On the evening of 30 May 1593, the sounds of a heated argument could be heard emanating from a boarding house in Deptford, a district of London on the south bank of the River Thames. Two of the boarders were quarreling over which of them should pay the bill – or ‘the reckoning’ – for the supper they had just finished. As the argument escalated, a dagger was suddenly and “maliciously” drawn and one of the men attacked the other, inflicting “two wounds on his head of the length of two inches, and of the depth of a quarter inch” (quoted in Wells, 99). The wound, though deep, was not fatal, but the wounded man now feared for his life. After a desperate struggle, he wrenched the dagger free from his attacker’s hands and gave his opponent “a mortal wound over his right eye” (ibid, 100). The attacker died instantly, according to the coroner’s report, although modern medical opinion holds that he likely lived for several minutes before succumbing to his injury.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original article at https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2702/the-violent-and-mysterious-death-of-christopher-ma/.
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