In June 1638, Ellis, Lady Cahir, described what she had witnessed in the days leading up to the death of Lady Joan Masterson. Lady Cahir reported to Christopher Brook, justice of the peace, that Joan had told her how her husband, John Butler, had been verbally abusive, thrown furniture around and forced her to flee the home in Garrylough, County Wexford, ‘for feare her husband would kill her’. Not long after this, Joan died following a severe beating. John was taken into custody and her father, Richard Butler, third Viscount Mountgarret, arranged for Lady Cahir and other witnesses to give statements in preparation for John Butler’s trial for murder.Footnote ¹ Not only did witnesses detail Joan’s injuries, they also outlined their understanding of John’s emotional responses to Joan. In doing so, they demonstrated that the violence he used could not be justified as acceptable discipline by a husband towards his wife, building a picture of murderous and uncontrolled rage. The documentation of the circumstances surrounding Joan Masterson’s death is unusually detailed and allows for close analysis of how early modern people understood violence within the domestic household.

Historians have examined violence between family members in Ireland within histories of marriage and marriage breakdown.Footnote ² The recent survey history by Maria Luddy and Mary O’Dowd considers marriage in Ireland from a variety of angles, including marital breakdown, while Diane Urqhuart analyses the change in availability of divorce from the eighteenth century.Footnote ³ They all detail how evidence of physical cruelty was reported by wives when they sought legal separation from their husbands, as cruelty was one of the few grounds women could advance when they sought marital separation in the ecclesiastical courts that regulated marriage until 1869.Footnote ⁴ For the earlier period, research has been hampered by a relative lack of available sources. Archives that do survive include court records for the late medieval archdiocese of Armagh, late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century consistory court of the diocese of Killaloe and some years from the seventeenth-century assize courts of Clonmel.Footnote ⁵ As Art Cosgrove demonstrated in his early study of the Armagh church courts, while dissolution of marriages were not infrequent, most cases claimed lack of consent, consanguinity or desertion rather than cruelty or violence.Footnote ⁶ Leanne Calvert has recently studied marriage and marital breakdown in Ulster Presbyterian communities from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷ She used Presbyterian church session minutes and found that some women detailed violence within their homes, such as when Lettuce Wilson stated in 1679 that she had ‘no peace in her family because of her husband’s hard usage’.Footnote ⁸ However, like the records from the Armagh courts, such instances are relatively uncommon and not much detail is provided. While the work of Luddy, O’Dowd, Cosgrove and Calvert demonstrates the variety of pathways to flexible solutions for couples who wanted to end marriages prior to the nineteenth century, there are limited narratives or detailed descriptions of what women like Lettuce Wilson meant when she noted her husband’s ‘hard usage’.

While quantitative analysis of early modern family violence in Ireland is not feasible due to the relative paucity of surviving court records, a limited number of extensive records survive for cases of murder. This article closely analyses three of these detailed narratives to consider how violence between household members was understood by neighbours, bystanders and communities.Footnote ⁹ Although all of these testimonies describe murder, they also include descriptions of other forms of household violence, including verbal abuse, as evidence of breakdown in household relationships. Early modern societies understood that words were powerful weapons that disrupted relationships and wounded reputations.Footnote ¹⁰ Words that wounded are most often analysed in the context of accusations of slander; however, when women described cruelty by their husbands, they often included descriptions of damaging words. The narratives describing the circumstances of these people’s lives before their deaths give longer and more detailed narratives of violence than the typical records from ecclesiastical or lower courts. This means that analysis can widen away from women’s efforts to end marriages, to how other household members, friends and family interpreted the circumstances, emotions and meanings of violent acts that preceded fatalities.

The relative paucity of legal sources for the early modern period in Ireland contrasts with the richness of court documents from other European countries, especially England.Footnote ¹¹ In her influential analysis of the meanings of violence in early modern English societies, Susan Amusssen defines violence as acts that cause physical harm and then demonstrates that the meanings of such physical harm shifted according to circumstances. Violent acts could be understood as legitimate or normal discipline when inflicted by a social superior, such as a husband, father or master with the intention of guiding or correcting a wife, child or servant. Yet, early modern people also understood that such actions needed to be tempered so as not to inflict grievous harm or to punish unjustly.Footnote ¹² Communal interpretations of the motivations for physical actions were critical in defining acts as either unjustified violence or righteous discipline. However, as Joanne Bailey and Loreen Geise have argued, early modern English courts were not necessarily consistent in how they defined marital cruelty.Footnote ¹³ Many scholars, such as Garthine Walker, have argued that women describing the violence that they suffered at the hands of their husbands usually emphasised the disordered emotions and irrationality of men’s actions in order to define what had happened to them as illegitimate.Footnote ¹⁴ Elizabeth Foyster analysed witnesses in cases of marital separation based on accusations of cruelty and argued that servants and bystanders offered interpretation of the emotional state of men who beat their wives, often testifying their support for women seeking separation by stressing the virtue of the women and the irrational cruelty of men’s actions.Footnote ¹⁵

