introduction tive, or any motive, of interest. Equally, studies can seek to identify motives even when there were no confessions or other sources for the perpetrator’s views. Alastair Bellany, for example, uses material such as reported shouts to interpret the motives behind a crowd committing a murder in London in 1628.7 And of course, reading from the sources and the literature, the greatest uncertainty about a perpetrator’s primary motive seems often to have existed in the mind of the perpetrator.8 The direct motive most often discussed in the literature was probably the wish to go to heaven soon instead of living out one’s span until a natural but uncontrolled death.9 However, several variations can be found. Was the main reason the hope for a certain way to salvation? Or the fear of not resisting the temptations of the devil, or perhaps a particular temptation? Or of falling into apostasy, and so going to hell? Or was it the horrors of life here that needed to be replaced? Étienne Esquirol suggested, beside this, two other primary motives: a lack of courage to commit suicide and the wish to reach another life with the object of their affection.10 The latter motive was not defined any further by Esquirol. Not mentioned by Esquirol, however, was one motive that stood out from the others: the avoidance of corporal punishment. Prisoners and members of the armed forces lived in cultures where frequent corporal punishment was the norm, and some found it better to die than be subject to it. Soldiers, for example, might commit a murder in order to be executed instead of facing a feared corporal punishment, such as running the gauntlet.11 It has also occurred that soldiers condemned to death refused to ask for mercy for fear of being reprieved to a corporal punishment.12 As late as 1856 a prisoner in Waldheim responded to repeated corporal punishment by requesting that he instead should be executed.13 7 Bellany 2008 p 42. 8 See, for example, Andersson 1988, p 103 sqq and cases cited there; Report of the Capital Punishment Commission 1866, p 173 sq. 9 See e g Krogh 2012 p 45 sq and Bergman 2010 p 137 sqq, 148 sqq. 10 Esquirol 1838II:341. 11 See also Krogh 2012 p 31 and Byard and Maxwell Stewart 2018 p 1147. 12 See e g Charpentier 1969 p 112 sqq. 13 Bretschneider 2015 p 282 sq. 22
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