Journal articles on the topic 'Benefactors England Chester History'

Choice of place of burial in the Middle Ages was perhaps the most poignant indicator of belief in the efficacy of different sorts of religious intercession. Ariès concluded that the pre-modern response to death was public and communitarian, becoming only latterly private and individualistic. Most recent reconsiderations of notions of death and burial have concentrated on the early modern period. For this period, the distinction made by Ariès between modern, private, individualistic burial practices and earlier public, communitarian rites, has been revised, both in the sense that this change occurred earlier than Ariès would allow and that other influences were at work, in particular the formative consequences of the Reformation. Research into death and burial in the later Middle Ages has tended to confirm the communitarian nature of the rites surrounding death and burial. Burial in the high Middle Ages has been reviewed from a much more pragmatic rather than theoretical perspective, as a consequence of which the wholly communitarian picture depicted by Ariès has hardly been challenged. Presented here, however, is some modification to the Ariès thesis, supported by some very particular evidence, burials of lay persons who were not of patronal status, in religious houses, within the wider context of burial practices in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England.

Robert Witham (1667–1738) was the seventh son of a prominent Yorkshire Catholic Recusant family. Little is known about his early life. He studied at Douay, where he was ordained a priest circa 1691, and remained as a teacher until circa 1698. He returned to England to serve as a priest in Cliffe and was promoted in 1711 to Vicar General of England’s Northern District. In 1714 he was appointed the twelfth president of Douay. He assumed the position in 1715 and remained there until his death. In administering Douay, he was faced with an unrelenting demand for the most resourceful diplomacy. He had to keep satisfied his superiors and benefactors in England and Rome, and deal with the liberalizing influences of French institutions. In addition, he was confronted with a series of financial crises, including the forfeiture of Catholic estates that followed the unsuccessful Stuart rising of 1715, followed by the ‘Mississippi Bubble’ that devastated the French economy and cost Douay most of its endowment. The frustrations of what he termed this ‘troublesome office’, caused him on three occasions to offer his resignation. Nonetheless, Witham proved to be one of Douay’s most successful presidents, sometimes considered its ‘second founder’, eliminating the College debt, increasing the number of students, and beginning an ambitious building programme.

Most studies of Anglo-Irish relations in the middle ages understandably concentrate on the activity of the English in Ireland, and unintentionally but inevitably this can leave the impression that the movement of people was all one way. But this was not so, and one group who travelled in the opposite direction were some of the merchants and seamen involved in the Anglo-Irish trade of the period. Irish merchants and seamen travelled widely and could be found in Iceland, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Brittany and Flanders, but probably their most regular trade remained with their closest neighbour and political overlord: England. They visited most western and southern English ports, but inevitably were found most frequently in the west, especially at Chester and Bristol. The majority of them stayed for a few days or weeks, as long as their business demanded. Others settled permanently in England, or, perhaps more accurately, re-settled in England, for those who came to England both as settlers and visitors were mainly the Anglo-Irish of the English towns in Ireland and not the Gaelic Irish. This makes it difficult to estimate accurately the numbers of both visitors and settlers, because the status of the Anglo-Irish was legally that of denizen, and record-keepers normally had no reason to identify them separately. They may, therefore, be hard to distinguish from native Englishmen of similar name outside the short periods when governments (central or urban) temporarily sought to restrict their activities. However, the general context within which they worked is quite clear, and this article considers three main aspects of that context: first, the pattern of the trade which attracted Irish merchants to England; second, the role of the Irish merchants and seamen in the trade; and third, examples of individual careers of merchants and seamen who settled in England.

AbstractThe established view of the Viking-Age Northumbrian Church has never been substantiated with verifiably contemporary evidence but is an inheritance from one strand of ‘historical research’ produced in post-Conquest England. Originating c. 1100, the strand we have come to associate with Symeon of Durham places the relics and see of Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street from the 880s until a move to Durham in the 990s. By contrast, other guidance, including Viking-Age material, can be read to suggest that Cuthbert was at Norham on the river Tweed and did not come to Durham or even Wearside until after 1013. Further, our earliest guidance indicates that the four-see Northumbrian episcopate still lay intact until at least the time of Æthelstan (r. 924–39). The article ends by seeking to understand the origins of the diocese of Durham and its historical relationship with both Chester-le-Street and Norham in a later context than hitherto sought.

