“Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice?”

Legal Context and Attitudes toward Parricide

In effect, as historians, there are two key works to consult when undertaking an analysis of the legal context for any crime in Scotland during the era before 1850. These are Sir George Mackenzie’s (1636–1691) Law and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal first published in 1678 and the work of Baron David Hume (1757–1838), entitled Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland Respecting Crimes which was published in two volumes in 1797. ⁷ As Hume largely assimilates Mackenzie’s conclusions and opinions into his own late eighteenth-century work, it is sufficient to predominantly refer to Hume’s Commentaries when illuminating the Scottish legal context for parricide prior to 1850, although we should note that Mackenzie considered any legal provision for this “odious” crime “unnecessary” in Scotland due to its rarity. ⁸

In the first volume of his work, Hume explains that in order to prevent the “monstrous” and “unnatural” crime that occurs when a child kills his or her parent, King James VI of Scotland passed a Parricide Act in 1594. The Act set out to extinguish the “… abhominable and odious crueltie” of parricide that “… hes bene at sumtymes heirtofoir vsit within this realme.” ⁹ The Act makes plain, however, that the extent of its application was to be limited to the killing of mothers and fathers alone. Principally, this was because the provision as established was specifically created to protect parents from their direct line of descendants. The murder of stepparents, “parents by affinity” (mother-in-law, father-in-law), or of grandparents was not deemed parricide but simple homicide. Furthermore, and as Mackenzie reminds us in relation to the judicial approach to parricide, the Scottish legal establishment was very much against laws being extended to include a broader purview to that originally intended. ¹⁰ Consequently, then, while the Scottish judiciary used the term parricide quite regularly to describe an array of different circumstances involving attacks on relatives including the killing of stepparents, killing of in-laws, the killing of newborn infants by their mothers and fathers, and even forms of domestic assault, it was only in instances of parental murder that the statutory provision for the specific crime of parricide was enforced. Alternative legislation governed the other offenses as indictment material indicates. ¹¹

At any rate, and according to Baron Hume at least, parricide was regarded as a very serious offense. As he explains:

The crime of parricide is one of those which finds a fit place in the list of aggravated murders, being such of which the laws of all countries have agreed in testifying their abhorrence, by denouncing some sort of extraordinary punishment for the person who shall be convicted of so wicked and unnatural a deed. ¹²

In his trawl through Scottish legal case trials from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Baron Hume could only find four instances of parricide. All of the cases were committed by sons against their fathers. In all four instances, there seems to be some support for Hume’s insistence that parricide was an extremely serious offense as all four were convicted and sentenced to death, and although none of them were given poena cullei, three of the four did receive what could be deemed “exemplary” or aggravated forms of capital punishment. Some of these mirror the types of premortem and postmortem penances introduced by the passing of the Murder Act in 1751, intended to make executions more shocking and terrifying to the audience who watched them and thus increase their deterrent effect. ¹⁴ In April 1591, John Dickson from Belchester in Berwickshire was sentenced to be broken on the wheel for the murder of his father. In September 1694, William Rutherford was sentenced to have his right hand amputated before execution for a similar offense and this was same fate that befell James Lauder, also deemed guilty of parricide in March 1707. ¹⁵ Normally, and prior to the Union of 1707, extreme forms of punishment such as these were typically reserved for heretics and those guilty of treason.

In Scots Law, and contrary to normal procedure (even in relation to “regular” homicide convictions), guilty verdicts for parricide called for “… the total corruption of the convict’s blood.” ¹⁶ What this meant in practice was that not only was the convict sentenced to be executed in some sort of “extraordinary” way, but for evermore, his or her direct descendants were to be utterly disinherited of all lands, heritages, tacks, and possessions “… in the same manner as if the direct line had failed.” ¹⁷ Thus, as echoed in the stanzas of the murder ballad “Edward” at the start of this article, the entire name and lineage of the culprit was to be destroyed forever based on the provisions on the 1594 Act. This ruling only applied when actual blood-relative parents were murdered by their offspring, and its application (alongside that of the Parricide Act more generally) seems to have died out over the course of the eighteenth century as gradually all instances of unlawful killing were indicted under the legal provision for the more general offense of “homicide.” Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that technically, the 1594 Parricide Act has never been repealed in Scotland. Despite legal protestations against its impact on succession and inheritance in the modern era as recently as August 2014, it still remains in force alongside eighty-three other statutes which predate the Union of Parliament in 1707. ¹⁸

