Crime Notes

This class will be on Tuesday 14 March.

Secondary sources

M Gaskill, Crime and mentalities in early modern England, chaps. 6-7; or M Gaskill, ‘Reporting murder: fiction in the archives in early modern England’, Social History, 23 (1998).

P Lake, ‘ “Deeds against nature”: cheap print, protestantism and murder in early seventeenth-century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and politics in early Stuart England (1994).

Frances Dolan, Dangerous familiars: representations of domestic crime in England 1550-1750 (1994).

(Don’t forget to refer back to the articles on violence that we read for week 2 as well.)

Primary source

Select a murder pamphlet from Early English Books Online (EEBO). (You’ll need to sign in with your Athens password if using this off campus.) You may want to download a copy to keep/print off (see notes below). Be ready to discuss it in class.

Ask yourself: what’s the moral of the story? Think about the kind of language that’s used, and what sort of audience it might have been aimed at.

Also, if you remember the homicide case in court records that we looked at before (the Francis Wood case, which is archived on Blackboard), how does it compare with that?

Notes

Tips for searching EEBO: if you simply type ‘murder’ in the keyword search, you’ll be presented with a very large number of hits, consisting of a wide variety of texts. A title or subject search for ‘murder’ should give something more manageable. (You could further narrow your search down by restricting dates searched.) Even then, you’ll get a variety of results. Murder pamphlets are quite easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for. They’re generally not very long: you should be able to find good examples about 8 pages in length. (But NB that if it’s just a single page it may be a ballad, which is a related but distinct genre.) The titles frequently contain lurid phrases like “bloody news”, “barbarous murder”, and/or “a true account of the trial of…”, “The last confession of…”, etc.

The process to download a copy of the whole text (as a PDF file) to read or print off or save on your own computer or in your M drive is a bit longwinded:

1. On the screen that shows the first page of your text, check the box that says “Add this record to your Marked List”.
2. Click on “Marked List” at the top of the page.
3. Click on “Download Document Image sets in PDF format”.
4. Check “Download entire document” and then the blue Download button
5. It’ll take it a few seconds to generate a PDF. Click on “confirm”.
6. Then either “open” or “save” in the dialogue box that should pop up. (If you choose “open”, you’ll need to subsequently save a copy to your computer if you want to keep it.)

If you have any problems with this, get in touch with me.

I’ll probably post the readings for the following class (on Friday 17 March) next week so that you have some extra time available for preparation, since there’ll only be three days between the two classes.

Read at least one of the following:

C Herrup, ‘New shoes and mutton pies: investigative responses to theft in seventeenth-century East Sussex’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984) [online]; or chap. 4 of her book The common peace

Garthine Walker, ‘Women, theft and the world of stolen goods’, in Kermode and Walker (eds), Women, crime and the courts; or the chapter on theft in her Crime, gender and social order in early modern England

S Howard, ‘Investigating responses to theft in early modern Wales: communities, thieves and the courts’, Continuity and Change, 19 (2005) [online]

I’ve put a copy of the main primary source in Blackboard, in Course Documents. (There are a few extra examples from last year as well, for anyone interested.)

This is one I came across recently and haven’t got round to putting on the main primary source list: The justicing notebook of Henry Norris. (The editor’s introduction is a good outline of the work of JPs.)

Secondary sources: read at least one of the following; if you have time, read one from each of the two sections. (Please remember that other people will be looking for them and don’t hog them. If you can’t get hold of any of these, look at the course bibliography for this week’s topic and pick something else from it.)

Local Policing
K Wrightson, ‘Two concepts of order: justices, constables and jurymen in seventeenth-century England’, in J. Brewer & J. Styles (eds), An ungovernable people: the English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1980)
Or, if you can’t get hold of that:
Mark Goldie. ‘The unacknowledge republic: officeholding in early modern England’, in Tim Harris (ed), The politics of the excluded.

Another alternative I’d forgotten, which is available online: Joan Kent, ‘The English village constable 1580-1642‘, Jnl British Studies 20 (1981).

Trials
JH Langbein, ‘The criminal trial before the lawyers‘ [JSTOR link], Univ. of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978)
or
JH Langbein, The origins of adversary criminal trial, chap. 1. (This book is available online at Google Book Search, but it’s not ideal for this purpose; you’ll need to set up a (free) account and not all pages will be available to view. But it might do as a last resort.)

Primary source

Trial of William Roberts at the Old Bailey, 1732
I’ve put a copy of this in Course Documents on Blackboard, if you want to print it out.

Try to think about two things in particular when reading this trial report:

1. Policing: How and by whom is the suspected thief caught? What roles do legal officials play in the process?

2. Trial: How is the trial conducted? Who are the main participants? What figures are absent who play a major role in modern criminal trials, and what other differences are there?

As I mentioned, I’m not a great fan of Blackboard. But I will be using it to store copies of course handouts and other documents, so that if you misplace anything, you’ll be able to get a replacement there. (It also has some primary source materials that we may use in coming weeks and a few useful links.)

Secondary sources: you should read at least one (and preferably both)

S D Amussen, ‘Punishment, discipline and power: the social meanings of violence in early modern England’ (JSTOR link), Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995)

J S Cockburn, ‘Patterns of violence in English society: homicide in Kent 1560-1985’ (JSTOR link), Past & Present, 130 (1991)

NB: What is meant by ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’? Very broadly:
Quantitative methods employ systematic collection and analysis of numerical data to try to explain social/historical phenomena (any non-numerical sources can be studied quantitatively if they are structured enough to be broken down into standard categories). Qualitative research emphasises verbal analysis and tends to use more loosely structured texts, aiming particularly to understand people’s own understandings of their experiences, and to reconstruct the social or cultural contexts of the subject being studied. Useful summary.
.

Primary source: Old Bailey Proceedings Online

1. Use the statistical search facility (under ‘Search the Proceedings’). Spend a little while playing with this - try out some different variables (eg, the difference between calculating by ‘offence’ or by ‘defendant’) and see what effects you can get. Then select one table/chart that you think is interesting, save a copy of it (to MS Word or Excel) and print it out to bring to class. Be ready to discuss it and what you found interesting about it.

Think about the different kinds of questions a historian might try to answer using quantitative methods.
What are the benefits of quantification?
What problems might these particular sources (i.e, trial reports), or other records derived from court proceedings, present to a historian trying to study crime levels and patterns?

2. Then select a single trial (before 1800) from within the sample to read. Again, get a copy to bring to class - either print the page itself or copy/paste it into Word. (Beware of late-18th-century trials; they can be very long. Your best bet is to find something from around the 1730s to 1760s, which directly reproduce witness testimonies but should be a manageable length.)

When interpreting witness testimonies what might we need to bear in mind? If we can’t be sure that witnesses are telling the truth, do testimonies still have any historical value?
Specific to the OBP: how reliable are they as a record of what happened in the court? What was the intended audience and how might that affect the reporting? (There is a useful page on the value of the Proceedings as a historical source.)

A few questions you might want to ask yourself before the first class.

What is ‘crime’?

Why is it of interest to historians?

What kind of primary sources might they use to study it?

Can you think of activities that today are not considered crimes but were during the early modern period? (And vice versa?)