Bloody Code

9 Key excerpts on "Bloody Code"

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  Newgate

  London's Prototype of Hell

  • Stephen Halliday(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  THREE The Bloody Code: Punishment in Hanoverian England The Bloody Code was monstrous and ineffectual. Its vice lay in the enormous disproportion it maintained between offences and penalties. It gave the impression of a world in which ‘great thieves hang little ones’. It was not justice that was administered; it was a war that was waged between two classes of the community. (The Times, editorial, 25 July 1872) Instead of making the gallows an object of terror, our executions contribute to make it an object of contempt in the eye of the malefactor; and we sacrifice the lives of men, not for the reformation but the diversion of the populace. (Henry Fielding, magistrate at Bow Street) THE PENAL CODE In 1582 William Lambard of Lincoln’s Inn applauded the fact that the English penal code no longer included ‘pulling out the tongue for false rumours, cutting off the nose for adultery, taking away the privy parts for counterfeiting of money’ or certain other punishments associated with the Medieval period. That is not to say that the remaining penalties were altogether humane. Lambard divided them into three categories – infamous, pecuniary and corporal. 1 Infamous punishments were reserved for crimes such as treason and involved such hideous processes as hanging, drawing and quartering. Pecuniary penalties involved fines for such offences as swearing, playing a musical instrument on the Sabbath or failing to attend church. They were mostly imposed by Justices of the Peace and constituted an important source of revenue for the clerks who advised the Justices. The third category, corporal punishments, Lambard divided into ‘either Capital or not Capital. Capital (or deadly) punishment is done sundry ways, as by hanging, burning, boiling or pressing

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  Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law

  Reform in England, 1808-30

  • R. Follett(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Mitigating the `Bloody Code': an Introduction Between 1808 and 1830, the British parliament debated the amelioration of England's `Bloody Code' of criminal statutes. Before 1808, the few attempts to challenge England's expanding list of capital statutes had generated little sustained discussion. After 1830, the matter gained enough public attention to warrant professional and royal commission investigations. `Amelioration' initially meant simply the repeal or amendment of statutes which made crimes as minor as pick-pocketing and shoplifting punishable by death. In the late 1760s William Black- stone counted 160 crimes that might lead a convict to the scaffold, and by 1819 Thomas Fowell Buxton could specify 223. In practice, relatively few offenders were hanged, but to reformers that fact, combined with the apparently random selection of those who were, proved that the existing laws were inappropriate. The repeal of capital statutes goes hand-in-hand with the reform and expansion of the prison system in Britain. But unlike the question of prisons, amendment of the Bloody Code raised cries of `innovation' in the structure of the English law and constitution. The members of Parliament who led the reform effort were of eminently respectable backgrounds and social position, eschewing radical causes and rhetoric which might have inflamed the democratic elements in the population. Yet one could not deny that the assault upon the vast number of laws dealing with property challenged assump- tions about the limits of government authority as well as the nature of criminal jurisprudence. A shift was occurring in these assumptions which found expression in the politics surrounding the amendment of the criminal statutes. This change in perspective makes the debates and public discourse on penal reform fertile ground for examining the interrelated concerns and pressures at work in early nineteenth-century Britain. Religious revival, 1

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  Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England

  • Frank McLynn, McLynn Frank(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14

  Execution

  The only possible form of justice, of the administration of justice, could be, and will be, the form that in a military war is called decimation. One man answers for humanity. And humanity answers for the one man.

  Leonardo Sciascia, Il Contesto

  Those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and her prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries of the earth.

  Charles Dickens, American Notes

  One to destroy, is murder by the Law; And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe; To murder thousands, takes a specious name, War’s glorious art, and gives immortal fame.

  Edward Young, Love of Fame

  The heart of the Bloody Code was its extensive provision for capital punishment. The years after 1688 saw a return to the Tudor policy of enlarging the scope of the death penalty. Large numbers of offences were removed from benefit of clergy; new crimes bearing the death penalty were added to the statute book. In 1688 the death penalty was ordained for about fifty distinct crimes. By 1765 this number had risen to at least 165 and to about 225 by the end of the Napoleonic wars.1 This increase represented a determined defence of property by men who thought that hanging was the only real deterrent to crime.

  The logical expectation, then, would have been a dramatic increase in the rate of public executions. But the level of hangings remained low. There were four times as many executions in the early seventeenth century as in 1750.2 Only 10 per cent of those indicted in London in the years 1700-50 ended up on the gallows.3 The general level of execution decreased further in the late eighteenth century. About twenty people a year were hanged in London and Middlesex at the end of the century, as compared with 140 a year two hundred years earlier. By 1800 only about a third of those condemned to death in London were executed. The number of capital statutes (more than 200) began to overtake the number of people (about 200) hanged every year in England and Wales.4

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  Women and the Noose

  A History of Female Execution

  • Richard Clark(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  2

  LATER GEORGIAN PERIOD AND THE ‘Bloody Code’

  I n the period 1760-1799, 205 women were executed, seventeen at the stake and 188 on the gallows. This was an average of just over five a year. One hundred and eight of these women had been convicted of murder.

