Episode 290: Tudor True Crime
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I'm just like...

basic sometimes, but I also need it in addition to any new sauces I'm trying. With a new creamy chili McCrispy strip dip, it's chicken made for dipping only at McDonald's. Hey, hey, hey, welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, my friends, the original Tudor history podcast telling stories of Tudor England since 2009. I am Heather. And as always, I am delighted that you are here with me.

Today, we're going to talk about a Tudor obsession with true crime.

If you thought that our modern interest with true crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries was something new, let me introduce you to the 16th century, where scandal sold just as well in song form. In Tudor England, murder was entertainment, morality play, and best-selling media all rolled into one. True crime, my friend, was big business. So we will talk about that.

Before we do, though, just a quick heads up. If you haven't joined the Anne Boleyn scavenger hunt yet, like what even are you doing with your May? It's completely free. It's filled with daily clues. I mean, you can do it one day at a time or you can do it all at once. It's up to you. It's a scavenger hunt that is just filled with tutor nerd joy following Anne's life from her early

early life through to the scaffold. You can jump in anytime up until May 19th at englandcast.com slash Anne Boleyn Scavenger. There's puzzles, you can learn things and fall in love with Anne Boleyn all over again as we remember her death this month in 1536.

All right, my friend, let us get into it. So, like we said, true crime, it's a big deal. Pamphlets flew off the presses faster than you could say public hanging, complete with blood-soaked woodcuts and salacious headlines. There were broadside ballads, basically the early modern version of a viral tweet, pinned up on alehouse walls.

and sung loudly in marketplaces to jaunty tunes that made even the most gruesome killings sound bizarrely festive. It wasn't about accuracy, it was about spectacle. And nothing drew a crowd quite like a woman who had committed murder. That's right, friends, while men were far more likely to commit violence, tavern brawls, duels gone wrong, the occasional politically motivated beheading, it was the women killers who turned heads.

When a man killed, it might be shocking, but when a woman killed, it was unnatural. It was a breach of gender, of divine order, of everything the patriarchy was trying so desperately to keep in place. And so, in the pages of those cheaply printed murder pamphlets, women were seductresses, witches, monsters, matchless monsters of the female sex, one 17th century headline roared.

Never mind that the man in that case had actually landed the killing blow. If a woman had so much as whispered in his ear, the blame was hers. So in this episode, we are diving into the bloody, bizarre world of Tudor crime, where murder was moral failure, divine signs exposed killers, and the most dangerous weapon of all might have been a woman's tongue. Though in Tudor England, men could commit violence without much of a raised eyebrow. A tavern brawl that ended in death?

Unfortunate, but not exactly shocking. A neighbor duel over land, pride, or a spilled pint? Practically a rite of passage. Male violence was so embedded into daily life that it often didn't even register as criminal. It was just men being men, especially if the victim wasn't too high up the social ladder.

But, my friend, when a woman killed, that was different. That was a moral crisis. In Tudor society, women were expected to be quiet, obedient, and deeply domestic. Meekness wasn't just a virtue, it was mandatory. A good woman obeyed her husband, nurtured her children, and made herself useful without being noticed. A woman who spoke out of turn, challenged authority, or, God forbid, asserted herself, was already skating pretty close to the edge of acceptability.

So what happened when such a woman crossed the line from disobedient to deadly? Public hysteria.

A woman who killed, whether it was her husband, her child, her employer, her lover, was no longer simply a criminal. She was monstrous. In the lurid pamphlets that reported on these crimes, the female killer became an icon of everything society feared. Loud, sexual, willful, dangerous. The press painted her not just as a murderer, but as a perversion of womanhood itself.

Take, for example, Esther Ives, who was accused of conspiring with her lover to murder her husband. He, the lover, was the one who strangled the man. His own name was heard by a witness as the victim fought for his life. But in the printed story, Esther took center stage. She was the schemer. She was the seducer, the root of it all. Her name appeared in the headlines. The lovers, the one who actually killed the person, didn't.

Because when women were involved in murder, it was a violation of the natural order. The monstrous woman who dared to want, to seduce, to act, was far more terrifying than any drunk with a dagger. And if the crime could be blamed on love, lust, or manipulation, well, that was even better. The public couldn't get enough. And so, in crime and in print,

Tudor women were held to an entirely different standard. Not equal, not fair, but actually really fascinating. So let's look at the first example, the murder of Thomas Beast. If you were looking for a story that ticked every box of Tudor scandal, lust, betrayal, and a sharp farming implement, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one than the murder of Thomas Beast.

