.

• 33:27Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Elizabeth then has to make her defence. Now, I don't think she had any defence counsel, which isn't necessarily that unusual, but it does mean she is having to cross-examine witnesses. She said to-

• 33:41Kate Lister?

  She's having to do it.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  She's having to do it.

• 33:43Kate Lister?

  Shit.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  She asks Thomas Duncan, she's like, didn't you hear us quarreling though? And he's like, no, I couldn't hear what you were actually saying.

• 33:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Which is, it's horrible. She does this extraordinary thing of having to defend herself or her life, but I think in some respects, she's quite astute in the way she puts this together, it's thought through. So the first thing she does, or one of the first things she does, is she introduces the fact that her and Robert weren't actually married.

• 34:11Kate Lister?

  Ba ba bum.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Ba ba bum.

• 34:13Kate Lister?

  Now, there's a good technicality. If they're not married, it's not technically husband murder, is it?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Well, this is what you'd like to think. That being said, proof of marriage wasn't required-

• 34:24Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  -for the charge of petty treason. People, you know, as you know, Kate, like, you know, quite often would cohabit and live together as man and wife without ever actually being married officially. So the understanding was if you cohabited and you treated each other as husband and wife, that was enough. Now, I wonder, shouldn't do counterfactions like this, but perhaps if she'd had a lawyer, whether there could be more kind of push on this. But she introduces it, she said they weren't married, doesn't seem to matter. But then she gives a really kind of detailed account of what had happened that day, the day that he died. So she talks about the morning of the accident, that's her words. So it's like, yes, yes, you're thinking carefully about this, Elizabeth. And Robert treated her absolutely abominably.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  She said, he came home and called me a great many bitches and whores and used me very ill and broke every little thing belonging to the apartment that I had. He ran a fork into my arm, which she showed people, the wound. He struck me and knocked me down and used me very ill in every shape in the world. So they've had this physical fight all morning. They both go off to the pub, but Elizabeth says that he continued to verbally abuse her, so she goes and sits away from him. He then calls her back to join him when the food is served, and she says, he said, you bitch, come and eat a bit. I was overjoyed that he should ask me to come to eat with him after we had quarreled. I went to him with as much joy as I should go into the kingdom of heaven this moment.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And she, again, we might be like, really? Did you really feel that pleased? But it's an important point to be making, because what she's doing, she's saying there's no resentment, there's no malice, she was happy to go back to him. She's doing good wife, right?

• 36:07Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Happy to go back to him. So this is quite an important sort of legal one, I suppose. He then, according to Elizabeth, throws his pipe in her face, then he chucks a pint of beer over her, at which point she says she took the knife that she was eating with and screw it at him. So she thought quite carefully about this. She's tried to establish kind of provocation.

• 36:28Kate Lister?

  Is that plausible, Rose? What do you think? As, I know that we're not lawyers, bless his pretend we're lawyers, like, is it possible that she was, I don't know what, I don't know what eating knives in pubs in the 18th century would have looked like? I mean, would they have been sharp enough to just like, you just throw it at somebody and then it goes into their neck?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I think the throwing is probably not necessarily the most accurate statement, so it's a case-

• 36:49Kate Lister?

  It sounds sort of like, like she's just gone, ugh, like that.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. I think it's Thomas Duncan says, he thought she was going to get up and slap him, that she had the knife in her hand.

• 36:58Kate Lister?

  She has stabbed him, hasn't she?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  She has stabbed him, yeah. But it's a question of how far, certainly in this instance, the jury would be concerned with the fact that he'd provoked her.

• 37:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Not just this history of abuse that day, but the fact that he'd provoked her in that moment. And that's where the kind of problems for Elizabeth start to happen, is that none of the prosecution witnesses are saying that they saw him provoke her. Now, she does have defence witnesses, which is great. She's got this organised, she's got it sorted, and she's got her friends, her neighbours to come and testify, which is really important because the evidence is so damning, like, she's in the pub, everyone's saw this happen, she's clearly responsible, it's a question of deciding what level that is. She brings in character witnesses, so her neighbours, who've said that they'd witnessed Robert knocking her down, they'd heard her screaming out in the night, that he'd kicked

• 37:53Speaker 01

  her out into the street in the night, barefoot. One of her other neighbours talks about how Elizabeth used to go and stay with her to avoid Robert, to get away from him beating her. And another neighbour who'd stayed with Elizabeth and witnessed Robert beating her with a poker, that the night watch were called out, and that actually this witness had said she was terrified of him and didn't want to kind of confront him because he was so violent.

• 38:21Kate Lister?

