Conspiracies and puzzles in medieval London

CW: foetal death

Continuing my occasional posts on indications of medieval legal thought on the foetus,[i] here is another tantalising keyhole for us to look through … The King’s Bench plea roll for Easter 1324 (KB 27/256 m.22 ) has an entry about an alleged conspiracy to have a woman indicted of an offence, before the coroner, and that offence appears to involve a foetus.

It was a London case, in which Amice de Ragace complained that Geoffrey de Litlington and William de Wengrave had conspired on 23rd July 1310 to have her indicted before a coroner of London of the death of a certain child [infans] in the belly of Alice le Callestere. As a result of this, she had been arrested and locked up in Newgate for about a fortnight in August 1310, before being acquitted at gaol delivery of the death of the infant. Rather a long time later, she was claiming compensation from Geoffrey, and successfully convincing a jury that there had indeed been a conspiracy (though she did receive rather less than she claimed, and there was a dispute about whether satisfaction had been received).

This seems to imply that nobody said ‘hang on, that is not an offence’, that it was not, therefore, obviously preposterous, as far as the London authorities were concerned, to prosecute somebody for causing the death of a foetus (apparently this alone, and not also injury to or death of the pregnant Alice – at least this is not mentioned). This is not to say that medieval law regarded termination of foetal existence as the same as murder/felonious homicide of somebody who had been born, and it certainly shouldn’t be co-opted into modern debates about abortion, in our very different contexts. What is does suggest is that it could be seen as some sort of serious wrong, and that the status of the foetus, and its place in ‘criminal law’ in the first third of the fourteenth century needs closer attention. (A small point which I am mulling over is that designation of the foetus as infans – a word I would have associated with a small child rather than applying to the pre-birth situation. What can be read into that, and what influence might word-choice have had on the case?).[ii]

JUST 3/40/2 m.8, an entry relating to a woman who looks likely to have been the same defendant, Amice Ragaz, at the relevant time. Here, though, the accusation was that she had killed ‘Alice daughter of John Feryn’. So: was this the pregnant Alice, her child, or somebody else entirely? Ever more mysterious, and signalling once again, if it needed to be signalled, that there is a need for extreme caution in attempting to draw conclusions on the basis of half-glimpses in manuscripts of thinking on what was clearly regarded as a puzzling matter, and one that could be considered from different perspectives.

27/10/2024

Image: that London. Vaguely where the conspiracy was hatched …

[i] See, e.g.,: Finding the words for offences involving the foetus: a medieval Midlands example | Bracton’s Sister

A pregnant pause (in legal proceedings) | Bracton’s Sister

A vicious beating or a vicious lie? A fifteenth century Somerset case | Bracton’s Sister

A Cornish compensation claim | Bracton’s Sister

Procedure and pregnancy: a Middlesex appeal | Bracton’s Sister

Criminal Chaplains in Yorkist Yorkshire? | Bracton’s Sister

Kentish conundrums | Bracton’s Sister

Bleeding Legal History | Bracton’s Sister

Untruth in wine: a snippet of medieval medical thinking | Bracton’s Sister

I really should bring these together somehow …