AbstractThis article unearths the forgotten history of the first modern church planting scheme in the Church of England: an attempt to restructure parish ministry in Chester-le-Street, near Durham, in the 1970s and 1980s. This story of rapid growth followed by decline, and of an evangelical church’s strained relations with their liberal bishop, David Jenkins, has pertinence for contemporary Anglican antagonisms over ‘fresh expressions’ and other church planting programmes. A culture of mistrust is arguably apparent both then and now, between liberals and conservatives in ecclesiology, even as the same line divides those of the reverse tendency in broader, doctrinal theology: conservatives from liberals. Developments, decisions and, indeed, debacles in the story of Chester-le-Street parish point to the urgent need for liberals and conservatives in Anglican ecclesiology and theology to overcome their mistrust of each other by recognizing the other as valuable for the mutual strengthening and renewal of the Church.

In the dramatic confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh that preceded the Israelites' departure from Egypt, Pharaoh's magicians played a prominent role: they turned their rods into serpents, if only to have them devoured by Moses's serpent, and then matched the first two plagues brought down on the Egyptians before failing to perform the third (Ex. VII. 11–VIII. 19). Although not named here or elsewhere in the Old Testament, they were identified in II Timothy III.8 as ' ιανν⋯ς and ιαμβρ⋯ς (the Latin forms are usually ‘Iannes’ or ‘Iamnes’ and ‘Mambres’) in a remark that suggests that a considerable tradition had already arisen concerning them: ‘Now just as jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith.’ Two fragmentary Greek papyri (Pap. Vindob. G 29456 verso, in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; and Pap. XVI, in the Chester Beatty Library and Gallery of Oriental Art, Dublin), dated to the third and fourth centuries respectively, confirm the existence of at least one early apocryphon about the brothers. The problem of interpreting these fragments, however, is complicated by a bewildering array of references to the two in various languages, which results from both the importance of Exodus to Jews and Christians, and the connection of the brothers to magic. Albert Pietersma and R. Theodore Lutz note that ‘the precise relationship between the loose traditions and the written composition’ is ‘not yet entirely clear’.

During the last two decades the interests of scholars of early drama and of urban historians have found common ground in the study of urban celebration and ceremonial. For the student of early drama the beginnings of this interest coincided with a redefinition of the area and nature of the study of early drama, a shift in emphasis from the textual and literary problems of the few extant dramatic texts to the circumstances and conditions of their performance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M. Salter's revealing study of the production of Chester's Whitsun plays, this movement gained impetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of the development of English stagecraft between 1300 and 1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959, which illustrated the interdependence of a range of ostensibly disparate activities, such as plays, royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s an iconoclastic challenge to traditional theories about the staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H. Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and from the resulting controversies was born a new initiative, the Records of Early English Drama, whose avowed purpose is ‘to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. That series is still ongoing and already constitutes a major primary resource of regional documentary transcripts for all interested in early dramatic and quasidramatic activity, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected diversity and frequency of dramatic activity throughout England.

The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue between, the universal standpoint emerging from the presentation of the biblical story of humankind and a contemporary perspective, pertaining to the reality of the viewers. Therefore, while pointing to the unique formal and structural uniformity of the cycle, which strengthens the idea of continuity between the Old and the New Covenant and the role of the Israelites in the history of salvation, it also recognizes the potential of the plays to engage in the current stereotypes. The article examines how the Gospel account of Christ’s trial and death is modified through presenting the Jews as torturers, whitewashing the non-Jewish characters, and placing special emphasis on the question of Jewish ignorance. It is demonstrated how different theological and popular stances concerning the Jewish people are merged and reconciled in the Chester representation of the passion of Christ and it is argued that the plays in question retell the biblical story in such a way that the justification for the expulsion of the Jews from England could be derived from it.

Private correspondence between Rome and England in the fifteenth century is not unknown but is usually to be found among the business papers of proctors permanently resident at the Curia, such as William Swan and Thomas Hope. By contrast, the three letters printed below were written by an occasional visitor to Rome, charged with a specific errand. They tell us more about England than Italy, and more about the everyday concerns of a moderately successful clerical careerist than the procedures of the papal court, but they are unusual and valuable precisely for that reason. The author of these letters was Master Robert Thornton. A canon lawyer in the service of Archbishop Kempe, he began his career as an advocate in the prerogative court of York and, during the 1440s, established himself as one of the mainstays of the diocesan administration there: he acted as commissary-general to the court of York and official of the absentee archdeacon of York, besides serving on many ad hoc commissions. By the time these letters were written, Thornton's diligence in the archbishop's service had brought him several desirable benefices: already perpetual vicar of Silkstone (Yorkshire, West Riding), he became rector of Almondbury (Yorkshire, West Riding) in 1451 and was presented by William Bothe, Kempe'ssuccessor as archbishop, to a prebend at St. John's, Chester, in the following year. It was his membership of Kempe' familia that, indirectly, set him on the road to Rome. In May 1452 he was dispatched with a bundle of papers and sixteen marks in cash to pursue the claims of John Berningham, resident canon and treasurer of York, to the vacant deanery.

