Courts, Officers and Documents

Any student of crime must familiarize him or herself with the law-enforcement agencies of the society he or she studies. Crime has usually been detected, tried and punished within an institutional context: its very definition is often in large measure dependent upon rules laid down by the law-enforcement agencies of the society in which it is committed. Early modern England, as we shall see, was a country which enjoyed the presence of a large number of courts with a criminal jurisdiction, while there were also numerous officers charged with enforcing the law and maintaining the monarch's peace: indeed, even in 1550, England has the appearance of being a much-governed country. ¹ This government had, by the standards obtaining in many contemporary European states, a number of peculiarities, of which two are outstanding: the overwhelming importance of royal, as opposed to local or seigneurial, law; and the widespread dependence upon unpaid amateur local officials. The main purpose of this chapter, therefore, will be to give some impression of the main elements of this system, in many ways unlike those obtaining in the other large European monarchies of the time. There is, however, a further reason for gaining a working knowledge of how the courts functioned and of how officials went about their business. Much of our argument in the three following chapters will be founded upon the study of archival materials generated by the courts; indeed, as we have suggested in the introduction, it is the availability of these archives, many of them still in large measure unexplored, which has made serious research on the history of crime possible. Accordingly, the final section of this chapter will consist of a brief discussion of the main types of document produced by the clerical staff of early modern English courts, and of their usefulness to the historian of crime.