  It sounds like pretty solid evidence to me.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, and you know, these women are very sort of clear on this. So this could stand in her favour, and you see it in a lot of cases where this sort of provocation defence and domestic violence comes into these cases all the time, where this, you know, is quite successful, that it could result in acquittal or certainly in a, you know, a lower charge of manslaughter, but no one can prove that this happened in the pub. One of the defence witnesses says, oh, well, the landlady, Hannah Darling, who we've met before, she told her that she'd seen Robert throw a pint at Elizabeth, this kind of immediate provocation. So Hannah Darling is immediately asked again, is this true? She says, no, absolutely not, didn't see that.

• 39:04Kate Lister?

  Why would she lie about that? What's going on there?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  I don't know, but Elizabeth claims that Hannah has a problem with her. She said that she has had a spite against me for six months, but Darling absolutely persists, saying, no, didn't it? She says, you know, they were of the jangling order, so they were a bit kind of rowdy, but I never thought it would come, come to blows. So she keeps saying, and even the newspapers pick up on the fact that had Elizabeth been able to prove this provocative assault in the pub, things might have been different for her.

• 39:37Kate Lister?

  Shit, man.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, I think there's a class dimension here too, and that poor old Elizabeth wasn't necessarily the most kind of credible witness.

• 39:48Kate Lister?

  But I mean, like, there's, there's not liking somebody, there's, there's taking a spite against somebody, and then there's like, knowing that if you do this, they're going to get burnt to death in the fucking street. That's, that's wild to me.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, I mean, again, I've seen other cases where the witnesses are clearly concerned about what's going to happen, you know, but Boyle and particularly Darling seem absolutely adamant that, you know-

• 40:12Kate Lister?

  I don't know what to make of that.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:13Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  But the newspapers are quite interesting because they sort of, you know, there wasn't necessarily a huge stir about this, but there is this acknowledgement that had she been able to prove the provocation, things might have been different. So there's this sense that that's how the law works in this context. But there's other comments around, you know, men shouldn't be beating their wives, but they kind of go on to imply that maybe working class women are just as bad, like, you know, amongst the lower order, women are a bit like this. And this is the problem, I think, for Elizabeth. She's also written about as being someone who was prone to passion. Yeah? So she's not meek and wrong and passive, yeah?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  In Boyle's testimony, he said that she called Robert a bugger, you know, she's swearing at him in the pub, and that she'd called him Boyle a futer, which is, it's a corruption of a French word. It has all sorts of slang meanings, but it's somewhere around like fucker or wanker, basically, I think.

• 41:15Kate Lister?

  She's not delicate, is she? She's not demure?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  No, she's not demure. And she stood up there and led her own defence and, you know, she said, no, no, no, you're lying to some of the witnesses.

• 41:27Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rose after this short break.

• 41:44Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 42:13Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 42:27Kate Lister?

  Do you know what's really upsetting about this is like, you know, if she'd had a lawyer that this would have gone so much different. Like, I, I, any lawyer could have got her off on this, even a bad one, surely. Like, once you've got like the evidence in that, like, no, he has been abusing her. It has been, you know, we do have this evidence that was provocation. Like, bring in the fact that, like, this is in a pub. Who does a premeditated murder in a pub over a pie? That's like, that's not premeditated, you've just lost your temper. Although I think she did stab him, though.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And this is the thing that still kind of stands out, it's still not quite clear. Because there's a lack of commentary on this, still not quite clear why, you know, the jury was so against her. Like, okay, so they couldn't prove the assault, but there was this history of abuse. Yes, she's a bit kind of rowdy. One of the defence witnesses says she's a very sober woman, but she has been in the pub for three hours. Like, but that's not unusual at this point. It's really hard to kind of discern why the book was thrown at her in particular.

• 43:25Kate Lister?

  Because it, yeah, like you're saying, like, most cases is like, you know, they're found guilty, but then it's commuted. Why, why? Because this case is, well, this doesn't sound like a cut and dried, like she absolutely definitely meant to kill him. Why this one?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  But I think this is the sort of, the tension around it is there's enough here. Should they kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm, I'm reaching a little bit here, but very few women are being successfully prosecuted for this. Because they had this history of fighting with each other, that there isn't this sense of her being quite the victim in the way that perhaps was more comfortable to look at. The fact that she had said things, the fact that she was a violent person. It's a kind of useful example to say, no, you cannot behave like this. That it's reinforcing all those sorts of ideas and structures.

• 44:13Kate Lister?

  You'd need to look at wider discussions that were happening at the time, I reckon, to see what this is tapping into. What, why was this, why did she need to be made example of what was happening? And you said that, like, this was discussed in the press, so it's clearly a case that's getting some attention.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting because in the press, it's noted, but we're talking about column inches like literally an inch. And what they tend to focus on, they say two things, three things. One, that she's prone to passion. One, that if she'd been able to prove the assault in the pub, it might have been different. And then they go on to talk in quite specific detail about the mechanics of her execution.