Thomas was, by all accounts, a decent and godly husband living in the Worcestershire village of Cotheridge in the early 1580s. He had land, a wife, and a servant named Christopher Thompson. Nothing seemed particularly out of place until, of course, his wife and the servant decided that they'd be better off without Thomas in the picture.

Pamphlets at the time spared no ink in describing Mrs. Beast, which I have to have a little sidebar here. Mrs. Beast. So I have an 11 and a half year old daughter. Anybody else out there who has children in that general age is very familiar with Mr. Beast, right? Mr. Beast on YouTube. He's like the biggest YouTuber in the whole history of ever the universe. And he actually seems like a pretty decent person.

Anyway, so I keep saying Mrs. Beast and I just keep imagining the kinds of videos he does are like contests where, you know, if you can stay in this circle for a thousand days, you get eight million dollars and stuff like that. And I keep imagining Mrs. Beast is the Tudor version of that, but she's clearly not. Anyway, pamphlets at the time spared no ink in describing Mrs. Beast, not the wife of Mr. Beast, the YouTuber, the wife of Mr. Beast, the Tudor farmer, as the absolute worst sort of woman.

She was older, experienced, and apparently seething with desire for her handsome young servant.

Christopher was portrayed as naive, besotted, and tragically dim, led astray by a woman so seductive that he was powerless to resist. According to the true crime reporting of the day, Mrs. Beast grew weary of her inconvenient husband and began planting the idea of murder in Christopher's head. She did this through a classic combination of sweet words and steamy promises until the lad caved.

And just to make sure he didn't muck it up, she even handed him the murder weapon, a sharpened billock, and told him rather chillingly to hit him right. Thomas, working in the fields, had his back turned when the fatal blow landed, and it was over quite quickly.

Now, it should be said that both Christopher and Mrs. Beast were arrested, tried, and hanged. But the way the story was told was very one-sided. Christopher became the puppet. Mrs. Beast was painted as the wicked woman, the harlot, and memorably a devil. The narrative wasn't content to see her as a killer. Oh, no, no, no. It needed her to be the very embodiment of female sin.

This was more than justice. It was spectacle, and the readers weren't buying pamphlets to learn about the legal process. They were buying them to see a, quote, most horrible and wicked woman get what was coming to her. Then we've got Alice Shepard and the Hidden Child. Some Tudor crimes weren't about lust or revenge. They were about fear, and few things terrified an unmarried woman in the 16th century more than an unwanted pregnancy.

Alice Shepard was young, unmarried, and pregnant in Salisbury around 1591. To modern ears, that might not sound like a crime, a situation that needs, you know, some work around it, but not a crime. But in Tudor England, burying a child out of wedlock was enough to ruin your reputation, your livelihood, and your life. Women like Alice were branded bastard bearers, harlots, and outcasts.

So Alice hid her pregnancy. She gave birth in secret with the help of her grandmother and a sympathetic midwife.

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And when the baby was born, healthy, crying, very much alive, Alice did what many women in her situation felt was their only option. She killed the baby. She buried the baby's body in a shallow grave in a churchyard, hoping that that would be the end of it. But then, as the pamphlets told it, divine justice stepped in.

in the form of a dog. The animal dug up the tiny corpse and laid it at the feet of passerby. Soon the hue and cry went out, and within days Alice, her grandmother, and the midwife were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. The case was reported with religious overtones. See the will and wonderful work of Almighty God, one writer marveled, to reveal this most wicked act.

But what it really revealed was how little room Tudor society gave a woman like Alice, cornered by shame, with no choices and nowhere to run. In Tudor England, if you committed murder, your biggest fear wasn't always the sheriff. It was God's birds, and sometimes his ghosts, or his dogs, or a particularly bloodthirsty corpse.

To modern ears, these sound like plot devices from a Gothic novel. But in the 16th century, many people believed that while God might allow sin to occur, he would not allow it to go unpunished. If justice didn't come through human investigation, it would come through divine revelation, what they called wondrous discovery.

Take Ralph Sookie, a gentleman in Norfolk who murdered a man in 1658. There was no evidence, no witnesses. He probably thought he'd gotten away with it. But not long after the crime, he was walking through a field when a flock of crows began circling above him, cawing and swooping.

Now, this was probably just, you know, random bird behavior, but Suki interpreted it as a divine accusation. He panicked, confessed to a bystander, and ended up tried and executed, all because of the birds.

Other cases involved bleeding corpses, a supernatural phenomenon known as cruentation. The idea was that if a murderer touched the body of their victim, the wounds would, you know, just start to bleed again. And yes, this was taken seriously. Coroners even staged lineups to test it. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote that if a dead body gushed blood when touched by its killer, it was God himself revealing the truth.

