Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain

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The author uses inquests records for coroner's courts, parish archives, letters, diaries etc to put together the circumstances surrounding the nine crimes discussed in the book. I had heard of Great and Horrible News on a podcast I listen to so I was delighted to get an ARC copy of the book. There’s so much packed into each of the nine cases that I’m not even going to try to cover it all here.

While some involved wealthy or well known figures, others were ordinary citizens who might have been otherwise lost to memory if they hadn't met a grisly end. And I felt she used them really well to show some of the aspects of the society and the culture of the time.

Adams doesn’t shy away from inserting her own modern hindsight and bias which I actually found refreshing - especially since at its core this book is all about reaction and opinion. But because they are nine quite distinct stories I was able to read one a day and then move on to something not quite so grim! If I have a criticism, it’s that sometimes I felt she perhaps embellished the bare bones a little to improve the storytelling aspects – I wondered more than once how she could have known what someone’s motivation was or how she could be so sure what had happened when she didn’t cite a specific source.

This was a great read, diving into the crimes or not-true crimes of early Britain, and some of the horrific laws that were enacted. Indeed, it often felt like while trying to provide “both sides”, Addams excused the killers due to lack of historical evidence, rather than using this as a time to discuss treatment of women or the mentally ill at the time and make meaningful points about miscarriages of justice. Blessin Adams traded police work investigating today’s crime in the Norfolk Constabulary for academia, tracing the lives and deaths of people in early modern England. explores the strange history of death and murder in early modern England, yet the stories within may appear shockingly familiar.Blessin Adams presents an interesting range of historical true crime cases that shed a light on the judicial system of that time as well as how society as a whole worked. This was hugely shocking in some areas, particularly how segregated certain groups of women were and the injustice of how the process was dealt with, which were at times literally based upon class and gender. I think my main problem with the book is that it’s very repetitive, with a lot of the same language and small amounts of analysis being used.

The sad thing is that I suspect it still goes on even in our “civilised” countries, but these days it’s probably immigrant women who get the worst of it.An absolutely macabre fascinating account of deaths of real people in London during the middle part of the last 1000 years. Each one is like a short story in the way it's written, but backed up by remaining documentary evidence.