Late in November 1624, Ann Poole of Colchester lay in her winding sheet. The church bell was tolling for her burial, but her body was still exposed to view. An elderly female neighbour was ready with ‘thread to sew her up’ and asked for a needle, but ‘the mother of the girl … crying said it had more need to be searched’. The two of them, together with other women present, ‘searched’ – that is, closely examined – the body and ‘found her privy parts to be as red as blood and that she was grievously misused and hurt by some man’. Another witness reported that it ‘did pierce her heart to see it’; yet another, that the child was ‘pitifully hurt … in so much as she never saw the like before’. Ann Poole was seven years old when she died.

Children are as individuals and as a group among the most vulnerable elements in any society. How they are treated, and the laws, customs, institutions and procedures that exist to help and protect them, are highly revealing of social values. Yet surprisingly little research has been undertaken on this topic in early modern England since the controversy aroused by the work of Lawrence Stone some twenty years ago. Most historians concluded from this debate that behaviour that we would interpret as the abuse of children was certainly not a central feature of early modern English society, something that respectable people, of whatever social rank they might be, would readily admit to or publicly condone. But plainly this tells us little about what happened in secret or away from public view.