Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

• Mark Knights

Law as integral to constituution and liberty

Impartial justice, applying equally to mutineers and a governor of Goree who committed murder

Historiography

• 1970s Marxist or neo-Marxist perspective of E.P.Thompson, Douglas Hay and others [Whigs and Hunters; Albion’s Fatal Tree]: law as an instrument of social or even political control; some crime regarded as illegitimate by authorities but legitimate by perpetrators eg poaching, rioting, wrecking. [So what is ‘crime’? John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) contrasted fuss over a few pounds stolen by a highwayman and the wholesale corruption of Walpole’s regime; what are the causes of crime?]
• John Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (1986), focusing on assize records

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834

• Contains 101,102 trials, from April 1674 to October 1834
• http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
• Robert Shoemaker, Tim Hitchcock,
• See also Frank McLynn, Peter Linebaugh

Criminal law

• Tremendous growth in litigation, from C16th. Almost 30,000 cases in Court of common pleas and King’s bench in 1640; by 1820s an average of 72,00 actions a year were started.
• Problem of delay. 1824 commission to investigate Chancery found one case with took 16yrs of preliminary work before a barrister had even been briefed, with costs of £3719
• Growth in legal profession. 1739 Society of Gentlemen practitioners in the courts of Law and Equity; with provincial societies eg Bristol 1770, York 1786

treason

• 200 prosecutions in the decade 1795-1805
• Seditious libel, seditious words
• Riot and breaking the peace: 3 or more assembled to do an unlawful acts constituted riot; 1715 riot act required groups of 12 or more to disperse within an hour of the reading of the proclamation

Property and game

• Informal resolution
• Extension of the death penalty [the Bloody Code]
• Number of capital offences increased from just over 50 in 1688 to 160 in 1765 and 225 by 1815
• Many of these related to game: there were 24 acts 1671-1832 regulating the hunting of game. 1752 Association for the Preservation of Game – pressure groups.
• 1723 Black Act created 50 capital offences and responded to poaching by those who ‘blackened’ their faces (response to 1722 Atterbury Plot – jacobite - repealed 1823); 1741 and 1742 theft of sheep and cattle became capital offences
• For theft of monetary notes, deeds, bills [1742, 1751, 1767, 1795, 1797]
• Shoplifting [1699, for goods worth 5s]

• But
• There were four times as many executions in the early C17th as there were in 1750
• 50-60% of those sentenced to death were pardoned (except in years of crisis eg high rate of executions in 1780s); 90% by early C19th
• There were only about 20 people a year hung in London and Middlesex at end of century; about 60 for rest of country
• Benefit of clergy (1706 reading test abolished; though many crimes specifically exempt eg murder, rape)
• Influence of Enlightenment ideas. Jeremy Bentham: punishment should fit crime in a scientific manner
• Informal resolution, discretionary system via JPs, who part of a community; jury leniency
• Does the flexibility in the system give the elite more power – discretion was empowering? [Frank McLynn]