Family and Household Violence

Whereas today ‘domestic violence' usually means violence between intimate partners, if we were to investigate early modern family violence using this definition, we would miss crucial aspects of the topic.

Early modern married men had prescribed responsibilities, one of the most significant being to maintain order within their households. Both Protestant and Catholic authors discussed models of the ideal godly household and how men were to exercise authority over their dependants. A husband was expected to govern his household wisely and without recourse to uncon­trolled force.^[460] Conversely it was, as a seventeenth-century Swedish moralist wrote, a husband's ‘greatest humiliation and shame, if he allowed himself to be subdued, ruled and criticised by a woman'.^[461] In other words, a man who failed to maintain control over his wife, or other household members, was likely to find his standing within the community undermined.^[462] Responsibility for discipline devolved down the household hierarchy, so that the wife of the male head also had power over subordinates, especially children, servants and apprentices.

When men used excessive violence - defined as such if death or serious injury resulted - they could damage their social status as they were likely to be seen as creating disorder within their own households. In 1579, for example, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Christopher St Lawrence, Lord Howth, was prosecuted and fined a huge sum of money for physically assaulting his wife and daughter. The court found these assaults to be reprehensible, not because Howth had struck them, but because the motivation behind the punishment was to injure rather than to correct. The extent of their injuries was taken as evidence of motivation. Howth beat his wife so badly on the back that ‘her skin [was] so taken away that for many days she could not abide any clothes to touch her'; he also inflicted sixty lashes on his daughter, so that she afterwards contracted a fever and died.^[464] While the injuries described and the penalty imposed clearly indicate that Howth had breached the legal limits society placed upon acceptable household violence, the political context of this court case is important. He was only tried because of his political

activities; it is unlikely that otherwise the injuries done to his dependants would ever have come to light.^[465]

When violence by men against their wives or other household members did attract the notice of European courts, either through circuitous routes as in the Howth case or directly through prosecutions for murder or serious assault, penalties varied considerably. Murder was most likely to lead to a prosecution and result in a conviction, which could attract the death penalty.

What motivated both the man and his victim was crucial, for motivation influenced whether a legal penalty could be sought or secured. If discipline was the accepted motive, then it was more likely that a man would be deemed not guilty, even if a death had occurred. An eighteenth-century Swedish law specified that if a child died while being disciplined, then it was a case of death by misadventure, not of murder.^[467] Yet, if witnesses testified that a householder’s violence was the result of anger or drunkenness and that a wife or other dependant had offered no provocation, then the case was more likely to be judged as murder. On the other hand, if a wife or dependant was reputed to be drunken, quarrelsome or violent, or if a wife was suspected of adultery, then the violence employed by a male house­holder was far more likely to be considered justified.

Prosecutions for violence resulting in non-lethal injuries were less common in all jurisdictions than prosecutions for lethal violence. Protestant moralists preached the duty of women to suffer and be obedient to God’s natural gender order, no matter how unbearable their marriages were made by violent husbands.11 Nevertheless, women did on occasion seek relief and redress by airing their marital grievances in court. In response, courts sometimes tried to force men to maintain domestic order and refrain from violence.

Ecclesiastical courts, rather than civil ones, were often the arbiters of matters involving sexual misconduct and marital breakdown. The remedies offered in church courts might include the following: monetary bonds imposed on husbands to keep the peace by not assaulting their wives and dependants; public shaming rituals with erring husbands paraded through village streets; public apologies made by husbands in church; or explicit promises extracted from husbands before courts to stop their violence. As a last resort, a form of separation could be ordered by the courts, intended to protect wives while, at the same time, husbands remained financially respon­sible for them. In local courts, many judges tried to promote harmony within households and communities by publicly ordering husbands to stop beating their wives, but wives were also instructed to refrain from quarrelling with their husbands. When women took their husbands to court in early modern France seeking a separation, they usually argued that the violence employed against them was extreme and beyond normal bounds, whereas husbands responded by claiming that any physical discipline used was appropriate and acceptable. In 1656, for example, Rouen husband Jacques Lyon said in court that he and Marguerite Barry argued ‘as spouses do’ and, while he admitted slapping her, he claimed that this did not amount to the brutal battery she had alleged. Wives, such as Catherine Puy, also of Rouen, usually countered by emphasising their virtuous characters, as well as their forbearance in the face of aggressive and unreasonable men.^[471]

Other avenues open to women who suffered at the hands of excessively violent husbands might entail enlisting the support of family, friends or neighbours.