  The effects of the ‘Bloody Code’ as it was known became apparent during this time with a general increase in executions of both sexes, particularly in the period from 1775-1790.

  The English Penal Code in the period from 1723 to 1820 became increasingly severe, mandating the death penalty for ever more offences. The year 1723 saw the introduction of the first of the (Waltham) Black Acts and these continually increased the scope of capital punishment over the next ninety years. In 1688 there were fifty crimes for which a person could be put to death. By 1765 this had risen to about 160 and to 222 by 1810.

  It should be noted that only twenty or so crimes typically resulted in the execution of women and that in the vast majority of cases (69-70 per cent) the death sentence was commuted.

  The huge number of capital crimes was inflated not only by endless acts of Parliament mentioned earlier but also by the minute subdivision of capital offences into individual categories. For instance there were seven individual capital offences of arson.

  The country was run by the property-owning middle classes who were understandably keen to protect their property from the large underclass who were seen as feckless and whose lives were considered to be of little real value. In the period from 1735 to 1800, an amazing 1,596 females were condemned to death with 1,243 being reprieved and 356 executed, 32 by burning and the remainder by hanging. A total of 169 women and girls were executed for crimes against property whilst 187 were to suffer for murder: most of them were convicted on circumstantial evidence or on the strength of their confessions after very short hearings, often without any real defence in trials that would be considered wholly inadequate by today’s standards.

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  Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900

  Punishing the English

  • Paul Griffiths, Simon Devereaux(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The rest of the Introduction turns to punishing petty crime, and the need to combine its various significances for past penal cultures and practices with what we know now about the course of punishing capital crime through time. No claim is made that this is a coherent collection with a sin- gle purpose that follows on from what I have to say in my review of the field. The leading link, of course, is that each essay is on punishment and sheds new light on past penal cultures and practices. I ‘There is nothing we can learn from the penal code’ of the later eighteenth century, one observer noted in 1974, ‘except that we are well rid of it’. 3 Getting rid of executions was a high-water mark for humanity. Ever since 2 Introduction executions disappeared behind tall prison walls once and for all in 1868, the story of punishing felony has been portrayed as a brash forward movement from the ‘enlightened sunshine’ of the eighteenth century on. It is a good story, with a good ending: the removal of a sadistic sight from public gaze. We as a society are said to be better for it, and the fact that it could happen at all was a proof of human kindness and sympathy to the agony on the gal- lows. 4 Even the words that we use for this bygone brutality are emotive ones, based in blood: the capital code that was extended around 1700 to protect property in the main was called the ‘Bloody Code’. 5 This code along with felony and the ‘long’ eighteenth century (stretching from c.1680–1830, also the lifetime of the ‘Bloody Code’) are the principal reference points for how we have come to understand past penal cultures and practices. This is true of Sir Leon Radzinowicz’s mammoth five-volume History of English Criminal Law (1948–86), 6 as well as the work that followed by John Beattie, Vic Gatrell, Douglas Hay, and Peter King, to name only the most prominent people in a packed field.

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  The Birth of Industrial Britain

  1750-1850

  • Kenneth Morgan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ‘Bloody Code’. Many such crimes already existed under common law, but they were now explicitly added to the statute books. Over 150 such offences were made capital crimes in that period, including over 50 at one fell swoop with the Waltham Black Act (1723), ostensibly aimed at poaching from the royal forests. It was not until the 1820s that many capital offences were repealed by various statutes dealing with obsolete laws, something that was influenced by the reprieve of so many capital offenders. The Criminal Justice Act of 1827 abolished ‘benefit of clergy’, a hangover from the ecclesiastical court of the sixteenth century that was extended to people who could demonstrate basic literacy. In so doing, the statute restricted the death penalty to felonies from which benefit of clergy had previously been excluded. The Whig governments of the 1830s continued to reduce the number of capital crimes, taking account of the findings of a Royal Commission on the Criminal Law. By 1841 this resulted in the death penalty being used almost solely for those convicted of murder.

  Bloody Code: A term applied by historians to the series of criminal statutes enacted by eighteenth-century British Parliaments, many of which prescribed the death penalty. There were over 200 capital statutes by the end of the eighteenth century.

  There was a general expansion in the inclusion of non-capital crimes on the statute book in early industrial Britain, especially those dealing with summary jurisdiction. Most non-capital crimes consisted of grand larceny (defined as theft of goods worth more than 39 shillings) and petty larceny (stealing goods worth less than that amount). The distinction between the two types of larceny was abolished in 1827 and replaced with a new offence called simple larceny. Larcenists could be pickpockets, livestock stealers, game poachers, thieves taking clothes, food, coal and industrial goods, and perpetrators of other crimes against property. A summary of one trial involving a pickpocket at the Old Bailey illustrates how courts handled such cases (

  Doc. 29

  , p. 148).

