ABSTRACT
One of the questions which the historians of crime is most often asked to answer is that of the nature of the rates and patterns of crime in the past. The question is a legitimate one, made all the more so by the evident willingness of historians of crime to adopt a statistical approach to their subject. The author of a major study of crime in colonial New York declared crime in the past to be an ‘eminently countable phenomenon’, 1 and support was lent to this proposition by such important pioneering works as those of Beattie and Samaha. 2 The logic behind such a methodology is a seductive one: as we have seen in the previous chapter, there existed in early modern England a large number of courts; despite the vicissitudes of time, a massive bulk of archival material survives from these courts; despite the difficulties of using this material, it might be expected that the industrious historian would be able to glean from it some criminal statistics, at least for isolated institutions or localities. Taken over a short period, such statistics might furnish details of a ‘pattern of crime’. Over a longer timespan, they might produce evidence of fluctuations in levels of crime, which might in turn be compared against other socio-economic variables: demographic trends, harvest failures, inflation, trade depressions, the impact of war, and so on. Superficially, the study of crime statistics would seem to be the logical initial task of the historian of crime.
