Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Volume 2

Boundaries, Behaviours and Bodies

David G. Barrie, Susan Broomhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472449672
• eBook ISBN: 9781317079231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Volume 2 of this two-volume companion study into the administration, experience, impact and representation of summary justice in Scotland explores the role of police courts in moulding cultural ideas, social behaviours and urban environments in the nineteenth century. Whereas Volume 1, subtitled Magistrates, Media and the Masses, analysed the establishment, development and practice of police courts, Volume 2, subtitled Boundaries, Behaviours and Bodies, examines, through themed case studies, how these civic and judicial institutions shaped conceptual, spatial, temporal and commercial boundaries by regulating every-day activities, pastimes and cultures. As with Volume 1, Boundaries, Behaviours and Bodies is attentive to the relationship between magistrates, the police, the media and the wider community, but here the main focus of analysis is on the role and impact of the police courts, through their practice, on cultural ideas, social behaviours and environments in the nineteenth-century city. By intertwining social, cultural, institutional and criminological analyses, this volume examines police courts' external impact through the matters they treated, considering how concepts such as childhood and juvenile behaviour, violence and its victims, poverty, migration, health and disease, and the regulation of leisure and trade, were assessed and ultimately affected by judicial practice.

Chapter 1
Violence and Vulnerability

I. Introduction

Drunk and disorderly conduct, assault and theft were the three most common charges in police courts. Indeed, assault and breach of the peace alone accounted for approximately one-third of cases in the Edinburgh Police Court’s formative years.¹ Violence brought before magistrates was that which procurators deemed did not warrant more than two-months’ imprisonment – the maximum length of sentence bailies could impose. Although this meant that many more serious crimes such as homicide, rape, assault using lethal weapons, or exposing children would be regularly remitted to higher courts, police court magistrates sat in judgement over a wide range of offences to persons and property that were considered violent. It seems likely therefore that they at least reflected, if not indeed actively shaped, notions of what violence was, who committed it, and which of its victims deserved attention, over the course of the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that conceptualisations of those who were considered victims (either personally or as a society) shaped the practices of the police courts in prosecuting violent behaviours.

Violence is a subject with a large historiography for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain,² although the particularities of Scottish violence and the role of police courts in echoing, sustaining and creating ideas of violence has been less well explored.³ Indeed, scholarship on Scottish violence has focused primarily on criminal prosecutions before the High Court of Justiciary,⁴ or on specific forms of violence such as domestic assault or gang culture, rather than on the lower courts where the vast majority of Scots who were deemed violent were prosecuted.⁵ A predominant consideration in much of the existing wider literature has been to chart the civilising process (or indeed whether there was one), seen through a diminution in violent behaviour from the early modern period to the modern age.⁶ Sociologists and historians have debated the civilising process and whether the courts were able to ‘civilise’ local populations in the nineteenth century.⁷ Broad cultural changes and civilising processes, allied with changes in prosecution and policing procedures, have been suggested as reasons why the prosecution of violence fell so substantially in England in the 1880–1920 period, although, as Volume 1 discussed, the experience of the Scottish police courts paints a somewhat different picture.⁸ While historians have used police prosecutions as a way of assessing these changes in social behaviours, scholars of the courts have pointed to the importance of understanding police pressures, culture and practices in shaping the extant data with which changing behaviours were charted.⁹ Violent crimes such as minor assaults pursued in contemporary English eighteenth-century summary courts have been characterised by Drew Gray as almost akin to civil offences where the magistrate’s role was to mediate between opposing sides of a conflict, in order to broker a settlement or reconciliation, rather than to punish petty violence.¹⁰ Scotland’s distinctive procedures, which ensured that public prosecutors, rather than victims, pursued cases through the police court, thus offer an opportunity to explore a different contemporary mechanism for the interrogation and control of violence, as well as to contribute to these wider historiographical debates.

The crucial role played by gender ideologies in explaining the treatment of violence before the law has been increasingly mined by scholars in recent years. Whether it is the ideals of femininity, masculinity, or both, contemporary understandings of gender have assumed a central role in explaining issues surrounding women’s experiences at the hands of domestic abusers, in discussions as to whether police courts ‘civilised’ urban populations and contributed to a decline in violence in general and, more commonly, in studies of witchcraft and infanticide. Growing revulsion towards violence as a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century middle-class manly conduct and dispute resolution has also been acknowledged by scholars.¹¹ They have argued that professional and mercantile men’s control of their bodies and passions was a sign of their ability and entitlement to govern, reflected in shifting and increasing regulation of their sexual conduct, manners and civility as recommended by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators.¹² More recently, gender analysis has been used to assess the policing of gender boundaries, in explaining trends and patterns in female crime, and in understanding how male and female behaviour was criminalised and treated differently by the police, courts and penal systems.¹³ But much work remains to be done on these areas, especially at a summary level, and on the importance of masculinity as well as femininity in determining those deemed vulnerable to violence as well as its perceived perpetrators, patterns and procedures in court. This chapter will be particularly attentive to the importance of the former, developing an integrated analysis of social and cultural histories of masculinity.¹⁴ The sources allow for focus on the lived experiences of both individual men and male collectives, understood in relation to the cultural codes in and through which men could act, and how power could be wielded, manipulated and expressed in the city.¹⁵ As John Tosh has observed, by the mid-nineteenth century civic men argued that the ever-growing industrialised city presented dangers from which women were to be shielded within the domestic domain.¹⁶ This chapter explores how such ideologies were projected or reflected through the practice of the police courts, analysing which men and women could be victims of violence or were perceived to be its perpetrators.¹⁷

