Crime in England 1688-1815

David Cox

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136184215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crime in England 1688-1815 covers the 'long' eighteenth century, a period which saw huge and far-reaching changes in criminal justice history. These changes included the introduction of transportation overseas as an alternative to the death penalty, the growth of the magistracy, the birth of professional policing, increasingly harsh sentencing of those who offended against property-owners and the rapid expansion of the popular press, which fuelled debate and interest in all matters criminal. Utilising both primary and secondary source material, this book discusses a number of topics such as punishment, detection of offenders, gender and the criminal justice system and crime in contemporaneous popular culture and literature.

This book is designed for both the criminal justice history/criminology undergraduate and the general reader, with a lively and immediately approachable style. The use of carefully selected case studies is designed to show how the study of criminal justice history can be used to illuminate modern-day criminological debate and discourse. It includes a brief review of past and current literature on the topic of crime in eighteenth-century England and Wales, and also emphasises why knowledge of the history of crime and criminal justice is important to present-day criminologists. Together with its companion volumes, it will provide an invaluable aid to both students of criminal justice history and criminology.

Information panel 1

Criminal courts in eighteenth-century England

During the period covered by this book criminal cases were first brought before one or more justices of the peace (JP) or magistrates – the terms are interchangeable – at Petty Sessions courts, which were held as and when the need arose and which were usually convened at a local community venue such as a public house, or occasionally at a magistrate’s home. For more serious cases, magistrates (who were all male – women were not allowed to sit as magistrates until 1919) could send the case up to Quarter Sessions, which, as their name implies, were held every quarter (January, April, July and October), usually in the county town. These were presided over by county magistrates and further differed from Petty Sessions in that presented cases were heard first before a Grand Jury (a body of influential propertied men who decided if a case should proceed to trial – a system that also applied to the higher court of Assizes and which was not abolished until 1933), and then before a jury of twelve selected men (it was not until 1919 that women were given limited rights to sit on juries).¹ In cases where the magistrates felt that they were unqualified to deal with the complex or serious nature of a crime (such as murder) defendants could be imprisoned for an often considerable period to await trial at the next County Assizes, which were presided over by State-appointed judges and which normally took place twice a year, usually in the county town, at Lent (March/April) and Trinity or Summer (July/August). London’s equivalent to the Assizes was the Old Bailey. A third Assize court – the Winter Assizes – could also be held if warranted by pressure of number of cases waiting to be tried in any particular year. The system of Petty Sessions, Quarter Sessions and Assizes was finally swept away by the passing of the Courts Act 1971 (19 & 20 Eliz. II c.23), which replaced the old system with Magistrates’ Courts (which deal with petty offences) and the Crown Court (which hears more serious criminal cases).

Note

    1  Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 (9 & 10 Geo. V c.71).

Information panel 2

The pre-decimal currency system

Throughout the period under discussion in this book the pre-decimal system of currency was utilized. Prior to decimalization in 1971 the British currency system was based on the ancient and complex system known as L.S.D. (derived from the Latin librae, solidi and denarii), more commonly known as £ (pounds), s. (shillings) and d. (pence). £1 was made up of 240 pennies (because a pound in weight of silver originally made that number of silver pennies), twelve of which made a shilling. The penny itself was subdivided into farthings (four of which made a penny) or halfpennies (two of which made a penny). To further complicate the matter there were also other coins of various denominations, including half-crowns (worth 2 shillings and 6 pennies) and florins (worth 2 shillings). A guinea (a solid gold coin) had its worth officially set at £1 and one shilling (i.e. twenty-one shillings) between 1717 and 1816. Another coin, the solid gold sovereign, ostensibly worth £1, had been in circulation in the medieval period, but was withdrawn between 1604 and 1817.

It is extremely difficult, if not ultimately impossible, to accurately equate monetary values from historical periods to those of the present day, owing to the fluctuating relative costs of and demand for basic goods and foods (for example, staple foodstuffs such as bread have become much cheaper, while property prices have risen exponentially), but a multiplication of somewhere in the magnitude of between 100 and 150 can generally be made to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century figures in order to roughly estimate their present-day values.¹

Note

    1  For a fascinating overview of inflation and relative purchasing power over the past millennium, see Peter Wilsher, The Pound in Your Pocket 1870–1970 (London: Cassell, 1970). A very useful website for price comparisons between the eighteenth century and today can be found at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/. This site provides both a currency converter and a facility to see the relative buying power of a given amount of money in two periods.

1	Introduction

Historical and geographical scope

This volume of the series History of Crime in the UK and Ireland covers 1688–1815, a period often referred to as the ‘long’ eighteenth century.¹ It therefore spans events from the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ (which resulted in the enforced removal of James II and the accession of his Dutch son-in-law William III and daughter Mary II) to the triumph of the duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. It concerns itself primarily with England, with occasional passing mention of Wales, which had formally become a part of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1536 and which was largely governed on the same legal principles as England, although there remained a clear division with regard to language and culture.

Scotland was a separate kingdom at the start of the period; it was not until the Acts of Union 1707 (6 Anne c.11 and Anne c.7) that it was joined politically with England and Wales (although the crowns of Scotland and England had merged in 1603 following the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne, whereby he also became James I of England). Similarly, Ireland remained a separate political entity until the Acts of Union 1800 (39 & 40 Geo. III c.67 and 40 Geo. III c.38). Throughout the eighteenth century both Scotland and Ireland enjoyed very different legal and judicial systems, and therefore these two countries remain largely outside the scope of this volume.²

Rationale

The book is written with both the criminal justice history/criminology student and the interested general reader in mind. It assumes no prior specialized knowledge of criminal justice history or criminology and it concisely describes and investigates key concepts and issues within a historical framework. The volume is by both necessity and design an overview of criminal justice history of the period. Therefore, a comprehensive Bibliography is included for those readers who wish to carry out more detailed study into particular aspects featured in the book, and all acts of parliament have been fully referenced to enable those interested in pursuing the legal aspect of a particular subject or case study to do so.³ A timeline of relevant major events is also included (see Appendix) in order to enable the reader to further contextualize the developments in criminal justice history within the general history of England during the period. Although part of a series dealing with the criminal history of the United Kingdom and Ireland during the past three centuries, this book is also intended to be a stand-alone introduction to the study of English criminal justice history in the eighteenth century.

