Week 2: numbers and meanings
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.
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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.)