• 44:55Kate Lister?

  We should talk about that then. So go on, what happens to Elizabeth?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's, it's horrible. There is one letter, I should say, Kate, one letter I've found so far, from a guy who is writing about the barbarity of the spectacle of the execution. And how horrendous the impact is on the crowd. And then goes off on a complete tangent, almost, saying that actually, it's probably just prostitutes who are the women in the crowd. And actually prostitutes are infecting all our men folk. And it's like, you've gone from barbaric punishment of a woman to

• 45:27Kate Lister?

  Come back. Wow, okay.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, that prostitutes are destroying all of our families and, you know, and literally infecting.

• 45:35Kate Lister?

  Is there any discussion at all that Elizabeth might have been selling sex?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 45:40Kate Lister?

  They'd have mentioned that, wouldn't they? They'd have loved that detail.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Her defence witnesses talk about her being a sober and honest woman.

• 45:45Kate Lister?

  So that's just a complete random tangent, then?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Random tangent man, yeah, who's just lost his shit, basically, and decided that he will use his letter space.

• 45:54Kate Lister?

  It's a shame we're burning women to death, but if they weren't all on the game, we wouldn't have to do it. What, what a fantastic reasoned argument that is.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  I reread this and I was like, hang on a minute, mate, you've gone for the standard, you know, this is a barbaric spectacle and like, fair enough. And then you've just lost it and gone off on one about sex work.

• 46:11Kate Lister?

  Fuck. So was there any attempt at like a last minute reprieve for Elizabeth?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Well, she tries to kind of instigate one for herself. So she pleads the belly, so she says that she's pregnant. So the idea being that at least then there would be a stay of execution until she'd had the child. And what quite often happened after that point is you didn't get executed anyway. So they empanel what's called a jury of matrons. So this is a group of older, very respectable women who will investigate this proposition. And they come back and say, no, she's definitely not pregnant, so.

• 46:49Kate Lister?

  So what happens to Elizabeth then? They, they really go through with this, the whole kit and caboodle?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely, they go through with it. So she is dragged on a hurdle on this sledge that's pulled by four horses from Newgate up to Tyburn. And then she's chained to a stake. So they've put kind of a chain round, under her arms. And then they put a rope round her neck and she's standing on a stool and the rope's fastened round the back of the stake. So they kick the stool out from under her, so she is strangled to death. So she's strangled for about 15 minutes.

• 47:21Kate Lister?

  Jeez Louise.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And then when they're satisfied that she's dead, they burn off the rope and her body kind of falls forward. So it's supported by the chain. And then they put the wood faggots onto the fire and set fire to it and her body's burned to ashes.

• 47:36Kate Lister?

  And how many people came along to watch this?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  So newspaper estimates are like 20,000 people. And they, yeah, there's, it's meant to be chaotic, that there are coaches overturned. There are newspaper reports of a young lad who was trying to scramble up to get a better viewpoint. He slips and impales himself on railings. Like, I mean, it sort of feels very chaotic, but then the newspaper reports do tend to kind of go one flavour on this. But it is a huge deal. There haven't been another execution or burning at the stake in London for like 15 years. So this is not necessarily something people would have seen.

• 48:13Kate Lister?

  No, this isn't normal.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  No, it's not normal. So it attracts an awful lot of attention.

• 48:18Kate Lister?

  Why is the crime of killing your husband so utterly, utterly terrifying to these people?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  It's that total kind of upending of the social order. It's, you know, the microcosm of patriarchal authority that you are kind of absolutely turning on its head. And that's, that's how it's, you know, when it's talked about in terms of condemnation, it is all about the fact that you have killed the person you are supposed to be obedient to, that you have destroyed the home, that you have destroyed proper relationships, that, you know, it's the worst thing that a woman could do, basically. Absolute kind of antithesis of her nature.

• 49:01Kate Lister?

  And it's interesting as well that, like, the other people that could be prosecuted for this is like people killing their masters, people that they work for. So you've got the capitalist society being protected as well.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's just that social order that's being protected. And even kind of pre-capitalist, that idea of, you know, there are the places that you have in society, that there are those figures of authority where their authority is almost unchallenged. That that is what is reinforcing there, that subordination of particular people that upholds patriarchal authority. And I think what happens from the 17th century, Matthew Lockwood's written some interesting kind of legal discussion around this. Particularly, obviously 17th century, it's a period of challenging some of those ideas, which is perhaps where the provocation defence comes from. But even when we don't have petty treason anymore, the kind of inheritance of it, the legacy, the way it's evoked

• 49:56Speaker 01

  when women commit violent crimes, particularly against their husbands, it still comes back, that idea that this is unnatural, that it's a breach of, yeah, the kind of proper order of things. And that it's a threat to society. That's the kind of key thing, that it's that danger to those structures, I suppose.

