1629: John Dean, boy arsonist
February 23rd, 2011 Meaghan
(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On or about this day in 1629, one John Dean, described in court documents as “an infant between eight and nine years,” was hanged in Abingdon, England for setting fire to two barns in the nearby town of Windsor.
According to Historia placitorum corone: The history of the pleas of the crown, Volume 1 by William Axton Stokes and Edward Ingersoll, this juvenile felon was indicted, arraigned and found guilty all on the same day, February 23, “and was hanged accordingly.” The actual date of his execution is not known, but it can’t have been long afterward. The wheels of British justice ground very quickly in those days, though not so fine.
The age of criminal responsibility in England at the time was seven years old. (It was later raised to eight, and in 1963 to ten, where it remains; there have been calls to raise it again.) Accordingly, anyone seven years or older could be charged with a crime and face the same penalties as someone seventeen or forty-seven — including the death sentence.
This does not mean that vast numbers of children were executed, however; quite the contrary. As Capital Punishment U.K. notes, “Death sentences were certainly routinely passed on 7 -13 year olds but equally routinely commuted. Girls were only typically hanged for the most serious crimes whereas teenage boys were executed for a wide range of felonies.”
The same source notes that little John Dean was probably the youngest child ever executed in England.
For reasons lost to history, he was not given the usual commutation: although there is no mention that anyone was hurt or killed in the fires, the judge found that John had “malice, revenge, craft and cunning,” and refused to recommend a reprieve. Perhaps the boy had a prior criminal record.
Thus did John Dean secure a footnote in history; were it not for his death no one would remember him today. Somehow, I doubt he would have thought it was worth it.
On this day..
- Feast Day of St. Polycarp of Smyrna - 2020
- 1719: Lt. Edward Bird, ungentlemanly - 2019
- 2000: Ahmad Ismail Uthman Saleh and Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Naggar, renditioned - 2018
- 1807: John Holloway and Owen Haggerty, sworn away - 2017
- 1554: Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk - 2016
- 1513: Pietro Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, but not Niccolo Machiavelli - 2015
- 1828: Antoine Berthet, Stendhal inspiration - 2014
- 1939: Alexander Kosarev, Spartak Moscow patron - 2013
- 1906: Johann Otto Hoch, bluebeard - 2012
- 1942: Boris Vilde, linguist - 2010
- 1885: Not John "Babbacombe" Lee, the man they could not hang - 2009
- 1838: Andrea Rondola but not Peppino - 2008
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Arson,Capital Punishment,Children,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Guest Writers,Hanged,History,Milestones,Other Voices,Public Executions,Uncertain Dates
Tags: 1620s, 1629, abingdon, february 23, john dean, windsor
Just a point of Latin grammar to be corrected in this article (how could I resist): “corone” in the title of the chronicle you cite (and link to, and note that there the correct form is given) should be coronae, i.e., the proper genitive singular of the first declension noun corona ‘crown’, hence coronae = ‘of (the) c/Crown’.