"A Hellish Murder": A Case of Petty Treason in Early Modern England

On March 2, 1688 a French midwife by the name of Marie Hobry was taken by Sheriff’s Officers from Newgate Prison in London and removed to Leicester Fields, where she was hanged before being burnt at the stake.[i] Marie was executed for the crime of murdering her husband of four years, Denis Hobry on January 27, 1688.  Under the laws of England at the time, the murder of a husband by a wife was considered a crime against domestic authority and required a charge of petty treason rather than just murder. Popular accounts of the early modern period reveal that petty treason was seen as a deeply gendered crime, designed and enforced to protect the entrenched domestic social structure that demanded obeisance from a wife just as a man did the same for the King. Women were indicted for petty treason at ten times the rate that men were, and given that a husband inherited the right to “correct” or beat his wife “within limits” from the moment they were married, just as it was expected for a monarch to punish his disobedient subjects, the idea that a wife could be driven to kill her husband was not given any consideration in sentencing for such a conviction.[ii] Boundaries between domestic and political life in early modern England were fluid, and the murder of a husband by a wife or a master by his servant not only threatened the tranquility of the household but also the stability of the state. Challenging a patriarchal, hierarchical social order even in defense of oneself was defined as treason, and the legal system took great pains to ensure such murders retained a separate classification from other murders.

Fig. 1. Playing card depicting an etching of Mary Aubry's execution, 1689. Guildhall Library, Corporation of London

Petit treason, the official charge of the murder of a husband by a wife or a master by a servant or a religious inferior, was part of English law from 1351 to 1828. Marie’s story offers a glimpse into the historical inequality of women as enshrined under this particular law, and how their subjugated status within the home was replicated from the poorest laborer to the royal court of England. No matter a male subject’s social class, his home was considered his castle, mirroring the social hierarchy of fealty owed by all subjects to their sovereign. In her article “Petit Treason in Eighteenth Century England: Women’s Inequality Before the Law,” Shelley A.M. Gavigan argues the law of petit treason both reflected and reinforced social and economic relations of gender and class that were feudal in nature.[iii] Social relations were hierarchical in form, and this tradition traveled with English settlers to the American colonies. An examination of petit treason, and specifically Marie’s case, helps us understand contemporary legal definitions of privacy, particularly when applied to domestic relationships in the home. The law changed, and social movements of the late twentieth century ensured legal definitions guaranteed all equality before the law no matter a person’s race, gender, or sexuality in the United States. While substantive economic and social inequalities continue to exist, as Gavigan argues, it is imperative to remember the moment and the conditions which required the reshaping of social and economic relations upon a formally equal footing.[iv] Marie’s case also brings up contemporary notions of who makes a sympathetic victim and who is entitled to protection of the law when all other social structures fail.

Marie Hobry is distinguished in history by several characteristics. These include her and her deceased husband’s alien statuses as French citizens living in England as well as her Catholic faith; by her position as a midwife in her neighborhood; and by the extraordinary press coverage her case received at the time.  She was a midwife who spoke French as her primary language.  Due to her profession she knew several people throughout her London neighborhood of St. Martins in the Fields, despite not being able to speak English well, and it was these same people who offered testimony against her while the murder of Denis was being investigated.[v] Anti-French sentiment was high during this time period in England, as was Anti-Catholicism.  Marie’s case can be seen as an example of how common Londoners – artisans and servants – demonized her French descent, her religion, and her alleged lack of morality on the eve of the Glorious Revolution.  Her neighbors turned a deaf ear to the tragedy of her domestic abuse, giving her no moral leeway for the murder of her husband.  Finally, in the publication of the pamphlet that provides exhaustive detail of witness transcripts and Marie’s own version of events, her case offered a warning to the common people of England as well as a counter to rumors proliferating about the case, particularly any ideas about attaching political significance to it.[vi]