• 50:18Kate Lister?

  So there's a final question then, why did they change the law? Because I love, I love stuff like that. Like, you look at, this has been on the books since like 1400. They were doing it for 500 years or however long. And then all of a sudden, somebody goes, maybe we shouldn't put women on the bonfire. Maybe that's, maybe that's a bad idea. Like, what, was it Elizabeth's case that particularly changed it? Was it just that there was a shift in feeling, in different feeling around public execution? What was it?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  So sadly, I don't think Elizabeth's case particularly made an inroad, although it is part of this wider discussion. Like you say, or we've implied, Kate, around kind of concerns about public executions that we've had certainly from at least the middle of the

• 50:59Kate Lister?

  Parking's terrible.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Eighty, so parking is a nightmare, right? Your coach gets down over, Kate, what are you gonna do?

• 51:05Kate Lister?

  So British.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  You might have like a small child land on it because they've impaled themselves, it would be awful.

• 51:09Kate Lister?

  It's absolute chaos.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  But, but no, there is this kind of, it feeds into this kind of wider discussion about whether or not we should have these sorts of public executions. And particularly these very violent deaths, what's it doing to the people who watch them? What are the lower orders going to do? They're going to be hardened to violence. They might even be compelled to do it, especially if you keep letting people off. So there's those questions around public executions more broadly, and particularly the barbarity. Then there's also the question of gender, and particularly because burning at the stake is only for women. There is a general reluctance amongst judges, juries, and it seems to kind of grow. I mean, there are really notable and important exceptions to this, but it tends to grow as we kind of go through the 18th century and into the 19th century.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Fewer women are facing this sort of punishment or they're being reprieved. I don't think it's necessarily anything other than kind of squeamishness or this idea of not wanting to punish female bodies in public. At the same time, you see the decline of other public physical punishments, like whipping women in public, that's reducing. And there is also the question of equality in the punishment. So by the time we get to the 1780s and you get this concentration of cases, 1786 and 1788, there's several women who are burned at the stake in London. And it feels like that's a lot, you know, that's really focusing people's attention, it is a lot.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  But because they've stopped the procession by this point, from Newgate to Tyburn. And they don't really do the disemboweling anymore. If a man is facing a traitor's death, then he's pretty much just being hanged. Whereas we're still burning women at stake. And considering all these other kind of contexts around the way they feel about women, punishing women's bodies and public execution, they want to kind of equalise it as well. So there's this sort of idea that this is, it needs to be kind of, yeah, equalised. I'm not suggesting that this is any sort of real gender equality.

• 53:07Kate Lister?

  It's a win for feminism.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't burn them at the stake. Um, anyway, but there's also the practicalities of it. And I know we've sort of joked about this, but Simon Devereux's done quite a lot of work on this, that the sheriffs who were responsible for organising it, certainly in the 1780s, they start charging to attend these things for their time.

• 53:25Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  And which is kind of, they've never done that before. It's an expression of them not wanting to do it. This is, this is the burden. But also, more importantly, there are people who complain about it. The populace that is in and around Newgate, there are complaints about the smoke making people sick.

• 53:42Kate Lister?

  Oh, God.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  It takes hours for a body to be reduced to ashes.

• 53:46Kate Lister?

  I mean, when you think of like the practicality of it, of like the effort that has to go in to that, like attempting if we can to take aside the abject horror of someone actually being burnt to death. But like the logistics of that, of setting it up, of organising it, of putting everything in place, of getting the people there that can do that, of the actual, like, what that means. And it's an hours long spectacle, isn't it? And then like smoke going everywhere, the smell of it, the shouts and the screams. It's like, it's real horror stuff. I'm not surprised the neighbours were complaining.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  No, and this is it. So you have these practicalities. So I think William Milbyforce, I think, tries to get a bill to stop burning at the stake in 1786 after Phoebe Harris is burned, and that doesn't pass. But it does in 1790, and this is after you've had this kind of concentration through 88 and 89. So it does kind of get through. And then what the law does in 1828 is it actually kind of just consolidates this to say, we now treat these crimes as murder and we don't burn women at the stake anymore.

• 54:49Kate Lister?

  Rose, you have been fabulous and horrifying to talk to, but absolutely wonderful. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 54:57Speaker 01

  So you can look me up on the university website or you can find me on Instagram at DrRoseWallace.

• 55:03Kate Lister?

  Thank you very much for coming along. You've been marvellous.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  It's been a total pleasure, Kate. Love talking to you, you know that.

• 55:11Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Rose for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.