ABSTRACT
The administration of criminal justice is the commonest, the most striking, and the most interesting shape, in which the sovereign power of the state manifests itself to the great bulk of its subjects. Between 1776 and 1914 considerable change occurred in the ways of handling criminality. ‘Social crime’ is a category created by the modern historian to embrace those criminal acts such as smuggling or wrecking that had the character of collective endeavour or protest and typically enjoyed community support. The way in which the English criminal courts managed crime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a function of the ‘pre-modern’ style of justice. The exercise of the prerogative of mercy, and the conservative resistance to the reform vision of certain and proportionate punishment, were the prompts to one of the most significant discussions among historians about the ‘pre-modern’ system of justice.