While these analyses of English records provide useful starting points, communal interpretations of violence for early modern Ireland were also complicated by divisions caused by religion and ethnicity. This article draws on extended narratives and testimonies of household violence embedded within a small number of legal cases from a variety of seventeenth-century archives to extend conclusions about household violence beyond the claims of cruelty used to secure marital separations as recorded in ecclesiastical courts and studied by Calvert, Henry Jeffries and Cosgrove. The fate of Grace Bushin was included in reports in a case of misuse of judicial power in Ireland that was eventually brought to the English Star Chamber court, while witness statements to the murder of Joan Masterson survive in family papers.Footnote ¹⁶ In the third case study discussed, household disorder was described in an appeal to the lord lieutenant against John Bough’s conviction of the murder of his landlord in Dublin.Footnote ¹⁷ The choice of these three cases is not because they are representative but because there are unusually lengthy witness statements and depositions in each one, which allows analysis of events and the reactions of bystanders to household violence. These case studies reveal the importance of three interlocking frameworks informing communal interpretations of violence: the position of both victim and perpetrator in the hierarchies of gendered power within households; interpretation of the emotions underpinning the motivations of perpetrators; and the grammar or interpretation of bodily marks to demonstrate meanings of violence.

Philippa Maddern in her influential study of fifteenth-century east Anglia built on Amussen’s work on the meanings of violence to outline how a ‘moral hierarchy of violence’ operated within late medieval and early modern European households. She argued that heads of household — mostly, but not always, male — were believed to be more reasoned and rational than their dependants.Footnote ¹⁸ Heads of households were thus expected to control the moral and social behaviour of their dependants, including wives, children and servants, using physical discipline when necessary. The meanings of any violence used within households thus shifted according to the position of those wielding physical force and those receiving it. At the same time, the meaning of any violent act was mediated by the emotional motivations that led to physical discipline.

This hierarchy of power flowed on to the wife of the head of the household, who was responsible for children and servants. Scholars of early modern violence have long recognised that discipline, including physical discipline, by those higher in the household hierarchy was expected to be motivated only by rational emotions such as the desire to guide and teach. In turn, subordinates within the household hierarchies were expected to respond to such discipline with acceptance and resignation.Footnote ¹⁹ Maddern demonstrated that those lower in the hierarchy, especially wives, were advised by sermons, hagiographies and other advice literature to accept violent actions delivered in the name of legitimate discipline.Footnote ²⁰ Since subordinates were expected to endure correction, there was no capacity in this framework for them to physically wound or offer violence to those above them in the household hierarchy. If such violence occurred, it was interpreted as a serious disruption of the natural order of society on a par with treason against the state. Under English law, people convicted of such violence against a household superior were punished for ‘petty treason’ because they were killing someone to whom they owed ‘faith and obedience’.Footnote ²¹ Until 1790, the punishment for petty treason was gendered, so women guilty of murdering their household superiors were executed by burning at the stake, while men were hanged.Footnote ²² These laws were extended to Ireland, so when children’s nurse, Honora ny Caffery, was convicted of murdering her employer and household superior, Mary Babington, Dowager Dunsany, in 1609, she was executed by burning.Footnote ²³

When witnesses were assessing the aftermath of violence between household members, they paid particular attention to the marks on injured bodies, in what Hanna Skoda has labelled the ‘grammar of violence’. By this she means that ‘practices of violence centre … on wounding and marking the physical body’. Communities read the marks that violent actions left on damaged bodies to find meaning in what had occurred. ‘Physically violent actions were made meaningful through an increasingly explicit semiology of marks on bodies.’Footnote ²⁴ Witnesses read markers such as blood, pain, bruises and fracture to understand if excessive or unjustified violence had been used. In 1531, for example, Elicia Butler, abbess of one of the largest religious houses for women in the English colony, Kilculliheen in County Waterford, was deposed from office.Footnote ²⁵ Among the many accusations against her was that she had struck the nuns under her control, ‘to the extent of shedding blood’ and that this was not done in order to discipline but through ‘quarrelling and fighting’.Footnote ²⁶ The emotional motivations of the violence — fighting and quarrelling — and the grammar or signs of violence — bleeding — were interpreted by the nuns, and by the religious authorities who agreed with them, to mean that unjustifiable violence had been perpetrated by the head of the household, Abbess Elicia, against her dependants, the nuns of Kilculliheen.

