This chapter derives from a project aimed at studying the long-term history of violence in England. Its evidentiary base is drawn from materials amassed in the course of Economic and Social Research Council-funded project on the history of violence, and in particular homicide, in the county of Cheshire between 1600 and 1800, and from subsequent research into Cheshire sources. The chapter looks at the input of female observers and onlookers into cases where a woman was the victim of homicidal violence. It examines the input of women witnesses and other participants into what was the most normal form of fatal homicide in the period in question: male-on-male violence resulting in a fatality. If many of these incidents of male-on-male violence took place in alehouses, women were frequently present as proprietors, wives of proprietors or servants. As might be expected, the involvement of women is less pronounced in what was the most common form of non-infanticidal homicide in these Cheshire materials.