Opening the first volume of a new open-access peer-reviewed academic publication, we are pleased to introduce the Offa’s Dyke Journal. This venture stems from the activities of the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory, a research network founded in April 2017 to foster and support new research on the monuments and landscapes of the Anglo-Welsh borderlands and comparative studies of borderlands and frontiers from prehistory to the present. The proceedings of a series of academic and public-facing events have informed the character and direction of the Journal. Moreover, its establishment coincides with the Cadw/Historic England/Offa’s Dyke Association-funded Offa’s Dyke Conservation Management Plan as well as other new community and research projects on linear earthworks. Funded by the University of Chester and the Offa’s Dyke Association, and published online by JAS Arqueologia and print-distributed by Archaeopress, the journal aims to provide a resource for scholars, students and the wider public regarding the archaeology, heritage and history of the Welsh Marches and its linear monuments. It also delivers a much-needed venue for interdisciplinary studies from other times and places.

AimsResearch demonstrates greater mortality and physical health morbidity in those with mental illness, as compared to the general population. National Health Service (NHS) England has introduced policies to reflect this and promote improvements in physical healthcare for mental health patients. Inpatient admission provides a valuable opportunity to action such recommendations and offer a detailed health review, guided by local frameworks. A new annual audit commenced in Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP) assesses admission physical health screening on its adult acute inpatient wards.MethodsAudit standard was 100% compliance to CWP's admission pathway (Policy CP35). Parameters included doctor's review, medical history, physical examination, drug history, medication chart, allergy status, venous thromboembolic risk, blood tests, electrocardiogram (ECG), physiological observations, smoking history, body mass index (BMI) and falls risk. Data were collected retrospectively for all patients admitted or transferred to Juniper Ward, an acute adult inpatient unit in Bowmere Hospital in Chester, during October 2020 (cycle 1) and September 2021 (cycle 2). Different months were assessed due to senior staff changes in October 2021.Results30 patients were identified in 2020 and 37 in 2021. In 2020 the most consistently achieved parameters were, in order, medication chart/drug history, doctor's review and past medical history. In 2021 the most consistently achieved parameters were medication chart/drug history, smoking status and past medical history. Across both years completion of the cardiometabolic tool was lowest, although this improved from 6.7% to 16.2%. In 2020 there were 5 parameters achieving <50% compliance (cardiometabolic, physiological observations, smoking status, BMI and falls risk). In 2021 this reduced to 3 parameters (doctor's review, cardiometabolic tool, falls risk). Local policy was updated following the 2020 results, amending the criteria for doctor's review from commenced within 6 hours, to completed within 12 hours. Improvement was seen in all other areas in 2021, with medication chart/drug history documentation achieved in 100% of admissions.ConclusionGeneralised improvement was seen following the 2020 audit, although only one parameter reached 100% compliance and most remained under 75%. The first cycle led to a policy change with respect to the doctor's review timeframe, although this limited direct comparison between years. A flow chart will be trialled on Juniper Ward, highlighting required tasks and assigning ownership to specific team members. The local Medical Education team were also made aware of the results to inform junior doctor induction. The audit will be repeated in Autumn 2022.