Evidence and Characteristics of Parricide in Scotland, 1700–1850

Given the serious regard paid to instances of parricide by members of the Scottish judiciary, this study will focus on indictment records from the Scottish Justiciary Court between 1700 and 1850. The Justiciary Court was the “ultimate” jurisdiction which dealt with serious criminal matters in Scotland. In 1672, the High Court of Justiciary was formally established and was presided over by the Lord Justice General, the Lord Justice Clerk, and five Lords of Session. The High Court sat in session in Edinburgh on a weekly basis, and in order to ensure broad coverage of its jurisdiction across Scotland more widely, additional circuit courts were introduced, with the country divided into three associated jurisdictions. The North Circuit related to courts held in Aberdeen, Inverness, and Perth, but its jurisdiction included serious offenses committed on any of the Northern Isles too. The West Circuit managed the courts held in Glasgow, Inverary, and Stirling, and the South Circuit dealt with the courts held in Ayr, Dumfries, and Jedburgh. Initially at least, these circuit courts met once a year, presided over by two of the lords referred to above. After 1746, and the passing of the Heritable Jurisdictions Act in Scotland which abolished a wide range of inherited regalities, there was an increased volume of business brought before the Justiciary Court which had to be absorbed from those local jurisdictions that were now defunct. This meant that the court had to go on circuit twice a year, typically in the spring and in the autumn. ¹⁹

The Justiciary Court had a wide remit when dealing with criminal offenses. Prior to 1747, it dealt with petty crimes and moral offenses on occasion, but these were increasingly assigned to the more “inferior” jurisdictions (such as the Justice of the Peace Court or the Sheriff Court) over the course of the Enlightenment era. In the main, therefore, the Justiciary Court dealt with “serious” offenses such as political and treasonous crimes, the four pleas of the crown (murder, rape, robbery, and arson), and a suite of other felonies. These included assault, counterfeiting and fraud, infanticide, riot, sodomy and bestiality, theft, and the receiving and keeping of stolen goods (known as reset north of the Tweed), as well as various other diverse legal infringements. In the management of these crimes, the court also had a wide gamut of punishments at its disposal. However, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, the punishments meted out by the Justiciary Court became more fixed and prescribed and tended not to involve the kind of aggravations or exemplary elements of the kind described above. ²⁰ Sentences of death by hanging or transportation overseas were the most common punishments received by those convicted of serious offenses between 1700 and 1850, especially those which had involved the use of violence. For lesser offenses, heavy fines, corporal punishment, and imprisonment (or even a sentence which combined all three) were more regularly meted out by judges of the Justiciary Court. In any event, before 1780 at least, few of the men and women charged before this court were released as a result of being found not guilty or their cases not proven, and fewer still were pardoned after conviction. As historian Stephen Davies illustrates, “If someone was charged with a serious crime before the Justiciary Court, then their chances of survival were slim since acquittal was rare and mercy unheard of.” ²¹ Although the Justiciary Court in Scotland appeared to indict fewer suspects than its counterparts south of the border in the period before 1850, ²² it seems it was far more likely to convict and punish the individuals brought before it than was the case in England at this time. ²³ It could be argued then that the Scottish provision of justice at the highest level was more exacting and targeted during this era, especially when compared with the unpredictable and rather random nature of justice under the infamous “bloody code.” Whether this argument specifically applies to the crime of parricide, remains to be seen, as there is not enough comparative data in existence to facilitate such an analysis.

