Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900

Clive Emsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351384841
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Ranging from the middle of the eighteenth through to the end of the nineteenth century, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 explores the developments in policing, the courts and the penal system as England became increasingly industrialised and urbanised. Through a consideration of the difficulty of defining crime, the book presents criminal behaviour as being intrinsically tied to historical context and uses this theory as the basis for its examination of crime within English society during this period.

In this fifth edition Professor Emsley explores the most recent research, including the increased focus on ethnicity, gender and cultural representations of crime, allowing students to gain a broader view of modern English society. Divided thematically, the book's coverage includes:

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• the varying perceptions of crime across different social groups

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• crime in the workplace

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• the concepts of a 'criminal class' and 'professional criminals'

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• the developments in the courts, the police and the prosecution of criminals.

Thoroughly updated to address key questions surrounding crime and society in this period, and fully equipped with illustrations, tables and charts to further highlight important aspects, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 is the ideal introduction for students of modern crime.

Chapter 1

Introduction: crime and the law

Previous editions of this book began with a paraphrase from Karl Marx. This has gone, not because Marx’s ideas are no longer relevant or useful, but because of the shifts in research over the last years or so. Historians have moved from focusing on the history of appropriation largely as a protest against changes in the nature and setting of work, to gender distinctions, violence and the significance of cultural representations of crime. The research began as another aspect of ‘history from below’. From exploring crowds and their motives during the 1960s and 1970s, social historians swung, perhaps inevitably, to other kinds of ‘lawbreaker’ seeking to understand the causes and pattern of crime in different economic, social and political contexts, the motives of offenders, the systems of policing and punishment, and the extent of change over time.

This book is an attempt to synthesise recent work on crime and English society from roughly the middle of the eighteenth until the close of the nineteenth century. There is a reference to crime in Wales where the legal system was indistinguishable from that of England; but Scotland, with a different legal system, and Ireland, with its rural and nationalist rebels and para-military police, receive little attention. The book addresses itself to four key questions: What did contemporaries understand as crime during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What patterns of crime were detected, and have been detected subsequently by historians? Who committed crime? What remedies were attempted to prevent crime and to handle offenders?

A definition of crime which embraces all of its different perspectives and which satisfies every generalisation and nuance is probably impossible. In the simplest definition, crime is behaviour which violates the criminal law, behaviour which ‘if detected, would lead to prosecution in a court of law or summarily before an accredited agent of law enforcement’.¹ There are problems with this definition. Some public order legislation gives citizens and law officers, particularly police officers, discretionary powers which can be used if they consider it necessary. Among the most obvious examples are ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace, or whereby a breach of the peace may be occasioned’; and, of course, ‘resisting or obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty’.² This kind of discretionary power increased with the growth of the new police during the nineteenth century, and it even became possible for men to be arrested by the police and then to be given periods of imprisonment by magistrates for being ‘suspicious persons’; the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act, for example, provided for a maximum of twelve months’ imprisonment on such a charge. Most people would differentiate between such ‘offences’ and what they consider to be ‘real crime’, such as murder, rape and theft; but as far as the accused was concerned, the result – arrest, trial, punishment – could be the same. Nevertheless the definition of crime as behaviour violating the criminal law has the advantage for the historian of relating behaviour to laws in force at a particular time; thus ‘criminal’ behaviour is tied firmly to its historical context. It is this definition which informs this volume.

Some historians have used the term ‘social crime’ to differentiate between ‘real crime’ or, perhaps better, ‘anti-social crime’ and those offences which had a degree of community acceptance or which can be linked with social protest. The inhabitants of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester had to get their water from taps or pumps in the street or courtyard. Reporting for the Morning Chronicle Angus Reach noted:

Where standpipes or public taps are erected, the charge by the water company is about 10s. a year for every house the inmates of which use the convenience. Of all the petty thefts which occur in Manchester, however, none – although they do not appear in the police returns – are so common as larcenies from taps and pumps.³

Probably very few of the water thieves ever considered their behaviour as criminal: even if the water company provided a facility, was not water a man’s right and free in the rain and in the rivers? A very small number of offenders set out to justify their behaviour as actions in a kind of class struggle. At the Norfolk Summer Assizes in 1839 William Watts was sentenced to his second term of transportation after having been found guilty of shooting six horses and cattle. Watts declared from the dock that:

he was perfectly satisfied with his sentence but to such a state had they brought the poor of this country by oppressing them with taxes, poor rates, and other things, that it was impossible for a poor man to live by honest means, and all this was to support big-gutted relieving officers, and other folks connected with them and the [Poor Law] union.⁴

It has been suggested that it is useful to think of two main types of social crime during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: first, those offences which drew collective legitimation from their explicit protest nature, and second, offences which, although against the law, were not regarded as criminal by those who committed them. Thus poaching, illicit distilling, wrecking and smuggling can be included among social crimes.⁵ It is also possible to include rioting – particularly over the high cost of food, over enclosures, recruiting, turnpike tolls and so forth – and the appropriation of some perquisites from the workplace as social crimes; ‘perks’ seem to have been increasingly the objects of criminal prosecution by employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Food riots, or disorders over the appropriation of common land, and perks, in particular, demonstrate that there could be different perceptions of justice from that enshrined in the law. Furthermore the language of the law can obscure the protest nature of some crimes as where, for example, individuals making an attack on an enclosure were indicted on charges of ‘forcible entry’; though, by the same token, it must be recognised that some prosecutions in summary courts for the offence of ‘trespass’ were often prosecutions for the theft of growing crops.⁶