Marie Hobry gave her testimony on February 4, 1688, at which time she reported that she had been married to Denis Hobry for four years.  Soon after the marriage took place, Marie stated Denis denied the union and “cast all sort of Infamous Reproaches” upon her. She revealed the source of his anger to be her unwillingness to engage in acts she considered unnatural, and as a result Denis began to beat her to the point where she felt her life was in danger.  She left him for a period of four months, although she lived close by, and for roughly two years after that he spent most of his time in France.  Denis returned to her several times and promised to make amends, and Marie decided to go back to him so long as he declared before a priest and two witnesses that she was his lawful wife.  Denis agreed to this, but within just a few days of living together the abuse began again.  He would leave for France and stay away for a few months at a time, then return to her, and this pattern continued until the date of the murder.  Marie reported asking Denis for a final separation but he refused, telling her that “he would be the Ruine of her.” She had thoughts of killing herself or her husband, and she admitted she told him she would kill him if he continued to behave in the manner he had.  She also told others of her lamentable situation.[vii] 

Before his death, Denis returned from another trip to France after he’d spent all of his earnings and demanded money from his wife, to which she refused.  In response, he threatened her and told another that he would be the destruction of her.  She went to bed at 10 o’clock, alone.  Denis returned home around five in the morning, drunk, and he woke Marie by beating her with his fists.  He raped her, and bit her “like a Dog,” and she asked him, “Am I to lead this Life for ever?”  He responded with, “Yes, and a worse too, ere it be long, you had best look to your self,” after which he fell asleep. Feeling she had no other choice to save her life, she confessed to taking one of Denis’s garters and strangling him with it.  Marie claimed to have immediate remorse and hoped he wasn’t really dead; she waited three days before going to fetch her thirteen-year-old son at the home where he was an apprentice so he would help her dispose of Denis’s body.[viii]

Marie stated her son did not want to meddle in the disposition of Denis’s body, and that she cut off the head and limbs so she herself could more easily dispose of it.  Denis’s “trunk was discovered on a dung hill in Parker’s Lane, his limbs in a House of Office (or privy) in the Savoy, his head in a vault (a cellar or crypt) near the strand.” The body was reassembled in the hopes that it would make identification easier, and once it was confirmed to be Denis Hobry, Marie was apprehended at the home of one of her clients. The gruesome discovery of body parts became an immediate focus “…for the anxieties surging through London at a time of particular upheaval, anxieties that often attached to those who…were both foreign-born and Catholic.”[ix] Not only did the dead body of Denis Hobry present a challenge to the social hierarchies framing marriage in England, but Marie herself engendered suspicion based on her religion and place of origin.

Fig. 2. William III and Mary, Copyright: Royal Collection Trust/Â Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

By 1640 Charles I had sat upon the throne of England for fifteen years and during that time his relationship with the political community deteriorated; two years of political machinations ensued, with demands being made in Parliament which the king steadfastly refused to acknowledge. By the middle of 1642 England’s Civil War was on between the royalist side, who identified with the king and the “High Church,” and moderate reformers who did not want to join forces with parliamentary radicals, and Parliamentarians, which included Puritans who would not settle for anything “short of a restructured Church and a spiritually revived commonwealth;…”[x] The intervening years saw Charles I tried and beheaded in 1649, the establishment of a protectorate under General Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of the king-in-exile, Charles II in 1660. Charles II was succeeded in 1685 by James II, an unpopular Roman Catholic, and by 1688, shortly after the arrest and prosecution of Marie Hobry, he would be replaced on the throne by the Dutch leader, William, Prince of Orange.

Politically speaking, then, Marie’s crime occurred during a time when an unpopular Roman Catholic monarch sat on the throne of England.  Within a year after her execution, William, a Protestant who engaged in several wars with France, would take the crown with hardly any internal strife. Not only did the political machinations of the time place an anti-French bias against Marie, but her social status caused suspicion, as well. She was a midwife by trade but the profession in England would not have provided her with a livable income without the earnings her husband brought home. The only training available for midwifery was through apprenticeship, whereas in France a noted school of midwifery existed at the Hotel Dieu in Paris. While there is no direct evidence that Marie trained there, her employment by a respectable middle-class clientele suggests they viewed her skills as a sign of her professional expertise despite her French origins and language.[xi] Despite her valuable skillset, work was difficult to find due to shifting demographics in England.

