Crime in Early Modern England 1550-1750

James A Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317891765
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER ONE

---

Definitions, Methods and Objectives

Crime is now accepted as a serious subject of historical study. That it has achieved this status owes much to the explosion of interest in social history which began in the 1960s, and which led historians to study not just crime but a number of other hitherto disregarded or little regarded topics: the family, popular culture, women's history, the history of childhood, the history of death. Certainly, although the existence of a number of important earlier studies should not be overlooked, it was the 1970s which were to see the publication of a cluster of significant scholarly studies of the history of crime, law and order, and related topics. These studies, and others which followed in the early 1980s, convinced many historians that the history of crime was a growth area, and led those of them working on more traditional themes to describe (or perhaps more accurately decry) the subject as ‘fashionable’. Yet so far as the history of early modern England was concerned, the volume of this pioneering work was hardly overwhelming: a handful of monographs, a smaller number of collections of essays, a few articles in scholarly journals and less than ten doctoral theses. The bulk of publication subsequent to these pioneering days has not been massive, although the arrival in print of some excellent monographs and scholarly articles has ensured that the quality of work in this field has offset any deficiencies in quantity.¹ Historians of crime in early modern England, once constantly reminded by their colleagues that their subject was expanding and fashionable, might justifiably think that, many years after the subject made its first claims for academic recognition, there is still considerable work to be done. Those based in British institutions might also ponder on why it is that so much work in this field has been carried out by transatlantic, or transatlantically based, scholars.

The scholarship devoted to the history of early modern crime since the 1970s has served as a corrective to the neglect with which it had previously been treated. To demonstrate this point, let us turn to how an earlier generation of history textbooks treated the subject, making at best only passing and impressionistic reference to it. J. B. Black's account of the reign of Elizabeth I in the ‘Oxford History of England’ series made a few generalized remarks on lawlessness, mentioned highwaymen briefly, and devoted the obligatory few paragraphs to vagabonds. Sir George Clark's account of the later Stuarts, in the same series, restricted its discussion of crime and lawlessness to a brief and not entirely accurate commentary on witchcraft and duelling. One of the best known general histories of the eighteenth century of its time, by J. H. Plumb, mentioned crime and the criminal law as one element in the supposed brutality of the age. A familiar picture was conjured up of gin-drinking, ineffective parish constables, the London slums, and Tyburn, while ‘the brutality and ferocity of life… prevalence of dirt, disease and poverty’ was commented upon. In such a world, it is little wonder that ‘angry mobs, burning and looting’ were ‘as prevalent as disease’.² Even works of this vintage claiming to deal with economic and social history had little of any value to say about crime.

In large measure, this neglect of crime as a historical phenomenon is just one aspect of a much wider tendency, which has still not been fully dispelled, to treat social history as the Cinderella of the historical sciences. Since the late nineteenth century, the main thrust of English historical writing has been towards the study of past politics. Social history, when studied on a level above the purely anecdotal, was frequently approached largely in terms of the history of social policy. Even labour history, potentially an exciting subject, took some time to emerge from its preoccupation with the early prefigurations of the modern Labour Party and trade union movement, and to concern itself with the broader social and cultural aspects of working-class history. Only recently has much serious attention been paid to those aspects of life which are outside the ken of such political institutions. This past neglect has led to two problems. The first, to use the words of Keith Thomas, is that social history has usually been treated as an ‘undemanding subsidiary’, something that at best deserves only brief mention before the historian passes on to those central concerns, politics and the constitution. Secondly, as Edward Thompson put it, to the mainstream historian ‘the people of this island (see under Poor Law, Sanitary Reform, Wages Policy) appear as one of the problems which the government has to handle’. Thomas's claims, made as long ago as 1966, that ‘the social history of the future will… not be a residual subject, but a central one, around which all other branches of history are likely to be organized’³ has not been fulfilled in Britain, least of all in the undergraduate syllabus. Nevertheless, important advances have been made.

These advances are the outcome of a number of factors. One of them is the influence of foreign historians, not least French proponents of the Annales school. Another is the contribution made to the study of history by the social sciences, of which social anthropology is probably of the most use to the early modernist.⁴ Both of these influences have done much to encourage historians of Tudor and Stuart England to approach their subject in new ways. But what is arguably the most important contribution to this rewriting of the history of early modern England has come from the massive growth in what might be best described as archive-consciousness: documentary sources are more widely available than ever before, and historians are becoming increasingly imaginative in their ideas of how to use them.⁵ Many sources which were undiscovered, unavailable, or whose usefulness was unappreciated a generation ago, are now readily on hand at the Public Record Office in London, or in local or specialist record offices. Research on these documentary riches is made easier by the way in which many of them have been repaired, cleaned, catalogued and indexed in such a fashion as to facilitate their use. In 1848 Macaulay, at the beginning of the famous third chapter of his History of England, lamented the fact that he was forced to base his account upon ‘scanty and dispersed materials’. Most later political historians, in their brief accounts of English society in the past, have used a similarly anecdotal approach, although few have matched Macaulay's vividness of writing. Now, thanks to the labours of the archivist, those embarking on the writing of English social history frequently find an embarrassment of primary materials upon which to base their researches.

