This week’s episode is a bonus episode on the history of witchcraft in English law. We give murder a rest in this episode and focus exclusively on the rise and fall of witchcraft in England in the 17th century instead. The episode starts by looking at King James I’s weird personal relationship […]

Today’s episode is on one of the best topics ever – the history of witchcraft! We start this episode by looking at the first famous witchcraft trial (and pamphlet) in England, the case of Mother Waterhouse. Mother Waterhouse’s case gives us some clues as to why witches and witchcraft-accusers tended to be women. One reason […]

  This week’s episode focuses on the trial of Catherine Hayes, convicted of murdering her husband and executed for it in 1726. Catherine Hayes was accused, along with two men, of murdering her abusive husband. The facts are just as fascinating now as they were in 1726. Spoiler alert: we’ll see a preserved (pickled?) head, […]

  Today’s episode looks at women in the history of murder. First, we’ll see how the law of murder applied differently to women than it did to men. One big difference is the fact that women weren’t eligible to plead benefit of clergy until 1691, which meant they were (essentially) unable to be convicted of […]

  Today we take a whirlwind tour through the controversial topic of felony murder and constructive malice! In today’s episode, we ask whether it is murder when someone kills someone else unintentionally but during the course of a serious crime (or a felony). Normally killing has to be intentional to qualify as murder – but […]

  Welcome to today’s episode on unintentional killing!  We all know (now) that if you kill someone intentionally, it’s murder. But is it ever murder when someone kills someone else unintentionally? Today, we look at a whole range of unintentional killings and ask whether they’re murder, manslaughter, or sheer accident. Is it murder if you mean […]

  Today’s bonus episode is on insults. It looks at which insults were considered to be the most provocative in the 17th century. We’ll see that courts were willing to excuse men who flew into a homicidal rage upon having their noses tweaked, being jostled, having the wall taken from them, and being “filliped upon […]

    Today’s episode features a considerable amount of spontaneous stabbing. We start off with the famous case of Watts v Brains (1600), where the court has to deal with two major problems. First, is it OK to kill someone just because they make “a wry face” at you? Second, how do we prove malice […]