Robert B. Shoemaker

Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgments List of abbreviations and conventions Part I. Background: 1. Introduction 2. Options for prosecution 3. Patterns of prosecutions Part II. Procedures For Prosecution: 4. Informal mediation by justices of the peace 5. Binding over by recognizance 6. Indictment at quarter sessions 7. Houses of correction Part III. The Contextx of Misdemeanor Prosecutions: 8. The participants: plaintiffs, defendants, and justices of the peace 9. The reformation of manners campaign 10. Geographical contexts 11. Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index.

Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London.

In explaining the long-term decline of violence in English society, historians have failed to recognize the importance of changing gender-based conceptions of honour. During the eighteenth century the per capita rate of homicide in London decreased dramatically, and because 93% of homicides were committed by men, this decline essentially involved a change in male behaviour. At the start of the period violence served to enhance or defend mens reputations, and thereby to reinforce their social and gender identities. In order to maintain their honour, most men felt the need to physically challenge anyone who insulted them or questioned their honesty or courage. Such disputes often took the form of duels and other ritualized staged fights and were conducted by men of all social classes. While the violence was limited by accepted rules (violence committed by women, though much rarer, more easily got out of hand), fatalities nonetheless occurred. Over the course of the century, however, these types of disputes became far less common as reputations came to be defined much less publicly in London, and men found new ways of establishing and defending their honour, and thus of asserting gender and social differences. However, private violence, notably wife beating, continued behind closed doors.

THE TAMING OF THE DUEL: MASCULINITY, HONOUR AND RITUAL VIOLENCE IN LONDON, 1660–1800

Over the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century the nature and significance of duels fought in the London area changed dramatically. Pistols replaced swords, seconds took on a new role as mediators, and new conventions reduced the violence. Consequently, injuries and fatalities decreased significantly. The purpose of fighting duels also shifted from the defeat of ones antagonist to a demonstration of courage. Although duels continued to occur, growing opposition meant that the audience of people who supported duelling became increasingly limited and duels took place in places far from public view. At the same time, both the press and the courts provided alternative strategies for defending reputations. These changes cannot be attributed to technological developments, official attempts to prevent duelling, or the embourgeoisement of the duel. Rather, they resulted from a series of interlinked cultural changes, including an increasing intolerance of violence, new internalized understandings of elite honour, and the adoption of ‘polite’ and sentimental norms governing masculine conduct. These eighteenth-century changes shed new light on the reasons for the final end of duelling in England in 1852.

The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, published accounts of felony trials held at London’s central criminal court, were a remarkable publishing phenomenon. First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court. Despite the huge number of trial reports (some 50,000 in the eighteenth century), the Proceedings, also known as the “Sessions Papers”, have formed the basis of several important studies in social history, dating back to Dorothy George’s seminal London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). Their recent publication online, however, has not only made them more widely available, but also changed the way historians consult them, leading to greater use of both quantitative analysis, using the statistics function, and qualitative examination of their language, through keyword searching. In the context of recent renewed interest in the history of crime and criminal justice, for which this is the most important source available in this period, the growing use of the Proceedings raises questions about their reliability, and, by extension, the motivations for their original publication. Historians generally consider the Proceedings to present accurate, if often incomplete, accounts of courtroom proceedings. From this source, along with manuscript judicial records, criminal biographies (including the Ordinary’s Accounts), polemical pamphlets such as Henry Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and of course the satirical prints of William Hogarth, they have constructed a picture of eighteenth-century London as a city overwhelmed by periodic crime waves and of a policing and judicial system which was forced into wide-ranging reforms in order to meet this challenge.

Digital London: Creating a Searchable Web of Interlinked Sources on Eighteenth Century London.

Purpose – To outline the conceptual and technical difficulties encountered, as well as the opportunities created, when developing an interlinked collection of web‐based digitised primary sources on eighteenth century London. Design/methodology/approach – As a pilot study for a larger project, a variety of primary sources, including the Old Bailey Proceedings (OBP), were digitised and then interlinked using names. The paper outlines the solutions adopted for dealing with uncertainties in record linkage and for displaying a range of different historical sources while preserving their archival integrity. Findings – Records should be linked with varying degrees of probability, allowing users to participate in the choice of which records truly concern the same individuals. Research limitations/implications – Further work is necessary to create mechanisms for allowing users to specify levels of certainty in record linkage, and to develop methods for searching and displaying results when working with multiple collections of archival sources. Originality/value – This paper shows the potential of combining XML markup with flexible record linkage strategies to interlink complex collections of digitised sources. The resulting source will allow historians to ask new historical questions; in this case concerning the role played by individuals in shaping the evolution of social welfare provision in London.