Early modern frameworks for understanding violence between members of the same household were thus based on the positions of each participant within the household hierarchy, the emotional motivations that led to violent acts and the meanings assigned to physical marks on wounded bodies. Authorities and communities in early modern Europe, including Ireland, did not condone excessive violence between family members, especially not violence motivated by emotions such as anger and jealousy.Footnote ²⁷

There are multiple commonalities between legal and social structures in early modern England and Ireland, including the importance of household hierarchies of moral authority. However, there were also significant differences flowing from the political position of Ireland as a proto-colony within the kingdom of England.Footnote ²⁸ Women and families were at the heart of the English colonial project designed to force Irish Catholics to conform to English Protestant ideals, just as was the case in other parts of the later British empire, such as India.Footnote ²⁹ As part of the colonising ideology, one of the stereotypes used by English commentators to justify ongoing colonisation and military intervention in Ireland was that uncivilised Irish men were violent towards their wives.Footnote ³⁰ Edward Tremayne, for example, in 1571 wrote to English government officials stating that Irish men physically assaulted and ‘useth … with abomination’ the women of their households and their female tenants. Tremayne had been Sir Henry Sidney’s secretary when he was lord deputy of Ireland in the early 1570s, and Sidney relied on analysis by Tremayne and others in formulating his political and military campaign against Irish rebels.Footnote ³¹ Violence by Irish men against their dependants was thus read as a sign of defective masculinity, of men who were not able to control their emotions and, therefore, their households. This was considered an indication that they were not fit to be a part of civil government and society.

Connecting control of dependants and households with good public judgement and civilised behaviour was not only evident in rhetoric used by the English in Ireland to justify military and political domination of the Gaelic Irish. Among the English elite, illegitimate violence against dependent family members was a weapon available to discredit political opponents.Footnote ³² The sensational accusations of household disorder and abuse levelled at Sir Christopher St Lawrence, seventh Baron of Howth, in 1576, is one of the best known examples of this from early modern Ireland.Footnote ³³ He was convicted of assault against his wife, Elizabeth Plunkett, his servants and his children, including his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jane. This violence was described in the court documents as ‘unnatural, unmerciful and vile’. The motivation for his actions was his ‘passionate and cruel mynde and humor, of furiouse Distraught passion’. Here, the signs of violence on his wife’s and daughter’s bodies were clearly legible to observers and demonstrated, in physical form, Howth’s lack of control of his emotions or his ‘passions’. Further evidence for his loss of control was ‘his open filthie manner of Conversacion, of life with strange women’. He also had accused his ‘honest chaste Ladye’ of over-familiarity with the servants, so ‘slaunderinge of her to helpe more infamy to her person’. The court then juxtaposed the chaste reputation of his wife, who had done her duty to the family through producing children, with the ‘unnatural’ reputation of Howth’s dissolute way of life.Footnote ³⁴ While there is no reason to doubt the sufferings of his household, Valerie McGowan-Doyle argues that the reason that Howth was subjected to such a public trial and conviction was because his political opponents wanted to damage his reputation and neutralise his political power. He had supported Gerald Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Kildare, who had been arrested in 1575 for treason and also publicly opposed the lord deputy, Sir Henry Sidney’s, plans for reform of the tax base from Old English elites such as Howth.Footnote ³⁵ In order to undermine Howth’s political position, his enemies aired charges of overly passionate and violent treatment of his dependents to discredit his political agenda.Footnote ³⁶ This was also the tactic used by the enemies of Philip Bushin of Kildare fifty years later.

The line that separated justifiable discipline and intolerable violence was hard to define and so could be manipulated. Each individual who heard or saw evidence of unhappy and violent households made their own assessment of the meaning of what they witnessed within the context of their community’s understanding of the norms of discipline and gendered behaviour. Readings of the marks on bodies could be used as evidence that heads of household had lost control of their emotions, employed unjustifiable violence and so lost their reputations and wider public credit. In order to present such violence as outside the boundaries of the usual discipline, witnesses needed to prove both the result of the violence in the marks on injured bodies, but also the emotional intent that led to that violence. That people could make quite different assessments of the same events is evident in the competing narratives of those who witnessed the death of Grace Bushin, the wife of Philip Bushin, a prosperous settler in Kildare in the 1620s. Two groups came to alternative interpretations of Philip’s actions around the time his wife died, and these differences fuelled ethnic and religious tensions that had been brewing in the community.