  Along with the changes in statute law concerning crimes came new ideas about punishment and increased means of law enforcement. By 1850 there were more laws against property crimes, a wider range of criminal punishments, and more direct and effective policing of communities compared with a century before. This chapter considers the changes occurring in crime, justice and punishment in early industrial Britain.

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  The Regency Revolution

  Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World

  • Robert Morrison(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  26

  V

  Unsurprisingly, many judges and juries looked at other legal options in an attempt to steer a just course between the ruthless capital convictions mandated by the Bloody Code and the known realities of Regency social and economic life, mindful, as William Cobbett maintained, that “poverty has always been the parent of crime.” Some prisoners were pardoned, especially when family members or charitable institutions pledged to take charge of them. Some were given lesser physical penalties such as time in the pillory, where they were locked helplessly into place for one hour while jeering crowds pelted them with mud, rocks, fruit, vegetables, and dead animals. Thousands of others, many of whom had had their capital sentences commuted, were put on transport ships and sent halfway around the world to the British penal colony in New South Wales, Australia – though conditions on these vessels were so horrendous that many who had escaped the noose at home died at sea long before their ship reached Botany Bay.27

  Still other prisoners were packed onboard broken-down ships known as “hulks.” These had originally been used as a temporary measure to house the surplus prison population, but by the Regency they had become a standard part of the penal service. During the day the convicts were sometimes taken ashore in work parties, but for the rest of the time they were incarcerated on the ship and literally going nowhere. It was the closest thing the Regency knew to hell on earth. “There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed,” wrote the convict James Hardy Vaux; “and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard among them.” 28

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  Dear Freedom

  Imprisonment and the Death Penalty in Novels of the South

  • (Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cuvillier Verlag

    (Publisher)

  PART I: THEORETICAL APPROACH 1. History of the Death Penalty in the United States To understand the importance of capital punishment in the United States it is vi-tal to see its sources and development throughout the centuries. When English co-lonists arrived on the new continent in the 17th and 18th centuries, they brought with them a set of English laws and the death penalty for various crimes such as treason, murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, burglary, arson, counterfeiting and theft (Ban-ner 5). From the outset the Northern Colonies were far more lenient on crimes than England. Over the years the death penalty was abandoned for some moral crimes, such as adultery, blasphemy and incest. The South, however, did not elaborate new criminal codes, but simply adopted English law, which counted far more capital offenses than the Northern Colonies eventually named in their codes. Not only did they not work on the laws in the course of time, but they also tended to come from regions of England that were more violent than the ones from which northerners had emigrated (Banner 7). While England’s criminal law became one of the harshest in Europe during the 18th century and the Northern colonies developed more and more their own laws, the South followed Eng-land in many ways. Similar to the English Bloody Code, 29 the Southern colonies de-veloped their Black Code. 30 Although law in the Northern colonies was not as harsh 29 Crimes punished with death in the England of the 18 th century were: steal-ing horses or sheep, destroying turnpike roads, cutting down trees, pick pocketing goods worth more than one shilling, unmarried mother concealing a stillborn child, arson, forgery, stealing from a rabbit warren, murder. The name was given to the English legal system from the early 17th to the late 19 th century. 30 The Black Codes were created after the Civil War in former slavery states to regulate labor and restrict former slaves’ freedom.

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  Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900

  • Clive Emsley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Matters had rarely been that simple, nevertheless Peel was right in draw-ing attention to the fact that eighteenth-century parliaments did not leg-islate for species of crime. While there were efforts to consolidate the vagrancy laws and the game laws, eighteenth-century legislators had never attempted to codify capital legislation; they did not think in terms of gen-eral codification or going back to first principles. More important, perhaps, in any assessment of the Bloody Code is to recognise that the majority of those executed during the eighteenth century were prosecuted under legislation which went back to the Tudors and Stu-arts. Furthermore there were far more executions during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than during the eighteenth; and one or two offences ceased to be capital: at least two Jacobite pamphleteers were executed for sedition, but at the end of the eighteenth century Jacobin pamphleteers, if convicted, even at worst were rarely sentenced to more than two years in gaol. 7 Figure 10.1, based on figures in the appendices of C R I M E A N D S O C I E T Y I N E N G L A N D , 1 7 5 0 – 1 9 0 0 2 6 2 FIG 10.1 The pattern of capital convictions and actual executions on Assize Cir-cuits, 1749–1819 2 6 3 P U N I S H M E N T A N D R E F O R M A T I O N FIG 10.1 continued C R I M E A N D S O C I E T Y I N E N G L A N D , 1 7 5 0 – 1 9 0 0 2 6 4 the Report from the Select Committee on Criminal Laws 1819 , shows the pattern of capital convictions and actual executions. These follow roughly the same pattern with increases in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, when gentlemen were expressing concern about a crime wave, and in the famine year of 1801, though London and Middlesex saw no marked increase on the latter occasion. There is a widening gap between capital convictions and actual executions in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

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