In 1827, in Polstead, Suffolk, Maria Marten was murdered by her lover William Corder.
Until the 1970s I had no knowledge of my family’s connection to this event. Prior to discovering that my direct line female ancestry leads back to Polstead … Maria Marten was my G G G Grandmother’s cousin, I had from childhood experienced on several occasions a very scary and startling waking dream. I’d close my eyes and immediately see a decomposing head … that seemed to be “alive”. The Wiki article doesn’t mention it but during the trial the pathologist caused a sensation (so The Times reported) by producing Maria Marten’s head from a bag, in open court,.
Recently there has been speculation that events experienced by long dead ancestors can be epigenetically transmitted to the consciousness … my experiences always happened when I was very tired. R D Laing (a psychiatrist who attracted world-wide attention in the 60s and 70) speculated that mental illness may have something to do with the experiences of ancestors.
So, if someone hears about or sees their cousin’s decapitated head, the memory can be genetically passed on for five generations? I’m not seeing the benefit or the mechanism. Much more likely that you heard a story about the head when very young, with the fearful image sticking in memory, but not the memory of hearing the story/stories. Fear memory is much stronger than episodic memory. Still, it’s an interesting bit of family history.
Just a quick check on R.D. shows his ideas “ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day”, and that day was before genetic screening and brain scans. His big theory was that mental illness was the result of a battle between your true self and the expected self that your family and society had constructed. So, no genetic component to mental illness. It’s your family’s fault or the world’s fault.
I can’t find anything about him hypothesizing inherited memories. He seemed to have been against heredity and pro personal influence, in general. Although there were comments that he got odd after being withdrawn from the medical register in 1987 due to alcoholism, so he could have said something about inherited memories then. Personally, the views of anyone described as A Sixties Celebrity Guru should be taken with a grain of salt.
Laing’s analyst, Dr David Cooper, was eventually sectioned … after he began clamiing that other psychiatrists were putting evil spirits into patients they sent to him. Laing, in his later life, had a habit of fleeing the room when disturbed patients started acting up. Both Cooper and Laing became alcoholics … after experimenting with a wide range of psychedic drugs.
But Marten’s head wasn’t ‘decomposing’ when the surgeon, John Lawton, produced it at the trial - it was just the skull. Indeed, according to the author of the published account of the trial, ‘it did not exhibit a very ghastly appearance’ (p. 174 footnote).
My G G G Grandmother, Sarah Bedford, Maria’s cousin, was 15 at the time of the trial. In 1833 she became pregnant out of wedlock. She baptised her child as Emmaretta Bedford … then got a bastardy order against a man she claimed was the father. He, faced with having to support the child, which would mean he could not support a wife as well, reluctantly married her. … but never acknowledged Emmaretta as his daughter. There was no other child in the locality with the name Emmaretta. Corder was at risk of having to support Maria’s child if she got herself pregnant by another man and claimed the child was his.
They found the falling down timbers
Of a spooky old barn
Out there like a slave ship
Upside down
Wrecked beneath the waves of grain
When the river is low
They find old bones and
When they plow they always
Dig up chains