New frocks for judges. The update’s only taken 3 centuries!
(Whatever would Bloody Jeffreys say?)
Update: mind you, as The Little Professor has just reminded us, academics are in no position to laugh at judges for wearing silly outfits that haven’t been in fashion for several centuries.
Well, I was a little cryptic the other week, but tomorrow it all goes public (and we kind of expect it to crash at some point - I’ll be almost disappointed if it doesn’t…),* and today there is a pretty nice feature in the Observer.
[Monday update… creak… groan… thud… Sorry, folks. It should get back to normal in a day or two…]
So here it is: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834 is now the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court 1674-1913.
This doesn’t only mean that you can now search for 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey over a period of 2 and a half centuries. The other new set of goodies is the full text of (almost) every Ordinary of Newgate’s Account between 1690 and 1772 (in the next few months this should expand to a full archive of every known surviving Account from c.1674 onwards).
I’ve written here before about these grimly fascinating pamphlets. They’ve been used by a number of historians, including Andrea Mackenzie and Peter Linebaugh, but the surviving pamphlets have been scattered across a number of different libraries and archives. From now on they’ll be together in one fully searchable digital archive. Plus, I’m in the process of completing a database that links every convict mentioned in the Accounts to their trial, providing it has a surviving report (perhaps 3/4 of the links have already been made).
This should make for some interesting research possibilities. For example, historians often argue that women who successfully ‘pleaded their bellies’, ie had their death sentence postponed on grounds of being pregnant, usually escaped hanging. In fact, we say that in our own background section. But I’m not so sure. Through the process of cross-referencing trials and Ordinary’s Accounts, I’ve already discovered several women whose sentences were respited for pregnancy but subsequently carried out (eg in September 1695. So what I’ll be asking (once I’ve finished making the damned links) is: how many were executed and how many were permanently reprieved? Have we historians been getting it wrong? Answering those questions wasn’t impossible before now, but it would have been extremely difficult. And there will, no doubt, be many more possibilities like this.
***
The other news, because I haven’t been plugging it enough and you’ve probably all forgotten, is that we’re holding a conference in July to celebrate the relaunch: The Metropolis on Trial, in the throbbing metropolis of… Milton Keynes. If you’d like to attend, registration is open and you can download a booking form at the website. If you want to book the accommodation we’ve arranged at discount rates, you need to send the form in by the end of May at the latest and preferably as soon as possible. There is a 2 person room sharing option which is really good value (if you’re skint and looking for someone to share with maybe we can put people in touch here - leave a note in comments).
***
Linkage…
(Note that old links will continue to work for a few months, and we may well set up proper redirection at some point.)
Old stuff on OBP at this blog: Old Bailey category and the Old Bailey Symposium.
Old Bailey Files at The Head Heeb.
—
*Already this morning some searches have been very slow, which is not a good sign.
Last November, I dashed off a quick post about someone I’d encountered in an Ordinary’s Account: It’s Your Neck or Your Arm
On the evening before execution, a respite of 14 days was brought for George Chippendale, and to be continued, if within that time he shall submit to suffer the amputation of a limb, in order to try the efficacy of a new-invented styptic for stopping the blood-vessels, instead of the present more painful practice in such cases. For this indulgence, he, together with his brother and his uncle, had joined in a petition to his Majesty, and thankfully accepted it, appearing in good health and spirits, ready and chearful to undergo the experiment. (Ordinary’s Account, May 1763.)
Well, I got at least one important thing wrong, anyway. It wasn’t George’s arm that was, er, on the block. It was his leg.
How do I know this? Well, by sheer chance, a few weeks after I posted that, I got an email query at work, from a family historian who was searching for a George Clippingdale in the Old Bailey Proceedings. The problem was that the OBP reporters (unlike most other sources the researcher had consulted) spelt his surname Chippendale. (Spelling variations are not an uncommon problem in 18th-century sources, as I’ve mentioned here before.)
So, we got that sorted out, and that would normally have been the end of it. But then the researcher happened to mention that his George was reprieved from a death sentence because a surgeon wanted to use him in an experiment.
At which point, I thought ‘Hang on a minute… that sounds familiar’, and came over here and checked my earlier post. And it’s the same man!
Naturally, of course, I had to write back with a barrage of questions. And the researcher was kind and generous enough to send me his write-up of everything he’d found out about George - and to agree to let me tell you lot about it.