During Marie’s lifetime, the birth rate in England experienced a drop beginning in the 1570s and lasted through the 1660s; it would not recover until the eighteenth century. It can be expected that this affected the amount of work available to Marie.  Homicide figures for the time period are problematic to differentiate since all non-infanticide cases were grouped together; it is therefore difficult to tell what proportion were for spousal murders as opposed to murders committed during robberies. The overall homicide rate in England surged during the first years of the seventeenth century but began to decrease following the end of the English Civil War. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many communities saw an increase in social stratification and more explicit divisions between landowners, the poor, and among those who lived in communities and those who were considered outsiders. However, things began to shift toward the middle of the seventeenth century as people began to question the limits of tyranny that were acceptable in a king. This questioning of absolute power extended to the rights of a husband as the head of household, and ultimately led to changes in the handling of cases of petty treason.[xii] 

The law for spousal murder committed by wives was interpreted strictly up until the 1630s, but beginning in that decade legal scholars began to explore provocation as a legitimate defense and a mitigating factor in cases of petty treason in legal treatises and pamphlets. Testimony at domestic murder trials often included commentary on mutual friction between marital partners.[xiii] This was certainly the case with Marie and Denis Hobry, as many would testify the two often complained of a history of mutual incompatibility, and Marie herself would testify to her husband’s repeated threats, drunkenness, and violence toward her.[xiv] While historians have a limited number of cases to work with over the course of several hundred years in the field of domestic homicide, the documentation that does exist highlights many of the social and economic struggles that lead to violence in today’s family units were similar to those that existed in Marie’s time.   

The testimony against Marie included information providing a somewhat intimate view of the violent and unhappy relationship she shared with Denis, as well as some of the economic and social struggles they dealt with at the time of the murder.  During the course of my research I found five pamphlets about Marie’s case.  Four pamphlets were created for the general public to read, one of which provided the testimony of several witnesses against her character as well as supportive testimony from her thirteen-year-old son and married daughter.[xv] This pamphlet also shows accusations leveled against her son, John Desermeau (also spelled John Desermo), and acquaintances Denis and John Favet, as accessories after the fact.  Following Marie’s guilty plea, all three men were charged with being an accessory to murder but were later acquitted.

One French witness who testified against Marie was Philip Yard of St. Martins in the Fields, whose profession was listed as a cook. Yard identified himself as a friend of many years to Denis Hobry, and he indicated that their friendship went back to their time in Paris. He stated that Marie spoke of her husband in “menacing and reviling” terms and called him insulting names; he also relayed a scene from “the House where her Daughter Lodges,” where Marie threatened to kill Denis. Yard implicated the daughter as having witnessed the exchange, but in his next statement he said that Marie asked him not to speak of the incident at her daughter’s. Yard testified he confronted Hobry and asked her if she had done to Denis what she had threatened to do; he also noted they both spoke French and no one would be able to understand them if she spoke to him about what happened.[xvi]

Fig. 3. Pamphlet on Marie's Execution, Early English Books Online, November 24, 2020

 

Maria Anne Rippault related specific information about Marie’s story, stating that Marie indicated that she had “got quit” of her husband by getting him drunk and sending him to the Indies and that Marie noted that upon his return he would have diamonds. Maria Anne’s testimony used the word “Raillery” when discussing Marie’s story about Dennis being in the Indies, which would signify that Marie was joking when she was talking to Maria Anne.  Maria Anne also recalled that Marie said many times that “she would be the Death of her Husband, and that she had it several times in her Thoughts to Strangle him, and put him into a Common-shore (common sewer).” Maria Anne was married to Claude Royer, a goldsmith, and was likely to have a little bit of an elevated status compared to some of the other witnesses; she also signed her signature instead of making a mark. 

