Posted by Krista J. Kesselring, 27 October 2025.
Medievalists who have touched on such questions suggest that references to the devil in English legal records were often exculpatory.[1] Similarly, writing of the eighteenth century, Owen Davies highlights references to the devil in criminal narratives that excused wrongdoing.[2] But over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it seems that talk of being seduced by the devil came to demonize particular offences while firmly imputing guilt to the failings of all-too-human offenders.
What prompts the questions posed above is a line that appeared in many criminal indictments in the years I usually study, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: an assertion that the individual charged with an offence acted as they did “not having the fear of God before [their] eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil.” For many years, the line was a standard, formulaic part of many indictments, but when and why did it first appear?
Suicide
The presence and significance of phrasing that asserted diabolic instigation has had some attention from historians who study suicide. In the past, many people deemed suicide both a grave sin of despair and a felonious, criminal act of “self-murder.” (People found criminally culpable for their own deaths risked a demeaning burial of their remains as well as forfeiting the property that might otherwise have gone to their heirs.) In some cases, though, a coroner’s jury might deem the victim non compos mentis instead, and thus not criminally responsible. Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy’s history of suicide in early modern England noted that verdicts of felonious self-murder—with references to the devil’s instigation—were the norm in inquests in their samples from the 1660s and into the 1700s, until a “secularization” in attitudes tilted the balance of responses away from treating such deaths as criminally sinful. Among the responses to MacDonald and Murphy’s study of suicide were suggestions that they made too much of phrasing that was merely a formulaic way of denoting deaths that jurors deemed willing, intentional, and thus criminal. [3]
Perhaps, but medieval historians have shown that the line describing a self-slayer as acting at the instigation of the devil wasn’t always present, let alone formulaic. One can certainly find references to diabolic provocations in medieval suicide inquests, but they’re scattered, short, and sometimes ambiguous. Searching through medieval coroners’ inquests, Sara Butler found that juries deemed some 79% of the suicides felonious, but that only 14 out of 718 inquests spread over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries referenced diabolic or demonic influences. Jurors decided that one woman had killed herself because she was “vexed by a demon,” for example. Another died “through the temptation of an evil spirit.” Of the 14 inquests that mentioned demonic influence, half deemed the act felonious, half excusable.[4] Gwen and Alice Seabourne noted something similar in their study of suicide in medieval law: they found only a scarce few references to diabolic incitement, references that sometimes excused the act, sometimes not.[5]
So, when and in what contexts did people start to reference the devil’s instigation more frequently? Samples of inquests suggest that the language of diabolic incitement may only have become common in the sixteenth century—and it did so in ways that more clearly affirmed or afforced an individual’s responsibility for a serious crime against both the king’s peace and God himself. Something else was added to the references to the devil’s instigation more frequently by the middle of the century: the clause noting that the individual had failed to keep the fear of God before their eyes.[6] That addition firmly imputes responsibility to the individual. It removes any ambiguity about whether the diabolic influence mitigated or worsened the offence. In samples of suicide inquests from the sixteenth century, the language of diabolic instigation becomes fairly common, with the addition of the God-fearing line happening haphazardly from about 1540 and the two being regularly paired by century’s end.
In a batch of suicide inquests from 1530, for example, roughly half reference the devil but none mention the individual’s failure to fear God. Skipping ahead to 1550, a higher proportion of the suicide inquests reference the devil, and some now include the line about the fear of God. It’s used alongside words such as feloniously, voluntarily, and maliciously—language the jurors used to assert the offender’s intent, ill will, and culpability.[7] By 1600, phrasing denoting both the devilish temptation and the failure to fear God had become the standard terminology in suicide inquests, though sometimes still with new variations to suggest that it hadn’t yet become fully formulaic.[8]
Treason
Why did this line about being moved and seduced by the devil and failing to fear God come to be grafted more frequently into inquests and indictments? What did it do? The earliest English criminal indictments in which I’ve yet found the full formula arose in the 1520s and 30s, not for suicides but in accusations of treason. Used in high profile cases in which Henry VIII and his closest counsellors took a direct interest, the line linked crimes against the king with offences against God—treason with apostasy—and described offences not readily punishable unless malicious intent could be shown. It had not been a regular part of late medieval treason charges, but reference to diabolic instigation appeared in the 1521 indictment of Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham. A man with royal blood and exceptional wealth, Buckingham was charged with having entertained prophecies of the king’s death and talk of his own succession thereafter. Henry VIII’s effort to take the duke down raised legal and evidentiary qualms: accompanied by no overt acts, did Buckingham’s purported words alone constitute treason? And did a case built on hearsay and the testimony of servants suffice for a conviction?[9] Perhaps adding the line about diabolic instigation helped emphasise Buckingham’s supposedly malicious intent.
