Tudor true crime wasn’t just a curiosity—it was a cultural phenomenon. Long before Netflix documentaries and true crime podcasts, 16th-century England was obsessed with murder, scandal, and sensational justice. From blood-soaked pamphlets to catchy broadside ballads sung in town squares, Tudor true crime captivated the public imagination with tales of monstrous women, divine retribution, and shocking betrayals.
In this episode, we’re diving into the dark world of Tudor justice, where crime wasn’t just punished—it was performed.
Transcript of Tudor True Crime: The Most Scandalous Murders of the 1500s
Today we’re going to talk about a Tudor obsession with true crime. If you thought that our modern interest in true crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries was something new, let me introduce you to the 16th century—where scandal sold just as well in song form. In Tudor England, murder was entertainment, morality play, and bestselling media all rolled into one. True crime, my friend, was big business. So, we will talk about that.
True crime was a big deal. Pamphlets flew off the presses faster than you could say “public hanging,” complete with blood-soaked woodcuts and salacious headlines. There were broadside ballads—basically the early modern version of a viral tweet—pinned up on alehouse walls and sung loudly in marketplaces to jaunty tunes that made even the most gruesome killings sound bizarrely festive.
It wasn’t about accuracy—it was about spectacle. And nothing drew a crowd quite like a woman who had committed murder. That’s right, friends. While men were far more likely to commit violence—tavern brawls, duels gone wrong, the occasional politically motivated beheading—it was the women killers who turned heads.
When a man killed, it might be shocking. When a woman killed, it was unnatural. It was a breach of gender, of divine order, of everything the patriarchy was trying so desperately to keep in place. And so, in the pages of those cheaply printed murder pamphlets, women were seductresses, witches, monsters—“matchless monsters of the female sex,” as one 17th-century headline roared. Never mind that the man in that case had actually landed the killing blow. If a woman had so much as whispered in his ear, the blame was hers.
So in this episode, we are diving into the bloody, bizarre world of Tudor crime—where murder was a moral failure, a divine sign, an exposé of killers, and the most dangerous weapon of all might have been a woman’s tongue.
In Tudor England, men could commit violence without much of a raised eyebrow. A tavern brawl that ended in death? Unfortunate, but not exactly shocking. A neighborly duel over land, pride, or a spilled pint was practically a rite of passage. Male violence was so embedded in daily life that it often didn’t even register as criminal—it was just men being men, especially if the victim wasn’t too high up the social ladder.
Women as Monstrous Killers
But, my friend, when a woman killed, that was different. That was a moral crisis. In Tudor society, women were expected to be quiet, obedient, and deeply domestic. Meekness wasn’t just a virtue—it was mandatory. A good woman obeyed her husband, nurtured her children, and made herself useful without being noticed. A woman who spoke out of turn, challenged authority, or—God forbid—asserted herself was already skating dangerously close to the edge of acceptability.
So what happened when such a woman crossed the line from disobedient to deadly? Public hysteria. A woman who killed—whether it was her husband, her child, her employer, or her lover—was no longer simply a criminal. She was monstrous.
In the lurid pamphlets that reported on these crimes, the female killer became an icon of everything society feared: loud, sexual, willful, dangerous. The press painted her not just as a murderer but as a perversion of womanhood itself.
Take, for example, Esther Ives, who was accused of conspiring with her lover to murder her husband. He—the lover—was the one who strangled the man. His name was even heard by a witness as the victim fought for his life. But in the printed story, Esther took center stage. She was the schemer, the seducer, the root of it all. Her name appeared in the headlines. The lover—the one who actually committed the murder—did not.
Because when women were involved in murder, it was a violation of the natural order. The monstrous woman who dared to want, to seduce, to act was far more terrifying than any drunk with a dagger. And if the crime could be blamed on love, lust, or manipulation—well, that was even better. The public couldn’t get enough.
The Murder of Thomas Beast
So in crime and in print, Tudor women were held to an entirely different standard. Not equal, not fair—but actually really fascinating. So let’s look at our first example: the murder of Thomas Beast. If you were looking for a story that ticked every box of Tudor scandal—lust, betrayal, and a sharp farming implement—you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than the murder of Thomas Beast.
