English
‘Tis Fearful Sleeping in a Serpent’s Bed’: Arden of Faversham and the Threat of the Petty Traitor
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
On Valentine’s Day, 1551, Alice Arden, the wife of a Kentish customs official, conspired with her lover, several servants, and two hired criminals to kill her husband at his own dinner table before disposing of his corpse in a nearby field. The crime—along with details of Alice’s and her co-conspirators’ apprehension and execution for (respectively) petty treason and murder—was documented in official records, popular prose accounts, and historical chronicles including Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, 1587) and John Stow’s Annals of England (1592). The murder also inspired the Elizabethan domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1592) and at least one ballad, The Complaint and Lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feuersham in Kent, Who for the Love of One Mosbie, Hired Certaine Ruffians and Villaines Most Cruelly to Murder her Husband; with the Fatall End of Her and Her Associats (1633), which ventriloquizes the treacherous Alice’s remorse in forty-eight quatrains, just before her spectacular death at the stake. That this middle-class murder continued to stimulate fresh literary interpretations decades after it occurred attests to the crime’s grip on the contemporary imagination, in a period when the analogical framing of the household as “a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof God’s glory may be advanced” made murderous wives agents of profound discord, akin to political dissidents and religious heretics, and in equal need of suppression.
Publication Title
Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame
Publication Date
2019
Volume
10
First Page
340
Last Page
355
ISSN
2352-0299
DOI
10.1163/9789004400696_016
Keywords
coverture, Alice Arden, Arden of Faversham, murder, Medieval literature, petty treason
Repository Citation
Berg, Dianne, "‘Tis Fearful Sleeping in a Serpent’s Bed’: Arden of Faversham and the Threat of the Petty Traitor" (2019). English. 9.
https://commons.clarku.edu/facenglish/9
