Teaching Resources: Online Primary Sources
Crime and the Law in England and Wales
c.1500-1800

NB: Citing Online Sources
Take care to note any particular citation requirements for pages at websites; eg Citation guide at the Old Bailey Proceedings website.
General guidance: Citing electronic documents

Court Documents and Related Records

Old Bailey Proceedings (printed reports of criminal trials at the Old Bailey 1674-1834, plus some associated archival records for the 18th century; transcripts and document images, keyword searchable, statistics facilities)

Virtual Norfolk (transcripts/extracts)

• Crime and the law
• Gender, sexuality
• Witchcraft and magic
• Popular religion
• The case of John Kettle
• Riot and rebellion
• Kett's rebellion 1549
• 18th-century poverty and riot
• Dissent and sedition after the Restoration
• 'Glorious Revolution' and seditious words
• Prosecutions of Quakers
• 18th-century election disputes

Crime and punishment in 18th-century mid- Wales (document images and transcripts)

• The pillory
• Public whippings
• Treatment of women
• Prison conditions
• Death sentences
• Selling ale without a licence
• Transportation
• Bastardy
• Profanity
• Escapes from prison

Gathering the Jewels (Wales): Crime (document images and transcripts/translations/extracts)

• Assault cases
• Theft cases
• Assorted court records
• Juries
• Caernarfonshire Quarter Sessions
• Recognizance, innkeeper, Caernarfonshire
• A Caernarfonshire beggar, 1795
• Trial for forgery, Wales, 1818
• Jury service and an execution, Beaumaris
• Corn riots and magistrates, Anglesey

Wales and the Law (transcripts; a few document images)

Witchcraft in Flintshire (document images only)

Petition against an illegal alehouse, Gloucestershire

JPs' list of alehouses in Derbyshire 1577

Crime in Print and Popular Culture

Complete Newgate Calendar

Jonathan Wild

Jack Sheppard

Fielding's life of Jonathan Wild

Autobiography of a smuggler

Early eighteenth-century newspaper reports

The word on the street: Scottish broadsides

The Beggars Opera

Balladry

Bodleian broadside ballads

16th-century ballads (also here)

A caveat for cutpurses

The Berkshire tragedy

Tom Clinch going to be hanged

Law and Order, Ideals and Ideologies

Extracts from Dalton, The Countrey Justice

Blackstone's Commentaries

Beccaria Of crimes and punishments

Adam Smith, Lectures on jurisprudence

Elizabeth Homily on obedience

Homily against disobedience and rebellion

From the 'Book of Sports' (1633)

The Act against Puritans 1593

The Act against Recusants 1593

Act against Jesuits 1585

Elizabethan proclamation against maintenance of pirates

Habeas Corpus Act 1679

Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1603-10

Tyburn Tree: 'Dying Speeches'

Particular Topics

Outlaws and Highwaymen

Homosexuality in eighteenth-century England

Pirate image archive (also includes documents)

Pirate documents

Hanover Texts: Witchcraft documents

Religion and politics

The Pilgrimage of Grace

Dissent, doubt and spiritual violence in the Reformation

Trial of the Gunpowder plotters

Killing the King: Trial of Charles I

Trial of royalist plotters against Cromwell

Punishments

Tyburn Tree: Various documents

Boswell at Tygate and Newburn

Tudor England: Executions

• Executions of Fisher, More et al 1535
• Anne Boleyn, last words/execution (1536)
• Execution of Duke of Somerset 1552
• Executions of Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley 1554
• Execution of Thomas Cranmer 1556
• Execution of Mary Stewart 1587

Convicts and the Colonies

Images

The Hogarth Archive

 

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This page last updated 3 January 2005 by Sharon Howard

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