Sometime in the early 1620s, Philip Bushin charged two Irish brothers with stealing a considerable number of his sheep. He succeeded in securing the conviction and execution of one of the brothers, George Mackrobin. The surviving brother, Edy, publicly declared he would take revenge by proving Philip Bushin was guilty of the murder of his first wife, Grace. At least four juries were at different times empanelled to hear the conflicting evidence, with accusations of intimidation and tampering with the outcome of these trials reaching the highest officials in Dublin. The chief justice, Viscount Kilmallock, was sent to Kildare by the lord deputy, Viscount Falkland, to bring order, ‘because he had good Irish and the defendants were Irish’. Philip Bushin was eventually found guilty of murdering his wife and condemned to death. There was then a scramble for ownership of his considerable estate by his neighbours, including Irish members of the jury. Later in 1633, Bushin’s son, also Philip, claimed Kilmallock, Falkland and others had conspired to corrupt the jury because they wanted the estate, and this allegation led to more legal action.Footnote ³⁷

Within the welter of witness statements presented at the trial and retrials of Philip Bushin are two alternative accounts of Grace Bushin’s last days, each centring on Philip Bushin’s reputation among local Irish and English communities. These two accounts give different versions of the woman’s body and the emotional state of the married couple. The evidence that Philip Bushin had a reputation of honour within the English local community rested on proving that Grace Bushin had died a natural death. This in turn heavily depended on the statements of neighbours and friends who testified that Grace had been ill with the flux for some time and that this had caused her death. A woman who may have been a relative, Susan Bushin, described how in Grace’s last illness, Philip ‘had been very careful’ of her, and another witness, John Gaulsworth, said that Grace had died in her husband’s arms. Witnesses stated that there was a group of women in attendance on the night of Grace’s death, alongside her husband, and that numerous candles were burning around her bed. Two of these women, Sara Miller and Margaret Cooper, said that they saw Grace being put in her winding sheet ready for burial and had seen no marks upon her body.Footnote ³⁸ The minister, Edmund Hinde, testified that she had been buried on the next day and that ‘many had dined with Bushin’.Footnote ³⁹ In these accounts, there was no suspicion of untoward violence and all the rituals of peaceful and natural death were conducted including attendance by the ‘careful’ husband and watchful women followed by a well-conducted religious funeral. These witnesses testified that the emotional rituals of religious and communal mourning were followed, with Bushin performing his expected role as grieving husband and head of household.Footnote ⁴⁰

It was when the meaning of these same practices and actions were brought into question over the next two years that Bushin was accused of murder. Questions arose after Edy Mackrobin accused Bushin of facilitating the conviction and execution of his brother, George, and so violating Edy’s credit as a worthy man of the community.Footnote ⁴¹ Evidence that Philip Bushin had murdered his first wife relied on rumours about the actions observed between the married couple before her death, as well as witness testimony of his second wife’s emotions and fear of her husband. This then led to an alternative narrative about Grace’s death from a different group of women who read the marks on her body as evidence of violence. The sheriff, Sir Henry Beling, testified that Philip’s second wife had complained to him that she was afraid of her husband because he beat her, and when Beling enquired further, the local coroner told him it was ‘common report’ that Philip had murdered his first wife.Footnote ⁴² This led to the murder trial. Later, the guilty verdict was overturned and then the case was retried. More women who knew Grace were brought in and alleged that Grace was afraid of Philip and that in the days prior to her death, one of them, Anne Clere, said she had seen Philip beat Grace with a stick and Grace had complained that one of her ribs was broken and that ‘that was her life’.Footnote ⁴³ Local men, including the vengeful Edy Mackrobin, reported that they had heard that Philip had thrown a trencher at Grace the night she died. Sara Miller and Mary Wall were now reported as saying that Grace had complained of her husband and wished to leave him, and Sara Miller told a witness that Grace’s body had indeed been ‘black and blue about her neck’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Another witness, one of the attending woman, Dorothy Ni Turlough Burne, reported that as she had put the winding sheet on Grace’s body, she saw that it was black and blue but was reluctant to be drawn on the meaning of this ‘[if] she had been murdered she knew not’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Another neighbour, William Wallace, amplified some of the rumours by stating that Grace had been ‘buried hott’ or with unseemly haste after her death. These witnesses also reported with disapproval that Philip had married the widow Yates only six weeks after Grace’s death.Footnote ⁴⁶

