By Ines Jahudka
Content warning: Please note, this piece discusses suicide and mental health.
Suicide is a complicated topic for historians, as we are ultimately interpreting an interpretation of an interpretation: trying to unpick the decision-making process of those who declared the cause of death, and then the community’s response to that decision. For historians of early modern England, this examination often involves the language of the mind. The act of suicide was viewed on a moral and legal spectrum; exactly where along this spectrum the deceased was placed depended on how the judicial system and the community interpreted the emotional state of the deceased.
At one end of this spectrum was the accidental death: a tragedy, but nothing more. Adjacent to the accident were those cases where the deceased had obviously taken their own life, but the jury considered them to have been temporarily insane (or non-compos mentis) while doing so. These types of deaths still carried the stigma of suicide, but pity was interwoven with reproach.
This attitude did not apply to those found guilty of felo de se, or self-murder. These were the people who (according to the jury) had been sane when they had taken their own life. They were convicted of a felony: despised, their property confiscated, and their families forced into poverty and humiliation. Their bodies were cast out of the community, buried either in contempt in unconsecrated ground by the side of a busy road or, in certain cases, buried with fear and wariness at a crossroads, with stakes driven through their backs to pin their malevolent spirit in place.
‘A Suicide of Lucretia’ by Sérgio Valle Duarte. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Non-compos mentis
The Lex Coronatoria, the how-to guide for coroners written in 1761,was quite clear about a non-compos mentis ruling: “if one distracted, or losing his Memory, thro[ugh] Sickness, Grief, Infirmity, or other Accident, kill himself; it is not Felony”.[1] Throughout the eighteenth century, emotional states were increasingly equated with levels of responsibility. Behavioural or emotional changes meant that the act of suicide could be viewed as being committed whilst in an altered emotional state and without criminal intent, resulting in a non-compos mentis verdict.[2] Importantly, this state of emotional being should not be temporary; the victim’s ‘cohesive self’ must be shown to have been altered in the leadup to their act of self-harm. Witnesses therefore deliberately used terminology designed to present an ongoing, altered state of mind. ‘Melancholy’, ‘uneasy in their mind’, or ‘low spirited’ were key words for juries, as was describing head pains or dizziness. For example, Mary Cavanaugh was found non-compos mentis in 1785 after her neighbours testified that she had “frequently complained of her Head” over the past few months, and they thought her “much Disturbed in her Mind”.[3]
The state of melancholia was related to dyscrasia, or humoral imbalance: an excess of black bile. Despite the gendered understandings of bodily humours (women were considered cold and wet, therefore more prone to melancholia), men as well as women could fall victim to melancholic humoral imbalance. In the six weeks leading up to his suicide in December 1788, for instance, Robert Storey’s servants testified that he had been “very melancholy & low”, and that “his behaviour has been much altered & he has been much lost in thought”.[4]
While absolving the deceased of responsibility, a non-compos mentis ruling was still not a good death. Suicide of any type carried the belief of “corruption of blood” which would impact the lives of the victim’s children.[5] Yet at least the body was buried in the parish churchyard—even though this was typically in the (shaded) north corner and often at night, with very little ceremony. However, their remains were still part of their community; they still belonged to the society in which they had lived.
Felo de se
Not so for those ruled felo de se, or deliberate self-murder. These were the ultimate sinners; erased from memory, disgraced felons, cast out by being interred in anonymous graves alongside busy roads. Jacob Miers was one such case: before cutting his own throat in 1772, he left a note for the coroner in which he wrote “I am in my sences and to senceble of the Most horid Crime I am agoin to Comit” (sic).[6] Miers did not use any of the language of emotions which pointed to a non-compos mentis ruling, and his drinking companion stated that he had seemed to be “in his perfect senses”, although “low-spirited” when drunk. The coroner subsequently ruled his death a felo de se and ordered his burial “in the Kings Way in Portugall Street” (see figure 1).
Source: The Agas Map of Early Modern London https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm
Fig. 1: Jacob Miers was buried somewhere along the section of Kings’ Way highlighted in yellow, following his felo de se ruling in 1772. Portugal Street is the overgrown street coming off to the right. The parish church/cemetery, St Clements, is marked in red. Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Chancery Lane are to the left of Portugal St.
The difference between a non-compos mentis and felo de se ruling also relied upon the idea of a cohesive self, as opposed to supposedly aberrant behaviour which occurred in times of distress. For example, Sarah Hopkins had killed herself in 1792 by deliberately drinking arsenic.[7] Hopkins was an alcoholic whose actions when drunk was described in the language of diminished responsibility: she was described as “somewhat Deranged”, or “like a person Deprived of her reason”. However, the melancholic state which afflicted Hopkins while drunk was not present when she was sober, when she was apparently “a Woman of perfect understanding”. Her melancholia was therefore temporary in nature and her ‘cohesive self’ was not altered. She was sober when she added the arsenic to her cup; in this sobriety, she was guilty of felo de se.
The most extreme death by suicide was the felo de se whose actions in life had implications for their possible actions in death. Their bodies were handled less with Christian disgust and more with fearful folk belief: the deceased was placed on their knees in a shallow hole dug in the middle of a crossroad, a handful of lime was tossed on the body, then a stake was driven through their shoulder blades and into the earth below. The dirt was then filled in until a section of the stake was left protruding from the soil. Why the crossroads were chosen as burial location is open to conjecture, but the decision seems to have more hallmarks of folk belief than of religious practice. Humanity has always attributed emotional or spiritual meaning to certain geographic features.[8] Crossroads represent fear, confusion, the mysterious, the preternatural, which begs the question: why bury a potential malevolent spirit at a location associated with witches or other evil spirits? Was it simply giving the Devil his due? Or was it because crossroads are a space which symbolise the parting and meeting of journeys; a space where a vengeful spirit, a revenant with evil intentions, might remain trapped by indecision as to which direction they might travel?
Source: The Agas Map of Early Modern London.
Fig 2: Map depicting the crossroads where Francis Stirn, convicted of murder, was buried facing down and with a stake driven through him. Stirn had swallowed poison in his Newgate prison cell the night before he was due to be hanged.
Suicide is a socially constructed, and therefore historically contingent, way of describing a death. These descriptions shifted throughout the early modern era, gradually transforming suicide from sin into a pathology, while secularism and the rise of the intellectual middle classes shifted cultural attitudes from condemnation to pity.[9] Defining the nature of suicide was a complex and nuanced act, and folk beliefs surrounding suicide and the laying to rest of malevolent spirits clearly cast shadows until well into the nineteenth century. How suicide was interpreted by the community, whether it was borne of madness or demonic distraction, depended upon (and continues to do so) ideas of the self, the mind, and of emotions.
[1] Edward Umfreville, Lex Coronatoria, or, the Office and Duty of Coroners (London: Printed for R. Griffiths, at the Dunciad, and T. Becket, at Tully’s Head in the Strand, 1761), 4.
[2] Stanley W. Jackson, “Melancholia and Partial Insanity,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 19, 2 (1983): 173.
[3] “City of Westminster Coroner’s Reports into Suspicious Deaths, 26August 1785,” www.londonlives.org
[4] “City of London Coroner’s Reports into Suspicious Deaths, 11December 1788,” www.londonlives.org
[5] Umfreville, Lex Coronatoria, 7.
[6] “City of Westminster Coroner’s Report, 30 September 1772.”
[7] “City of Westminster Coroner’s Report, 21 June 1792.”
[8] Martin Puhvel, “The Mystery of the Crossroads,” Folklore 87, 2 (1976): 167-8.
[9] Michael MacDonald & Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 5.
Histories of Emotion 