Michael B. Katz. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. viii, 212. Cloth, $22.50; E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. Pp. xvii, 251. Cloth, $16.45; Diana Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr. What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Pp. ix, 293. Cloth, $15.95. Review by Richard A. Diem of The University of Texas at San Antonio. Henry J. Steffens and Mary Jane Dickerson. Writer's Guide: History. Lexington, Massachusetts, and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1987. Pp. x, 211. Paper, $6.95. Review by William G. Wraga of Bernards Township Public Schools, Basking Ridge, New Jersey. J. Kelley Sowards, ed. Makers of the Western Tradition: Portraits from History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Fourth edition. Vol: 1: Pp. ix, 306. Paper, $12.70. Vol. 2: Pp. ix, 325. Paper, $12.70. Review by Robert B. Luehrs of Fort Hays State University. John L. Beatty and Oliver A. Johnson, eds. Heritage of Western Civilization. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1987. Sixth Edition. Volume I: Pp. xi, 465. Paper, $16.00; Volume II: pp. xi, 404. Paper, $16.00. Review by Dav Levinson of Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts. Lynn H. Nelson, ed. The Human Perspective: Readings in World Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Vol. I: The Ancient World to the Early Modern Era. Pp. viii, 328. Paper, $10.50. Vol. II: The Modern World Through the Twentieth Century. Pp, x, 386. Paper, 10.50. Review by Gerald H. Davis of Georgia State University. Gerald N. Grob and George Attan Billias, eds. Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives. New York: The Free Press, 1987. Fifth Edition. Volume I: Pp. xi, 499. Paper, $20.00: Volume II: Pp. ix, 502. Paper, $20.00. Review by Larry Madaras of Howard Community College. Eugene Kuzirian and Larry Madaras, eds. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History. -- Volume II: Reconstruction to the Present. Guilford, Connecticut: The Dushkin Publishing Groups, Inc., 1987. Pp. xii, 384. Paper, $9.50. Review by James F. Adomanis of Anne Arundel County Public Schools, Annapolis, Maryland. Joann P. Krieg, ed. To Know the Place: Teaching Local History. Hempstead, New York: Hofstra University Long Island Studies Institute, 1986. Pp. 30. Paper, $4.95. Review by Marilyn E. Weigold of Pace University. Roger Lane. Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. 213. Cloth, $25.00. Review by Ronald E. Butchart of SUNY College at Cortland. Pete Daniel. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Pp. xvi, 352. Paper, $22.50. Review by Thomas S. Isern of Emporia State University. Norman L. Rosenberg and Emily S. Rosenberg. In Our Times: America Since World War II. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1987. Third edition. Pp. xi, 316. Paper, $20.00; William H. Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff, eds. A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Second edition. Pp. xiii, 453. Paper, $12.95. Review by Monroe Billington of New Mexico State University. Frank W. Porter III, ed. Strategies for Survival: American Indians in the Eastern United States. New York, Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1986. Pp. xvi, 232. Cloth, $35.00. Review by Richard Robertson of St. Charles County Community College. Kevin Sharpe, ed. Faction & Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Pp. xvii, 292. Paper, $13.95; Derek Hirst. Authority and Conflict: England, 1603-1658. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 390. Cloth, $35.00. Review by K. Gird Romer of Kennesaw College. N. F. R. Crafts. British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. 193. Paper, $11.95; Maxine Berg. The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. 378. Paper, $10.95. Review by C. Ashley Ellefson of SUNY College at Cortland. J. M. Thompson. The French Revolution. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985 reissue. Pp. xvi, 544. Cloth, $45.00; Paper, $12.95. Review by W. Benjamin Kennedy of West Georgia College. J. P. T. Bury. France, 1814-1940. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Fifth edition. Pp. viii, 288. Paper, $13.95; Roger Magraw. France, 1815-1914: The Bourgeois Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. 375. Cloth, $24.95; Paper, $9.95; D. M.G. Sutherland. France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 242. Cloth, $32.50; Paper, $12.95. Review by Fred R. van Hartesveldt of Fort Valley State College. Woodford McClellan. Russia: A History of the Soviet Period. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1986. Pp. xi, 387. Paper, $23.95. Review by Pasquale E. Micciche of Fitchburg State College. Ranbir Vohra. China's Path to Modernization: A Historical Review from 1800 to the Present. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1987. Pp. xiii, 302. Paper, $22.95. Reivew by Steven A. Leibo of Russell Sage College. John King Fairbank. China Watch. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. viii, Cloth, $20.00. Review by Darlene E. Fisher of New Trier Township High School, Winnetka, Illinois. Ronald Takaki, ed. From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. 253. Paper, $13.95. Review by Robert C. Sims of Boise State University.

