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Murders In The Seventeenth Century

Decent Essays

In the seventeenth century, murders were verified by the examination of witnesses who claimed people were murdered and supernatural happenings, such as corpses bleeding, ghosts, and dreams verified if the said person was the guilty murderer (4). The main focus of this article is an explanation of the examined accounts and also the comparison of another murder subject matter, printed murder pamphlets (4). These murder pamphlets made it so the destiny of the murderers was able to get through to the folks of the communities as well as to preach and exemplify how God's provision confused the opposition of Heaven and earth (4-5). The role of religion and more so, supernatural events go hand-in-hand when dealing with murder and the murderer (1-5). …show more content…

Cruentation is the oozing of blood from a post mortem body in the presence of the guilty. Cruentation as and religion are one in one, the reasoning is because it was believed that the evidence was given by God (7-9). This superstitious and religious belief was a very strong stage gimmick to determining how the victim was killed and by whom the deceased was killed by. No other evidence than this seemed more impressive or more questionable. An example of this instance happened in the late 1500's, more so in the 1590's, Lady Anne demanded the people take a look and watch as Gloucester's attendance caused Henry IV to bleed out (9). Another account of cruentation during the Elizabethan period, the wife of Arden of Faversham murdered her husband and confessed that when she speaks his name, he bleeds more (8-9). Also in the hometown of Arden, a man murdered his own mother but claimed her death was caused by the plague but his brother did not believe him and demanded the body be brought forth upon his accused brother and when it was, it was claimed that the body of their mother bled from the nose and the mouth (9). Cruentation was a type of evidence and one of the strongest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If the corpse bled with the murderer in the presence of the body or if the body was touched by the murderer, the fate of the accused was decided at that

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