Murder on Milk Street: News of Youth Crime in Seventeenth-Century London

This study argues that in order to comprehend the nature of the relationship between youth, crime and the media, it is important to have an adequate understanding not only of the present but also of the past. Accordingly, this study presents an analysis of two early modern British news pamphlets that report on a particular case of youth crime in which a young apprentice murdered a fellow apprentice and stole a large sum of money from the latter’s master. Through this analysis I attempt to show how the news media do not simply “report the facts” but actively construct their representations of the people, circumstances and events related to the crimes in ways which reflect political, social and, above all in this case, religious ideologies.