Many of the witnesses used against Marie were illiterate based on the fact they didn’t provide a signature, but rather a “Mark.”[xvii] Yard’s testimony has the most credibility given that he was able to speak French with Marie; however, it was established at the beginning of his testimony that he was a long-standing friend of Denis’s.  Testimony provided by Richard Kirkham, a servant to a shoemaker, indicated that a “French Midwife” using the name of “Madam Desermeau” sought lodging at the home of his master because she was trying to avoid someone, possibly Yard. During the woman’s stay, a constable showed up in the company of Yard and took her into custody. Yard appears to be a formidable foe who was determined to see Marie pay for the death of her husband. 

As noted earlier, in her confession Marie provides ample testimony about her relationship with Denis and it is an unhappy one, plagued by economic difficulties brought on by Denis’s frequent trips to France, his drinking, and his violent outbursts toward his wife. At the end of her testimony Marie was asked how she, “being of the Communion of the Church of Rome, came to throw the Quarters of her Husband into a House of Office at the Savoy, which was a way to bring so great a Scandal upon the Religion she professed, by laying the Murther at the Door of the Professors of that Religion?” The manner of questioning is clearly prejudicial because there is no indication that Marie’s religion has any direct correlation with the death of her husband.  In Post-Reformation England, Catholics occupied multiple spaces, lacking roots in one specific locale due to the suspicion and outright hostility their beliefs engendered. In some parts of the country such as Yorkshire, many families who still practiced Catholicism had been in their communities for generations, whereas in London they tended to be aristocratic, members of the court, or were foreign. Despite their presence, many still viewed Catholics as a threat because they at once defied the meaning of being English and retained an air of threat that they might want to re-establish a power base in England through alliances with a Catholic country such as France. However, there is no evidence that Marie was intricately tied to any place of public worship and it is unknown what Denis’s religious views were.  Marie pleaded guilty to her husband’s murder through an interpreter, and although she was offered the opportunity for her case to be heard by trial, she chose to forego that option and stick with her guilty plea, despite the mandatory sentence of death by burning.

In the latter half of the fifteenth century, popular culture began to reproduce works such as plays and texts about murderous wives.[xviii] Many such texts were targeted to a wide audience to promote social cohesion within communities, among both males and females and public spaces such as the marketplace, the parish church, and the local alehouse. Even with the changing mores regarding domestic murder and the issue of provocation by the mid-seventeenth century, Marie and Denis Hobry’s foreign status and their Catholicism made an ideal story to be told within this context. Many pamphlets about the case were produced as works of popular culture for mass consumption. One pamphlet that tells the story of Marie and Denis is called “A Warning-Piece to all Married Men and Women,” and is presented as a poem.[xix] The warning asks that “All you that Married Men and Women be Give Ear unto this woful Tragedy, That now befell a French man and his Wife, Who liv’d together in continual Strife;…” Another pamphlet is entitled “An Epilogue to the French Midwife’s Tragedy”, which is also presented as poetry.[xx] The pamphlets serve as a warning to common people. Their rhyming couplets might have allowed for the singing of stories as ballads. The public placement of Denis’s body parts gave the crime a gruesomeness that added drama to the proceedings, and this created an ideal marketing situation for publishers such as Roger L’Estrange, a Troy propagandist who published A Hellish Murder.  L’Estrange himself was the one who secured Marie’s confession through an interpreter, and it is his opinion at the end of the text that concludes that even if Marie had claimed provocation, it was unlikely that the outcome would be different.

Marie’s case is troubling in that it leaves many questions unresolved.  We can conclude she was unhappily married to Denis Hobry, and he was likely her second husband as it was indicated that she had only been married to him for four years.  Her children were grown, at least to the point that one was living outside her home as an apprentice and the other was married, and they probably had no blood relation to Denis. Each of them offered testimony that Marie was afraid of her husband and felt that he would do harm to her and not the other way around.[xxi] In the first examination of Marie’s son John, who was described as a servant to a weaver, his testimony conveys that his mother asked him to leave work because she was expecting a man at her home she could not understand because she didn’t speak English. John never stated who the man might be. It is interesting to note that after John left his mother’s home, he stated he went to different places where he spoke to no one, then turned up at his mother’s again in the morning. The events described by John occurred on Monday, January 27; with John being unaccounted for over a twelve hour period on the same day Denis was determined to have died, is there any likelihood that John killed Denis Hobry and Marie took the blame for it?  This is an angle that warrants further investigation, but there is likely no opportunity to confirm or reject his alibi after three centuries.   

