Week 3: Policing and prosecution
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?