When the Dead Cry: Crime, Population, and Popular Literature in Early Modern Southwark

Drawing on parish registers, records from the assizes, and an anonymous ballad, this article reconstructs the events surrounding the murder of John Clarke by his own master, silk weaver Richard Price. Price, it turns out, had killed before, and in many respects fits what we would today call a serial killer. The article thus examines the way parish registers might usefully be supplemented by legal and literary texts to get at not only the births, marriages, and deaths of parishioners in the aggregate but also their lived experience, how they responded to tragedy not on the nearby stage but in their neighborhood. The article thus argues for the importance of careful examination of the archives to understand the lives of ordinary people in the early modern period, and the article further suggests a symbiotic relationship between “big data” and microhistory.