Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

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Adams explores the period 1500-1700 as the true beginning to a true crime obsession in Britain - where the public still took a vested interest in grisly crimes and their inhumane repercussions, but with the interesting nuance of society’s shift to empirical evidence ushered in from the Enlightenment period.

My only disappointment was that almost all the cases were set in the south of England, and it would be great to see a second volume of stories from north of Watford! She shows how the street names in the surrounding area originated from the various markets held there – Milk Street, Bread Street, etc. As someone who is a bit obsessive about true crime it was kind of reassuring that far from being a new phenomenon it is, in fact, a very old one. And her style is very good – not nearly as dry as is sometimes the case with this kind of true crime/social history.Blessin Adams presents an interesting range of historical true crime cases that shed a light on the judicial system of that time as well as how society as a whole worked.

Adams shows that suicide then, as today, often arose out of depression and mental illness, but she also gives an example of what was thought of as “honourable suicide”, a hangover from the days of chivalry, when a man who had failed in some way, especially in public life, would take his own life. Some of the stories are more detailed than others depending on what records exist – unfortunately the ones that culminated in executions seem to have been the best documented!Yes, she managed to make me feel outraged a couple of times over the sheer unfairness of the justice system to women, and to poor people in general! I’m interested in that period too from a historical perspective, but so often history only deals with the monarchs and the aristocrats so it’s always great to get a bit of insight into the social history, and this book really does that very well, I felt. And I felt she used them really well to show some of the aspects of the society and the culture of the time. Their appetite for true crime was fed by the cheap news pamphlets that sensationalised the stories and whipped up public anger against individuals or sections of society.

Indeed, it often felt like while trying to provide “both sides”, Addams excused the killers due to lack of historical evidence, rather than using this as a time to discuss treatment of women or the mentally ill at the time and make meaningful points about miscarriages of justice. It's an intriguing, informative read which I found fascinating, but please be aware of the trigger warnings as there are some sensitive subjects dealt with. I found every story interesting and felt Adams got a really great balance between facts and the human traumas behind them.The author uses inquests records for coroner's courts, parish archives, letters, diaries etc to put together the circumstances surrounding the nine crimes discussed in the book.

But these moments were rare and I never felt she extrapolated unreasonably – I always felt her assumptions, if that’s what they were, were more likely to be true than not. That does sound very similar in style, though covering a later period – I may have to fit that one in sometime!It looks at nine different deaths and provides not just facts, but a complete view into the surroundings, providing almost smells and the feeling of being their as a witness to the act, along side the coroner investigating the cases. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and feel like I've gained a greater understanding of what drove the early moderns, and how they lived (and died). I would read another book by them in the hopes that the writing style had changed slightly as it’s always exciting to come across a book with new information, and it was a really quick read too. We untangle the mystery of a suspected staged suicide through the newly emerging science of forensic pathology.