Married Women, Crime, and Questions of Liability in England, 1640-1760
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Upon marriage, women in early modern England became subject to the common law doctrine of coverture.Coverture had a number of consequences, all of which stemmed from a married woman"s lack of independent legal identity.These consequences largely manifested themselves in a married woman"s complete lack of property rights, but the lack of an independent legal identity created complications for assigning criminal responsibility to married women in the early modern criminal justice system.Coverture largely manifested itself in the criminal law through the defence of marital coercion, which held that a married woman who committed a crimewith the exceptions of murder and treasonwas assumed to be acting under her husband"s coercion and was therefore not liable for her actions.This study examines the perceptions, treatment, and experiences of married women in the northern assize circuit and London between 1640 and 1760, with particular attention to the defence of marital coercion.This thesis discovered that the household ideal, not the defence of marital coercion, was the most important factor in determining the perceptions, treatment, and experiences of married women with the criminal justice system.People in early modern England did not see coverture as the loss of rights, but rather the means through which to create a unified household.The household ideal manifested itself in various ways, including understandings of women"s household role, the tendency of people to treat husband and wife as a criminal unit rather than two separate individuals, the "suitability" of victims in murder trials, and the unique treatment of married women in the execution pamphlets.The married women of this study were subject to the common law doctrine of coverture.While they did not feel its effects in their daily lives, their lack of an independent legal identity created complications in the criminal justice system.Above all, married women were both criminals and wives.Criminal actions may have removed these women from their husbands" cover, but their experiences with the criminal law were still shaped by coverture and the corresponding household ideal.Writing acknowledgements is always one of the more pleasant tasks of scholarship.It signals not only the completion of a project, but offers a small token of gratitude to those who contributed to the final product.First and foremost I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Jeff Collins and Jane Errington.Jeff"s comments consistently got to the heart of the matter, forced me to refine my ideas
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".