Women, with both Irish and English names, were crucial witnesses in interpreting the emotional state of the married couple, as well as the state of the body. Evidence that showed that Philip displayed the appropriate emotional state of an honourable male head of household was that he was ‘careful’ of Grace when she was dying and allowed all the regular rituals to take place, with candles, sheeting, mourners and a respectable funeral.Footnote ⁴⁷ Alternative descriptions of Philip’s unjustified emotions relied on observations from local women and servants — many of whom had Irish names — that Grace was afraid of him. There were also witnesses who saw Philip beat Grace for no reason, hitting her with sticks and throwing a trencher at her. These actions were deemed to be unnecessary within the hierarchy of power within the household, as Grace had not violated any of the gendered codes of conduct that an honourable wife was expected to abide by. Grace’s body was the most important piece of evidence for this argument and its signs were read differently by the women who had seen Grace being prepared for burial. Some women said she was ‘black and blue’ while others said there were no signs of violence upon her body. The marks of violence combined with lack of seemly rituals, the very quick burial and rapid remarriage were seen as evidence of inappropriate conduct by those who read all these signs as guilt. This community was split over the actions of Philip Bushin, both when he prosecuted George Mackrobin for theft and when his wife died. The Irish neighbours who presumably supported Edy Mackrobin interpreted Bushin’s treatment of his wife as unlawful and unjustifiable, based on the grammar of the marks on her body and the emotional motivations that they read into Philip’s actions. Philip’s English neighbours and relatives interpreted the same signs differently. This case then was ultimately about local divisions and politics.

Judgements about appropriate levels of discipline by husbands depended on evidence that a wife had not sought to leave or to provoke her husband but had fulfilled her duties, by caring for him and the household and producing children. In the complex personal relationships in frontier communities of Ireland, women had to negotiate not only these gendered expectations but also the tensions between Irish and English political groups and family members.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the tragic life of Lady Joan Masterson, daughter of Richard Butler, third Viscount Mountgarret, one of the leading Irish Catholic peers, these tensions exacerbated marital fracture which ultimately led to her death at the hands of her third husband, John Butler, son of Sir Richard Butler of Knocktopher, sheriff of Tipperary. Immediately after her death, and while John was in custody awaiting trial for her murder, Mountgarret organised the compilation of an unusually full dossier of the violence perpetrated against his daughter. In this collection of witness statements, the semiotics or ‘grammars’ of bodily marks were presented along with their interpretation by mostly female witnesses. These narratives that described Joan’s final days framed the household violence within gendered norms of expected behaviour for both women and men.

Widowed Joan Masterson should have been in a position of some power when she entered her third marriage in January 1637. She was one of the six daughters of Mountgarret and his first wife Margaret, daughter of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. These connections meant Joan was closely related to some of the most powerful families in early modern Ireland. Her parents’ marriage, like those of her siblings and her parents’ siblings, were part of the web of political, legal and social networks between the Gaelic Irish elites, Old English aristocracy and New English administrators. They provided her family with significant political capital, although by the time of her marriage to John Butler, her father had distanced himself from his O’Neill connections.Footnote ⁴⁹ Joan’s own first two marriages were to local Protestant English men who held important crown offices in County Wexford. In about 1620, she had married Sir Richard Masterson, constable of Ferns. Her second husband was Sir Philip Paulet, fourth son of Anthony Paulet, governor of Jersey. By 1637, she had lands of her own, including an estate near Garrylough and Ferns in Wexford, which came to her after Paulet’s death in 1636.Footnote ⁵⁰ Her older son, Joseph Paulet, was a ward of Lord Esmond, a prominent supporter of the earl of Ormond and a substantial Wexford landowner. Her daughter, Mary Paulet, was fostered with a local man, Bryan O Neal.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, these connections did not help her when her third husband, John Butler, fatally injured her in the summer of 1638, probably not long after the birth of their only child, Richard.Footnote ⁵²

When John Butler was helped to escape from custody by his brother before the conclusion of his murder trial, the witness depositions for the trial had already been taken.Footnote ⁵³ These statements were then kept by the family and survive in a collection of papers of Joan’s daughter, Mary Paulet. The case against John Butler was brought by Joan’s father and the first witness was Ellis, Lady Cahir, a high-ranking member of the Butler family, widow of Thomas, baron of Cahir, who stated she was Joan’s friend.Footnote ⁵⁴ Lady Cahir’s evidence was carefully structured to stress that John’s actions before Joan’s death were outside of the norms of gendered marital behaviour. She related how she had gone to visit Joan in May 1638 on hearing that she was pregnant and sick. When Lady Cahir arrived, Joan immediately told her that recently John had come home with blood on his hands. Joan had asked him: ‘I pray you tell me if any mischiefe have befallen you or that you have killed any one that I may provide for you to shift you away.’ Presenting this narrative at the beginning of Lady Cahir’s testimony established Joan as a good wife, one who was ready to help her husband if he was hurt or needed physical protection. It also framed John as a violent man when outside the household and points to fracture points over land or political influence within the complex world of the Butler lordship. It is possible that there were tensions over differing confessional backgrounds as well as political alliances. Joan was almost certainly Catholic, like her father. Her son by her second husband was a ward in the household of the vehemently Protestant Lord Esmonde, and her daughter by her second husband was fostered by the O’Neals, who were probably Catholic.Footnote ⁵⁵

