Norma Landau

Indictment for Fun and Profit: A Prosecutor's Reward at Eighteenth-Century Quarter Sessions

In the early modern era, the business of Englands criminal courts was founded upon charges brought and prosecuted by private individuals. And, as the English realized, private prosecutors posed a problem: how could the English ensure that private individuals would spend their own time and their own money in prosecuting an offender who had committed an offense against the peace of the realm? Parliaments solution was to proffer the carrot: sixteenth-century statute decreed that his prosecution of the thief was, in itself, action sufficient for the owner of stolen goods to recover those goods, while from 1692, statutes offered rewards to successful prosecutors of highway robbers, burglars, coiners, and other specified offenders. In contrast, Englands magistrates wielded the stick, binding a plaintiff bringing an accusation of felony to prosecute an indictment against the alleged felon. As a result, private prosecutors of major offenses were both bribed and compelled to prosecute. Private prosecutors of more minor offenses were neither bribed nor compelled to prosecute, and yet they did, nonetheless, prosecute indictments. Why?

Country Matters: The Growth of Political Stability a Quarter-Century On

Like Professor Roberts, I, too, think that re-evaluation of J. H. Plumbs The Growth of Political Stability, 1625-1725 poses interesting questions. However, unlike Professor Roberts, I do not think that the scholarship of the past quarter-century has undermined the foundations of Plumbs book. In large part, our assessments differ because we interpret Plumbs book differently. Roberts questions Plumbs identification of the structures that stabilized English politics; but Roberts does not present Plumbs diagnosis of what had been destabilizing English politics, and why. I consider that diagnosis the foundation of Plumbs book, for I read Plumb as arguing that the government of independent gentlemen—even if it be government by independent gentlemen—is no easy matter. How to govern effectively without arousing the ire of those whose autonomy effective central government would inevitably infringe? How to avoid attracting the enmity of powerful landowners, of merchants with power of their own, and of a populace with an experience of rebellion egregious even for seventeenth-century Europe? Roberts does not argue with Plumbs diagnosis of the causes of instability. However, his own solution to that problem implies that Plumbs book is ill-founded, for Roberts never mentions the problems intrinsic to governing the independent. Instead, he proposes that England achieved stability because English politicians elaborated constitutional conventions that subordinated the monarch to Parliament, and because the Church of England no longer had to fear for its existence. Roberts is dancing to a Whig beat, but Plumb played a Country tune.