Abstract Aim To critically analyze the concepts and cases that led to the seminal rulings in Montgomery and Sidaway Method A medical and legal literature review was performed. Case history was identified and critically analysed to understand the progression of consent law in England. Results The physician's duty to warn the patient about the risk associated with medical intervention has been developed through the cases identified to involve: The process of consent is of chief importance in surgery and yet only a single case (Chester) directly involves consenting during a surgical procedure. Conclusion The definition of material risk is expected to cover a plethora of medical interventions from minor procedures to major surgery. It was generated predominantly from non-surgical cases. The physician's scope to disclose risks to patients is broad and encompasses a skillset that incites core clinical skills of empathy, honesty, and information transfer. It has evolved alongside advances in medical and legal judgement, albeit reactively to cases of inadequate care. With regard to its clarity, one has to consider the acceptable boundary of prescriptivism that both respects patient autonomy and creates a transparent working environment. It can be argued that the current scope is not direct enough for healthcare professionals.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

BASTARDYAll children born before matrimony, or so long after the death of the husband as to render it impossible that the child could be begotten by him, are bastards.– Cro. Jac. 451William Toone: The Magistrates Manual, 1817 (66)On 4 September 1832, the body of a newborn baby boy was found washed up on the shore at the port town of Fremantle, Western Australia. As the result of an inquest into the child’s suspicious death, a 20-year-old, unmarried woman named Mary Summerland was accused of concealing his birth. In October 2014, 25-year-old Irish backpacker Caroline Quinn faced court in Perth, Western Australia, over claims that she concealed the birth of her stillborn child after giving birth in the remote north west town of Halls Creek during May of the same year. Both women denied the existence of their children, both appear to have given birth to their “illegitimate” babies alone, and both women claimed that they did not know that they had ever been pregnant at all. In addition, both women hid the body of their dead child for several days while the people they lived with or were close to, did not appear to notice that the mother of the child had had a baby. In neither case did any person associated with either woman seek to look for the missing child after it had been born.Despite occurring 182 years apart, the striking similarities between these cases could lead to the assumption that it is almost as if there were a written script of behaviour that would explain the actions of both young women. Close examination of the laws surrounding child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth reveals evidence of similar behaviours being enacted by women as far back as the 1600s (and earlier), and all are shaped in response to the legal frameworks that prosecuted women who gave birth outside of marriage.This article traces the history of child murder law from its formation in England in the 1600s and explores how early moral assumptions concerning unmarried mothers echoed through the lived experiences of women who killed their illegitimate babies in colonial Western Australia, and continue to resonate in the treatment of, and legal response to, women accused of similar crimes in the present day. The Unlicensed ChildThe unlicensed child is a term coined by Swain and Howe to more accurately define the social matrix faced by single women and their children in Australia. The term seeks to emphasise the repressive and controlling religious, legal and social pressures that acted on Australian women who had children outside marriage until the mid-1970s (xxi, 1, 92, 94). For the purposes of this article, I extend Swain and Howe’s term the unlicensed child to coin the term the unlicensed mother. Following on from Swain and Howe’s definition, if the children of unmarried mothers did not have a license to be born, it is essential to acknowledge that their mothers did not have a license to give birth. Women who had children without social and legal sanction gave birth within a society that did not allocate them “permission” to be mothers, something that the corporeality of pregnancy made it impossible for them not to be. Their own bodies—and the bodies of the babies growing inside them—betrayed them. Unlicensed mothers were punished socially, religiously, legally and financially, and their children were considered sinful and inferior to children who had married parents simply because they had been born (Scheper-Hughes 410). This unspoken lack of authorisation to experience the unavoidably innate physicality of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, in turn implies that, until recently unmarried mothers did not have license to be mothers. Two MothersAll that remains of the “case” of Mary Summerland is a file archived at the State Records Office of Western Australia under the title CONS 3472, Item 10: Rex V Mary Summerland. Yet revealed within those sparse documents is a story echoed by the events surrounding Caroline Quinn nearly two hundred years later. In September 1832, Mary Summerland was an unmarried domestic servant living and working in Fremantle when the body of a baby was found lying on a beach very close to the settlement. Western Australia had only been colonized by the British in 1829. The discovery of the body of an infant in such a tiny village (colonial Fremantle had