To date, and although the work is far from completed, a database of criminal cases has been constructed based on detailed research of the Scottish Justiciary Court over the 150 years from 1700 to 1850. ²⁴ Currently, this contains information relating to over 9,000 separate indictments for serious crimes. Of these, 3,872 or 43 percent relate to prosecutions for interpersonal violence of one form or another. However, even if we apply the broadest definition of parricide possible (the killing of parents by affinity as well as by blood), but take care to exclude nonfatal attacks which would not fall under the provision of the statute, only nine of these indictments relate to parental murder. There was an evident and distinct absence of this specific offense in the judicial records in Scotland prior to 1850, especially if we consider that Baron David Hume only managed to uncover four cases between the passing of the Parricide Act in 1594 and the end of the seventeenth century. In sum then, it would seem that only thirteen cases of parricide were brought before the Scottish Justiciary Court over a 250-year period. Obviously, as this article is working from a very small sample of cases, it would be inappropriate to make any statistically significant conclusions about the nature and incidence of parricide in Scottish history between 1700 and 1850 and whether the crime, its perpetrators, and its victims changed over that period.

A summary of the available data relating to the nine Scottish cases indicted between 1700 and 1850 is presented in Table 1. ²⁵

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Table 1.

Indictments for Parricide, Scottish Justiciary Court, 1700–1850.

Court	Indictment date	Defendant	Locus operandi	Modus operandi	Victim	Verdict
JC North	June 6, 1715	John Linklatter	Orkney		Father
JC West	February 11, 1718	Gilbert MacCallum	Oban		Father
JC North	June 25, 1749	Charles Grant	Aberdeenshire
JC North	December 13, 1768	James Cullen	Aberdeenshire	Battery	Stepmother	Guilty
JC North	October 3, 1810	Margaret Robertson	Fife	Poison	Father	Not guilty
JC North	September 27, 1815	James Esson	Aberdeenshire		Father	Not guilty
HCJ	July 28, 1824	Daniel Elphinstone	Edinburgh	Knife attack	Mother-in-law	Guilty
JC West	April 16, 1825	John Henderson	Stirling
HCJ	April 6, 1826	Thomas Moffat	Stirlingshire	Knife attack	Father	Guilty

Note: JC = Justiciary Court; HCJ = High Court of Justiciary.

Although comparisons between historical and contemporary studies of crime and between the nature of crime in different countries and contexts can be inherently problematic and must be treated with extreme caution, it is nonetheless interesting that many of the traits evident in the small sample of Scottish parricide cases compare well with data from studies of the offense in a more modern North American context. Historians and criminologists have worked together there, to develop a much more nuanced and in-depth understanding of parricide and the offenders involved, in an attempt to develop strategies to prevent parricidal behavior from occurring. It is evident from the lacunae of scholarship on the subject of parental killing, particularly from a historical standpoint, that no other country has come as far as the United States in comprehending parricide and the contextual factors which typically trigger its incidence. Certainly, and as yet, there is no comparable material on parental murder in modern-day Scotland. ²⁶

Despite leading the way in the study of parricide, American scholars have been quick to point out that since 1850, parricide has been a relatively infrequent form of homicide. Professor Kathleen Heide points out that although “The public’s fascination with parricide dates back thousands of years. The killing of fathers and mothers has been a recurrent theme in mythology and literature, as is evident in the stories of Orestes, Oedipus, Alcmaon, King Arthur, and Hamlet,” actual instances of the offense are not common. ²⁷ Indeed, the first and most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the data for Scottish parricide between 1700 and 1850 is that indictments for this offense were rare with only nine cases indicted over the period. We will consider possible explanations for the paucity of Scottish parricide in a latter section of this article.

The second noticeable characteristic among the nine Scottish cases is the seemingly gendered nature of the offense. Only two of the victims and one of the accused were female. The male domination of parricidal instances is something also mirrored in American studies of the offense dating back to 1850. ²⁸ Rather than this being symptomatic of a general deference on the part of daughters across time, cultures, and communities, however, the proportionate involvement of men to women in this offense is probably a simple reflection of gender differences in the perpetration of interpersonal violence more broadly. Although not reticent at using violence when a situation demanded them to do so, it is clear nonetheless that Scottish women (and indeed women in other historical contexts) were less often indicted for a violent offense prior to 1900 compared to their male counterparts. It could be argued then, that the data for parricide are simply an extension of that general trend. ²⁹

