In or just before 1591, in the city of Salisbury, a young, unmarried woman named Alice Shepheard was horrified to discover she was pregnant. If exposed she would be branded as a “bastard bearer”, a “harlot” and a “whore”, who could expect no more than ruination and exile from her community. Like so many women in her situation, she hid her pregnancy and gave birth in secret, with only her grandmother and a sympathetic midwife in attendance. Alice was delivered of a healthy baby boy, and to save herself she killed him and then buried his body in a shallow grave in a nearby churchyard.
For a time the infant remained hidden, until a passing dog caught the scent of decay and “with his feete scraped it up out of the ground” and “laid it open to the eye of each passenger”. The unearthed body was soon noticed and the hue and cry of murder went out. The midwife, “touched in conscience”, gave both Alice and her grandmother over to the authorities. All three women were tried at the next assizes and sentenced to death.
Reports of the case made much of the “wonderous discovery” of the murdered child. The dog, it was said, was not simply an animal driven by instinct to dig up a corpse, but a divine messenger who had been sent by God to uncover the heinous sin. “See the will and wonderfull woork of almighty God to reveale this most wicked act,” wrote one pamphleteer, who warned his readers that, through such miraculous signs, God would not suffer murder to go unpunished.
Supernatural evidence
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