Robert Perceval’s wraith: death omens and male violence in late seventeenth-century London

The folklore and history of death omens has been little studied, but the power of strange events to foretell death seems to have been strongly believed in early modern Ireland and Britain. This paper will use examples from the late seventeenth century to probe beliefs around death omens, focusing in particular on the case of nineteen-year-old Robert Perceval, who had become involved with a group of young gentlemen who spent their time drinking, carousing and feuding around the playhouses, streets and taverns of London. Days before his violent death in 1677, Robert claimed that he had seen ‘his own Apparition bloody and ghastly stalking into his chamber’. This was a wraith or fetch, potentially a harbinger of good or bad fortune and Perceval’s understanding of its import may have been influenced by both his Irish and English heritage. His consternation about what this ‘spectre’ portended is well caught in an account written many years later by his nephew, which also recorded other supernatural phenomena attending Robert’s death. Despite the efforts of his uncle and guardian, Sir Robert Southwell, Perceval was unable to extract himself from the homosocial world of ‘brawling and duelling’ which Vanessa McMahon has characterised as occurring in ‘male contexts and male spaces to fulfil an especially male sense of honour’. But the family lore around his unfortunate end was to be told and retold as a cautionary example of dishonour and shame: a warning about how not to be a man.