The third characteristic discernible from the Scottish evidence is that on the whole, the reported cases of parricide appear to have occurred in the more remote parts of Scotland and not in the central lowlands of the country where we might expect more interpersonal violence to occur due to population density levels. While this detail might be indicative of more lawlessness in the northern parts of Scotland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it does at least appear that the reach of justice was sufficient to detect parricidal instances in these more remote areas. In other words, it is likely that the specter of the so-called dark figure of unreported or unindicted crime did not cast a substantial shadow over parental killing in Scotland between 1700 and 1850. We have already seen that parricide was seemingly regarded as an extremely serious offense. This fact would encourage the reporting of the crime and would render community and judicial authorities anxious to investigate the offense and make an arrest. As with homicide more generally, parricide was a difficult crime to conceal, perhaps more so in remote rural areas where close-knit communal ties endured for longer and parochial supervision was more intense. ³⁰

The case studies in the section below illuminates more about the methodology and rationale involved in the few instances of Scottish parricide where substantial details remain of the events that transpired. Certainly, and as we might expect, there were no instances where firearms were used in the nine Scottish parricide cases between 1700 and 1850. This contrasts sharply with the more modern American studies of the offense, where guns were clearly the weapon of choice among those sons and daughters who chose to kill their parents. ³¹ In the Scottish cases, weapons (with the exception of the poisoning case) tended to be those close to hand in the domestic sphere and were indicative of instances of single-victim–single-offender episodes which involved hot-blooded combat rather than attacks of a premeditated nature. This supposition ties in well with what we know of the rationale behind the Scottish assaults that took place. It also tallies with what we know of Scottish homicide and domestic assault from this period. Most interpersonal violence in Scotland before 1850 was either victim precipitated (where the eventual victim had been the original aggressor) or was carried out in the heat of the moment as part of an impassioned argument. ³²

Although in the American cases of parricide that have been uncovered to date, there was also a degree of spontaneity about the assaults that took place, it is evident that other factors were at play in the more modern context. Retaliation against prolonged mental, physical, or sexual abuse was regularly a common rationale given for parricidal behavior. Sometimes the killing was planned to maximize the chances of the abuse being terminated. ³³ This particular rationale was not evident in the earlier Scottish cases of parricide. Also far more predominant in the American case files of parental killing were instances of acute mental disorder, particularly among adolescent perpetrators. ³⁴ Although the age of offenders in the Scottish cases is difficult to discern, it does seem reasonable to suggest from the limited evidence at hand, that they were all at least “adolescents” when they committed parricide. Moreover, two of the nine individuals indicted—Margaret Robertson (1810) and James Esson (1815) —were declared insane upon conviction by the Scottish courts and were indefinitely confined to lunatic asylums rather than hung. ³⁵ Looking at the detail of these cases, one might argue that the decision to declare them “insane” might have been made with haste and on the basis of scant, flimsy, and rudimentary medical and psychological evidence. However, the decision reached in these cases may have more to do with when they were prosecuted rather than the evidence to hand.

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Scottish courts were keen on introducing more professional testimony, especially in cases where individuals had defied “normal” or “expected” standards of behavior. In infanticide cases from this period, for instance, we see Scottish courtrooms filled with medical experts trying to explain away the abnormality of women’s violence toward their newborn children through the use of diagnoses of insanity related to parturition and lactation. It was believed that women could not be innately violent as that went against the accepted characteristics of their gender: chastity, femininity, gentility, and maternal instinct. Consequently, an alternative explanation needed to be sought in order to be able to understand infanticidal women. ³⁶ In a similar vein, as parricide was considered such an abhorrent, unnatural reversal of the well-established patriarchal order, other intrapsychic factors may go some way to explain the episodes of patricide and matricide that occurred. It was unfathomable to many to possibly concede that children would want to kill their parents or indeed be capable of doing so without some sort of external factor triggering their violent rage. Perhaps it is for this reason, that in both historical and modern episodes of parricide, alcohol in particular seems to have played a prominent role in precipitating the offense. ³⁷ It was also perceived to be an evident causal factor in six of the nine Scottish cases of parricide between 1700 and 1850.