a population of only 436 women and girls out of 1341 non-Aboriginal emigrants) (Gardiner) set in motion an inquest that resulted in Mary Summerland being investigated over the suspicious death of the child.The records suggest that Mary may have given birth, apparently alone, over a week prior to the corpse of the baby being discovered, yet no one in Fremantle, including her employer and her family, appeared to have noticed that Mary might have been pregnant, or that she had given birth to a child. When Mary Summerland was eventually accused of giving birth to the baby, she strongly denied that she had ever been pregnant, and denied being the mother of the child. It is not known how her infant ended up being disposed of in the ocean. It is also not known if Mary was eventually charged with concealment or child murder, but in either scenario, the case against her was dismissed as “no true bill” when she faced her trial. The details publically available on the case of Caroline Quinn are also sparse. Even the sex of her child has not been revealed in any of the media coverage of the event. Yet examination of the limited details available on her charge of “concealment of birth” reveal similarities between her behaviours and those of Mary Summerland.In May 2014 Caroline Quinn had been “travelling with friends in the Kimberly region of Western Australia” (Lee), and, just as Mary did, Caroline claims she “did not realise that she was pregnant” when she went into labour (Independent.ie). She appears, like Mary Summerland, to have given birth alone, and also like Mary, when her child died due to unexplained circumstances she hid the corpse for several days. Also echoing Mary’s story, no person in the sparsely populated Hall’s Creek community (the town has a populace of 1,211) or any friends in Caroline’s circle of acquaintances appears to have noticed her pregnancy, nor did they realise that she had given birth to a baby until the body of the child was discovered hidden in a hotel room several days after her or his birth. The media records are unclear as to whether Caroline revealed her condition to her friends or whether they “discovered” the body without her assistance. The case was not brought to the attention of authorities until Caroline’s friends took her to receive medical attention at the local hospital and staff there notified the police.Media coverage of the death of Caroline Quinn’s baby suggests her child was stillborn or died soon after birth. As of 13 August 2014 Caroline was granted leave by the Chief Magistrate to return home to Ireland while she awaited her trial, as “without trivialising the matter, nothing more serious was alleged than the concealing of the birth” (Collins, "Irish Woman"). Caroline Quinn was not required to return to Australia to appear at her trial and when the case was presented at the Perth Magistrates Court on Thursday 2 October, all charges against her were dropped as the prosecutor felt “it was not in the public interest” to proceed with legal action (Collins, "Case").Statutory MarginalisationTo understand the similarities between the behaviours of, and legal and medical response to, Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn, it is important to situate the deaths of their children within the wider context of child murder, concealment of birth and “bastardy” law. Tracing the development of these methods of law-making clarifies the parallels between much of the child murder, infanticide and concealment of birth narrative that has occurred in Western Australia since non-Aboriginal settlement.Despite the isolated nature of Western Australia, the nearly 400 years since the law was formed in England, and the extremely remote rural locations where both these women lived and worked, their stories are remarkably alike. It is almost as if there were a written script and each member of the cast knew what role to play: both Mary and Caroline knew to hide their pregnancies, to deny the overwhelmingly traumatic experience of giving birth alone, and to conceal the corpses of their babies. The fathers of their children appear to have cut off any connection to the women or their child. The family, friends, or employers of the parents of the dead babies knew to pretend that they did not know that the mother was pregnant or who the father was. The police and medical officers knew to charge these women and to collect evidence that could be used to simultaneously meet the needs of the both prosecution and the defence when the cases were brought to trial.In reference to Mary Summerland’s case, in colonial Western Australia when a woman gave birth to an infant who died under suspicious circumstances, she could be prosecuted with two charges: “child murder” and/or “concealment of birth”. It is suggestive that Mary may have been charged with both. The laws regarding these two offences were focused almost exclusively on the deaths of unlicensed children and were so deeply interconnected they are difficult to untangle. For Probyn, shame pierces the centre of who we think we are, “what makes it remarkable is that it reveals with precision our values, hopes and aspirations, beyond the generalities of good manners and cultured norms” (x). Dipping into the streams of legal and medical discourse that flow back to the seventeenth century highlights the pervasiveness of discourses marginalising single women and their children. This situates Mary Summerland and Caroline Quinn within a ‘burden on society’ narrative of guilt, blame and shame that has been in circulation for over 500 years, and continues to resonate in the present (Coull).An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard ChildrenIn England prior to the 17th century, penalties