TUDOR MURDER FILES

Discover how one murderer was gruesomely 'pressed to death', and another boiled alive for poisoning his victims. In the 16th century there was no organised police force and the role of the humble parish constable, unpaid and appointed for a year by local aldermen, was important at this stage. In 1595, William Randolph, a grazier from Cardiff, was murdered near Aylesbury. Descriptions of the suspects who had been acting suspiciously before Randolph's dead body was found in the thicket helped track one of the culprits down to as far away as Wales. Other gruesome cases in this murderous file include strangled with a scarf and burned in an oven (1518), butchered on the bridge (1527), a posh poacher snared in the noose (1541), stabbed and dangled from a castle window (1546), bludgeoned during a game of backgammon (1551), ambushed by the red bandits (1555), hanged by a rope made of silk (1557), a royal corpse under a pear tree (1567), the bride who poisoned her husband with pancakes (1590), the man who killed his own children for money (1590), murdered for pulling another man's nose (1591), Sir Francis Drake investigates (1591), who killed Christopher Marlowe? (1593), and death by sex (1594) among them. 31 cases reviewed in the Tudor Age where the murder rate was five times higher than it is today. 208pp in large softback with many images.