While few serious historians would now dismiss eighteenth- and nineteenth-century riots as the work of the dregs of society lacking in any motives other than the desire for drink, plunder and, perhaps, rape, the concept of social crime has its drawbacks. The poor may not have regarded poaching as a crime; ‘they almost universally look upon game, when in a wild state, as not being the property of any individual’, declared a Bedfordshire Justice before a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1826.⁷ But poaching did not merely involve poor men taking game to eke out their meagre diet. There were plenty of gentlemen poachers who were prosecuted under the Game Laws; in the spring of 1796, for example, the Reverend Francis Barstow was fined £20 by Lincolnshire justices for shooting game without a proper certificate.⁸ Moreover from the mid-eighteenth century until the legislation of 1831 which greatly reduced its profitability, poaching was increasingly a business carried on by organised gangs. In spite of laws forbidding the sale of game there was a ready and expanding market among poulterers, innkeepers and victuallers to provide for the dietary demands of urban gentlemen and well-to-do tradesmen; while the landed gentry’s creation of large new game preserves gave poachers, as well as sportsmen, new opportunities.⁹ Whether members of an organised gang, pursuing a business and satisfying a large market, can be adequately described as social criminals is, to say the least, a moot point.

Along the coasts, wreckers believed that they had a right to whatever was thrown up on their shores as a result of storm or misadventure, though legislation prohibiting such activity went back to Edward I. Local sanction of this offence could stretch to Methodist lay preachers, who appear to have participated, and to local parsons, who might receive wine or brandy liberated from wrecks.¹⁰ Gangs involved in another coastal crime, smuggling, also had support from local communities; but they were not averse to violence and intimidation to ensure that support. An excess of violence could be counterproductive, as in the case of the savage murder of a revenue officer and his informant in West Sussex in February 1748.¹¹ Furthermore, smuggling could be big capitalist business. This was especially the case with tea smuggling in the two decades between the end of the Seven Years War and the Commutation Act of 1784 which reduced the duty on tea by more than three-quarters. During these years wealthy merchants with far-flung interests replaced many of the small-scale smugglers and encroached massively on the legal tea market. Tea was smuggled in large, well-armed vessels; the illicit cargoes were even insured. In the end the smugglers were too efficient. They provided the public with an inexpensive, widely available beverage; at the same time they generated vigorous counteraction by legal tea merchants, the East India Company and the government, culminating in the 1784 legislation which dramatically reduced the profits of smuggling. Perhaps tea smugglers were social criminals, but their actions also promoted ‘the international and domestic trade of the kingdom, which, in turn, contributed to the growth of the British economy in the latter part of the eighteenth century’.¹²

During the 1760s there was widespread coining in the West Riding which received considerable support from all sections of the local community. This support was not grounded in an appeal to customary rights or widespread and long-standing hostility to the monopoly of the Royal Mint. Rather it was the Mint’s failure to produce gold coinage of sufficient quality and quantity which provided the coiners with their opportunity; at the same time the offence ‘provided a widely diffused source of income during a period of acute depression in the local staple [textile] industry’. Thus, rather than emerging as a challenge to a new economic order, popularly condoned money-making in the West Riding involved the commercial exploitation of an opportunity which was partly the product of a local economic crisis.¹³

Other offences might be tacitly condoned by social groups or communities. In 1827, at Greystoke in Cumberland, Mary Kirkbride died of poisoning. The overdose of laudanum which killed her appeared to have been administered by a group of local women, including the wife of one of the overseers of the poor. A wall of silence descended around the case; Mary Kirkbride came from a family notorious for burdening the parish with illegitimate children and for bringing trouble to the community.¹⁴ Six years later the new Metropolitan Police broke up a political demonstration in Calthorpe Street, London; during the fracas P. C. Robert Culley was stabbed and mortally wounded. A significant proportion of artisan London believed that the police had acted in a ‘ferocious and brutal’ manner quite ‘unprovoked by the people’. This attitude was reflected in the verdict of the coroner’s jury – ‘justifiable homicide’ – and the subsequent feting of that jury by the populace.¹⁵ Just over half a century later Captain Thomas Dudley and one of his ship’s crew, Edwin Stephens, were tried for murdering cabin boy Richard Parker. Dudley had stabbed Parker in the throat with his penknife and bled him to death over his ship’s chronometer case. Dudley, Stephens and another seaman, Ned Brooks, then drank the blood and ate the body over the next five days. The incident is horrific; but so too were the circumstances in which Dudley and his crew found themselves. They had been shipwrecked in the South Atlantic and adrift in an open boat for nineteen days with little food – two tins of turnips and a small turtle caught on the fourth day. Dudley gave a full statement when he was rescued, and was astonished when he and Stephens were arrested; Brooks was a Crown witness. Dudley’s defence was that he had observed a custom of the sea; public opinion appears to have acquiesced, though there was disquiet that Dudley and the others had selected the weakest among their unfortunate group rather than drawing lots. Defence counsel argued that Dudley and his crew were outside the jurisdiction of any court as well as of civilised society. The different courts hearing the case over a seven-month period fudged and hedged over the legal and ethical problems. Dudley and Stephens were found guilty and sentenced to death for murder; but, in the event, they were only required to serve a token period of hard labour.¹⁶

The killings of Kirkbride, Culley and Parker have not been described as ‘social crimes’ yet, to the extent that each was condoned or excused by different social groups, the label would not be entirely inappropriate. This underlines some of the problems in using the term: if the armed poacher or armed smuggler was a social criminal, why not the killer of P. C. Culley? And if the killer of P. C. Culley, why not the killers of Kirkbride and Parker, save that the former were well-to-do and, apparently, acting with cold-blooded premedita...