Legal and judicial sources

Since the 1990s there have been two contradictory trends in the study of legal and judicial sources in early modern England. On the one hand, historical interest in the study of crime, the courts and the criminal law has declined compared to the buoyancy of research on these subjects between 1970 and 1985. On the other, there has been an explosion in the availability of legal source materials online, led by the extremely impressive effort to digitize the printed proceedings of the Old Bailey Sessions, and encompassing a range of other online resources for criminal and Church court cases. ¹ The first generation of social historians and historians of crime, in particular, made extensive use of the records of the Assizes and Quarter Sessions, as well as of the Church courts before 1640. ² They mapped out the dynamics of offences and changes over time. ³ They were particularly concerned to establish the social profiles of offenders and victims of crime, for a wide variety of offences including theft, violence, murder, witchcraft, sexual offences, poaching, smuggling and vagrancy. ⁴ They looked at the processes of detection and arrest, the functions of constables and Justices of the Peace (JPs), and tried to establish how often cases ended up in court. ⁵ They attempted to reconstruct court proceedings, to assess the roles of jurors, defendants, counsel and judges. ⁶ They reviewed the kinds of punishments inflicted, and the moral messages conveyed by them. ⁷ More broadly, they sought to answer some big questions about the nature of society and justice in early modern England. They asked whether changes in the dynamics of crime (particularly declining rates of indictments for violent offences) and in the severity of punishments inflicted meant that early modern society was undergoing some kind of ‘civilizing’ process. ⁸ They debated whether the justice system really operated in the interests of the propertied elite, under the cover of justice for all. ⁹ They also examined the gaps within the legal record itself, and the more troubling issue of the unknowable ‘dark figure’ of unreported crimes. ¹⁰