(But I warn you, there’s a sad ending.)
A splendid outburst from a judge:
What is to be done with him? Is he to walk away as if nothing had happened? If his father would give him a good flogging, that would be the best way out of the difficulty, but that is not done now; it has gone out of fashion. Boys are allowed to do what they like. Then they are brought here charged with these offences, and then a passionate appeal, an eloquent appeal, or a pathetic appeal, is made to the judge not to send them to prison because it will ruin them for life.
What date do you think this is?
I’ve encountered 18th-century convicts getting a reprieve from hanging in return for agreeing to join the army or navy, but this is a new one on me:
On the evening before execution, a respite of 14 days was brought for George Chippendale, and to be continued, if within that time he shall submit to suffer the amputation of a limb, in order to try the efficacy of a new-invented styptic for stopping the blood-vessels, instead of the present more painful practice in such cases. For this indulgence, he, together with his brother and his uncle, had joined in a petition to his Majesty, and thankfully accepted it, appearing in good health and spirits, ready and chearful to undergo the experiment.
(Ordinary’s Account, May 1763.)
I don’t know if any of the medical historians know anything more about the ‘new-invented styptic’, or whether it was successful?
Really, it would be shockingly negligent of me not to plug our project conference here, now wouldn’t it? For all those of you interested in The Old Bailey Online, crime, justice and so on between the 18th and 20th centuries (not just in London - we’re looking out for comparative papers), the project conference will be next July, following the launch of the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court in 2008.
In addition to the general descriptions in the CFP below, there are a couple of planned panels that might particularly interest you folks.
First, we’d like to have a panel specifically on teaching with the OBP. My friend Chris Williams at OU is in charge of this one: “I’m interested in finding out more about how they have been used, how they could be used, and what’s worked, as well as what hasn’t. The implications of the impact of this kind of resource on teaching might also be worth a look.” You can email him to find out more: Chris.Williams[AT]open.ac.uk
We also have in mind a possible panel on digitising history - practicalities and ideas, issues and agendas, whatever. If that interests you, you might perhaps contact Tim Hitchcock (t.hitchcock[AT]herts.ac.uk) for a chat before submitting a proposal.
The Metropolis on Trial
An International Conference at the Open University, Milton Keynes10-12 July 2008
This conference heralds and celebrates the completion of the Old Bailey online project. From the early summer of 2008 it will be possible to consult at www.oldbaileyonline.org not only the Proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834 but also those of its successor, the Central Criminal Court, from 1834 to 1913. Papers at the conference will draw upon these proceedings, or those of similar courts in other metropolitan centres, to explore aspects of cultural, social or political life from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Clive Emsley, Open University
Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire
Bob Shoemaker, University of SheffieldProposals for papers, not more than 200 words please, should be sent by Friday 7 December 2007, to Sue Watkins, Dept of History, Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom. Email: S.Watkins[AT]open.ac.uk
(I’ll be keeping this somewhere near the top of the front page for a few weeks.)
Some of you will already know that Google has extended its Book Search facility to enable PDF downloads of many public domain works. This of course, has the potential to make it a tremendous free primary source resource for historians in many fields. So what has it got if you’re interested in British crime and legal history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
It’s pretty straightforward to use. You need to check the ‘Full view’ button on the Book Search page; do your search, visit the result for any book you’re interested in and if a download is available, there will be a button on the righthand side of the page. (A note: as far as I can tell, you can only get the complete downloads, not selected chapters or sections, and so some of the PDF files are going to be pretty large and take a while to download…)
You’ll probably need the Advanced search to narrow down searches, eg by specifying publication date ranges, words in title, author, etc), and once you’ve done that a couple of times you’ll be able to see that the advanced search syntax is really quite simple to type straight into the search box. So, for example, I just did a search for “intitle:justices peace date:1700-1900″. That was too narrow (although it did return this), but after all part of the fun with Google Book Search has been experimenting to find out what’s likely to be most useful, and being prepared to follow unexpected paths. Being able to get a PDF to save/print and read later just made doing all that much more worthwhile.
I decided to focus on the nineteenth century, for a change and since that’s where I’m in most need of help (and also because Google is unlikely to be able to surpass the range of texts I can already access at work for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). A search for ““old bailey” date:1800-1930” produces a promising number of results; a similar search for the more formal term “central criminal court” gives a smaller and only partly overlapping set of results. The phrase “criminal law” needs the addition of ‘england’ for manageability, but returns potentially useful results like this 1830 constables’ guide.
