The Strange & Wonderful Discovery of Mr Edmond Hally

Broadsheets were sold by hawkers on the streets of London. They were the seventeenth century equivalent of the modern tabloid press. Accounts of murders were hugely popular. Street literature of this kind stoked public fears over violent crime levels in the capital. This broadsheet describes the discovery of the body of Edmond Halley, the father of the famous astronomer.

Edmond Halley Senior lived in Winchester Street in the City and worked as a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London. Halley went missing on 5th March 1684. The following month his corpse was found washed up on the shore of the river Medway at Strood in Kent. The coroner concluded that Halley had been murdered. Pamphlets published in the wake of his death suggested that Halley was killed because he knew too much about the suspicious death of the Earl of Essex in the Tower the previous year.