‘She didn’t cry’: how this Tudor woman’s lack of emotion condemned her to death
The tragic case of Margaret Fernseed reveals how early modern Britain treated women who killed not as criminals, but as monsters, even when the evidence was shaky, and the motives far from straightforward
In the summer of 1607, a man named Anthony Fernseed was found dead in a field – his throat slit.
Yet when his wife, Margaret, was informed of his death, she barely seemed bothered at all.
“She [was] very uncaring and she didn't cry. She seemed bored more than anything, and impatient that these people were wasting her time,” explains Blessin Adams, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
“There was absolutely no evidence that she’d killed her husband,” says the historian.
“But that cold reaction was enough to implicate her in the crime and – further – would eventually become a death sentence.
“The only reason she became a person of interest was because she failed to cry… She becomes the prime suspect because she doesn’t show sufficient emotion,” says Adams.
After being accused of the crime, Margaret was subject to a public campaign of character assassination. “All of these other stories come out about her being adulterous… They invented a story – that she was a sex addict that wanted to get married to one of her cousins.”
Margaret Fernseed would go on to be executed later that year.
The savage woman
During the trial itself, no conclusive evidence linking Margaret to her husband’s murder was uncovered.
Ultimately, Adams says, it was the fact that she defied gender expectations that would lead to her demise. “She was condemned to death, I think, on the grounds of her moral character.”
And as Adams highlights, it was true to say that Margaret certainly wasn’t a saintly figure. “She wasn't a nice woman. She abused and used and hurt a lot of people in her life. She was a horrible person in her own right… [But] that's not a crime that brings a death sentence.”
She concludes, “Here we have a woman who I think was condemned to death on the basis of her moral character, rather than the fact that they could prove that she committed any crime. But it all links back to the facts or all traces back to the beginning when she failed to cry.”
Why was Margaret Fernseed treated so harshly?
Whatever her other flaws might have been, Margaret Fernseed almost certainly didn’t kill her husband; she wasn’t a murderer.
So, what motivated the court’s brutal treatment of her, culminating in her death? Part of the answer can be found in the misogyny of the era, and deeply gendered expectations of behaviour: submission, quietness, and acceptance of their social role.
In early modern Britain, female killers – or supposed killers – weren’t treated with the same grim solemnity as their male counterparts. Instead, they triggered an obsessive sense of moral panic.
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“It wasn’t just that she’d killed him,” says Adams. “It was that she’d become something totally other, something totally unnatural.” In the view of the times, to be a woman and to be implicated in a violent crime was to “be something unwomen,” Adams explains. “Something unhuman.”
“Even if they killed in extreme circumstances of provocation or domestic violence,” Adams says, “it was still considered to be the most outrageous, disgusting, unholy, unnatural thing. There could be no mitigation. There could be no excuse… Women were expected to be quiet and obedient and to take what was coming to them,” says Adams.
Weapons and warnings
The crimes women were accused of also shaped how they were perceived. Poisoning, for example, became associated almost exclusively with women — not because it was more common among them, but because it suited the narrative.
“Poisoning was considered to be very suitable for women,” Adams notes, “because women, after all, were thought of as weak and cowardly. And they couldn’t possibly use physical force.” Poison was imagined not as a practical weapon, but as a feminine betrayal: secretive, and underhanded.
These tropes were reinforced in print culture, ballads and public sermons. Women who killed became symbolic warnings of what could happen when women strayed from their proper place.
“The message,” Adams explains, “is ungovernable women, untameable women — when they break out of their moulds, the consequences can be absolutely horrific.”
The crime, in the eyes of the public, wasn’t always just the act of murder itself. It was rooted in being perceived as the kind of woman who might be capable of it.