The Penitent Murderer: A Study of Youth Crime News in Seventeenth-Century London

This study reviews a corpus of eight seventeenth-century printed news texts that reported and commented on the notorious murder of apprentice John Knight by his companion Nathaniel Butler in London in 1657. Charting the complex chronological sequence of re- porting, the paper situates the media frenzy within the anxious “godly order” of the Puritan Protectorate, a period marked by intense civic scrutiny of youth and social discipline. In the second half of the paper I focus in particular on one pamphlet from this corpus in which civic and religious authorities, including the Lord Mayor’s Chaplain and the state’s printer, exploited the news for commercial advantage while transforming the crime into a moral spectacle, ultimately shifting blame for urban disorder onto the failure of private household governance.