Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

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In thrilling narrative, we follow a fugitive killer through the streets of London, citizen detectives clamouring to help officials close the net. That particular episode definitely made me both angry and sad, though it also cheered me up a bit that she was found innocent in the end – I wouldn’t have expected justice to work for a poor woman in those days.

Yes, she managed to make me feel outraged a couple of times over the sheer unfairness of the justice system to women, and to poor people in general! It’s deficient in any meaningful analysis and the book feels more like a retelling of cases directly from the newspapers rather than presenting it from any specific point of view. She shows how the street names in the surrounding area originated from the various markets held there – Milk Street, Bread Street, etc.Suicide was considered a crime and those found guilty would have their property forfeited, leaving their families destitute.

This is a readable account of nine true crimes in early modern England in the Tudor period and walks us through all the ins and outs of how murders were committed, solved, punished and commemorated in the period, as well as what we can learn when we look at these crimes today: the way that we treat single mothers, or view suicide- a crime until the 1960s- although we've moved on in lots of ways, there are still things that our early modern ancestors would recognise, I think. My library gave me the option to let them know I want it added to their collection, so I did that to both the print and the audio versions. Adams uses each of the nine cases to highlight one or more aspects of the justice system and of the society of day.But as this book shows, humans have been obsessed with death and murder for centuries (likely millennia). She takes us beyond Nathaniel’s conviction to his time in Newgate, describing the appalling conditions in which prisoners were kept.