Thomas was, by all accounts, a decent and godly husband living in the Worcestershire village in the early 1580s. He had land, a wife, and a servant named Christopher Tomson. Nothing seemed particularly out of place—until, of course, his wife and the servant decided they’d be better off without Thomas in the picture.
Pamphlets at the time spared no ink in describing Mrs. Beast. Pamphlets at the time spared no ink in describing Mrs. Beast as the absolute worst sort of woman. She was older, experienced, and apparently seething with desire for her handsome young servant. Christopher was portrayed as naïve, besotted, and tragically dim—led astray by a woman so seductive that he was powerless to resist.
According to the true crime reporting of the day, Mrs. Beast grew weary of her inconvenient husband and began planting the idea of murder in Christopher’s head. She did this through a classic combination of sweet words and steamy promises until the lad caved. And just to make sure he didn’t muck it up, she even handed him the murder weapon—a sharpened billhook—and told him, rather chillingly, to “hit him right.”
Thomas, working in the fields, had his back turned when the fatal blow landed, and it was over quite quickly. Now, it should be said that both Christopher and Mrs. Beast were arrested, tried, and hanged. But the way the story was told was very one-sided.
Christopher became the puppet. Mrs. Beast was painted as the wicked woman, the harlot, and—memorably—a devil. The narrative wasn’t content to see her as a killer. Oh no, no, no. It needed her to be the very embodiment of female sin.
This was more than justice—it was spectacle. And the readers weren’t buying pamphlets to learn about the legal process. They were buying them to see a “most horrible and wicked woman” get what was coming to her.
Alice Shepherd and The Hidden Child
Then we’ve got Alice Shepherd and the hidden child. Some Tudor crimes weren’t about lust or revenge. They were about fear—and few things terrified an unmarried woman in the 16th century more than an unwanted pregnancy.
Alice Shepherd was young, unmarried, and pregnant in Salisbury around 1591. To modern ears, that might not sound like a crime—a situation that needs, you know, some support, maybe a social safety net—but not a crime. But in Tudor England, bearing a child out of wedlock was enough to ruin your reputation, your livelihood, and your life.
Women like Alice were branded bastard-bearers, harlots, and outcasts. So Alice hid her pregnancy. She gave birth in secret with the help of her grandmother and a sympathetic midwife. When the baby was born—healthy, crying, very much alive—Alice did what many women in her situation felt was their only option.
She killed the baby. She buried the baby’s body in a shallow grave in a churchyard, hoping that that would be the end of it. But then, as the pamphlets told it, divine justice stepped in—in the form of a dog.
The animal dug up the tiny corpse and laid it at the feet of a passerby. Soon the hue and cry went out, and within days, Alice, her grandmother, and the midwife were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death.
The case was reported with religious overtones: “See the will and wonderful work of Almighty God,” one writer marveled, “to reveal this most wicked act.” What it really revealed was how little room Tudor society gave a woman like Alice—cornered by shame, with no choices and nowhere to run.
In Tudor England, if you committed murder, your biggest fear wasn’t always the sheriff. It was God’s birds—and sometimes His ghosts, or His dogs, or a particularly bloodthirsty corpse.
To modern ears, these sound like plot devices from a gothic novel. But in the 16th century, many people believed that while God might allow sin to occur, He would not allow it to go unpunished. If justice didn’t come through human investigation, it would come through divine revelation—what they called wondrous discovery.
Take Ralph Suckey, a gentleman in Norfolk who murdered a man in 1658. There was no evidence, no witnesses. He probably thought he’d gotten away with it. Not long after the crime, he was walking through a field when a flock of crows began circling above him, cawing and swooping.
Now, this was probably just, you know, random bird behavior—but Suckey interpreted it as a divine accusation. He panicked, confessed to a bystander, and ended up tried and executed—all because of the birds.
Other cases involved bleeding corpses, a supernatural phenomenon known as cruentation. The idea was that if a murderer touched the body of their victim, the wounds would, you know, just start to bleed again. And yes, this was taken seriously. Coroners even staged lineups to test it.
