Chapter 27

Denounced by His Own Son 1594

Ralph Mepham knew all about fire. It was his job to dig for iron ore in the mines around Mayfield in Sussex and ‘make coals’. During the reign of Elizabeth, the village was at the centre of England’s most important iron-making region and the industry was booming. Hundreds of men were employed to extract the ore, which would then be smelted with charcoal to make the metal at one of the scores of new blast furnaces which dotted the countryside. By the 1590s the region’s iron industry was producing a massive 9,000 tons of iron per year, used in everything from nails to the navy’s cannons. In the twenty-first century, Mayfield nestles in a rural, agricultural setting, but in Mepham’s day it was a highly industrialized place full of noise and pollution with the brooding glow from the furnaces providing an eerie spectacle, both day and night.

In the late evening of 1 October, 1594, there was another blaze which lit up the sky in Mayfield. It was Ralph Mepham’s own house burning to the ground. The threat of fire filled Tudor men and women with dread. With most houses made of wood and other combustibles, a house could go up in minutes, and spread to other buildings quickly too. It was second nature for neighbours to keep a watchful eye on anything that might seem amiss at nearby properties. So when another villager, Joan Baylie, saw flames leaping from the Mepham house that night she cried out for help and ran to see what she could do. She believed both Ralph and his wife, also called Joan, to be out but that the couple’s five-year-old son was inside. Running into the house with some of her other neighbours to save the boy who was ‘like to perish’ she came across him still alive and hurried the youngster out of the property. The villagers then tried to salvage what goods they could from the burning house, but in the end the flames beat them back. It was only later that they found the charred body of Joan amid the burning embers. Yet it soon became clear that she had not died from the blaze or smoke inhalation. Her throat had been cut.

The parish constable was called for. He was a man described in a 1595 pamphlet as ‘very honest’, but it was unlikely that he had ever encountered anything so serious and at first he couldn’t ‘tell what course to take to find the murtherer.’ The pamphlet (in which Ralph’s surname is given as Deaphon) says that a coroner’s inquisition was immediately opened and that Joan Baylie was sent for ‘to finde what they coulde of the death of the woman’. But Joan had no more useful information. It was at this point that the surviving son, who was also called Ralph, was brought before the inquest and asked, by the coroner Magnus Fowle, to tell what he knew of the night’s terrible events. In A Most Horrible and Detestable Murder we are told that ‘the boy without any blushing feare tolde them that his father came home when his mother was a bed and first used some churlish speech unto her, then he drew out his knife.’ Ralph must have been sleeping in the same room as his mother for he was able to tell the court that next, without apparently hesitating for a moment, his father ‘cut her throat and left her to die.’ Despite his youth and the fact that he must surely have been traumatised by the death of his mother, Ralph junior was able to give the court a detailed description of the murder weapon, ‘describing in good order the bignes of the knife’ and even the colour of the handle. Given that his father was still alive, Ralph junior was either very brave or too young to understand the repercussions of the evidence he gave.

The pamphlet tells us that as soon as he had committed the murder, Ralph senior had calmly left the house leaving Joan bleeding to death or, as the anonymous author puts it: ‘weltering in her owne goare’. After the killing, the miner simply went back to work ‘without making any semblance of sorrow for this most odious murder.’ The fire that followed seems simply too coincidental to have been an accident, though the pamphlet tells us only that ‘leaving some candle or fire in such place of danger that the house therewith was fired.’ He may have knocked over a candle during his frenzy. More likely, Mepham had used one to set fire to the house, presumably with the intention of burning to death both Joan and his only son, so that he could not reveal what had happened. Yet the blaze had not destroyed the evidence as he had hoped, for his good neighbours had run to ‘quench it’.

Having survived, Ralph junior’s testimony was now seen as crucial. Quizzed by the coroner as to his father’s motive for the crime, the five-year-old could not offer any explanation. The pamphlet says: ‘Wherefore his father did this wicked deede hee coulde not say anything.’

Once the boy had given his evidence, the court ordered that Ralph senior should be brought to them immediately from his work place. Then they ‘strictly examined’ him over the facts as they had been presented to them by his son. However Ralph senior ‘stoutly and most audatiously denyed the fact.’ When asked where he had been whilst his house went up in flames, Mepham told the court that he had been at work the whole time. The coroner then asked to have a look at his knife, which Mepham duly pulled out of his pocket. It was observed that the blade was identical to the one that Ralph junior had described being ‘in all points for bignes, colour … and all other markes’, just as the child had earlier told the coroner. Mepham was then asked if the knife he had presented was actually owned by him. He told them that, in fact, it wasn’t and that he had ‘borrowed the same.’ The poor son was brought forward again and asked if this were true. He refuted this telling the coroner that the knife did indeed belong to his father.

Now it was the turn of Mepham’s workmates to come before the coroner and be questioned. They cast doubt on their colleague’s story that he had been at work at the time when the murder was committed. They all agreed that at about five o’clock on the night of Joan’s murder Mepham had left them. He had not returned to their mutual workplace until at least nine o’clock the same evening – after the fire had begun.

Their evidence, combined with Ralph junior’s startling revelations, seemed damning, but it was not quite enough for the coroner, who decided that Mepham should be placed in the town stocks overnight, with the hope that the sanction might encourage the suspect to confess. Yet the pamphlet goes on to describe how, ‘the next day being more thoroughly againe examined in the cause and the evidence being founde too apparent’ Mepham still denied having done the deed. The coroner was, however, satisfied that there was enough evidence to have him indicted – as long as the boy testified.

The official record of the inquest, from 8 October, shows that Ralph was alleged to have ‘murdered his wife Joan at Mayfield with a knife … which he held in his right hand, giving her a wound in the throat of which she died at Mayfield within an hour.’ Mepham was taken to the jail at Lewes awaiting the next assizes.

On 24 February, ‘with other notorious malefactours not unlike himselfe’ Mepham’s case was heard at the Grinstead assizes before Baron Robert Clarke and Serjeant Edward Drewe. Again Mepham’s son was called to give evidence, with the prosecution’s case largely resting on his testimony. He didn’t let them down. The pamphlet relates how he told the jury exactly what he told the coroner in a clear, loud voice, ‘which was in the child admired.’ It was enough to see his father found guilty and Mepham was sentenced to be hanged. The execution was carried out on 27 February, 1595, at Grinstead with, as far as we know, Mepham still claiming to be innocent of the crime. No clear motive seems to have been identified, but it was probable, given his son’s reaction that Mepham had subjected his wife to a long campaign of domestic violence and that, on one autumn night, he had finally lost all control.

What became of little Ralph the records do not tell us. The pamphlet concludes by warning: ‘Thus God revealeth the wicked practices of men who thought the act be kept never so secret.’ The court that convicted Mepham concerned itself with more mundane matters – carefully recording the value of the murder weapon as they always did. The knife used to kill Joan was said to have been worth two pence.