(Mind you, using the ‘date’ restriction can produce odd results. When I just searched for “old bailey” one interesting-looking text appeared on the second results page; in the restricted date search above, it didn’t turn up until the third page. Very strange.)
Google are clearly still working on this; for example, the download for Howell’s State Trials (1826) isn’t yet available [update (21 September): it is now, but it’s a big ‘un, over 50MB…]. I don’t yet know just how good this is going to be. But this very cursory examination suggests that it’s made the book search facility far more usable and useful for serious researchers than it has been so far. Which can’t be bad.
I admit, I was puzzled at first by the story that the government is thinking of introducing the Scottish ‘not proven’ verdict as part of its plans to ‘reform’ compensation for victims of miscarriages of justice.
The ‘not proven’ verdict is controversial in Scotland. The problems with it boil down to: a) it’s a cop-out, b) it’s irrational and c) it leaves a stain on the defendant’s reputation: the jury is saying that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict but they doubt the defendant’s innocence. But nonetheless the defendant walks free. How could this have any bearing on the kind of miscarriage of justice that puts an innocent person in jail?
The Scotsman (registration required?) spells it out more clearly than the English newspaper reports I’ve seen. This is not a plan to introduce ‘not proven’ as a third option for trial juries, as it’s used in Scotland, which would merely be somewhat bizarre.
No: the proposal is only for the ‘not proven’ option to be available to appeal court judges: they could decide that a conviction was ‘not proven’, but this would not be the same as quashing the conviction - and the prisoner concerned would not be eligible for any compensation at all.
By giving the appeal judges the option to find a conviction not proven, Mr Clarke could allow the Court of Appeal effectively to strike down a lower court’s verdict on procedural grounds, yet without declaring the defendant innocent. …
In effect, someone whose conviction was later found not proven by the Court of Appeal would technically be innocent, but not entitled to claim damages.
Regardless of how many years they might have spent in prison. Innocent, but not innocent.
This undermines a cornerstone of modern criminal justice: the burden of proof rests with the prosecution - and they must prove the case beyond all reasonable doubt (this is why ‘technicalities’ matter, even if sometimes you think they’re being manipulated).
In Scottish law, the legal effect of a ‘not proven’ verdict is exactly the same as one of ‘not guilty’. This proposal is twisting the concept in a way that has nothing at all to do with that usage, however controversial it might be (and I suspect its days are numbered in any case).
It is appalling.
I have a blog set up at crimenotes.wordpress.com (you get one automatically when you set up a WP account) and a chat with Kristine reminded me that I might as well do something useful with it. For now, at least, it’ll probably just be a link-dump for crime and legal history resources (not just the usual early modern stuff). Maybe it’ll grow into something more interesting later.
Here’s the RSS feed, for when I get round to adding something.
Crimes and Misdemeanours, Deviance and the law in historical perspective: Call for Submissions
In autumn 2006, SOLON (Interdisciplinary Studies in Bad Behaviour and Crime) is launching its electronic Journal to be called Crimes and Misdemeanours; Deviance and the law in historical perspective. An international journal with a wide-ranging interdisciplinary remit, it will showcase work which confronts and challenges the accepted histories and (re)-examines the implications for past and/or current professional practices relating to the study of offensive or anti-social behaviour and its implications… the journal intends to open up, engage and liven the study of an area of intense academic and public concern with a powerful contemporary resonance by locating it within a ‘historical’ context, and emphasising thereby the need for long-term perspectives on the area. This encompasses the work of academic historians, lawyers, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, education and literary scholars and psychologists… [and] practitioners and those engaged in the delivery of services and responses to law, crime and behaviour… Crimes and Misdemeanours; Deviance and the law in historical perspective especially wants to encourage the work of young scholars either still engaged in doctoral work or beyond, and also of young practitioners seeking to challenge established traditions. Thus, alongside refereed articles, there is the opportunity to publish work in progress and receive feedback on this through the journal’s Bulletin Board.
Should be interesting. I should set my brain to thinking about a submission at some point.
No information about whether it’ll be free to access or subscription-only, though. (I’ll be rather disappointed if it’s the latter.) And unfortunately there’s no sign of a website yet.