The witnesses who testified against Marie, save for Philip Yard, who was French, and perhaps Maria Anna Rippault, who used some French words in her transcription of her conversation with Marie, would likely not have been able to converse with her. There was very little information to be found about French Catholic migration to England versus Protestant French immigration.  How Marie and Denis ended up living in London at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was high is a question worth exploring.  The very fact of their French-ness likely contributed to publishers wanting to distribute pamphlets to the popular public as they weren’t likely to get much pushback for using a French woman as an example of a horrible murderess.  Marie and Denis would have also been considered labor competition by the common public and therefore a threat to English people seeking work.  Marie was able to sign her own name on her testimony, which indicates that she at least had received some formal education.  She also likely received specialized training in France to be a midwife, education which England didn’t provide at the time.  This qualified Marie as a more highly skilled midwife than English midwives, making her a target of resentment among her peers.   

There is also the question of why Denis was going back to France and staying for months at a time.  Was he working for a criminal element and transporting goods across the English Channel?  Could this have been a cause for his demise?  London in 1687 was unlikely to have a lot of work for Denis and it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to have found more unsavory ways to support oneself, and his wife when he thought about her.  Also, why was an autopsy not performed?  Historical evidence exists that supports that autopsies were being performed in late seventeenth century England, although they were confined primarily to those cases in which family members or attending physicians wanted to establish the cause of death to satisfy their own curiosity.[xxii] Given Marie’s language limitations and the fact that she and Denis were poor, this wouldn’t have been something she would have known she could demand.   

Marie’s case being tried as petty treason highlights one rule of law where the common people shared the same rights as those in the elite level of society; petit treason did not distinguish between the social classes but it reinforced gendered inequality under the law.  Historian Matthew Lockwood writes that, “Because petty treason cases were therefore tried under the same rules and procedures as high treason cases, the accused could not employ the common law defense of provocation, which was allowable in all other homicide cases.”[xxiii] Lockwood goes on to highlight that during the time period Marie was accused of murder, a husband was allowed to correct his wife physically and “even beat her within certain limits…..it must have been hard for contemporaries to conceive of the possibility that a husband’s legitimate violence could be deemed sufficient provocation to mitigate petty treason.”[xxiv] Nevertheless, Lockwood cites cases of petty treason in his study where women did claim provocation as a defense between 1674 and 1790 and received back verdicts of not guilty. While Marie’s case does show she was given the opportunity to have her case tried, where she could have claimed provocation, she chose to plead guilty instead. One reason she may have done this is she did not understand what her options were due to the language barrier. Another reason she might have chosen not to fight was because she was protecting someone, like her son. Finally, she could have felt that she deserved punishment for what she had done. 

Marie Hobry was accused of murdering her husband, Denis, and cutting up his body to dispose of it, in January 1688. She pled guilty and was executed by burning. She was a French woman who did not speak English, who was noted to be a midwife, but for whom there was no one to give defense to her character, aside from her two grown children.  She was accused most vocally by her violent husband’s best friend, Philip Yard, whom the deceased had known for several years.  Marie’s world was difficult in that she and her husband were part of a community of working poor immigrants, and they lived in London during a time where the populace was about to replace an unpopular Catholic monarch with a Protestant one who would spend his life engaged in battle with France. In each pamphlet that recaps Marie’s case, her French identity is consistently highlighted, as well as her Catholicism. The aftermath of the English Civil War was still being felt within popular culture in ways that affected the political, social and economic status of the common class.  Marie was unlikely to be seen as a sympathetic character due to the prejudices she faced as a Frenchwoman, and she would not have had the communication skills necessary to fight her legal battle due to her inability to speak English without considerable help. Whether she chose to do this because she didn’t understand the charges against her, or because she was attempting to protect a guilty party, is likely to remain a mystery.  Marie’s case provides a historical mystery despite her conviction and execution, for there remain several unanswered questions. Ultimately, her case highlights a prejudicial use of the law and court system in early modern England affirming the unequal status of women, or more specifically, wives. It wouldn’t be until after the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects in 1792 that the English legal system began to question the double standard present in the law of petit treason.

