In the same century an 11-year-old boy, Thomas of Hordleigh in Maidstone Kent, was found to have killed a five-year-old with a hatchet as she tried to stop him stealing her family's bread: he was sentenced to death, in large part because he tried to hide the body, seen as a sign of "heinous malice". That sentence seems to have been carried out in 1299, but generally even in this period it seems a King's pardon was often granted, although it might take a year or so of the child being in jail before it arrived.
By the 14th century there had been an advance - it was legally agreed that while a child under seven might be convicted, he or she should be immediately pardoned "because he knoweth not of good or evil".
Two centuries on, this boundary was moving to something more reasonable: Sir Edward Coke, the renown Elizabethan jurist, believed that both "madmen" and children under 14 could not be thought of as having full discretion or understanding. Yet in 1629 a boy of nine was hanged for burning two barns "it appearing that he had malice, revenge, craft and cunning". It was up to the jury to decide the child's state of development. (Attempts at concealment were often fatal, being judged as showing understanding of the wrongness of the action.)
That was to be the death of William York, a poorhouse boy who had been working as a servant who was aged 10 when on 5 August 1748 he was tried for the death of a five-year-old girl who had been in his charge. He had hidden the body in a dungheap and admitted the crime, under pressure. Nineteen villagers petitioned for mercy, to their credit, and the inevitable capital sentence was postponed for three sessions while legal experts conferred, but in the end the sentence was carried out.
It is often proclaimed that child murderers and their acts are a sign of some modern decadence, yet there's a case that Loach has uncovered that shows many aspects of human life (and you'd have to strong suspect the abuse to which children have been subjected) haven't changed. In 1778 three girls aged ten, nine and eight, were tried at the Huntingdon Lent Assizes for the murder of a three year old. A contemporary record reports: "The manner in which they committed this act was by fixing three pins on the end of a stick, which they thrust into the child's body, which lacerated the private parts and soon turned to a mortification of which she languished for a few days and then died." The jury found the girls not guilty by reason of being unable to understand the nature of their act.
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