for extramarital sex, the birth and/or maintenance of unlicensed children or for committing child murder were expressed through church courts (Damme 2-6; Rapaport 548; Butler 61; Hoffer and Hull 3-4). Discussion of how the punishment of child murder left the religious sphere and came to be regulated by secular laws that were focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother points to two main arguments: firstly, the patriarchal response to unlicensed (particularly female) sexuality; and secondly, a moral panic regarding a perceived rise in unlicensed pregnancies in women of the lower classes, and the resulting financial burden placed on local parishes to support unwanted, unlicensed children (Rapaport 532, 48-52; McMahon XVII, 126-29; Osborne 49; Meyer 3-8 of 14). In many respects, as Meyer suggests, “the legal system subtly encouraged neonaticide through its nearly universally negative treatment of bastard children” (240).The first of these “personal control laws” (Hoffer and Hull 13) was the Old Poor Law created by Henry VIII in 1533, and put in place to regulate all members of English society who needed to rely on the financial assistance of the parish to survive. Prior to 1533, “by custom the children of the rich depended on their relations, while the ‘fatherless poor’ relied on the charity of the monastic institutions and the municipalities” (Teichman 60-61). Its implementation marks the historical point where the state began to take responsibility for maintenance of the poor away from the church by holding communities responsible for “the problem of destitution” (Teichman 60-61; Meyer 243).The establishment of the poor law system of relief created a hierarchy of poverty in which some poor people, such as those suffering from sickness or those who were old, were seen as worthy of receiving support, while others, who were destitute as a result of “debauchery” or other self-inflicted means were seen as undeserving and sent to a house of correction or common gaol. Underprivileged, unlicensed mothers and their children were seen to be part of the category of recipients unfit for help (Jackson 31). Burdens on SocietyIt was in response to the narrative of poor unlicensed women and their children being undeserving fiscal burdens on law abiding, financially stretched community members that in 1576 a law targeted specifically at holding genetic parents responsible for the financial maintenance of unlicensed children entered the secular courts for the first time. Called the Elizabethan Poor Law it was enacted in response to the concerns of local parishes who felt that, due to the expenses exacted by the poor laws, they were being burdened with the care of a greatly increased number of unlicensed children (Jackson 30; Meyer 5-6; Teichman 61). While the 1576 legislation prosecuted both parents of unlicensed children, McMahon interprets the law as being created in response to a blend of moral and economic forces, undergirded by a deep, collective fear of illegitimacy (McMahon 128). By the 1570s “unwed mothers were routinely whipped and sent to prison” (Meyer 242) and “guardians of the poor” could force unlicensed mothers to wear a “badge” (Teichman 63). Yet surprisingly, while parishes felt that numbers of unlicensed children were increasing, no concomitant rise was actually recorded (McMahon 128).The most damning evidence of the failure of this law, was the surging incidence of infanticide following its implementation (Rapaport 548-49; Hoffer and Hull 11-13). After 1576 the number of women prosecuted for infanticide increased by 225 percent. Convictions resulting in unlicensed mothers being executed also rose (Meyer 246; Hoffer and Hull 8, 18).Infanticide IncreasesBy 1624 the level of infanticide in local communities was deemed to be so great An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was created. The Act made child murder a “sex-specific crime”, focused exclusively on the unlicensed mother, who if found guilty of the offence was punished by death. Probyn suggests that “shame is intimately social” (77) and indeed, the wording of An Act to Prevent highlights the remarkably similar behaviours enacted by single women desperate to avoid the shame and criminal implication linked to the social position of unlicensed mother: Whereas many lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoyd their shame and to escape punishment [my italics], doe secretlie bury, or conceale the Death of their Children, and after if the child be found dead the said Women doe alleadge that the said Children were borne dead;…For the preventing therefore of this great Mischiefe…if any Woman…be delivered of any issue of the Body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Lawes of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavour privatlie either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by herselfe of the procuring of others, soe to conceale the Death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it be borne alive or not, but be concealed, in every such Case the Mother so offending shall suffer Death… (Davies 214; O'Donovan 259; Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rose 1-2; Rapaport 548). An Act to Prevent also “contained an extraordinary provision which was a reversion of the ordinary common law presumption of dead birth” (Davies 214), removing the burden of proof from the prosecution and placing it on the defence (Francus 133; McMahon 128; Meyer 2 of 14). The implication being that if the dead body of a newborn, unlicensed baby was found hidden, it was automatically assumed that the child had been murdered by their mother (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Osborne 49; Rapaport 549-50; Francus 133). This