The phrase soon reappeared in other high profile treason cases, the most famous being the 1534 trials of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher. Their prosecutions were distinctive in the use of the language of “malice,” something More himself commented on in his defence. The words for which More faced death didn’t clearly fit the legal definition of treason on their own, so the prosecution needed to insist upon the maliciousness of those words, the malicious intent and ill will behind them. The language of diabolical instigation may have helped shore up this notion of malice, or maleficia of a sort.[10] Thereafter, this line regularly appeared in English treason charges.[11]
The Devil Abroad
One does find the phrase used earlier in other jurisdictions, also in ways that emphasize malicious intent and thus the peculiar heinousness of the offence. In their studies of late medieval Italian court records, Trevor Dean, Lidia Domingues, and others have noted that charges in serious cases of homicide and especially abhorrent sex crimes such as incest, sodomy, and violent sexual assault sometimes referred to diabolical influences and an offender’s active turning away from God. Joanne Vitiello notes a 1388 case in Reggio, for example, in which a woman charged with harmful magic was said to have been “instigated by a diabolical spirit, not having God or his mother the glorious virgin Mary before her eyes, but rather the enemy of the human race.”[12]
So, versions of the line were used earlier elsewhere. We’ve no strong basis to claim that the cases of the duke of Buckingham, More and Fisher in the early 1500s were the first in England to use the phrase, but they may alert us to its new purchase and utility. It was conjoined to the malice, or maleficia, that came to set some offences apart. The phrase became more widely used as the century progressed: for treason cases certainly, for suicides perhaps most frequently, and also for especially heinous interpersonal homicides. It also appears in a few self-defence killings, to show the maliciousness of the original attacker’s intent, and thus help absolve the killer of guilt.[13] In the late sixteenth century, it also starts to appear in some indictments for witchcraft.[14]
By the late sixteenth century and turn to the seventeenth, we find use of this phrase expanding beyond offences for which a special malicious intent had to be asserted to egregious moral crimes more generally. In a sample of 220 felony indictments from 1600, for example, it appears in 15 charges: murder (7), seditious words (5), witchcraft (1), buggery (1), and rape (1).[15] These weren’t the usual sorts of homicides but especially disturbing murders: a wife who poisoned her husband, a man who threw another into burning coals, for example. In the buggery case, interestingly, when jurors indicted William Knowler for carnal knowledge of a pig, they described him as “not having God before his eyes nor considering the dignity of human nature, but seduced by diabolical instigation.”[16]
So, jurors or the clerks who converted their discussions to text came to use variations on the line more frequently but not indiscriminately—for crimes where malicious intent mattered and for some other offences that jurors deemed egregiously immoral. In later years, yes, the line became a standard formalism, what eighteenth-century legal writers might describe as an unnecessary “surplusage.” But in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it seems to have been used intentionally and selectively: to demonize particular offences, but in ways that firmly imputed criminal culpability to the offenders. The offenders so described may have been seduced by the devil but became susceptible only because they turned their eyes from God.
The evidence from the indictments fits with what we see in the crime pamphlets of the pulp press, sermons, and literary texts, as studied by Nathan Johnstone and others: Johnstone noted a “widespread perception of increased diabolic activity” in the sixteenth century, beginning before the Reformation but enhanced by its divisions, and building to a zenith in the mid-seventeenth-century civil war years. Johnstone was partly concerned to show that fears of Satan’s powers to manipulate humans to his ends went beyond witchcraft alone. Johnstone observed that references to the devil’s “intrusive power” appeared in news pamphlets on murders as well as those on witchcraft, with the offenders not “demonized” in the sense of being dehumanized, but rather held up as warnings of the sins to which any of us might succumb. [17] The evidence from the indictments supports Johnstone’s points, I think—and invites us to consider how people used the figure of the devil to conceptualize intent, consent, criminality, and culpability. The devil’s seductive power helped explain why some people fell into heinous crimes, but it did not excuse them.
