Joanna Innes

The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England

One of the most exciting and influential areas of research in eighteenth-century history over the last fifteen years has been the study of crime and the criminal law. It is the purpose of this essay to map the subject for the interested nonspecialist: to ask why historians have chosen to study it, to explain how they have come to approach it in particular ways, to describe something of what they have found, to evaluate those findings, and to suggest fruitful directions for further research. Like all maps, the one presented here is selective. The essay begins with a general analysis of the ways in which the field has developed and changed in its short life. It then proceeds to consider in more detail four areas of study: criminality, the criminal trial, punishment, and criminal legislation. This selection makes no pretense of providing an exhaustive coverage. A number of important areas have been omitted: for example, public order and policing. However, the areas covered illustrate the range of approaches, problems, and possibilities that lie within the field. The essay concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the subject. The Development of the Field Before the 1960s crime was not treated seriously by eighteenth-century historians. Accounts of crime and the criminal law rarely extended beyond a few brief remarks on lawlessness, the Bloody Code, and the state of the prisons, often culled from Fielding, Hogarth, and Howard. There were exceptions, but they fell outside the mainstream of eighteenth-century history. The multiple volumes of Leon Radzinowiczs monumental History of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 began to appear in 1948, but Radzinowicz worked in the Cambridge Law Faculty and the Institute of Criminology, and, as Derek Beales has pointed out, his findings were not quickly assimilated by historians.

Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy

THIS paper provides a preliminary and exploratory account of some of the ways in which eighteenth-century parliaments helped to shape English social policy. At the heart of this study lie a body of measures, several hundred strong, which came before Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century. These were general rather than local measures, applying to the country as a whole. They dealt with such matters as the relief and regulation of the poor, repression of vice (variously conceived), handling of insolvent (and therefore perhaps imprisoned) debtors, and prevention and punishment of crime.

State, Church and Voluntarism in European Welfare, 1690–1850

The reconfiguration of charity and social discipline which took place in the 150 years or so following the Reformation has attracted the attention of a distinguished roster of historians. Characteristically, each has focused on the experience of a particular country, even a particular region. Yet they have also shown an interest in comparative issues. Curiosity about the extent and nature of differences between Catholic and Protestant practice has provided an important stimulus to this form of work. Collectively, historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have succeeded in mapping out a fairly coherent picture of commonalities and variations, both in the intentions and in the achievements of governments and the charitable in the face of poverty and distress. Robert Jutte’s recent survey, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, synthesizes a generation and more of this work.1