Early Criminal Trials. EARLY
CRIMINAL
429
TRIALS.
I. AS a mine of historical information the State trials have been commended from Burke to Froude. Long before the great political trials become of any value as legal precedents they throw all sorts of side lights upon contemporary life. While the trials of political offenders have received due attention, the occasional trials for common offenses scattered throughout the early State trials have been overlooked. Yet as pictures of the social life and customs of the nation some of them surpass in interest and value the most celebrated of the State trials, prop erly so-called. The earliest case of a common offense reported in the State trials is the trial of Lord Sandquire for the murder of a master of fence named Turner, 2 St. Tr. 743 (1612). In a fencing bout Turner had accidentallyput out one of Lord Sandquire's eyes. Some time thereafter, at the court of Henry of France, the king inquired of Sandquire how he had lost his eye. The latter answered that "it was done with a sword." "Doth the man live?" asked the king. This suggestive inquiry, says the report, was the "beginning of a strange confusion" in his lordship's mind. He brooded over it for years and finally resolved to have revenge for what he had come to conceive as a wrong. There upon he employed two ruffians to murder Turner, and for this murder he was tried and convicted. Sir Francis Bacon prosecuted in an admirable speech, in which he developed with characteristic power his view of the moral infirmity of revenge. In 1621 Archbishop Abbott had the mis fortune to be the subject of an investigation. 2 St. Tr. ибо (iÓ2i). While hunting with Lord Zouch in the latter's park in Hamp shire, the Archbishop shot at a deer with a cross-bow, and one of the keepers unluckily
came within range and was killed. It was deemed necessary to assemble a commission to inquire whether the fact that the Arch bishop had shed human blood should not deprive him of his ecclesiastical office. But Abbott was not disturbed. "As for the wife of him that was killed," says Howell in a contemporary letter, "it vas no misfortune to her, for he hath endowed herself and her children with such an estate that they say her husband could never have got." Passing over the revolting and unnatural crimes of Lord Audley, 3 St. Tr. 401 (1631), the next case in order of time is the trial of the Norkotts for murder, 14 St. Tr. 1342 (1628). One Jane Norkott had been found dead in her bed beside her infant child. There was no evidence of violence; she was found lying in a natural position and the bed clothes were not disturbed. Yet her throat had been cut and her neck broken. There was no blood on the bed, but a bloody knife was stuck in the floor, and there were two pools of blood at some distance from the bed. The mother and sister of the deceased woman testified at the inquest that they slept in an outer room, through which the room in which the deceased was found was entered, and that no stranger had entered during the night. After a second inquest these persons were suspected of the crime, tried and acquitted. Thereupon the judge, being dis satisfied with the result, instigated an appeal of murder by the infant child against its father, grandmother, aunt and uncle. The principal evidence against them was that at the second inquest, when the defendants were required to touch the dead body, "the brow of the dead, which before was of a lurid and carrion color, began to have a dew or gentle sweat arise on it, which increased by degrees until the sweat ran down in drops