Butler’s reply to his wife’s solicitude, as related by Joan to Lady Cahir, immediately revealed him as overly passionate, foul-mouthed and cruel as well as violent: ‘you whore it is you, your beggerly bastard, and your Kavanaghs your friends that is the cause of this.’ He then threw her off her chair. Joan persisted in trying to assist him, calling for water to wash the blood from his glove. He retaliated by knocking down the servant who was present. Lady Cahir used the couple’s emotional responses to provide justification for Joan leaving the household. Joan reported that she had evidence of John’s excess emotion, ‘seeing him so passionate’, and that this was the sign to her that she needed to flee. So, she went to the house of O’Neal, the foster father of her daughter. However, she, ‘thinking herself not safe’, left again, to spend the night in the open. In the context of Lady Cahir’s narrative, this evidence had multiple purposes: it was as close as was possible to first-hand testimony. Lady Cahir structured her testimony to give meaning to a set of events which could have been construed differently. According to Lady Cahir, Joan had not deserted her position as wife of the household: she had been forced out by the irrational violence of John, who should have been her protector. She had not given him any provocation; instead, her concerns were reported as being wholly wifely in their desire to care for and support him.

Lady Cahir then went on to describe the injuries that Joan had sustained from her husband’s beatings, and her evidence was corroborated by female servants. One attendant said that she had seen Joan ‘with her hair hanging downe about her face and tould this examinat that the said John Butler had beaten her and knockt her in the head like an oxe and saw her cloathes broken’. In this context, the servant invited the court to read Joan’s dishevelled personal appearance as a crucial physical sign of violence, possibly sexual violence, while the manner in which John had beaten her ‘like an oxe’ was evidence of his lack of human control and his animalistic passions. This beating brought on premature labour. There were, however, signs of more serious internal injuries than was usual with a miscarriage or premature birth. The midwife who attended Joan described matter that was ‘as long as this examinate hand like the lights of liver of a sheepe or a hogge’ expelled from Joan’s body while she assisted Joan to birth a dead child. Lady Cahir then described how Joan had contemplated suicide because of John’s violence towards her and his expressed desire to kill her, but had restrained herself because of her surviving child.Footnote ⁵⁶ This narrative structure presented Joan as a good mother, a woman prepared to put her child’s interests before her own, while John was destroying his children by violently assaulting her and causing the death of the unborn child.

As well as talking to her female friends, Joan had also asked the advice of a priest, Edmund Doran, telling him of the violence inflicted by her husband and showing him her bruises before enquiring about the possibility of divorce. He, however, told her to stay with her husband and she obeyed. Joan’s wifely virtue was again highlighted. Here, she followed long-standing Christian precepts for wives to find redemption in suffering at the hands of their husbands. Early modern female virtue was demonstrated by passivity and acceptance even of a husband’s violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ Joan does appear to have been aware of the need to ensure that she had witnesses to her injuries. Another witness, Mary Lambert, said in her statement that when she and Lady Cahir were with Joan as she was dying, Joan had reminded them both that John had beaten her on the head with a heavy book. The final depositions in the collection were from an attending doctor and the woman who had laid out Joan’s body. The doctor testified to the severity of her internal injuries and Giles ny Nitten Darvill described the clear signs of violence on her body, with the left side being bruised black and blue.

Joan’s own account of her final days was thus preserved by those who surrounded her. She had taken care to ensure that she had a high-ranking relative with her and had also reiterated to both Lady Cahir and Mary Lambert the emotional context in which she had received her injuries, making sure that they knew her husband was responsible. The evidence of the physical marks on her body was also carefully catalogued by her medical attendants and servants, ensuring that the marks were read as evidence of the lethal violence inflicted by her husband. The assembled narratives were designed to show John was seriously deficient as a man. He was dangerously ‘passionate’, irrationally making Joan sleep with no covers and beating her when she protested. His inappropriate violence deprived her of the protection of his house: he had driven her outdoors, thus disrupting the boundaries of the household to such an extent that it became public knowledge that he had abused her. Not only that, but his assaults killed their unborn child and so destroyed the main rationale for their marriage: the production of children. While there is no reason to doubt any of the evidence of this tragic marriage, it is clear that Mountgarret and his legal team were aware of what was required to convict a man of killing his wife. They evidently knew that they had to provide overwhelming evidence of inappropriate passions or emotions such as anger, that these emotions had resulted in observable severe physical injuries and that the wife had not engaged in any behaviour that provoked justifiable discipline. Joan’s husband was not convicted of her murder as he was rescued from the prison by his brother Piers and boarded a ship from Youghal bound for the continent. His flight meant he lost any remaining reputation within his community, and he did not inherit her property nor gain custody of his son.Footnote ⁵⁸

