Contextualizing Marital Violence

On 24 May 1611, Alice Peto, a widow, aged 58 years, living in St. Sepulchre without Newgate, testified in a London Consistory Court separation case in support of Frances Charles’ complaint of marital cruelty against her husband, Thomas Charles, a Constable in St. Andrew Holborn. 1 She was one of four witnesses who described Thomas’ physical cruelty to his wife. As Peto recounted, for the space of a yere and an half … there hath bin a publique fame and reporte of … Thomas Charles in Holborne London that … Thomas did many and often tymes evill intreat and abuse his said wife by beating of her very cruelly and inhumanly ex scientia et audita suis insomuch as … Francis … hath bin in danger to be killed by him and therof hath divers times made complaint to this deponent with greif and sorrowe of heart. 2 Peto detailed more specifically the extent and consequences of a beating that endangered Frances’ life. In about September 1610, Frances’ maid came to Peto’s house to complain of Thomas’ “hard usage” of his wife, the maid thinking that Thomas had killed his wife. Peto, going to Frances’ house, found her and many neighbors there to “Comfort her” as she lay in her bed with a swollen black and blue face and swollen throat “in such pittifull and dangerous sorte” that they all were “much afrayd of her safetye.” This beating was so severe that Frances then could not “take any meate for he r sustenance”; the neighbors and Peto all thinking that Thomas “had as good as killed her.” Eight months since this beating, Frances still cannot “scarce digest her … meate but is forced … to drincke after her meat or else her stomacke is soe sore and weake that it will not endure her food.” 3 In these accounts, in which Peto stressed that Frances Charles’ life was in danger as a result of her husband’s brutality, she labeled his actions “cruel” and “inhuman” but did not label the abuse as “violence.”