The London “Mob” in the Early Eighteenth Century

Shortened from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the movable or excitable crowd), “the mob” was first used to denote rioters in London during the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81). The term gradually entered the language Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades; justices of the peace did not commonly use it to refer to riots in the Quarter Sessions court records until the first decade of the eighteenth century. By 1721, 44 percent of the rioters who were bound over by recognizance to appear at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions were accused of raising, or participating in, a mob. Concurrently, the total number of recognizances for riot in urban Middlesex increased 520 percent between the 1660s and the early 1720s (table 1). These changes in the frequency and the language of London rioting recorded in the Middlesex court records around the turn of the eighteenth century raise several questions. Did the fundamental character of rioting in London also change? How (and when) did rioting become such a common occurrence on Londons streets? What was the relation between riots prosecuted at Quarter Sessions and the larger, primarily political disturbances of the period that were first studied by George Rude? How does urban rioting as a social phenomenon compare with rural riots such as food riots, riots against enclosures, and ridings, which have also been the subject of considerable recent research? What are the implications of the existence of widespread collective disorder for our understanding of social relations in London during a time of rapid population growth and socioeconomic change?

Streets of Shame? The Crowd and Public Punishments in London, 1700–1820

Early modern punishments frequently involved an element of popular participation. Penance (for defamation and sexual immorality), whipping (primarily for petty larceny) and the pillory (largely for ‘unnatural’ sexual offences, seditious words, extortion, fraud and perjury) were performed in public, and an important dimension of the punishment was the damage to the offender’s reputation which resulted from public humiliation. This is even true of public executions, since the spectacle of the scaffold served both firmly to identify the culprit for posterity as a convicted felon, and, if he or she behaved appropriately, to rehabilitate him or her as a repentant sinner. But arguably the main purpose of carrying out capital punishment in public was in order to deter others from committing crime. In the case of public corporal punishments like whipping and the pillory, deterrence was also important, but the significance of the publicity of these punishments was to a much greater extent that they shaped reputations. The public labelling of the recipient as deviant was intended to identify him or her as someone who could not be trusted, to damage his or her reputation as a respectable member of the community. This infamy lasted long after the punishment was completed and any bruises healed.

Making history online

This article considers the implications of recent innovations in digital history for the relationship between the academy and the public. It argues that while digitisation and the internet have attracted large new audiences, academic historians have been reluctant to engage with this new public. We suggest that recent innovations in academic digital history, such as the highly technocratic ‘Culturomics’ movement, have had the unintended effect of driving a wedge between higher education and the wider public. Similarly, academic history writing has been slow to embrace the possibilities of the internet as a means of dissemination and engagement; and academic publishing has moved even more reluctantly. Despite these issues, this article argues that the internet offers real opportunities for bridging the divide between the academy and a wider audience. Through non-traditional forms of publication such as blogging; through Open Access policies; and through new forms of visualisation of complex data, the digital and online allow us to present complex history to a wider audience. We conclude that historians need to embrace the ‘affordances’ and ‘disruptions’ posed by the internet to render the discipline more open and democratically accessible.

The Street Robber and the Gentleman Highwayman: Changing Representations and Perceptions of Robbery in London, 1690–1800

Owing to the growth of urban crime, the expansion of print culture, and changing cultural attitudes, a remarkably diverse range of positive and negative images of robbery were disseminated in eighteenth-century London. Attitudes in the 1690s were already ambivalent, but repeated negative reports in newspapers and trial accounts contributed to the identification, in the 1720s during a perceived crime wave, of the ‘street robber’ as a particularly threatening criminal. In response, the concept of the polite gentleman highwayman emerged, epitomized in representations of James Maclaine at mid-century. From the 1770s, however, the appeal of the gentleman highwayman began to wane, and all forms of robbery came to be seen as equally undesirable.

Forty Years of Crime in London (Journal)

Abstract As a contribution to the fortieth anniversary celebrations of The London Journal, this article provides an overview of the twenty-seven articles which it has published about crime and criminal justice since its inception. While few articles were published in its early years, there has been a big increase in articles published in the last decade, pushing the Journal into the forefront of the historiography on these topics. A survey of the recurring themes in articles about crime, policing, justice, and punishment leads to the conclusion that what is distinctive about London crime is not its severity or frequency, but the depth of evidence the records of its prosecution provide about the distinctive features of metropolitan life.