ABSTRACT
Crime is now accepted as a serious subject of historical study. That it has achieved this status owes much to the explosion of interest in social history which began in the 1960s, and which led historians to study not just crime but a number of other hitherto disregarded or little regarded topics: the family, popular culture, women's history, the history of childhood, the history of death. Certainly, although the existence of a number of important earlier studies should not be overlooked, it was the 1970s which were to see the publication of a cluster of significant scholarly studies of the history of crime, law and order, and related topics. These studies, and others which followed in the early 1980s, convinced many historians that the history of crime was a growth area, and led those of them working on more traditional themes to describe (or perhaps more accurately decry) the subject as ‘fashionable’. Yet so far as the history of early modern England was concerned, the volume of this pioneering work was hardly overwhelming: a handful of monographs, a smaller number of collections of essays, a few articles in scholarly journals and less than ten doctoral theses. The bulk of publication subsequent to these pioneering days has not been massive, although the arrival in print of some excellent monographs and scholarly articles has ensured that the quality of work in this field has offset any deficiencies in quantity. 1 Historians of crime in early modern England, once constantly reminded by their colleagues that their subject was expanding and fashionable, might justifiably think that, many years after the subject made its first claims for academic recognition, there is still considerable work to be done. Those based in British institutions might also ponder on why it is that so much work in this field has been carried out by transatlantic, or transatlantically based, scholars.