The final characteristic tentatively drawn from the small sample of Scottish parricide cases is perhaps not unsurprising, given the apparent gravity afforded the offense by the judicial authorities and the previous comments made about the more precise nature of justice north of the Tweed. Of the cases where the fate of the accused individual is known, convictions were universally secured and aside from the two cases of lunacy, the remaining convicts were all executed and received the exemplary punishment of public anatomization and dissection. This pattern extends into the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the use of additional premortem and postmortem punishments had largely waned in Scotland by that time, even for the most serious of crimes. ³⁸ In the more modern American instances of parricide by contrast, capital punishment has only rarely been applied since 1850 and instead, probably owing to the significant number of victim-precipitated cases based on prolonged child abuse and mistreatment, there is much more of an attempt made to understand the offender and support his or her rehabilitation back into the community. ³⁹

Case Studies of Parricide in Scotland, 1700–1850

Many of the characteristics and traits evident in the nine Scottish parricide cases uncovered between 1700 and 1850 and cautiously discussed above, appear in the two cases which for which we have the most extensive documentation. James Cullen was indicted at the Northern Justiciary Court in Aberdeen in 1768 charged with the parricide, incest, and rape of his stepmother Isabell Littlejohn. Two years previously, on December 13, 1766, Cullen had proceeded to get exceedingly drunk on home-made poitìn and “… in a furious and relentless manner” had violently attacked his father, breaking two of his ribs in the process. Fourteen days after this, on December 27, 1766, while his father was away working in the fields, Cullen got drunk again. This time he attacked his stepmother and after violently raping her in his father’s house, he proceeded to “… give her repeated blows by which she was severely hurt and bruised upon her shoulders, arms, breast, thighs, and other parts of her body.” At this point, Isabell Littlejohn attempted to make her escape. Presumably fearing for her life, she managed to get outside the house, but Cullen caught up with her just outside the front door and proceeded once again to batter his stepmother repeatedly with his fists, raining down fierce blows upon her “… until she was quiet.” Neighbors witnessed this particular part of the attack and testified in court that although they “… heard the victim’s bones crack and shatter,” they were too afraid to step in to stop the assault. As a result of this attack, Isabell Littlejohn died where she lay of multiple and horrific injuries.

Cullen was subsequently arrested by members of the local community in late December 1766, but he escaped from prison and went on the run. Undoubtedly, he recognized the seriousness of his actions, the fact that there were several witnesses to the assault he had perpetrated and he could guess the likely reaction of the judicial authorities to his crimes. He was recaptured two years later and was brought to trial. The presiding judge described Cullen’s actions as “shocking,” “wicked,” and “unnatural”. He was found guilty of all the charges brought against him and was sentenced to death by hanging with the added order that after his execution, his body should be publicly dissected and anatomized by a surgeon. ⁴⁰

Clearly, in this case, the instance of parricide was not victim precipitated nor was there any substantiated evidence of mental health problems with regard to the perpetrator concerned. Nevertheless, and as with the majority of the Scottish cases uncovered, the defendant was male, he committed his crime on a rural estate in the north of Scotland, and there was evidence of alcohol abuse acting as a trigger to the assault that took place. The killing was evidently part of a furious, prolonged but hot-blooded attack on his stepmother, where he used his fists rather than any weapon derived for the purpose. As with several other Scottish parricide cases, Cullen was convicted and given an exemplary punishment. Public dissection and anatomization was something that was evidently feared by the populace in the period before 1850, as it involved the desecration of the body without any chance of revival. ⁴¹ Although parricide was evidently rare in Scotland, it was clear that on those occasions when it did come to the attention of the courts, the authorities elected to use exemplary punishments to deter any other like-minded individuals from attacking their parents, in order to keep the patriarchal hierarchy of society firmly intact and under control.