For a class on early modern violent crime earlier this week, I’d asked the students to use Early English Books Online to find examples of cheap murder pamphlets to bring to class. One of them had found a real corker (link requires EEBO subscription, I’m afraid, though I might transcribe it at some point): The bloody innkeeper, or sad and barbarous news from Glocester-shire (1675).
(So there I am enthusing over this pamphlet, and they’re all very polite, bless ‘em, but I think they must be pretty certain by now that teacher is a complete weirdo…)
What happened: a Cromwellian soldier (unnamed) had returned from the wars and set up as an innkeeper in Gloucestershire with his Scottish wife. Because of her Scottish connections, pedlars (the travelling salesmen of the day) from Scotland were frequently among their customers. The innkeeper, neighbours noticed, did surprisingly well considering that the inn was rather small and off the main roads. In fact, he did so well that after some years he was able to set up in a larger and much more impressive establishment in Gloucester.
A read-worthy essay on law- and crime-related biographies (pdf) in the ODNB Online. (The essay is free to access, but you’ll need a subscription [or a good friend with a subscription] to access the biographies mentioned in it.)
Juvenile Rescue and Reform: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Monday, April 10th 2006
The European Centre for the Study of Policing, Open University, Milton Keynes
‘From Refuge to Reformatory. The Evolution of Britain’s First State-funded Juvenile Reformatory – the London Refuge for the Destitute 1805-1830’ - Peter King, The Open University
‘Strategies of Resistance within English Residential Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents 1950-1970’ - Abi Wills, Oxford University
‘Girls and the Politics of Protection: Historical and Contemporary Comparisons’ - Pam Cox, Essex University
£10 for the day including lunch; contact Valerie Humphrey (V.F.Humphrey@open.ac.uk) for a booking form.
If servants and apprentices constitute the largest single group of arson defendants in the Proceedings, the next most prominent group consists of people from the ‘middling sorts’. And in many cases, this represents the use of arson as a weapon or tool – often one wielded in the course of disputes and quarrels with neighbours or business rivals. This included the use of false accusations of arson, and juries may have been particularly concerned about this; acquittal rates seem particularly high in cases that had quarrelling neighbours as their backdrop.
Arson was infrequently prosecuted in the Old Bailey in eighteenth-century London. There are fewer than 100 reported trials in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online database for the period 1674-1834, out of a total of more than 100,000 trials (including, for example, more than 4900 burglaries and 2300 homicides).[1] This might at first seem surprising, given just how seriously arson was viewed within early modern societies.
I have mentioned this before, but now Jonathan at Head Heeb has made it official. ‘Symposia’ - when a group of bloggers gets together to write essays about a pre-specified topic - are becoming a regular feature of academic blogs, but so far they’ve usually focused on books (eg, fiction or non-fiction). I think this will be the first blog symposium for historical research based on primary source material: the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.
The Old Bailey database is, quite simply, the largest primary source collection currently available online, with reports (and often complete transcripts) of more than 100,000 criminal trials from 1674 to 1834. As such, it provides almost unlimited opportunity to use the online medium for original historical work.
This symposium isn’t just for those with an interest in crime or legal issues. Court records are a slice of life, and the Old Bailey papers provide an unparallelled look into the daily life of early modern London. My own online explorations of the Old Bailey records have revealed scenes from the class struggle, glimpses of London’s Jewish and black communities and quack medicine as well as early forensics. The academic conference held on 2004 at the University of Hertfordshire involved an even wider range of topics.
The symposium will probably be held in late January, and “submissions ranging from the scholarly to the entertaining will be welcome”. You don’t need to have a website of your own: Jonathan and I will both lend space if needed. Read the rest of Jonathan’s post, take a look at the OBP (try out a few keyword searches relevant to topics that interest you and see what happens!), and if you think you could take part, get in touch.
Um, how did I manage to miss crimeculture.com for so long? Apparently it’s been around since 2002.
Apart from all kinds of stuff on modern crime literature, films, etc, since this summer it has had a Rogue’s Gallery of early crime literature (medieval to eighteenth century).
It all looks amazing.
Of course, this is why I should remember to check who’s linking to me more often than I do.