James VI of Scotland—later James I of England—wrote that if a dead body gushed blood when touched by its killer, it was God Himself revealing the truth. In some trials, that was the only evidence brought forward, and people were hanged for it.
There were ghosts, too. In one case, a maid claimed she was visited by a spirit who belched fire and told her where to find two tiny corpses hidden under the floor. No one questioned the story. They just went and dug them up.
All of it—ghosts, crows, bleeding bodies—was a way for people to make sense of horror. In a world that didn’t yet have forensics, it gave comfort. Murder would out, because God would not let the guilty sleep. Or, apparently, walk quietly through a field of crows.
Lincoln and the Murder-for-Hire
Of all the Tudor crimes we’ve covered, this next one—Lincoln and the murder-for-hire—might be the most cold-blooded, and yet it somehow still manages to end with divine spectacle.
In the Kentish town of Warbleton in 1590, a widower known only as Lincoln was looking to remarry. But there was a problem. He had four children, and nobody wanted to take that on. So, in a move that would make Henry VIII look sentimental, Lincoln decided—yeah, the children had to go.
He recruited a friend over drinks, offering him 40 shillings and a cow to do the job. The plan was grim: Lincoln would take his eldest son to the market as an alibi, while the hired killer slipped into the house and murdered the three younger children. That part went to plan.
Then Lincoln got clever—or thought he did. He sent his eldest son home ahead of him, hoping the boy would discover the bodies and be blamed for the murders. This guy was such a great catch. I’m literally so sure that the fact he had four children had everything to do with why nobody wanted to marry him, and not at all with the fact that he was, you know, willing to frame his own child for the murder of his other children. Like, what a catch, man. I can’t believe nobody jumped at the opportunity to marry this guy.
Anyway, the neighbors were alerted, and the bodies—left lying in the house for three days—were hastily buried in the cellar. But word got out. The coroner arrived, had the bodies exhumed, and lined up suspects to perform the cruentation test.
Sure enough, when the hired killer stepped forward, the corpses—submerged in water and naturally prone to postmortem bleeding—began to bleed afresh. The killer panicked and confessed on the spot, and just like that, Lincoln’s entire scheme collapsed. Both men were tried and executed at Ashford.
The press predictably turned the case into a moral fable about divine justice. God had revealed the sin through the children’s blood. But underneath the pamphlet drama was a far more chilling truth: this was a man who wanted to start over and saw murder as housekeeping.
The crimes we’ve explored today weren’t just legal infractions—they were social earthquakes, each one tugging at the threads that held Tudor society together: family, gender roles, divine authority. And they showed just how fragile those threads could be.
Most violence in Tudor England came from men—that was no surprise. What did shock people, and what sold pamphlets, was when women crossed the line. When a woman killed, she wasn’t just seen as a criminal—she was unnatural. She was everything a woman was not supposed to be.
True crime stories in the 16th century didn’t aim for accuracy; they aimed for outrage. They shaped the public’s view of morality as much as they reported on it. The cases of people like Mrs. Beast weren’t just about murder. They were about what happens when women slip the leash of obedience. And if the facts didn’t quite fit the narrative—no problem. The press could always call in a ghost, or a dog, or a flock of angry birds.
But beneath the spectacle and the drama, these stories give us something very real: a window into what Tudor people feared, what they believed, and how they used crime to tell themselves stories about the world—and the people—they wanted so desperately to control.
So we’ll leave it there for this episode, friends. If you want to dive deeper into this, there’s an author named Blessin Adams, who is a former police officer, now a historian, and writes about all of these kinds of things. There’s a book, Great and Horrible News: Murder and Mayhem in Early Modern Britain, that I highly recommend if you want to get into true crime stories—really interesting.
And then the other book you can check out is called Thou Savage Woman: The gripping new true crime history book of female killers in early modern Britain—that’s the newest one. Highly recommend that as well. So, Blessin Adams—really interesting stuff.
Related link:
Religion and the Maintenance of Hierarchy in Murder Pamphlets in Renaissance England
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