Thomas Moffat killed his father Peter on April 6, 1822, near his home at Kilsyth, around twelve miles from the City of Glasgow. Peter returned home from a long day at work to find his son intoxicated and lazing about the house. Peter was not impressed by his son’s state and his perpetual disinclination to employment and said some strong words to him before leaving the house to go for a walk in order to calm down. Thomas Moffat followed his father “… in a vindictive temper” and they continued to argue furiously for a time. Thomas Moffat had armed himself with a large knife that he had grabbed from the kitchen on his way out, and seizing his father by the throat with one hand, he made three deep stab wounds into his father’s stomach with the other. Peter Moffat tried (with some difficulty) to make it back to his house, carrying parts of his bowels in his hands as they had obtruded through his wounds. However, he collapsed near his house “… languishing in great pain but for a short time” and died.

Thomas Moffat, who was described in court as a “cruel monster,” fled the scene of the crime and remained at large for three years until he was latterly captured by a sheriff officer in Glasgow on June 7, 1826. At his trial which began at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh on October 26, 1826, the court heard from witnesses who testified that Thomas Moffat had endured prolonged, vicious, and repeated physical assaults at the hands of his father. Testimony was also given by several individuals who had seen Thomas try to protect his (now deceased) mother from the “ill use” his father inflicted regularly upon his wife. The court heard that Peter Moffat was a violent man who drank away all the money he earned, leaving his family starving and giving his children no education whatsoever. Despite the best efforts of his defense team in bringing all of this contextual information to light, Thomas Moffat was unanimously found guilty of parricide. ⁴² On sentencing him to death with the exemplary punishment of public dissection and anatomization, the judge explained his decision:

You have been convicted of a crime which reflects a disgrace on the country within the bounds of which it is committed, which can never be wiped away. You have been convicted of the murder of your own father … the author of your being … the individual whom you were bound by the laws of God and nature, to have protected even at the risk of your own life. It is a crime which no circumstance could justify nor palliate. ⁴³

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Analysis—Reconstructing a Hidden History?

Before concluding this article, it is important to return to the issue of the paucity of indictments for parricide in Scotland between 1700 and 1850 and to try to determine why this offense seems to have so rarely been brought to the court’s attention during that period. As has already been alluded to above, it is unlikely that instances of parricide made a substantial contribution to the so-called dark figure of unknown or unrecorded criminal activity. The two case studies elaborated on in the previous section demonstrate that even when parricidal suspects absconded from justice, they were determinedly hunted down and arrested by sheriff officers. This resoluteness while impressive was unusual and was not typically mirrored in the other instances of interpersonal violence brought to the courts’ attention where suspects evaded justice. For instance, if we analyze indictments for homicide more generally between 1700 and 1850, the evidence from the Justiciary Court records twenty-one individuals who had been “declared fugitate” by the court after evading arrest, breaking out of prison, or not attending trial. ⁴⁵ However, if we use the database to track their names through the courts over time, we can see that none of them were subsequently recaptured and brought to justice.

The unyielding attitude to parricide in Scotland also suggests that such offenses would only be heard at the Justiciary Court. It is unlikely that indictments for parental killing would be hidden from the scope of this study, as they had been brought before courts of a lesser jurisdiction. Indeed, a sample survey carried out on records from selected Sheriff Courts and Justice of the Peace Courts bears out this contention. ⁴⁶ It seems that the Scottish authorities wanted to make an example of the few individuals who committed parricide—an offense they commonly regarded with loathing and repugnance—and as such, indictments for the offense had to be heard at the highest court in the land, dealt with sternly and publicly, and punished severely and without mercy upon conviction.

We have already seen in this article that the Scots were not averse to committing other forms of interpersonal violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Numerous individuals (men and women alike) were prosecuted for murder, infanticide, assault, robbery, rioting, rape, and forms of “sexual assault” during that era. Why then, did they seem to shy away from parricide? One tentative explanation for the lack of fatal parental violence evident in Scotland between 1700 and 1850 is the culture of intense supervision that existed in many European countries at that time. Facilitated by communal living and strong kinship ties, the prevailing Church in Scotland and its Calvinist orthodoxy preached an intense doctrine where respect for one’s elders lay at the heart of how society was to be organized and run. The Church was supported in this by its own interventionist parish-based court system, called the Kirk Session, which rigorously rooted out moral lapses and publicly punished sinners. ⁴⁷ Kirk Session pronouncements, sermons, ballads, and pamphlet literature which were published and widely circulated across Scotland during the period invariably made mention of the biblical commandment held to be the most important—“Honour Thy Father and Mother” —regardless of whether or not such deference was relevant to the content concerned. ⁴⁸ The published confessions of criminals about to be executed on the gallows, which were incredibly popular among the Scottish populace during this period, always referred to this commandment and suggested that no matter what offense had eventually been committed by the individual concerned, their feloniousness must have stemmed from a fundamental disrespect of parental authority, as this was where religious instruction in the ways of truth, goodness, and morality would emanate and be inculcated. To ignore and disrespect your parents then was to ignore and disrespect God. ⁴⁹