In some trials, that was the only evidence brought forward and people were hanged for it. There were ghosts too. In one case, a maid claimed she was visited by a spirit who belched fire and told her where to find two tiny corpses hidden under the floor. No one questioned the story. They just went and dug them up.

All of it, ghosts, crows, bleeding bodies, was a way for people to make sense of horror in a world that didn't yet have forensics. It gave comfort. Murder would out because God would not let the guilty sleep or apparently walk quietly through a field of crows. Of all of the Tudor crimes we've covered, this next one, Lincoln and the Murder for Hire,

might be the most cold-blooded and yet somehow still manages to end with divine spectacle in the kentish town of warehorn in fifteen ninety a widower known only as lincoln was looking to remarry

But there was a problem. He had four children and nobody wanted to take that on. So in a move that would make Henry VIII look sentimental, Lincoln decided the children had to go. He recruited a friend over drinks, offering him 40 shillings and a cow to do the job. The plan was grim. Lincoln would take his eldest son to the market as an alibi while the hired killer slipped into the house and murdered the three younger children.

That part went to plan. But then Lincoln got clever, or thought he did. He sent his eldest son home ahead of him, hoping the boy would discover the bodies and be blamed for the murderers. This guy was like, this guy was such a great catch. I'm literally so sure that the fact that he had four children...

had everything to do with the fact that nobody wanted to marry him and not the fact that this was a guy who was, you know, like willing to frame his own child for the murder of his other children. Like, what a catch, man. I can't believe nobody jumped at the opportunity to marry this guy. Anyway...

So, the neighbors are alerted and the bodies, left lying in the house for three days, were buried hastily in the cellar, but word got out. A coroner arrived, had the bodies exhumed, and lined up suspects to perform the cruentation test.

Sure enough, when the hired killer stepped forward, the corpses, submerged in water and naturally prone to post-mortem bleeding, began to bleed afresh. The killer panicked and confessed on the spot. And just like that, Lincoln's entire scheme collapsed. Both men were tried and executed at Ashford. The press predictably turned the case into a moral fable about divine justice. God had revealed the sin through the children's blood, but...

Underneath the pamphlet drama was a far more chilling truth. This was a man who wanted to start over and saw murder as housekeeping. Again, I'm so surprised he wasn't able to find anybody to marry.

before then. Anyway, so the crimes we've explored today weren't just legal infractions. They were social earthquakes, each one tugging at the threads that were just holding Tudor society together. Family, gender roles, divine authority, and showed just how fragile those threads could be. Most of the

Most violence in Tudor England came from men. That was no surprise. What did shock people and what sold pamphlets was when women crossed the line. When a woman killed, she wasn't just seen as a criminal. She was unnatural. She was everything a woman was not supposed to be. True crime stories in the 16th century didn't aim for accuracy. They aimed for outrage. They shaped the public's view of morality as much as they reported on it.

The cases of people like Mrs. Beast weren't just about murder, they were about what happens when women slip the leash of obedience. And if the facts didn't quite fit the narrative, no problem, the press could always call in a ghost or a dog or a flock of angry birds.

But beneath the spectacle and the drama of all of that, these stories give us something very real, a window into what Tudor people feared, what they believed, and how they used crime to tell themselves stories about the world and the people that they wanted so desperately to control. So we will leave it there for this episode, friends. If you want to dive deeper into this,

There's an author named Blessin Adams, who is a former police officer, now a historian, and writes about...

All of these kind of things. There's a book, Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain, that I highly recommend if you want to get into true crime stories. Really interesting. And then the other book you can check out is called Thou Savage Woman, Female Killers in Early Modern Britain is the newest one. Highly recommend that as well. So Blessin' Adams, really interesting stuff.

So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comments. Remember, you can be part of the Anne Boleyn scavenger hunt and explore some new resources about Anne, dig in deeper into her life totally free. Englandcast.com slash Anne Boleyn scavenger. I'll put the link down below as well. All right, friend. Thanks so much for being here. I will be back again very, very soon. Have an amazing week. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

This is Paige DeSorbo, the co-host of Giggly Squad. I have exciting news. McDonald's has all new McCrispy strips. It's chicken made for dipping. Tender, juicy white meat chicken with a golden brown peppery breading. It's chicken so good it deserves its own sauce. The creamy chili McCrispy strip dip, a sauce that's creamy, savory, and sweet with a little heat. But it works with any of our sauces. I'm personally a barbecue sauce girl. Even sometimes I like ketchup. I'm just like...

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