Hanging of Elizabeth Atwood

The Hanging of Elizabeth Attwood, who Murdered Her “Bastard Child”

Posted on by Gordon Harris

Thomas Attwood (aka Atwood) was a commoner in 1664 and became a surveyor of Ipswich highways in 1673. He and his wife Elisabeth had nine children, and his death is recorded in 1694, two years after their daughter Elizabeth was born. The inventory of his estate at his death was £267, and he left his wife rights in the commonage. After Thomas Attwood’s death, his wife Elisabeth married widower John West of Ipswich in 1697. He is called “yeoman” (a farmer).

On 17 May 1720, the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, Assize, and General Goal Delivery convened an Essex County session in Ipswich to hear the case of Attwood’s daughter, 28-year-old Elizabeth Attwood, “spinster.” The charge was that “On the 20th of February last she was delivered of a male bastard and that she con­cealed the death.” If found guilty of the crime of fornication and murdering the newborn child, the penalty in English and Provincial law was the death penalty. She pleaded not guilty.

Women in the community had become suspicious that Attwood was pregnant. After birth of the child, “bloody matter and “bloody clothes” were discovered in a chamber pot. Attwood’s mother Elizabeth was jailed and charged with concealing the pregnancy. (*Some sources refer to her as Attwood’s stepmother.)

No indictment or charges were leveled against any man. If they had known his identity, Massachusetts Provincial Laws decreed “that if any man commits fornication with any single woman, upon due conviction thereof they shall be fined unto their majesties not exceeding the sum of five pounds, or be corporally punished by whipping, not exceeding ten stripes apiece,” and would be responsible for maintenance of the child with the assistance of the mother. (Massachusetts Provincial Laws, 1692-93, Chapter 18, Section 5). The seeming reluctance of either Elizabeth to provide the name of the father suggests that Elizabeth Atwood may have been raped by a brother, stepbrother, her father, or another relative, but we will never know. It seems the Court was disinclined to ask.

The charges against Elizabeth Attwood were based on a 1624 English stature:

“WHEREAS many lewd women that have been delivered of bastard children, to avoid their shame, and to escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the death of their children, and after, if the child be found dead, the said women do allege, the said child was born dead; whereas it falleth out sometimes (although hardly it is to be proved) that the said child or children were murthered by the said women, their lewd mothers, or by their assent or procurement:

“For the preventing therefore of this great mischief, be it enacted by the authority of this present parliament, That if any woman after one month next ensuing the end of this session of parliament be delivered of any issue of her body, male or female, which being born alive, should by the laws of this realm be a bastard, and that she endeavor privately, either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by her self or the procuring of others, so to conceal the death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it was born alive, or not, but be concealed: in every such case the said mother so offending shall suffer death as in case of murder, except such mother can make proof by one witness at the least, that the child (whose death was by her so intended to be concealed) was born dead.”

Eliza­beth Attwood was tried May, 17, 1720 and the jury returned a guilty verdict in June. Elizabeth West was acquitted of being an acces­sory to the crime. Attwood was hanged at Pingrey’s Plain, near the present-day site of the Clam Box. The ministers of the church prayed for her soul and a crowd gathered to view the spectacle.

Joseph Felt in his History of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton wrote that it was “tradition” that as she was being led to her hanging, Elizabeth Attwood “gave no signs of being properly affected by her crime, or by the realities of eternity. She put on, as many others in a similar condition have done, a mock courage, which set at defiance the retributions of both God and man.” “As evidence of her callousness, tradition tells us that, as it was customary for the executioner to have the clothes of those whom he executed, she fitted herself out in the very worst of her apparel, and, on her way to the gallows, she laughed, so that a woman who attended her saw it, and exclaimed, ‘How can you be so thought­less on such an occasion? and that she immedi­ately replied, ‘I am laughing to think what a sorry suit the hangman will get from me.'”

Elizabeth West died a few months later, on Aug. 20, 1720. On September 27, three months after Elizabeth Attwood’s hanging, Sheriff John Denison presented an “account of the charges on the capital criminal execution of Eliza Atwood.” As was customary, sheriffs were paid from the estate of the accused, and the court ordered an inquiry into the estate of Elizabeth Attwood. In 1730, her stepfather John West, a farmer, was summoned into court to answer to the charge of being six weeks willfully absent from the public worship of God. He pleaded that he was deaf and very infirm, and was discharged. He died three years later in the home of his son in Bradford.

Sources & further reading

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