A move away from parental deference then was something that was highly feared by religious and judicial authorities in Scotland as elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it would result in anarchy, chaos, and the ruination of the social and moral fabric of the nation. Coupled to the intense scrutiny and “social control” of sorts at a local, parochial level and in order to alleviate fears of moral decay in Scottish society, it is evident that the judiciary worked in tandem with religious authorities to reinforce the message that parental authority was tantamount and needed to be protected. First of all, one of the earliest Scottish legal digest that we know about, the Regiam Majestatem produced in or around 1318, made it a capital crime to invade and attack an individual in their own dwelling place, in an offense known as hamesucken. Although attacks on parents were not specifically mentioned in this piece of legislation, it is clear from the description provided that parental protection was the chief preoccupation of the legal minds who put the statute together. ⁵⁰ Furthermore, and in any case, by a statute of 1661, it became a capital crime in Scots Law to curse or beat your parents if you were over the age of sixteen. ⁵¹ This time, the legislation which applied throughout the premodern period left little room for any doubt: parents were to be revered and respected in Scotland, not belittled or abused in even the slightest way, as otherwise, the full wrath of the authorities would come crashing down on the culprit concerned.

It could be argued then, albeit tentatively, that the combined forces of the law and the Church, seem to have enabled the Scots to limit the number of parricidal instances brought to court during the period before 1850 by sending out an unequivocal message that parental deference was fundamentally expected at all times. While criminals in Scotland were more than capable of ignoring other pronouncements made to them regarding the observance of morality and decent standards of behavior, it seems that giving respect to one’s parents was one tenet that was customarily accepted as incontrovertible. In addition, and as may also have been true elsewhere, the Church and the law also evidently worked together to deploy early interventionist strategies in areas of domestic dispute between parents and their children, so that petty disagreements and minor skirmishes did not escalate into more serious instances of violent behavior between the parties involved. The Church did this by employing a network of individuals whose job was to observe parishioners and the nature of their relationships with others, in order to constantly indoctrinate them with behavioral expectations and to intercede and arbitrate if tempers flared. The law, on the other hand, did this by establishing a methodology of mediation through a system of so-called Letters of Lawburrows. This process facilitated the resolution of disputes between individuals by both parties agreeing to sign a pledge to keep the peace between them under the threat of a substantial monetary fine if that agreement was ever breeched. Thousands of these “Letters of Lawburrows” can be found in the records of the Justiciary Court alone between 1700 and 1850, and they were evidently routinely employed by the Scottish populace. ⁵²

There is some evidence to support the contention that the authoritative approach to parental protection in Scottish society prior to 1850 was effective. Not only was there an evident reluctance to kill parents north of the Tweed at that time, there was also a reluctance to abuse them as well. If we look at instances of domestic assault where parents were the victims, the number of prosecutions is relatively limited. Although “unreported” or “unindicted” offenses may have had a much more significant role to play in relation to these more minor offenses (due to the severe nature of the legal provision for the offense) and other instances may have been brought to courts of lesser jurisdiction than the Justiciary Court, there were only thirty-eight instances of assault where both parents were victims between 1700 and 1850. This figure needs to be considered out of a total of 3,872 indictments for assault accumulated to date. Only a further twenty-seven assaults specifically committed against fathers and sixteen against mothers were reported. Interestingly, none of these eighty-one cases were convicted under the 1661 legislation, although the indictments were initiated under that provision. Instead, these instances were treated as regular, but aggravated assaults, and if convictions were achieved, the culprits were typically given sentences of corporal punishment or transportation. Clearly, the value of the 1661 Act to the Scottish judiciary by the eighteenth century at least lay in the threat it posed to rebellious and insubordinate children. This ploy, along with the others described above, seems to have kept Scottish sons and daughters in check throughout the 1700–1850 era.