That said, people brought the devil and demonic into early modern courts in other ways that were said to impair consent and excuse decisions. To some observers, at least, the actions of evil spirits could moderate human responsibility in some cases. We see hints of this even in the witchcraft statutes themselves: all three of the major English Acts on the subject imposed penalties on people who used witchcraft to “provoke any person to unlawful love.” The idea that a person could conjure evil spirits to have someone do something that they would not otherwise have done also appeared in allegations of forced marriage: parents and guardians sometimes maintained that abductors had drawn on devilish aid and magical means to seduce children into unsuitable unions.[18] Such talk suggests that people believed that bewitchment could impair consent—the devil’s agency at one remove could diminish a person’s responsibility for their acts. People who let themselves fall directly prey to the devil’s seduction because they failed to keep the fear of God before them were more guilty of more heinous crimes than others; but people who were seduced by others using magical means might at least warrant some sympathy or protection.
And some people argued that full scale demonic possession absolved a person of responsibility for thoughts and actions, too. But this was hotly disputed: did possession, unlike obsession or bewitchment, not require some degree of consent from the victim? Moreover, possession was hard to prove and easy to fake. Samuel Harsnett made a career for himself debunking false possessions and exorcisms by both “papists” and puritans. In his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), he depicted it as a Catholic failing when priests denied a person’s responsibility for their thoughts and words while under demonic control. When one young woman admitted to murderous intent, the priests said “it was not she but the devil”; in another case, “it was not she that spake but the devil.”[19] Harsnett had no patience for such talk, but the degree to which the devil’s agency overrode that of an individual in cases of purported possession remained contested—not unlike discussions of insanity, anger, and inebriation.
Evidently, talk of the devil didn’t always intensify perceptions of a person’s culpability in early modern England. But in looking at the language in criminal indictments, I think we see a phrase that was for a time more than a mere formalism: in its early years, it aggravated rather than excused an offence and heightened rather than diminished responsibility for a crime by emphasizing the offender’s failure to fear God. It brings to mind Sir Edward Coke’s verdict that “a drunkard who is voluntaries daemon [a voluntary madman]” should have “no privilege thereby, but what hurt or ill so ever he doth, his drunkenness doth aggravate it.” As Elizabeth Papp Kamali has recently suggested, writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries took a firmer line than had their predecessors in arguing that inebriation heightened criminal culpability.[20] The perceived effects of the devil’s temptations seemed similar. In the indictments, we see evidence of concerns about the devil’s agency in offences beyond witchcraft and suicide alone, concerns that intensified over the 1500s, a chronology that fits with what others have described as a “demonization” of sixteenth-century Europe.[21] But we see a phrase that also, implicitly, offered guidance on how the devil’s influence could be fought by human agency: one simply need to keep one’s eyes on God. Less simply, though, one also needed to demand the same of others. The devil might just be in the details after all.
Images:
Cover image: a detail from Bartolomé Bermejo, Saint Michael Slays the Devil (1468), via Wikimedia Commons.
Document images: Used with permission, © The National Archives, Kew.
Bottom image: from the title page of I.T., A horrible creuel and bloudy murther, committed at Putney … vpon the body of Edward Hall (London, 1614), image via ‘Shakespeare Documented,’ courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.
Notes:
[1] See Gwen and Alice Seabourne and Sara M. Butler, cited below on suicide, and on felony more generally see Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2019), esp. 63, 94. Kamali noted a handful of texts in which individuals were said to have acted “at the enticement of the devil” – and in which the references seemed to mitigate a person’s guilt.
I first discussed this material at the May 2024 conference, “The Devil 2024,” at the University of King’s College, Halifax. My thanks to participants at that enormously informative and enjoyable event for their helpful comments. For a good introduction and overview of changing understandings of the devil over time, see the recent collection from some of the organizers of that conference: The Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition, ed. Richard Raiswell, Michelle Brock, and David Winter (Routledge, 2025).
[2] Owen Davies, “Talk of the Devil: Crime and Satanic Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century England,” University of Hertfordshire, 2007.
[3] Michael MacDonald, “The Secularization of Suicide in England, 1660-1800,” Past and Present 111 (1986) and MacDonald and Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1990). The trend they called “secularization” others might now call “medicalization” or part of a broader desacralization. For a critical response, see R.A. Houston, Punishing the Dead? Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Among other works responding to Macdonald and Murphy relevant to this discussion, see esp. Sonja Deschrijver, “From Sin to Insanity? Suicide Trials in the Spanish Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 42.4 (2011), 981-1002 at 993-4: based on a set of 130 records from 1500-1700, she found references to demonic temptation reaching a high point in the first half of the seventeenth century – and at the same time as witchcraft prosecutions.
[4] Sara M. Butler, “Women, Suicide, and the Jury in Later Medieval England,” Signs, 32.1 (2006), 144-66 at 152 and Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015), 201-2, 222, 245.
[5] Gwen Seabourne and Alice Seabourne, “The Law on Suicide in Medieval England,” Journal of Legal History, 21 (2000), 21-48 at 32-3. My thanks to Gwen and Sara for discussing these cases with me.