But in artisan and farming communities economic survival depended upon married couples and their dependants working together cooperatively, so keeping households intact was an imperative.^[475] One way of enforcing com­munal expectations of acceptable martial behaviour was through public shaming rituals, known in different countries as ‘rough music' or ‘charivari' or ‘youth abbeys'. These usually involved groups of young unmarried men publicly humiliating husbands or wives whose behaviour was considered to have gone beyond communal norms.^[476] Such rituals were often aimed at husbands who were believed to be dominated or cuckolded by their wives, but they could also target men known to assault their wives without justification.^[477] In 1566 a Lyon street parade contained floats ridiculing local men who either beat their wives excessively or were beaten by their wives.^[478] How successful these communal sanctions were in curbing marital violence is hard to say. But what they do demonstrate is that violence by husbands against wives was recognised as not just a problem within particular house­holds, but one that could also threaten the well-being of the broader com­munity.

Apprentices and servants mistreated in the households of their masters were often in a more difficult position than were wives, for throughout Europe there were severe penalties for breaking employment or apprentice­ship contracts. Some avenues for redress did exist, however, even though proving that a master or mistress had used excessive or unjustified violence was far from easy. Apprentices in eighteenth-century Paris who were mis­treated by their employers often relied upon their own families to protect them. In 1761, for example, an 11-year-old apprentice to a master enameller returned home to his mother, ill, exhausted and severely bruised from the beatings inflicted upon him by his master's wife. The child's mother responded by launching a court action to annul his apprenticeship on the grounds of ill-treatment.^[479]

Dependent children had even fewer opportunities to seek legal protec­tion against violent parents. Prosecutions of adults for physically injuring children, even when the child died, were rare. But there is evidence of informal attempts through public shaming to curb violence against chil­dren. In Essex in 1623 a long poem was printed and circulated in taverns and other public gathering places accusing a father of beating his daughter excessively. Clearly this was an attempt by someone in the local commu­nity, who judged the father to be abusive, to call him to account by means of publicising his actions.^[480] Popular German literature of the sixteenth century was fascinated by stories of children murdered by one of their parents, suggesting anxiety over the boundaries of discipline in rela­tion to children.^[481]

The key principle that physical correction of dependants should be moti­vated by the need to maintain discipline, and not be the result of anger, applied to all households, even religious ones. The complex case mounted in 1531 against Elicia Butler, abbess of Kilculliheen in Ireland, revolved around the question of motivation. The nuns testified that they had been regularly struck by their abbess: violence that they claimed was due to her ‘quarrel­someness' and not to a ‘desire to correct'. Moreover, as additional evidence that this violence was unjustified, the nuns alleged that blood had flowed from the wounds to their bodies caused by their superior. Genuine discipline was not supposed to entail bloodshed.^[482]

The moral hierarchy of authority not only shaped the meanings attached to the violence employed by men and women against their dependants; it also configured the meanings of any violence directed against the men at the apex of the hierarchy. This was most evident when women attacked their husbands, but also when servants or children used violence against either a master/father or a mistress/mother. Such actions attracted extremely severe legal and social penalties. The ambiguities surrounding the use of violence by masters did not exist when violence was turned against them. Under English common law, for instance, a violent act by a woman against her husband or by a servant against a master was defined as petty treason. The logic behind the treason analogy was that such cases were in essence comparable to when subjects attacked a king, because the man was ‘king' in his own household.^[483] This meant that if a wife killed her husband, she was liable to be punished as if for high treason: that is by being burnt at the stake, rather than hanged as was usual in murder cases. This penalty continued to be used up until the 1790s.^[484] In Germany, the penalty inflicted upon a woman who murdered her husband was decapitation.^[485] While such prosecutions and convictions were not particularly common, a great deal of popular literature reinforced the legal code and revealed a general fascination with the concept of the rebellious wife. Ballads, ephemera and pamphlets offering lurid details of the crimes allegedly committed by wives against their husbands circulated widely in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France.^[486]

Harsh penalties also applied to servants, apprentices and children who attacked, injured or killed a master or a father. By such actions they were in effect attempting to overthrow the God-given social order, which made justification virtually impossible. In Frankfurt in 1585, a woman who had been convicted of killing her former employer was executed. Her arms were first pinched with hot tongs in front of the house where the crime had occurred; then she was placed in an open grave and covered with wooden branches before a wooden pole was driven through her heart.^[487] In England, servants who killed masters or mistresses were viewed by the courts in the same way as wives who killed their husbands, for their crimes too were punished as if they amounted to treason.^[488]