made the Act unusual in that “the offence involved was the concealment of death rather than the death itself” (O'Donovan 259). The only way an unlicensed mother charged with child murder was able to avoid capital punishment was to produce at least one witness to give evidence that the child was “borne dead” (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia 104; Meyer 238; McMahon 126-27).Remarkable SimilaritiesClearly, the objective of An Act to Prevent was not simply to preserve infant life. It is suggestive that it was enacted in response to women wishing to avoid the legal, social, corporal and religious punishment highlighted by the implementation of the poor law legislation enacted throughout earlier centuries. It is also suggestive that these pressures were so powerful that threat of death if found guilty of killing their neonate baby was not enough to deter women from concealing their unlicensed pregnancies and committing child murder. Strikingly analogous to the behaviours of Mary Summerland in 19th century colonial Western Australia, and Caroline Quinn in 2014, the self-preservation implicit in the “strategies of secrecy” (Gowing 87) surrounding unlicensed birth and child murder often left the mother of a dead baby as the only witness to her baby’s death (McMahon xvii 49-50).An Act to Prevent set in motion the legislation that was eventually used to prosecute Mary Summerland in colonial Western Australia (Jackson 7, Davies, 213) and remnants of it still linger in the present where they have been incorporated into the ‘concealment of birth law’ that prosecuted Caroline Quinn (Legal Online TLA [10.1.182]).Changing the ‘Script’Shame runs like a viral code through the centuries to resonate within the legal response to women who committed infanticide in colonial Western Australia. It continues on through the behaviours of, and legal responses to, the story of Caroline Quinn and her child. As Probyn observes, “shame reminds us about the promises we keep to ourselves” in turn revealing our desire for belonging and elements of our deepest fears (p. x). While Caroline may live in a society that no longer outwardly condemns women who give birth outside of marriage, it is fascinating that the suite of behaviours manifested in response to her pregnancy and the birth of her child—by herself, her friends, and the wider community—can be linked to the narratives surrounding the formation of “child murder” and “concealment” law nearly 400 years earlier. Caroline’s narrative also encompasses similar behaviours enacted by Mary Summerland in 1832, in particular that Caroline knew to say that her child was “born dead” and that she had merely concealed her or his body—nothing more. This behaviour appears to have secured the release of both women as although both Mary and Caroline faced criminal investigation, neither was convicted of any crime. Yet, neither of these women or their small communities were alone in their responses. My research has uncovered 55 cases linked to child murder in Western Australia and the people involved in all of these incidences share unusually similar behaviours (Gardiner). Perhaps, it is only through the wider community becoming aware of the resonance of child murder law echoing through the centuries, that certain women who are pregnant with unwanted children will be able to write a different script for themselves, and their “unlicensed” children. ReferencesButler, Sara, M. "A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England." Journal of Women's History 19.4 (2007): 59-82. Collins, Padraig. "Case against Irish Woman for Concealing Birth Dropped." The Irish Times 2 Oct. 2014. ---. "Irish Woman Held for Hiding Birth in Australia Allowed Return Home." The Irish Times 13 Aug. 2014. 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"Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England." Past & Present 156 (1997): 87-115. Hoffer, Peter C., and N.E.H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Independent.ie. "Irish Woman Facing Up to Two Years in Jail for Concealing Death of Her Baby in Australia." 8 Aug. 2014. Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. "Chapter 3: Manslaughter and Other Homicide Offences." Review of the Law of Homicide: Final Report. Perth: Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2007. 85-117.Lee, Sally. "Irish Backpacker Charged over the Death of a Baby She Gave Birth to While Travelling in the Australia [sic] Outback." Daily Mail 8 Aug. 2014. Legal Online. "The Laws of Australia." Thomson Reuters 2010. McMahon, Vanessa. Murder in Shakespeare's England. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Meyer, Jon'a. "Unintended Consequences for the Youngest Victims: The Role of Law in Encouraging Neonaticide from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries." Criminal Justice Studies 18.3 (2005): 237-54. O'Donovan, K. "The Medicalisation of Infanticide." Criminal Law Review (May 1984): 259-64. Osborne, Judith A. "The Crime of Infanticide: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater." Canadian Journal of Family Law 6 (1987): 47-59. Rapaport, Elizabeth. "Mad Women and Desperate Girls: Infanticide and Child Murder in Law and Myth." Fordham Urban Law Journal 33.2 (2006): 527-69.Rose, Lionel. The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1986. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Swain, Shurlee, and Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Teichman, Jenny. Illegitimacy: An Examination of Bastardy. Oxford: Cornell University Press, 1982. Toone, William. The Magistrate's Manual: Or a Summary of the Duties and Powers of a Justice of the Peace. 2nd ed. London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1817.