Moreover, police courts offer opportunities to examine contemporary notions of violence and vulnerability in the data that it produced in such documents as police returns. The aim of this chapter is not, however, to assess whether there was a rise or fall in violence per se over the century. This would be somewhat futile, given that scholars have recognised that conceptualisations of violence are socially constructed,¹⁸ being redefined and reconceptualised over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to legal reforms,¹⁹ hardening attitudes and sensibilities towards interpersonal violence,²⁰ changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity,²¹ and the cultural construction of the ideal of the English gentleman that emphasised self-control, respectability and restraint.²² Moreover, as this chapter shows, police returns in Scotland inconsistently categorised violent crimes and offences over this period, thereby rendering it extremely difficult to accurately ascertain long-term changes in violent behaviours. The chapter aims instead to trace how violence was constructed in relation to social ideologies, geographical locations, legal factors and practical pressures, as it was prosecuted and punished by police courts. The violent offences which were prosecuted in police courts were those deemed less serious, such as common assault and disorderly and aggressive conduct, and excluded serious assault, such as violent sexual assault, grievous bodily harm and battery with intent to rob. The chapter contends that meanings of violence as well as its perceived victims were to change over the course of the nineteenth century, bringing new populations to the court as they were deemed vulnerable to, or susceptible to, violence. Violence for the police courts, seen as a relationship of power, did not merely involve direct victims of violent acts or indeed even only people, although interpersonal forms have garnered most attention from scholars. As this chapter argues, violence also involved property, animals and urban spaces, in ways that reflected and enshrined middle-class rights and expectations to legal protection and thus to power. Violence enacted in certain spaces of the city such as streets, factories and households was prosecuted unevenly, reflecting social norms, gender and class ideologies, and also the practical limitations of policing oversight.

An additional discourse about legal, social and cultural meanings of violence to be examined in this chapter was that which occurred through the media, particularly how it represented cases before the court and which victims and perpetrators were prioritised for media attention. Scholars have given important focus to media portrayals of violence at this period, typically in relation to higher court crimes, showing how instrumental the press could be in creating, sustaining and shaping notions of violence.²³ This chapter thus embeds the press as a key locus for the formation of, dissemination of, and changes to social ideologies (especially middle class) about how violence was to be determined, which forms of it were unacceptable, and which victims could expect protection from the police courts.

II. Policing, Property and the Press

Concerns about the protection of property had been at the heart of arguments for the establishment of police courts. In the growing towns of Scotland, men of property found the protection of their assets afforded by the burgh courts did not meet their expectations. The middle-class citizenry of Scotland’s cities had argued forcefully for the need to enable the police to safeguard their domestic and commercial domains more successfully.²⁴ This section explores how the notion of violence to property was interpreted within the courts, what kinds of people were perceived to be its perpetrators and victims, and how these determinations affected the disposal of offences concerning property damage.

Destruction of property was a matter of deep concern for middle-class citizens and thus for the courts. Indeed, so important was property considered that crimes against it committed with violence were remitted to the higher courts. This spoke volumes about the significance bestowed on this form of violence (and its victims). The most violent property offences disposed of in the Edinburgh and Glasgow police courts were wilful or malicious damage, and breaking or extinguishing public lamps or smashing windows. These did not represent a large percentage of the police courts’ business in their foundational years. As Table 1.1 indicates, only 18 cases of malicious damage passed through the Edinburgh Police Court in its first year of operation (1805–1806), accounting for less than one per cent of total cases. As Chapter 5 explores in more detail, such property violence, especially targeting lamps erected under police acts, could represent communi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 VIOLENCE AND VULNERABILITY
• 2 BREEDING CRIMINALS
• 3 COMMERCE AND COMMUNITY
• 4 PROTECTING, PURIFYING AND POLLUTING
• 5 TIME, PLACE AND PASTIMES
• 6 POVERTY AND PROSTITUTION
• CONCLUSION
• Selected Secondary Reading
• Glossary
• Index