The Crime of Self-Murder

The first European record of judicial process for self-killing is an account from the English rolls of the twelfth century for ‘a woman who hanged herself' with possessions worth seven shillings.^[550] The rise of inquisitorial Roman law procedure in the late Middle Ages led to an attendant rise in recorded prosecutions for self-murder, declining only after the advent of decriminali- sation from the eighteenth century onwards.

The word ‘suicide' itself is a neologism, entering the English language through Thomas Browne's Religio Medici of 1643: ‘yet herein are they in extreames, that can allow a man to be his own Assafiine, and so highly extoll the end and suicide of Cato’.^{[551] [552]} The spread of ‘suicide' to other European languages during the eighteenth century ‘reflects a gradual and complex historical process of pathologising and decriminalising the act of taking one’s own life’.11 Luminaries thus hoped to destigmatise self-killing by eliminating any pejorative religious connotations attached to an activity legitimised through an invented Latin word. However, by defining the act in conjunction with the verb ‘to commit’, they unwittingly reinforced both its traditional association with homicide and the depiction of the self-killer as the perpetrator of a crime, an association that remains implicit into the present day. Occasionally, the association wasn’t entirely unwitting. During the nineteenth century the officially sanctioned procedure of delivering the cadavers of impoverished self-killers to anatomical theatres for medical dissection by doctors-in-training was ubiquitous.

Prior to the discovery of the term ‘suicide’, official inquiries into the crime of self-murder most often discussed the felo de se (felon of themselves) in reference to method (self-hanged, self-drowned, self-shot, etc.). Investigations served cross-purposes, foremost to ascertain cause of death as either homicide, suicide or misadventure. Always a complex procedure, investigations involved coroners, eyewitnesses, statements from relations and neighbours and expert testimony from physicians, parish priests and pastors regarding the physical circumstances of the death and the deceased’s state of mind.

Given existing folk attitudes towards corpses, peculiar circumstances during such investigations were not unusual. Disputes left corpses rotting in barrels awaiting final disposition and endangering communities with infectious disease. In one particularly bizarre incident involving a dispute over a property confiscation in Germany, a corpse was formally summoned to appear before judges in camera for examination in 1542. The relatives did not appear, so it was judged a suicide and sentenced to burning with the property forfeit.^[553] Determination of cause of death aimed to prevent murder cover-ups masquer­ading as suicide. As accused criminals, both failed (living) and successful (dead) self-murders faced legal sanctions and social degradation.

Legal sanctions from church and state - chiefly confiscation of property and elaborately degrading funerary rituals - evolved to punish the self­murderer after death. In the early modern period local rituals and customs ranged from removal through a tunnel dug under the threshold of a door, dragging the corpse backwards from a donkey's tail to its final resting place (the so-called asses' burial depicted in Jeremiah 36:30), disposal in a barrel thrown into a nearby river, interment under the gallows, disposal in swamps or other waste places, burial at a crossroads with a stake driven through the heart, hanging upside down on a pitchfork (furca) or burning to ash.^{[554] [555] [556]}

Euphemisms were regularly deployed and while their meanings were abun­dantly clear to contemporaries, they are now often misunderstood.

Apart from punishment by the authorities, the crime of self-murder carried the stigma of dishonour. Local authorities sanctioned executioners to con­duct removals and degradations in order to prevent honourable individuals from coming into physical contact with the corpse of a self-killer. Apart from incurring public shame, early modern honour codes held systematically enforced legal ramifications, analogous to the caste system in India. Strict laws concerning loss of honour prevented citizenship in towns, membership in guilds, the practice of an honourable trade and marriage in respectable circles. Individuals who came into physical contact with the corpse of a self­murderer (or who touched the executioner or the gallows for that matter) forfeited their honourable status and had to seek legal redress to have it reinstated.^{[557] [558] [559] [560]} As the practitioner of a dishonourable trade, the legal and moral stigma of dishonour through physical contact with the self-murderer could not affect the executioner or local knackers, hired by the executioner as assistants.