[6] Presumably inspired by language in Psalms 36:1 and Romans 3:18.
[7] See J.G. Bellamy, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England (Sutton Publishing, 1998), 29, on “phrases of afforcement,” language that grand and coroners’ juries added to indictments to emphasize the heinousness of particular offences to the trial jurors to follow.
[8] All samples of coroners’ inquests and indictments come from The National Archives, Kew (TNA), KB 9/481, 481, 477, 482; KB 9/545, 546, 547, 548; KB 9/703, 704, 706, etc.
[9] For the indictment: TNA, KB 8/5, m. 28. [The reference to the devil does not appear in the subsequent act of attainder, though: 14 & 15 Henry VIII, c. 20. The first attainder act in which it appears seems to be that of John and Alice Wolfe for murder, 25 Henry VIII, c. 34 (1533).] Barbara J. Harris counters the conventional treatment of Buckingham’s trial and execution as “thinly veiled acts of judicial murder” but still identifies the legal and evidentiary concerns: Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1478-1521 (Stanford University Press, 1986), 185-202. See also Mortimer Levine, “The Fall of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham,” in Tudor Men and Institutions, ed. Arthur J. Slavin (Louisiana State University Press, 1972). A monk had told the duke that upon the king’s death he would succeed, whereupon one of the duke’s servants warned him that the monk might be deluded by the devil and that it was evil to meddle with such things, but the duke said it could not harm him and reportedly “rejoiced” in the monk’s prophecy. My thanks to Dan Gosling for discussing the language of treason indictments with me (and for suggesting the title of the post!)
[10] Thomas More’s Trial by Jury, ed. Henry Ansgar Kelly, Louis W. Karlin, and Gerard Wegemer (Boydell, 2011), 11-16, 49, 134; J.G. Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (Routledge, 1979), 33; and Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017), 245-6.
[11] See also, e.g., David M. Head, “’Beyng Ledde and Seduced by the Devyll’: The Attainder of Lord Thomas Howard and the Tudor Law of Treason,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13.4 (1982), 3-16 for the 1536 proceedings against Howard for marrying the king’s niece. On the more pervasive linking of treason and the devil in writings from later years, see especially Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 184-96.
[12] Trevor Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33; Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues, Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: Siena, 1260-1330 (Oxford University Press, 2021), 142; Joanne Carraway Vitiello, Public Justice and the Criminal Trial in Late Medieval Italy: Reggio Emilia in the Visconti Age (Brill, 2016), 166.
[13] TNA, KB 9/703, m. 81. See also KB 9/582, m. 68, in which a would-be rapist was described as having acted upon diabolical instigation, and his death at his intended victim’s hands was characterized as accidental, cited in Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromwelski, “Coroners’ Inquest Juries in Sixteenth-Century England,” Continuity and Change 37 (2022), 365-88 at 383.
[14] David Lederer, Jeffrey Watt, and Sonja Deschrijver have noted a “nexus between prosecutions” for both suicide and witchcraft in the continental jurisdictions they studied, with the crimes rising and falling together in ways that warrant more attention: David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 242-3; Jeffrey R. Watt, “Suicide, Gender, and Religion: The Case of Geneva,” in From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Cornell University Press, 2004), 138-157, at 150-3; and Deschrijver, “From Sin to Insanity?”
[15] TNA, ASSI (Assize) files for Essex, Suffolk, and Kent: ASSI 35/42/2; ASSI 35/42/7; ASSI 35/42/8; ASSI 35/42/5.
[16] TNA, ASSI 35/42/5, m. 20v (emphasis added). For similar phrasing in another Essex case, see Essex RO, Q/SR 129/93, discussed in Courtney Thomas, “’Not Having God Before his Eyes’: Bestiality in Early Modern England,” The Seventeenth Century 26.1 (2011), 149-73 at 150.
[17] Johnstone, Devil and Demonism, esp. 213, 216. On the role of the devil in witchcraft narratives, see also Charlotte-Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2017).
[18] See, e.g., TNA, STAC 8/305/3 and STAC 8/63/22.
[19] Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603), 194, 212. On possession, see, e.g., Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Erika Gasser, Vexed With Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York University Press, 2017).
[20] Co. Litt. 247a, cited in Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “The Horrible Sepulture of Mannes Resoun: Intoxication and Medieval English Felony Law,” Rechtsgeschichte 30 (2022): 20-44 at 40.
[21] See, e.g., Lederer, Watt, and Johnstone, cited above.
Legal History Miscellany 
