ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the previous chapter, quantitative study of court records, although an essential and in many respects intriguing exercise, provides an imperfect impression of the nature of crime in the past. We have also seen that this imperfection is especially marked in those studies which have concentrated on a statistical analysis of assize and quarter session indictments. It has, moreover, been argued that the major problem in attempting to develop criminal statistics for the period with which we are dealing is that the decision to prosecute was usually the outcome of an initiative made by an individual rather than a ‘police’ agency. Behind every indictment, presentment, and binding over there lay an individual set of circumstances: to understand crime in early modern England, therefore, it is necessary to grasp something of the interpersonal relationships that preceded formal court action. Trying to do so inevitably leads us to an examination of the social milieu in which the victim and offender existed. Ultimately, we must endeavour to understand what was happening in the villages and small towns in which 90 per cent of the Englishmen and women of this period lived, and to try to connect the issues of crime and control with some of these wider problems of social history.