In addition to statutory rewards for disposing of the corpse of the self­murderer, the executioner traditionally claimed possession of all goods within a sword's length of the body.1⁷ Records pertaining to the local execu­tioner are a reliable source of information regarding early modern percep­tions and the procedural treatment of self-killers. In Augsburg, for example, the executioner placed the corpse in a barrel and disposed of it in the Lech River. The town council duly recorded payment for the construction of each barrel and, from these and other sources, we can ascertain crude rates of reported self-killing. 1⁸ The law code of Baden stated:

If it happens that someone in our town and our jurisdiction brings death on himself and this becomes known, the man or woman should be shut in a barrel and on each side of the barrel should be [fastened] a note [to say] what he has done; and he should be thrown in the river Limmat and allowed to float away.1⁹

Notes affixed to the containers read, ‘Let it go! Official!' to ward off treasure seekers and garbage pickers. The custom extended to many towns located on rivers, such as Basel, Frankfurt am Main, Lucerne, Regensburg, Strasbourg and Zurich.

A self-killing by someone declared sane (compos mentis) by the court was invariably attributed to despair and apostasy, namely, the rejection of hope in salvation, and therefore the self-killing was considered to have been committed at the behest of the devil. This spawned a variety of folk beliefs. Communities feared the return of the dead as revenants caught between this world and the next, wandering endlessly in search of expiation and haunting the living.

In Catholic regions, burial in hallowed ground was prohibited by eccle­siastical law as a profanation of a cemetery.^[561] Another communal fear arose concerning divine retribution for the burial of a self-murderer in the local cemetery. In communities dependent upon subsistence agriculture, the pea­santry observed over centuries how inclement weather, particularly hail­storms that destroyed crops and livestock, appeared to coincide with the outrage of self-killers.^[562] In reaction, they meted out vigilante justice, sacking and destroying the deceased's household to eliminate their memory from the community. Just such an event is illustrated in a Swiss collection of woodcuts, which depicts a crowd of locals disinterring a body and burning it.^[563] Even when authorities intervened and reports confirmed that a self-killer had suffered chronic illness or insanity, angry mobs violently disinterred corpses.

Occasionally, tensions between ecclesiastical authorities, secular authori­ties and the populace over the interment of self-murderers ended in violence and legal sanctions. Peasants and members of the lower clergy were chastised for harbouring such ‘superstitions'. However, their beliefs contained an essential logic, which simply inverted cause and effect. Suicide was held responsible in the popular mind for crop failures and famine. Upon closer examination of individual case histories, we find evidence pointing to suffer­ing, starvation and chronic illness as significant motivations to take one's own life.^[564] As in the case of witchcraft persecutions, the equation of folk beliefs about self-killing with unfounded superstition is clearly an oversimplification of the complex interpretive processes of the collective consciousness in the face of environmental and biological events.

Theoretical debate also exists questioning whether these European rituals served either as deterrents, indicators of anthropological pollution anxieties, manifestations of popular fears subsequently rejected by the Enlightenment as unfounded prejudice and common superstition, or, as Alexander Murray claims, as pragmatic methods of waste disposal. Nonetheless, even after elite commentators no longer condemned suicide outright, many continued and continue to regard suicidality pejoratively as a pitiable condition or as indicative of pathological weakness.

This is significant from the perspective of moral panics and demonstrates, at least in this particular instance, the direct correlation between climate-related crises and popular culture. To illustrate the functional social mechanisms by which a moral panic over self-killing resulted in violent unrest, we need simply to triangulate instances of subsistence crises, peaks in rates of suicide and witchcraft persecutions during the era of a well-researched climatic phenom­enon known as the Little Ice Age, in particular the deepening and disastrous cycle of inclement weather, crop failures, famines, price inflation and pan­demics during the years 1580 to 1650. Although primary sources documenting suicides were never intended for statistical analysis in the systematically quanti­tative fashion employed by suicidologists since the nineteenth century, even a perfunctory graphic analysis of available information on reported suicides is illustrative. Spikes in suicide rates at this time tended to conform with the aforementioned crisis events and peaks in rates of witch hunting, which have also received much quantitative attention.^[565] In other words, what for enligh­tened authors was made to appear a mindless superstition in fact evidences real crises in a society dependent upon subsistence agriculture which resulted in moral panics and scapegoating behaviour. Crudely put, it is an anthropological demonstration of how weather events influence the popular mood.