The practice of burning women as a method of execution was abolished in 1790. The offense of petit treason was repealed in 1828, and after that women who murdered their husbands received similar charges to men who killed their wives. This significant transformation to formal equality under the law remains relevant today, as even with the progress the repeal of petit treason signaled, England was about to undergo a major societal shift due to the Industrial Revolution that reaffirmed the private, domestic sphere as the preferred space for women.The emerging middle class reinforced the fluid boundaries between domestic and political life, as a social hierarchies shifted rather than reformed. The tranquility of the household but also the stability of the state remained the essential goal of the law. While challenging a patriarchal, hierarchical social order in defense of oneself was no longer defined as treason, using the law as protection against interpersonal violence was still 150 years away. 

About the Historian: Samantha Edgerton is a second-year doctoral student working with Dr. Laurie Mercier. Her primary research fields are women and gender, race and ethnicity, social movements, and popular culture in the 20th century United States. She received her bachelor’s degree in History and a minor in Women’s Studies, then an MA in History in 2019. Her Master’s thesis, “Better Than Being on the Streets”: Oregon, Idaho, and the Battered Women’s Movement, centered on interpersonal violence (IPV) and the battered women’s shelter movement in Oregon and Idaho during the period 1975 through 1994. Edgerton examined how the battered women’s movement transformed public consciousness about IPV in the Pacific Northwest and offered a historical analysis of the people and institutions that created shelters, pursued legislation criminalizing IPV, and the political backlash they faced in the early 1980s. Non-historical interests include travel, attempting to improve as a photographer, and being a soccer mom. 

Sources

[i] Anonymous, AN ACCOUNT Of the Manner, BEHAVIOUR AND EXECUTION OF Mary Aubry, Who was Burnt to Ashes, in Leicester Fields, on Friday the 2d Day of March, 1687. For the Barbarous and Inhumane Murther, Committed on the Body of Dennis Aubry, Her Husband, in the Parish of St. Martins in the Fields, on the 27 of January last (London, 1687)

[ii] Matthew Lockwood, “From Treason to Homicide: Changing Conceptions of the Law of Petty Treason in Early Modern England,” The Journal of Legal History, 2013. Vol. 34, No. 1, 31-49.

[iii] Shelley A.M. Gavigan, “Petit Treason in Eighteenth Century England: Women’s Inequality Before the Law,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 3, (2), June 22, 1989, 338.

[iv] Gavigan, “Petit Treason in Eighteenth Century England,” 338.

[v] A Hellish Murder Committed by a French Midwife on the Body of Her Husband, Jan. 27, 1687/8 for which she was arraigned at the Old-Baily, Feb. 22, 1687/8, and pleaded guilty and the day following received sentence to be burnt (London: Printed for R. Sare…and published by Randal Taylor,1688), 4/39.

[vi] Frances E. Dolan, "Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture.” Feminist Studies 29, No. 2 (Summer 2003), 267.

[vii] A Hellish Murder, 32-33/39.

[viii] A Hellish Murder, 34/39.

[ix] Dolan, “Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of Coverture,” 266.

[x] Charles M. Gray, Renaissance and Reformation England, 1509-1714, (New York/Chicago/San Francisco/Atlanta, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 128.

[xi] Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, (London and New York: George Routledge & Sons, LTD., 1919), 269.

[xii] Randolph Roth, “Homicide in Early Modern England 1549-1800: The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis”, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 5, No. 2 (2001), 33-67.

[xiii] J.A. Sharpe, Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press, Vol. 24, No. 1 March, 1981), 44.

