Thanks everyone for interesting and helpful comments. Keep them coming!!
Any stillbirth to an unmarried mother was automatically deemed as abortion or infanticide unless proved otherwise (I can't remember when it changed - this was in some old midwifery history book I've got)
That is interesting. I wonder if it still applied in 1865? It would seem she certainly wasn't considered guilty of infanticide or sh'ed have been imprisoned for more than 2 weeks.
Offences Against the Person Act 1861
Thanks for this reference, it was almost certainly current at the time, just 4 years later. This was clearly not considered a serious crime, but a "misdemeanor" with a maximum penalty of only 2 years. Since Betsey only received 2 weeks, it must have been considered minor, or else the judge was hugely sympathetic.
It sounds like a very lenient sentence? Could she have been "feeble minded" in some way? Such girls always have been, and still are, taken advantage of.
I have wondered the same thing. This was her third child (that we know of) before age 23. She was in the workhouse for a while, which was for people unable to find work or unable to do work. Since her family was nearby, you'd think they'd care for her unless they had given up trying to help her, for whatever reason. The four possible theories I can come up with are (1) naivete, (2) mental disability, (3) working as a prostitute, or (4) very unfortunate.
The story handed down in the family was that she was working in "the big house" and was taken advantage of by the son of the squire, who then paid a man in the village to accept paternity. Closer investigation reveals many holes in that story (not least that the paternity case was for her first child, and the man in the village contested paternity, whereas the family link is through the second child. So I think the story was probably invented to save family reputation, but it does illustrate the difficulties facing young women in service in those days. They needed #MeToo back then!
Sometimes there are newspaper articles on these sorts of cases and at times give a bit of information on the mother's life. Could be worth a look. Prison records might give something up as well.
I have a newspaper report, but it says little beyond the fact that she was single, the location (a village about 20 km from the small villages where she and her family had lived), and the fact that the child died immediately after being born, and she disposed of it by wrapping it in a bundle and placing it under the bed (which sounds a very naive thing to do). I haven't seen prison records betond the court case summary.
There are thousands of newspaper reports on cases of concealing the birth of a child. The earliest one in the British Newspaper Archive is for March 1803.
I have never heard of it before, but I will have to look it up. Thanks.
Are you sure that the person convicted was the one who had given birth?
The court return says "her child" and the newspaper account says the same. From what others have said, the light sentence probably indicates a degree of sympathy and an assessment of little culpability.
Thanks again everyone, I hope more can be found about this and similar cases.