In order for supporters of women such as Grace Bushin and Joan Masterson to demonstrate that they had suffered unjustifiable violence, they had to prove that their husbands had disrupted the gendered hierarchy of their households. It was different when household subordinates disrupted the hierarchy by injuring or killing the head of the household. Women and men who were believed to have killed their domestic superiors were judged harshly, with a lower burden of communal proof of unjustifiable violence than when husbands killed their wives.Footnote ⁵⁹ Women wishing to prove that they had not used unjustified violence against their husbands needed to frame their actions as having always been within norms of gendered behaviour and to marshal substantial community and familial support for their version of events. Martha Crompton used all these methods when she petitioned the lord deputy for a pardon after being convicted of the manslaughter of her husband in 1615.Footnote ⁶⁰ In her narrative she was careful to explain how her husband had died of knife wounds when she was alone with him. She said that by ‘casuall and unpretended means’, she accidently killed her husband, because he had ‘come upon her’ when she was holding the knife and so ‘he was guilty of his own death’.Footnote ⁶¹ While she may have been using the knife to defend herself, she could not construct the petition using self-defence as motivation because within gendered norms of behaviour she should not have been resisting her husband. She did not dwell on the injuries or marks on the body of her husband, because her argument was based on her lack of inappropriate motivation to harm him. Since she was within her own home, her access to the knife was not remarkable. She was very clear in her petition that her gender barred her from the method that a man could use to avoid punishment for manslaughter, which was to plead benefit of clergy.Footnote ⁶² Presumably she also could not ‘plead her belly’, or prove pregnancy, the only method for avoiding the death penalty available to a woman sentenced to capital punishment.Footnote ⁶³ In addition to all these mitigating circumstances, she also stated that her husband’s relatives agreed with her in her interpretation of events and that ‘no frend or kinsman of her said husband doth seek to crosse but will rather further the same, knoweing the casuallite of her miscarriage [of justice]’. Martha obviously satisfied the judges appointed by the lord deputy that she had indeed not intended to kill her husband and that his death was an accident. She was issued with a certificate of pardon.

When household subordinates could not present their version of events in a way that satisfied norms of gendered behaviour within the household hierarchies, their actions were likely to be seen as unacceptable. William Wells was attacked and killed within his own rooms in a crowded tenement in Dublin in the 1660s. Later, in 1666, John Brough wife, Ann, along with her brother-in-law, Walter, tried unsuccessfully to secure a pardon for her husband, then in prison after conviction for William’s murder. Ann claimed that her husband, a surgeon’s assistant, had lodged with William Wells, whom she described as ‘quarrelsome’, and William had ‘violently assaulted’ John causing wounds in ‘severall places’. It is in the review of the case ordered by the lord lieutenant that the prosecution’s version of events was recorded. Ann and Walter Brough framed John’s actions as self-defence because William Wells was ‘quarrelsome’. In other words William’s actions were not motivated by a head of household’s desire to correct or ensure order, but were illegitimately passionate. John then responded in justified self-defence which led to William’s death.Footnote ⁶⁴

Unfortunately for the Brough family, there was ample evidence that presented a very different interpretation of the events that led to William’s death. According to the testimony of William’s eight-year-old son, John Brough had been out in the evening alone with William’s wife, Sarah, and when they returned to the household, William had been ‘very angry with the said Sarah his wife, for being out with the said Brough and gave her severall angry words’. When neighbours heard the cries of ‘murder’ through the walls and saw blood dripping through the floors of the tenement, they forced open the door. On entry, the neighbours judged Sarah’s emotional demeanour as inappropriate, saying, ‘the saidd Sarah very briskly and unconcerned sayd “I’ll take my oath my husband began” [the fight] though noebody gave the least occasion of saying soe either by asking her any question or otherwise’. John was in an adjoining room holding a bloody sword and saying that he had done it. John reported that William had struck and injured him with a chamber pot and that this is why he raised the sword against William. The judges were unconvinced by this and stated that, as William was unarmed, there was no evidence ‘that he gave the least occasion of quarrell at the tyme to the said John Brough, he the said William Wells being on or in his bed with his son, when the said Brough came in, and had only some few clothes loosely on when he was slaine’. The judges here contrasted the intimate scene of the undressed man in bed with his young child with John’s allegation that the chamber pot had been used as weapon. They then decided that this combination did not constitute a credible threat of lethal violence which might have meant that John was justified in wounding William in self-defense. The intensely domestic setting of the crowded bedroom of a Dublin tenement had none of the expected weapons for an equal fight between two men. As John Brough was the only man armed with a lethal weapon, the court understood that he must have instigated the violence and so committed murder.

