Under His Roof: Wives on Trial in England and Wales the Presumption That Spared Them

Her husband was in the room. That was the whole defence.For three centuries an English jury could be told that a wife who committed a crime in her husband's presence had no will of her own - and must be acquitted. Nobody asked whether she was frightened. Nobody asked her anything at all.UNDER HIS ROOF is the true story of the presumption of marital coercion: the rule that decided the fate of married women at the Old Bailey from the age of the gallows to a courtroom in 2013, and of the men who were hanged, burned and transported in their place.The women in this book- Katharine Lloyd, 1725 - acquitted without saying a word, while her husband went to Tyburn- Catharine Murphy, 1789 - burned outside Newgate, because her crime was called treason- Hannah Peace, 1879 - wife of the burglar Charles Peace, and a marriage the court simply assumed- Elizabeth Staunton, 1877 - tried for murder in the Penge mystery, where the rule could not reach her- Martha Torpey, 1871 - accused of holding a soaked handkerchief to a jeweller's face, and acquitted- Susan Willis Fletcher, 1881 - the American medium who crossed the Atlantic without her husband to stand trial What you will find inside- Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian crime told from the trial transcripts, not from legend- Coiners' garrets, pawnbrokers' counters, Gordon Riots doorways, a séance room and a suburban hallway- How coverture, benefit of clergy and the law of one flesh shaped English women's lives- The 1922 scandal that forced Parliament to act, and the debate that replaced one injustice with another- Why the defence survived until 2014 - and what the law offers a coerced woman now- A source file at the end of every chapter, with the Old Bailey reference for each case True crime, legal history and the history of marriage in one storyDrawing on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, parliamentary debates, law reports and contemporary newspapers, Eleanor Kenward follows one rule across three hundred years - from a kitchen in 1724 to the statute that finally abolished it.A companion to Not Guilty, and a book for readers of British true crime, social history and women's history.The law decided she could not say no. It never asked her.