[xiv] A Hellish Murder, 1-29/39. Philip Yard, Denis Hobry’s friend, testified that Marie had made repeated threats against her husband; Mary, the wife of Tobias Hope, a Sawyer, related a conversation she’d had with Marie and Marie’s daughter about Denis’s whereabouts, and how they’d indicated Marie would be better off without Denis; Maria Anne Rippault, wife of Claude Royer, the Goldsmith, testified Marie spoke of her troubled marriage and had told Maria that Denis had gone away to the Indies; Joan Rippault, Maria’s mother, testified that she had heard Marie complain of her husband and threaten to kill him; Claude Poullet, an Enammel-Painter, testified that he had heard Marie talking to Maria Anne Rippault about killing her husband; Margaret Vasal testified that Marie had been known to her and had confessed to murdering Denis; Mary, the wife of Lewis Pottron and daughter of Marie Hobry, stepdaughter of Denis Hobry, testified that she had heard Denis threaten the life of Marie on several occasions; John Desermeau, son of Marie Hobry, stepson of Denis Hobry, testified that his mother had told him several times of her fear of Denis and that he might kill her.

[xv] Anonymous, AN ACCOUNT Of the Manner, BEHAVIOUR AND EXECUTION OF Mary Aubry, Who was Burnt to Ashes, in Leicester Fields, on Friday the 2d Day of March, 1687. For the Bar barous and Inhumane Murther, Committed on the Body of Dennis Aubry, Her Husband, in the Parish of St. Martins in the Fields, on the 27 of January last (London, 1687); A Hellish Murder Committed by a French Midwife on the Body of Her Husband, Jan. 27, 1687/8 for which she was arraigned at the Old-Baily, Feb. 22, 1687/8, and pleaded guilty and the day following received sentence to be burnt (London: Printed for R. Sare…and published by Randal Taylor,1688); Settle, Elkanah, Epilogue to the French Midwife’s Tragedy Who Was Burnt in Leicester-Fields, March 2, 1687/8, for the Murder of her Husband Denis Hobry (London, 1688); Old Bailey Proceedings Online www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 13 December 2015), February 1688, Trial of MARY AUBRY Dennis Fanet John Fanet John Desermo (t16880222-24).

[xvi] A Hellish Murder, 2-3/39.

[xvii] A Hellish Murder, 1-29/39. Marie herself signed her name, but her children Mary Pottron and John Desermeau left marks of “X;” James Richards, Victualler, signed his name; Philip Yard signed his name; Julian Coze, Gardner, signed his name; Henry Fuller, Office of a Constable, signed his name; Christopher Austin, shoemaker, mark of “X;” Richard Kirkham, Servant to John Izember, mark of “X;” John Izember, signed his name; Mary, the wife of Tobias Hope, mark of “Y;” Elizabeth Beech, daughter of Mary Hope, mark of “E;” Maria Anne Rippault, signed her name; Joan Rippault, signed her name as the anglicized “Jane Rippault;” Claude Poullet, Enammel-Painter, signed his name; Margaret Vasal, signed her name; James Lorraine, Surgeon, signed his name; Anthony Matson, Beadle of the Dutchy-Liberty in the Strand, signed his name; Giles Malvault, signed his name.

[xviii] Kirilka Stavreva, “Scaffolds unto Prints: Executing the Insubordinate Wife in the Ballad Trade of Early Modern England.” Journal of Popular Culture 31, No. 1 (June 1997), 177.

[xix] Anon. A WARNING-PIECE TO All Married Men and Women. Being the Full CONFESSION of MARY HOBRY, The FRENCH Midwife, Who Murdered her Husband on the 27 of January, 1687/8 (London, 1688).

[xx] Elkanah Settle, Epilogue to the French Midwife’s Tragedy Who Was Burnt in Leicester-Fields, March 2, 1687/8, for the Murder of her Husband Denis Hobry (London, 1688).

[xxi] A Hellish Murder, 25-30/39.

[xxii] Carol Loar, “Medical Knowledge and the Early Modern English Coroner’s Inquest,” Social History of Medicine 23, No. 3 (Oxford University Press 2010), 479.

[xxiii] Lockwood, “From Treason to Homicide,” 34.

[xxiv] Lockwood, “From Treason to Homicide,” 34.