Sarah’s behaviour was also judged to be that of an undutiful wife. She was away from her household with another man at night, having left her own husband and child. Her reactions to her neighbours’ response to the cries that they heard were also read harshly against the expected gendered emotional responses of a wife. She had refused to fully open the door to her neighbours, obscuring their view of the scene. The witnesses interpreted this as further sign of her untrustworthiness. She also did not demonstrate expected grief or other emotion at her husband’s death, which no doubt led to her own conviction for his murder. John’s own supporters attempted to present William’s behaviour as deficient in that it was overly passionate and exhibited a loss of the control expected of the male head of the household. In their narrative, John was thus justified in taking up arms against his household superior. John’s supporters did not mention Sarah at all. However, the narrative of those who supported John seems to have carried little weight, probably because of the difference in masculine status between William and John and the involvement of Sarah. While John was a married man, at this time he was a lodger, so in a subordinate position to William as head of the household in which they were both living. In this instance, his actions against William were interpreted as those of a man upending the expected social hierarchy alongside the adulterous wife, Sarah. The judges described the crime as a ‘traitorous murder’ which was a phrase used when describing murder of a head of household by a subordinate, often a wife.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sarah then tried to ‘plead her belly’ to avoid the death penalty, but this failed when midwives testified that she was not pregnant.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sarah and John may be the unnamed man and woman jailed in Dublin for the murder of the woman’s husband, who in 1667, after they had been reprieved a few times, tried to poison the gaoler. When that was discovered, they were immediately executed. She was burnt and he was hanged, drawn and quartered which were the methods of execution for ‘petty traitors’ who murdered their household superiors.Footnote ⁶⁷

Violence within households in early modern Ireland was not unregulated or uncontrolled by laws or societal expectations. Heads of household were expected to use physical means to correct and discipline their dependants, including their wives, servants, lodgers and children. Social, and to some extent legal, constraints around such discipline were meant to ensure that lethal or dangerous violence was not inflicted upon those lower down the household hierarchy. The public reputations of elite men could be undermined by accusations of private emotional disorder and violence, as happened with Lord Howth and Philip Bushin. Embedded within these accusations were narratives of defects in hegemonic masculinity of elite men who lost control of their passions and emotions enough to injure those they were meant to discipline and protect. Reports of abuse of power and loss of control underpinned public attacks on these men’s probity, reputation and honour.

Societal constraints around the use of discipline within households were imperfect, with varying understandings of acceptable physical control and illegitimate violence. Witnesses in all the narratives examined here framed their descriptions of events to emphasise that perpetrators were moved by the illegitimate emotions of anger or jealousy and not by any attempt to discipline or mould behaviour. As all the narratives examined here were generated within legal proceedings under English law, it is inevitable that there are similarities between them. Even though the case studies include households from a range of backgrounds, the narratives framing motivations for violence as illegitimate emphasise common elements. The Wells household was poorer and at a lower level of society than that of Lady Joan Masterson, yet witnesses in both cases strove to prove the violence used on each victim was unjustified. In the case of Joan Masterson, her husband had turned her out of the house and withdrawn his protection. When dependants were accused of violence against the head of household, the bar of proof of illegitimate violence was low. For the witnesses to the death of William Wells, the master of the crowded Dublin household, the fact that he was attacked while unclothed, in bed and unarmed meant that his attacker could not be excused even by the harsh words spoken. There were very limited circumstances in which a wife or dependant could claim that violence against a husband or head of household was justified as they were never in a position to discipline their superior. When John Brough was discovered standing over the body of his unarmed landlord, even the petition of John’s wife setting out the quarrelsomeness and inappropriate emotions of William towards John could not justify John’s violence towards his household superior. It was not only words and actions that were given meaning by witnesses in all these case studies. The emotional contexts in which witnesses interpreted what they saw and heard framed how witnesses interpreted marks on injured bodies. Witnesses’ readings of the grammar of damaged bodies, combined with their interpretations of household dynamics and emotional contexts, informed communal judgement that judged events as unjustifiable violence.