ABSTRACT
It is, perhaps, inevitable that the most significant type of study produced by the recent growth of interest in the history of crime in pre-industrial England should be that based upon the county and the work of the courts of assize and quarter sessions. Although the activities of the assizes must, for many purposes, be examined in a national context, the judges sat shire by shire to deal with the crimes committed on the circuit they rode, and the indictments for felony, recording the more serious offences, were generally filed by county. Firstly, the very fact that a study of crime and delinquency in a seventeenth-century parish should end by describing a group of religious radicals reintroduces the whole problem of the definition of ‘crime’ in this period. Governmental ambitions for a disciplined populace and the element of self-regulation combined with the economic and social structure to produce a distinctive type of criminal.
