Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840

Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139459495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840

Crime and Law in England, 1750–1840 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139459495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

Crime and Law in England, 1750-1840

Crime and Law in England, 1750-1840 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521781992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900

Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 PDF Author: Clive Emsley
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750

Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750 PDF Author: James A Sharpe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317891775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Still the only general survey of the topic available, this widely-used exploration of the incidence, causes and control of crime in Early Modern England throws a vivid light on the times. It uses court archives to capture vividly the everyday lives of people who would otherwise have left little mark on the historical record. This new edition - fully updated throughout - incorporates new thinking on many issues including gender and crime; changes in punishment; and literary perspectives on crime.

Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830

Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 PDF Author: Norma Landau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139433261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book examines how the law was made, defined, administered, and used in eighteenth-century England. A team of leading international historians explore the ways in which legal concerns and procedures came to permeate society and reflect on eighteenth-century concepts of corruption, oppression, and institutional efficiency. These themes are pursued throughout in a broad range of contributions which include studies of magistrates and courts; the forcible enlistment of soldiers and sailors; the eighteenth-century 'bloody code'; the making of law basic to nineteenth-century social reform; the populace's extension of law's arena to newspapers; theologians' use of assumptions basic to English law; Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's concept of the liberty intrinsic to England; and Blackstone's concept of the framework of English law. The result is an invaluable account of the legal bases of eighteenth-century society which is essential reading for historians at all levels.

Crime in England

Crime in England PDF Author: J S Cockburn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000156257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This volume, first published in 1977, brings together eleven studies of crime and the administration of the criminal law in England during the early modern period. They represent a variety of approaches – legal, historical and sociological – to the study of historical crime. The initial essay in this study, which is written from a legal standpoint, is the first coordinated account of the structure of criminal law administration in this formative period. It is followed by investigations into the nature and incidence of crime, court appearance and punishment, separate studies of witchcraft, infanticide and poaching, and an account of conditions in eighteenth-century Newgate. This book will be of particular interest to students of criminology and history.

Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750

Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 PDF Author: J. A. Sharpe
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description


English Criminal Law Reform, 1750 to 1830

English Criminal Law Reform, 1750 to 1830 PDF Author: Rolland L. Comstock
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criminal law
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
In the relatively few years between 1750 and about 1840, English criminal law underwent a great and significant change. This chain of development has best been stated in a work of fiction by the contemporary British novelist, Daphne du Maurier, with these lines from "My Cousin Rachel": "They used to hang men ... in the old days. Not any more, though." This writing begins in the period which might be termed the "dark age" of criminal law. During this time as many as three hundred and fifty persons a year traveled the road to Tyburn where a rope or a stake awaited them. The crimes of which these men, women and children had been convicted where great in number and ranged in seriousness from murdering the kind to being found in the company of Egyptians or gypsies. Although the movement for general criminal law reform begins first in Italy and France, it spreads very quickly to England. Such men as Sir Samuel Romilly, Jeremy Bentham, Henry Fielding and others are prime movers in the struggle for a more humane body of law and enforcement. Public opinion favorable to the reformers existed throughout the entire period. Henry Fielding's tract on the subject, published first in 1750, expressed the enlightened idea that the roots of crime are to be found in given social conditions; and that crime should thus be stopped at its "fountainhead". These words were well received by almost everyone in the country with the exception of the tradition-bound House of Lords. Proof that the public found the capital statutes to be too numerious and too harsh is to be found in the fact that juries would frequently find that stolen goods of great value had only nominal value, well below the statutory limits. After almost a hundred years of urging reform oon the part of individuals, committees, associations and the general public. Sir Robert Peel becomes head of the Home Office and a "wind that was the breath of the" new age begins to blow with great force against the bloody, but placid, "dark age". Although it is not correct to assume that capital statutes were done away with in the period under review here, it is correct to say that here the foundation was put in place on which such a structure might be built.

A History of the Criminal Law of England

A History of the Criminal Law of England PDF Author: James Fitzjames Stephen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criminal law
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description


Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740-1820

Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740-1820 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191543756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The criminal law has often been seen as central to the rule of the eighteenth-century landed élite in England. This book presents a detailed analysis of the judicial processs - of victims' reactions, pretrial practices, policing, magistrates hearings, trials, sentencing, pardoning and punishment - using property offenders as its main focus. The period 1740-1820 - the final era before the coming of the new police and the repeal of the capital code - emerges as the great age of discretionary justice, and the book explores the impact of the vast discretionary powers held by many social groups. It reassesses both the relationship between crime rates and the economic deprivation, and the many ways that vulnerability to prosecution varied widely across the lifecycle, in the light of the highly selective nature of pretrial negotiations. More centrally, by asking at every stage - who used the law, for what purposes, in whose interests and with what social effects - it opens up a number of new perspectives on the role of the law in eighteenth-century social relations. The law emerges as less the instrument of particular élite groups and more as an arena of struggle, of negotiation, and of compromise. Its rituals were less controllable and its merciful moments less manageable and less exclusively available to the gentry élite than has been previously suggested. Justice was vulnerable to power, but was also mobilised to constrain it. Despite the key functions that the propertied fulfilled, courtroom crowds, the counter-theatre of the condemned, and the decisions of the victims from a very wide range of backgrounds had a role to play, and the criteria on which decisions were based were shaped as much by the broad and more humane discourse which Fielding called the 'good mind' as by the instrumental needs of the propertied élites.