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This research project will inquiry crime and punishment during the Shakespearean Era.

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When a woman was sentenced to death she could "plead the belly" meaning they would wait until her baby was born and then kill her because it would be a sin to kill her child. This would give her nine more moths to live or she could completely disappear from the system.

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The people who where usually hung were murders.The hanging usually took place in the same place but sometimes the court or jury would decide to have it done outside the St. Paul's Cathedral or where the crime was committed. "Sometimes murderers were hanged alive, in chains, and left to starve."

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Criminal activity was divided into three main categories:  treason, felonies, misdemeanors. Treason was the most serious of these crimes at the time. The punishment for treason was hanging or being torn apart.
Felonies usually included robbery, theft,  witchcraft, and violent acts. These were punishable usually by hanging or beheading. Misdemeanors were usually the sort of crimes the commoners committed like begging, forgery, being in debt, petty theft, adultery, fraud, travelling without a license from the Guild Hall, and even taking bird's eggs. Punishment was whipping, starvation, burning at the stake, dismemberment, hanging, the pillory, and branding.

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Pickpockets and thieves often hung around crowded streets where the people were distracted by by prostitutes, merchants, and many other things. "A visitor up from the country might be accosted by a ‘whipjack’ with a sad story of destitution after shipwreck, or a woman ‘demander for glimmer’ begging because she’d been burned out of house and home. Just keep walking, pay no attention. If you hear someone shout ‘look to your purses’, remember, this is not altruistic; he just wants to see where you keep your purse, as you clutch your pocket" . There were schools where they taught children how to pickpocket with being detected and how to disappear into the crowd.

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Some minor crimes were fornication,sexual intercourse between people not married to each other, and incest, sexual relations between people classed as being too closely related to marry each other. These were punishable by carting where they carry the criminals through the city on a cart, riding backwards on a horse wearing place cards naming their offense, or pillory, where they put you hands and head through a plank of wood and could be painful if the crowd decided to through things although stones were banned,  sometimes the offender might not finish his sentence alive depending on how the public felt about him. Sometimes his ears were nailed to the pillory or they were cut off entirely.

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The list for death for criminals was a curious one. Crimes that were punished with death consisted of buggery, stealing hawks, highway robbery, and treason. "To deny that Elizabeth was the head of the Church in England, as Roman Catholics did, was to threaten her government and was treason, for which the penalty was death by hanging. But first, torture, to discover any fellow-plotters. Although in theory it was ‘greatly abhorred’, torture happened: and hideously. The Rack ‘tears a man’s limbs asunder’ – not literally, but it could snap the ligaments and cause excruciating pain. Perhaps the Pit was preferable, or the Little Ease, where a man couldn’t stand upright. The Scavenger’s Daughter was an ingenious system of compressing all the limbs in iron bands. For all of these an official order had to be given. Optional extras such as needles under the fingernails could be left to the examiner’s discretion."
Another sentence was slavery although they killed any slaves strong enough to row a boat.

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Those who killed themselves where considered committing a crime because it was a sin to commit suicide. They were buried in a field with a steak driven through their bodies.

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Crime and Punishment For Nobles VS Commoners

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Crime and Punishment For Nobles VS Commoners

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If a commoner was convicted of treason they were hung for their crimes, the most sever punishment, but nobles were beheaded instead.

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"Traitors were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The grisly details included cutting the prisoner down before he died from hanging, and disemboweling him. After various other horrors, the corpse was cut into four pieces and the head was taken off."

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Most of the people who were burned at the stake were Anabaptist, basically Christians who thought you had to agree to be baptized in order to be Christian.

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"Crime and Punishment." ShakesphereMag.com, 2013, www.shakespearemag.com/fall98/punished.asp. Accessed 13 Feb. 2018

Picard, Liza. "Crime and punishment in Elizabethan England." Discovering Literature: Shakespeare and Renaissance writers, 15 Mar. 2016, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/crime-and-punishment-in-elizabethan-england. Accessed 13 Feb. 2018.

"Crime and Punishment in Elizabethan England," EyeWitness to History"Crime and Punishment in Elizabethan England," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2001).