Aside from this enforced culture of deference to familial authority, a more straightforward argument to explain the lack of parricidal instances in Scotland prior to 1850 relates to the observed protectionist nature of the kinship ties which existed at that time. Scottish social historians have explained that blood relatives were especially supportive of one another during the post–Enlightenment era. ⁵³ This was a time of rapid socioeconomic and political change, when families faced numerous outside pressures and threats of one kind or another including famine, disease, poverty, invasion, eviction, and the like. ⁵⁴ In the face of external adversaries such as these, close relatives tended to band together to safeguard themselves and their interests. A good example of this kind of familial collaboration can be seen in the Scottish food riots that occurred during the eighteenth century. In these often bloody episodes, whole families turned out to fight shoulder to shoulder against the malpractices of grain merchants, and on several occasions individuals went to great lengths to prevent a loved one being arrested or beaten by the authorities. ⁵⁵ Parents and children were thus far more likely to tend toward mutual protectionism due to codependency, rather than to aggression or destruction. Evidently, the ties that bound Scottish families together were typically strong in the period up to 1850. Consequently, parricide and parental abuse were uncommon during this time and only seem to have occurred in extreme situations and under certain conditions.

With perhaps the exception of treason, it is clear that the religious and legal authorities in Scotland effectively regarded parricide as the most serious offense that could be perpetrated by any individual and thus stringent provision was made for its prosecution and punishment. Although the Scots were not averse to engaging in other forms of interpersonal violence during the period 1700–1850, it would seem that the murder of parents was not part of their extensive felonious repertoire. From the few cases brought to court, we can tentatively surmise that parricide was a gendered crime, with males predominating in the role of both offender and victim. Furthermore, although parricidal instances appear across Scotland as a whole, they tend to have been perpetrated in rural and more remote areas rather than in the central lowlands of the country where arguably the reach and power of centralized justice was more dominant and robust. Most of the parricidal instances committed in Scotland between 1700 and 1850 were perpetrated without premeditation and involved weapons that were close at hand when arguments escalated. Alcohol seems to have been a particular trigger among the fatal assaults recorded, but we need to better understand the contexts and environment within which this offense took place before we are able to draw any meaningful conclusions about why they occurred. Certainly, it is of interest that many of the characteristics we associate with parricide in the modern era are mirrored in these early historical examples. Obviously, and as the data used in this article relate to the pre-1850 period, there are evident differences too. For instance, the majority of the Scottish cases lack reference to mental instability, there is a lack of victim precipitated assaults caused by prolonged abuse, and there is a dearth of instances where quarrels over money and inheritance was an underlying factor in the parental murders that occurred. ⁵⁶

Episodes of parricide evidently merit more comparative analysis between different jurisdictions, contexts, and cultures and across broader chronologies and geographical areas in order to further explore the nature and characteristics of this crime and to better understand its perpetrators. In this way, preventative measures to guard against the offense in the present day might be derived and implemented. In the Scottish context prior to 1850, however, as elsewhere, parricide did not pose a significant problem or threat to parental authority in practice, despite the evident fears and concerns of religious and judicial authorities at the time. Instead, parricide could be regarded as something of a “taboo crime” north of the Tweed. It was an offense that was so unpalatable and so unacceptable to both individuals and to Scottish society more broadly, that it was only very rarely conceived of and seldom resorted to. Given how bloodthirsty the Scots could be, particularly when provoked, this makes parricide a rather unique kind of criminal act and one that can illuminate much about the limitations of the Scottish criminal psyche rather than its reach and significance. ⁵⁷ For that reason, parricide has much to tell us about Scottish society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the nature of the intrafamilial relationships that existed and undoubtedly evolved during that time.