Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England,<i>c</i>. 1580 to 1850

Bailey, Joanne; Giese, Loreen L.

doi:10.1080/1081602x.2013.779292

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…50,51 In addition, the right of a husband to punish or discipline his wife has come under scrutiny, often through studies of court actions taken to protect an abused wife, or cases of murder. 52,53 But whereas under the companionate model marital violence has been viewed as decreasing, some studies have shown power in the relationship still resting firmly with men. 54 From the sixteenth century onwards an increasing quantity of published advice on marital behaviour advocated only mild physical punishment as a very last resort, and most rejected the use of physical force.…”

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…54 From the sixteenth century onwards an increasing quantity of published advice on marital behaviour advocated only mild physical punishment as a very last resort, and most rejected the use of physical force. 55 But none of this seems to have engendered a restrained attitude in William, who now began a reign of terror.…”

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…56 Such violence of language seems to have been commonly cited in court cases and was recognised as a form of marital cruelty even in the absence of physical violence. 57 William then said that if Mary would give him £300, she could keep the child and he would try to get a divorce. No confirmed baptism for this child has been found, and William Chance cared so little for it that, in reporting that it had died by the time of the Chancery case, he did not even refer to it by name.…”

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

Powers¹

2019

JGFH

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This paper discusses an early eighteenth-century Chancery case involving the extreme physical and mental abuse of a wife by a husband intent on stripping her of all her property, and looks at this in the context of the contemporary legal and social framework and the options for redress available to such a woman. In the process it explores the genealogy of the Catholic Arden family who were located near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. In the absence of many Catholic records, especially for baptisms and marriages, it explores the use of wills, recusancy records, Chancery records, and correspondence to fill in the gaps and create a family history. Introduction On 10 January 1719/20, a Chancery suit was taken out on behalf of Mary Chance by her brother Caesar Johnson in an attempt to recover the deeds to her real estate, the inheritance due to her daughters from their father, and her money, jewellery, clothes and other possessions. She also petitioned for the control of her three children by her former husband, James Arden, who were being held by her abusive third husband, William Chance. 1 The widowed Mary had been flattered into a precipitate third marriage, and was held captive, physically and mentally abused, while William Chance worked to deprive her of everything she owned. Eventually she escaped, wearing only her shift, nightgown and slippers, hid all day in a hayloft and finally sought refuge in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. As with many Chancery cases, only the initial complaint and witness statements exist, but it is possible to make some deductions about the eventual outcome using these and other documentary evidence such as wills and two other Chancery cases. All this enables us to reconstruct the family networks that Mary married into, and to shed light on the legal and social position of an early eighteenth-century wife. Availability of Catholic records in the early eighteenth century Following the defeat and flight of Catholic King James II in 1690, there was a steady decline in the numbers of Roman Catholics, estimated by the mid-eighteenth century at about 70,000 or 1 per cent of the population. 2 There were concentrations of Catholic families in certain counties, which included Worcestershire. Some who were Catholic in secret were prepared to be baptised or married by an Anglican priest in order to avoid legal penalties. Prevented from holding office and otherwise legally disadvantaged, many converted to Protestantism. Some had the eldest son baptised in the Church of England to ensure the family inheritance, and others obtained certification from the local bishop that they had taken communion according to Anglican rites to avoid a charge of recusancy. Before about 1700 Catholic registers of births and marriages were not kept for fear of endangering any priest who did so. After this date Catholic registers increasingly came into existence, usually recorded in Latin. Burials of Catholics, which had to take place in consecrated-and hence Church of England-ground may therefore appear in Anglican registers....

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Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

Powers¹

2019

JGFH

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“…Largely, it is due to the paucity of such cases; for men, the ignominy of publicly admitting their inability to control their wives and the embarrassment of admitting their victimhood prevented them, and still prevents many from, coming forward. Although this situation may be changing in the twenty-first century, with more and more men coming forward, it was certainly a factor in the nineteenth century [38]. Another contributing factor is the resultant lack of empirical evidence to draw on.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘A Shocking State of Domestic Unhappiness’: Male Victims of Female Violence and the Courts in Late Nineteenth Century Stafford

Turner

2019

Societies

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Instances where men were the victims of female violence in the past are very difficult to explore, especially when the violence took place in a domestic setting. There is now a notable body of work on violence in the nineteenth century but none that looks specifically at male victims of violence where there was a female perpetrator, and their treatment by the courts. This article goes some way in filling that gap by using data collected in researching female offenders at the end of the nineteenth century in Stafford. It argues that, as with violence where there was a female victim and female perpetrator, the courts and the press were similarly unconcerned and somewhat dismissive of female violence towards men in a domestic setting, thus being unsympathetic towards male victims of female violence.

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“…This view was reiterated by the Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1853, who specifically commended Scott's interpretation 44. That domestic violence might increasingly be perceived in Britain after 1800 as a specifically working-class issue, as it ultimately came to be labelled by mid-century, was by no means inevitable, nor does this period fit easily into a neat chronology of gradual 'improvement' in legal or social attitudes to wife-beating 45. After all, the repeated abuse suffered by the upper-middle-class writer Caroline Norton at the hands of her husband George, an aristocratic Tory Member of Parliament, was widely known and decried in society and multiple witnesses confirming that he had announced 'I shall be happy if she is a dead woman, and I shall die a happy man', he was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to just a year's imprisonment at Newgate Prison and the fine of a single shilling 49.…”

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confidence: 99%

Importing Gendered Legal Reasoning from England: Wife Murders in Early Colonial India, 1805–1857

Grey

2017

Cultural and Social History

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Marital cruelty: reconsidering lay attitudes in England,c. 1580 to 1850

Cited by 6 publications

References 35 publications

Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

‘A Shocking State of Domestic Unhappiness’: Male Victims of Female Violence and the Courts in Late Nineteenth Century Stafford

Importing Gendered Legal Reasoning from England: Wife Murders in Early Colonial India, 1805–1857

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