“To the disgrace of all womankind”
Some observations on two bestiality cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings.
In early modern England, the crime of sodomy wasn’t limited to anal sex between men. In theory, it covered all forms of penetration other than a man penetrating a woman’s vagina, including bestiality. The Old Bailey Proceedings record 104 trials for sodomy and 28 trials for assault with sodomitical intent between 1674 and 1834. To put that into perspective, in the same period there were 1,573 prosecutions for murder, 4,754 for burglary, and 50,328 for simple grand larceny! Even the offence of returning from transportation (difficult to do and difficult to detect, you’d think) was tried 347 times.
If sodomy prosecutions were rare, sodomy prosecutions against women were even rarer (lesbian sex as we know it was not a criminal offence). Only two women were prosecuted for sodomy, both of them accused of having sex with dogs. In the first case, heard on 11 July 1677, the proceedings described the defendant as “a married woman” but didn’t give her name. The second case, against Mary Price (alias Hartington), was heard on 26 April 1704.
There were some interesting similarities between these two cases. In both cases, the witnesses were neighbours who claimed to have observed the act through holes in the walls or ceiling. Was one of the witnesses in the first case just “happening to cast her eye in”? The witnesses said that “they had often seen her in the very acts of uncleanness with Villains that followed her” before the dog incident. It sounds like they’d been watching her regularly!
Both defendants claimed that the witnesses were making false accusations related to quarrels between neighbours. The verdicts depended on whether the jury believed this. The first woman was found guilty and sentenced to death as there was apparently no evidence that her neighbours had quarrelled with her, although they also seem to have done a better job of destroying her reputation by alleging her previous promiscuity. In the second case, Mary Price was acquitted as she brought in several witnesses, including the local constable, who attested that the witnesses were “quarrelsome People” who had brought the prosecution “out of Malice and Spight”. Furthermore, the prosecution evidence didn’t stand up to examination, as the girl couldn’t say what colour the dog was, and the constable asserted that it would have been impossible to see the alleged act through the hole in the ceiling.
Apart from the verdict, the two cases are strikingly similar, despite being 27 years apart. No other similar cases were heard at the Old Bailey in all of the period covered by the published proceedings. If we agree with the court that the second case was a malicious prosecution, it could be that the prosecution witnesses had read about the first case in the proceedings, or found out about it some other way, and decided to use it as a basis for their own story. If their aim was to get their neighbour executed, it didn’t work. It would be interesting to investigate this further. Did any other courts hear cases of women committing sodomy with dogs? How well known was the first case? Were stories like this common in popular culture? Erica Fudge has done some work on bestiality, which I’m intending to read when I get time.
It’s also interesting to note the very different tone of the reports in the proceedings, which seems to be heavily influenced by the verdict (nothing much has changed in that respect). In the first case, it was reported that the woman “to the disgrace of all womankind, did commit Buggery with a certain Mungril Dog, and wickedly, divellishly, and against nature had venerial and Carnal copulation with him” and that the first witness “saw her use such actions with a Dog as are not fit here to be recited” (even though the reporter has just recited them — tabloid hypocrisy is nothing new!). Compare this with the report of the hostile testimony in the second case, where Mary Price “took the Dog to her, which she said, acted with her as to a Bitch”. Still not flattering, but more neutral and vague than the first.
Trying to get beyond these narratives to reconstruct what actually happened is difficult or impossible. The case of Mary Price seems plausible on its own terms, and it’s easy to believe that she was innocent. However, the proceedings only give us a partial (as in incomplete and biased) account of the trial. We don’t have access to the full testimony of the witnesses, let alone access to the reality of what they did or didn’t see. The way both trials were reported was clearly influenced by the verdict. The writing of a trial report seems to have begun with the assumption that the verdict was correct (this wasn’t always true but it looks like it was in these two cases). The selection of witness testimony and the way the defence was represented followed from that. The innocence or guilt of the unnamed woman in the first case is even harder to get at because of the assumption of guilt in a report written after the verdict, combined with the lack of detail in early reports. The production of the dog in court doesn’t seem like very strong evidence, and the spin that the reporter puts on it is again likely to be influenced by the verdict. It’s not certain whether she was executed, as many death sentences weren’t actually carried out. There isn’t any record of what happened to the dog either.
