The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland funded Dr Louise Heron to undertake an eight day research visit to the National Records of Scotland (NRS) in March 2024. 

Trigger/content warning: sexual violence

The information gathered through investigation of High Court of Justiciary (HCJ) records and other archival materials, forms a crucial part of research for a new book, ‘A History of 15 Violent Crimes: Gender, Society and the Law’, commissioned by Bloomsbury. The book explores a selection of violent crimes from the first decade of the 1700s through to the 1980s, discussing one crime and trial per chapter exploring crimes of murder, witchcraft, infanticide, incest and rape. The book is aimed at undergraduates and is designed to support a 15-part seminar module for historians and criminologists. Chapters cover topics ranging from misogyny and patriarchy, to class and poverty, as well as tracing evidence for societal and judicial changing attitudes to violence.

Telegram confirming execution, Susan Newell 1923.  Crown Copyright. National Records of Scotland, HH16/180

Each chapter either explores a particular moment in Scottish history through the lens of a certain trial or identifies a trend in societal attitudes towards different types of violent crime.  For example, chapter two investigates the ‘trial’ of the last woman to be burned as a witch in Scotland and situates this event in the decades immediately after the Union of 1707, while also exploring early eighteenth-century attitudes towards widowhood, disability and gendered vulnerability. Chapter three discusses the case of Barbara Malcolm, the last woman to hang for child murder just one year before the death penalty was removed for this indictment. Previous discussions of this case have explored the legal aspects of child murder and infanticide as well as the plight of single women in early nineteenth-century Scotland. However, this chapter examines a new aspect of Barbara’s case, looking at her mental health through dissection of her behaviour towards her child and her poisoning of her in plain sight.

Other chapters investigate class conflict and rioting through 1811’s Tron Riots in Edinburgh; multiple murder and its relationship to medical developments in the case of Burke and Hare; middle-class propriety and female sexuality in Madeleine Smith’s famous case, before chapters reach the twentieth century where notions of insanity and diminished responsibility in Scots Law take a front seat in cases of unmotivated and accidental murder, rape and a so-called crime of passion.

Elspeth Martine, verdict 1709. Crown Copyright. National Records of Scotland, JC26/90

Susan Newell was the last woman to hang in Scotland in 1923 for the murder of a young boy.  There was no motive and her actions appear to have been spontaneous, fuelled by long-term alcoholism, poverty and fear for her and her daughter’s futures.  She attempted to conceal the murder which led to her discovery.  At trial, represented by ‘Poor’s Counsel’ who acknowledged that he had had only a few days to pull together her case, his argument for insanity in the moment of the crime failed.  No one raised a petition to request a reprieve of sentence, yet in another case three years later charged as a rape-murder of a nurse by her boyfriend, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the lesser charge of culpable homicide having accepted defence counsel’s argument for insanity.

The details of the two cases are dissimilar and their outcomes are very different, yet both clearly lack a motive and for both a plea for insanity was argued.  The first of these chapters explores societal attitudes towards a violent ‘bad wife’ and criminal culpability compared with the subject of the second chapter which considers a care-giver who had dedicated his youth to nursing in an asylum but who had killed his girlfriend.

These are not the only cases where insanity and diminished responsibility are pivotal to the verdicts and sentences, particularly as the book heads towards the government’s and society’s debate from the 1950s onwards concerning the abolition of the death penalty.

The book does not attempt to re-try these cases with twenty-first century mores and hindsight but instead explores them within their contemporary context while asking whether there is evidence for a civilising process across the three centuries since the Union of the Parliaments.

Dr Heron delivered a lecture for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in December 2024. The recording of the talk is available on the Society YouTube channel.