People's Courts?

In recent years a burgeoning historiography has identified summary courts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England as places of exchange and dialogue between different social groups. ¹ Rather than viewing the criminal law as an instrument of the ruling elite, as did many left-wing analyses of the 1970s and 1980s, ² historians have increasingly portrayed local courts as accessible public arenas in which magistrates handed out advice, negotiated disputes and settled grievances – often in an informal, discretionary manner. ³ Indeed, fulfilling this role, it has been contended, was the priority of the ‘patrician guardians’ who served on the bench, rather than bringing offenders to justice. ⁴ If not ‘people’s courts’, ⁵ these were courts which empowered working-class participants and provided accessible justice to the urban masses. ⁶ According to Drew D. Gray, the fact that so many of the lower orders brought complaints before magistrates was ‘testimony to the centrality and accessibility of the summary courts and to the perception that they were places where disputes could be satisfactorily aired and resolved’. ⁷ Similarly, Jennifer S. Davis has argued that the ‘process of negotiation which took place in the police courts appears to have been essential to the effective maintenance of the social order by the nineteenth-century state’. ⁸ In London, she contends, police courts were not expected to work hand in hand with police forces to suppress the rougher elements of working-class culture and behaviour. Rather, they were ‘to win lower-class acceptance of the law and, thus, implicitly of the social order’. ⁹ The criminal justice system, as Peter King has argued, was not only an arena of ‘terror, exploitation, and inequality, but also one of negotiation and accommodation and every group in society helped shape it, just as their behaviour was partly shaped by it’. ¹⁰