From Natalie of Philobiblon, the news that upstairs in the English department there’s a new colleague who is working on the biographies of Renaissance ‘nobodies’. (Yes, I am mildly entertained to get Aber news first from a blogger in London, but no doubt I’d have bumped into her sooner or later…)
Sometimes amongst early modern court records, you find autobiographical material. This is most common in what are known as ’settlement examinations’ or in the petitions of paupers for poor relief: in both cases the life of the petitioner or examinant is being set out to establish the case (or lack of it) for eligibility for parish-based support. But there are a few others, confessions to crimes that (for less immediately obvious reasons) reach back into the personal history of the offender.
(more…)
Ghost
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.HAMLET
Speak; I am bound to hear.
…Ghost
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away…
… List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love –HAMLET
O God!Ghost
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.HAMLET
Murder!
(Hamlet, Act I Scene 5.)
.
Hamlet’s father was merely the most famous of many early modern ghosts who manifested themselves in order to reveal the dreadful truth of a murder concealed and to demand revenge or justice. It was a familiar theme of murder pamphlets and ballads (see Malcolm Gaskill and Vanessa McMahon).
Avenging ghosts could take a variety of forms: usually the murder victim him/herself, although it was not unknown for a murderer’s ghost to confess his or her crimes. As in the case of Hamlet, some appeared to their close relatives or friends. In a late eighteenth-century ballad, a young sailor was murdered at the order of his lover’s father, but he appeared in the night to tell her the truth:
Your cruel parents have been my undoing,
And now I sleep in a watery tomb
She was so distraught that she drowned herself, and on learning of this, the boatswain whom her father had used to kill the young man was “struck with horror” and “did confess the fact he had done”.
Other victim ghosts tormented the murderer, as in a seventeenth-century ballad about a man who murdered his lover:
Sometimes her bleeding Ghost in flames appear’d
Saying, You shall not boast that you are clear’d,
Who wrought my fatal Fall,
For Vengeance still I call,
Alive or dead you shall have your reward. [Gaskill, p.218, reg. required.]
These ghosts represented a ubiquitous theme in cheap print about murder I’ve mentioned before, that of providentialism: God would intervene, sooner or later, to bring concealed murders to light. And He could do it in some mighty mysterious ways.
Such ghosts didn’t appear only in sensationalist cheap print, however. A number of diarists recorded cases of killers confessing to crimes because they had been tormented by the ghosts of their victims. We rational modern folk might smile and assume these were hallucinations and/or nightmares arising from guilt, but more detached witnesses sometimes claimed to have seen the ghosts of murder victims. So, a case from the Northern Assize circuit:
In 1660 Robert Hope of Appleby (Westmorland) informed a JP that he was being pursued by the ghost of Robert Parkin. When, standing in the parish church, Hope had “charge[d] the spiritt what was the reason it did soe molest him, it replyed I am murdered I am murdered I am murdered”. When Hope asked “was it by any man, it replyed noe, & thereupon he desired it to goe to its rest for when he came before the Justices he would divulge it to them”… [Gaskill, p. 231.]
Gaskill argues that this sort of testimony was intended to persuade officials, to kick-start an official investigation into local suspicions, and in this case it worked. (Unfortunately Gaskill doesn’t say what the final outcome of the case was. If no more substantial evidence were produced, a guilty verdict at trial would seem highly unlikely.) Ghosts and dreams were useful in enabling the witness to “impart knowledge about murders without attracting suspicion about either its veracity, or how it came to be acquired” (p.233). But of course, that could only be effective in a cultural context in which belief in ghosts was widely shared - including amongst the gentlemen who served as justices of the peace and coroners.
(Tag: Carnivalesque)
My archival research this summer has (at last) begun to develop some sense of direction, and one of the themes is masquerading under the working title of ‘Gentlemen Behaving Badly’. And I may well be writing a lot more about this, because it encompasses a lot of tasty topics: masculinity, ‘class’ or social rank, politics, litigation, violence, rioting, drinking… [Indeed, it looks like this is going to turn into a proper little series of posts: see here and here, and this earlier post as well. Not to mention this, too. Exciting eh?]
(I suspect that I shall not, however, be taking my cue from this book.)
And right now it has me thinking about the subject of the duel, on which there’s been a good deal of research since the late 1980s (perhaps especially in the mid-90s). I realised that I have quite a bit of catching up to do, in fact. So what follows here is very provisional. I’m just thinking my way around it, but I have some issues about the ways in which ‘the duel’ seems to be discussed in the work that I’ve read so far. Key problems: the research seems to me to tend to decontextualise the practice and not really think much about the relationship between theory and practice.
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