It is hoped that, after reading this book (along with its companion volumes), the reader who is interested in criminology/criminal justice history or is studying either subject at university or college will be better equipped to understand how the past has influenced the development of present-day criminological thought. Although it is a well-worn truism that history never repeats itself, nevertheless a knowledge of what happened in similar circumstances in the past can undoubtedly inform our understanding of the present; as the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) memorably stated, ‘to be ignorant of what occurred before one was born is to remain forever a child’.⁴ What seem at first glance to be purely contemporaneous debates about the number of people undergoing sentence, the merits and drawbacks of incarceration as a punishment, the right not to be detained without charge, ever-increasing public and private surveillance, the role of the State in preventing terrorism and the costs of policing crime all have their origins in our common past, and this book will illustrate how many of these debates were first aired in the eighteenth century.

The period also saw many challenges and changes to the organization of authority in the nation state, together with the beginning of mass urbanization and manufacturing. The nature of what constituted crime and criminal behaviour and the ways in which perceived criminals were dealt with also changed markedly throughout the century. This volume describes these developments in detail, with several aspects being further highlighted by the use of carefully selected and researched case studies. It documents the use of new methods of punishment and incarceration in the period, with a movement from punishing the body to early forms of imprisonment (Bridewells, Houses of Correction, etc.), and also explores concepts such as the use of transportation of offenders to a foreign land as a perceived means of ‘cost-effective’ punishment, ‘social crime’ and the development of the ‘Poor Law’ and the concomitant division of the poor into the needy or the indolent. It also investigates and explains the dramatic rise in contemporary literature about ‘troublesome’ groups in society – sturdy beggars, disobedient apprentices, vagrants and highwaymen, to name but a few.

While present-day Britain is fortunate in possessing a reasonably robust and fair legislature and judiciary, together with largely democratically accountable police forces (although the extent of this accountability has been increasingly questioned in recent years, not least in the Metropolitan Police’s mishandling of several high-profile situations and the behaviour of members of South Yorkshire Police in relation to the Hillsborough disaster), this has not always been the case.⁵ This book shows that many of the constituents forming the bedrock of our present criminal justice system, including the right to defend oneself before a jury, the expectation of receiving a fair trial, the right to appeal after judgement, the existence of a professional, full-time and publicly funded accountable police force, the need for prosecutors to prove a defendant’s guilt rather than a defendant prove his/her innocence, the reliance on judges and juries to be apolitical and impartial and, finally, the knowledge that the majority of offenders are sentenced to defined and finite terms of imprisonment within regulated prisons, are in fact all relatively modern constructs.⁶ Many of our predecessors (especially if poor) simply could not depend on the majority of these rights.

Sources

This book uses a wide variety of primary and secondary sources in its investigation of the criminal justice history of early modern Britain. With regard to primary sources, it relies to a great extent on the bureaucratic nature of the English legal system; an enormous posthumous debt is owed by historians and researchers to the untold legions of clerks who meticulously recorded many aspects of their daily work for posterity (albeit often unwittingly). Surviving Assize records and Quarter Sessions records (including sessions books, order books and minute books), together with justices’ notebooks and other records of the various lesser courts operating from the early modern period, have proved an invaluable mine of information to modern historians.⁷ Many Petty and Quarter Sessions records have fortunately been deposited over the intervening years within county/city archives or record offices, while the National Archives hold a staggering amount of detail on Assize trials from the twelfth century through to the twentieth century, as well as a wealth of information on many other aspects of criminal justice history. The proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913 (more than 100,000 trials) have recently been made freely available online and this resource, together with its companion website London Lives, has transformed research capability with regard to the criminal history of the metropolis.⁸

From the mid-seventeenth century onward the rapid increase in the publication of popular reading material in the form of newspapers, broadsheets, trial pamphlets and propaganda (both pro- and anti-Government) has provided the modern historian with an additional set of useful primary resources.⁹ A surprising amount of privately published material also survives and this archive gives the historian and criminologist a glimpse into the past that is often not afforded by official documents.

It must always be borne in mind, however, that the majority of the consulted primary sources were written or created by members of the ruling local or national elite, with only relatively few accounts surviving from other, lower, levels of society. The potential bias of such evidence clearly has to be considered when utilizing such sources. Documents cannot always simply be viewed at face value, therefore; the reader of such texts always has to consider how and why they were produced, the audience that they were intended for, and what explicit and implicit motives there were for their existence. This is perhaps especially relevant to the pamphlets and broadsheets that were printed throughout the period; many were written with a specific purpose (apart from considerations of circulation) in mind and contained implic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Information panel 1: Criminal courts in eighteenth-century England
• Information panel 2: The pre-decimal currency system
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The impact of historical developments on the criminal justice system
• 3. Crime, ‘traditional’ and ‘new’
• 4. Capturing the criminal
• 5. Punishment
• 6. Gender and the criminal justice system
• 7. Crime in contemporary literature and culture
• 8. Review and conclusion: beyond the eighteenth century
• Appendix: Timeline 1649–1815
• Bibliography
• Index