In particular, this extensive documentation makes it possible to treat crime as something more than an aspect of an undemanding and subsidiary area of history, subject to and deserving only anecdotal treatment. Recent work in the field has confirmed the suspicion that arises from reading a few of the older studies of the subject:⁶ abundant materials await the historian willing to go out and find them, and important results await those willing to show diligence in reading these materials and ingenuity in using them. Court archives, although nowhere near complete, survive in large numbers, and reveal the business of tribunals as disparate as the Star Chamber and King's Bench at Westminster, and the local manorial court in the darkest corner of the realm. Such archives form the basis of the most important research on crime, the actuality of the prosecution of offences and their punishment. Other sources, many of them still relatively unexploited, provide insights into other important if ancillary facets of crime in the past. Popular literature, almost since its inception, has been full of accounts of spectacular crimes, accounts which provide some factual evidence as well as information on attitudes towards illegal behaviour. By the early eighteenth century, newspapers were regularly reporting crime, while additional information on the phenomenon is provided by advertisements concerning stolen goods. The statute book and parliamentary diaries can be used to give evidence on official attitudes and preoccupations, while there are also frequent if scattered references to crime in a wide variety of private documents, among them diaries, letters and estate papers. There is certainly no shortage of material and, as we shall see, this is clearly reflected in a diversity of approaches to the subject.

Crime: the problem of definition

This variety of materials relating to the history of crime, and mention of the diversity of ways in which the subject can be approached, serve to introduce a fundamental problem: how ‘crime’ is to be defined. Our starting-point must be that the word crime is a general blanket term rather than a precise analytical or descriptive category. The term can be used to describe an accident; an incidental and unpremeditated explosion of passion or despair; a behaviour pattern expressive of emotional or mental instability or frustration; something akin to business activity; or even a chosen way of life. Defining behaviour as ‘criminal’ varies according to different circumstances or social conventions, and there is a constantly moving frontier of what is, and what is not, acceptable conduct in any given society. Crime thus includes not only those acts which most human beings would regard as intrinsically wicked but whose motivation can vary enormously (theft and murder, for example); it also comprehends behaviour which can be newly classified as criminal by a specific society and can therefore be created by legislators or law-enforcement agencies. As criminologists have reminded us, there is a need to distinguish between crime waves and ‘enforcement waves’ when analysing criminal statistics.⁷

Moreover, definition of behaviour as ‘criminal’ can vary according to social status or class, and is also prone to change over time: what a workforce might regard simply as taking traditional perquisites might be regarded as pilfering by employers, while types of violence which are acceptable in some periods might be less so in others. ‘Crime’, therefore, covers a wide range of activities, and is likely to be defined differently by different people at different times.⁸ For most of our purposes, however, since the early modern historian's concern must be mainly with recorded crimes, an effective (if by no means exclusive) working definition of the word must be that crime is behaviour which is regarded as illegal and which, if detected, would lead to prosecution in a court of law or summarily before an accredited agent of law enforcement. Above all, such a definition, allied to good court records, allows us to understand how crime was defined by the relevant institutions of the society experiencing it. Overcoming modern preconceptions on this point is a major obstacle.

The sort of problem which historians encounter when they fail to interpret crime in the past in the terms in which it was understood at the time is dearly demonstrated in G. R. Elton's introductory essay, ‘Crime and the historian’, in the collection of studies edited by J. S. Cockburn under the title Crime in England 1550–1800. Elton, for example, had difficulties with the notion that the historian of crime should be concerned with church courts and thus ‘throw theft and adultery into one bag’, since ‘contemporaries did not regard them as of one kind at all’.⁹ This is largely true, although we must bear in mind a number of Puritan writers who did put the two activities on a roughly equal moral plane.¹⁰ Neither, one suspects, did contemporaries regard theft and treason as the same thing: but Elton, a little later, put these two offences into one bag when he spoke of ‘the real crimes as it were… treasons and felonies’.¹¹ The use of the phrase ‘the real crimes’ betrays the writer's line of thought. His definition of crime, despite his willingness to accuse another contributor to the volume of ‘mildly anachronistic confusion’,¹² was evidently based on what is perhaps the modern layman or woman's definition of ‘serious crime’: burglary, robbery, rape and murder. To restrict a study of crime in early modern England to these offences simply will not do.

The first objection to equating ‘real crime’ with the serious offences, treason and felony, must be that in early modern England, as in modern British society (and, one suspects, all others), petty crime was more common, more typical, and in many ways more entitled to be described as ‘real’ crime than was the serious offence.¹³ In the crisis years of 1629–31, for example, 93 thefts were prosecuted at the Essex quarter sessions. The same years saw the prosecution of 698 individuals for defaulting on their statutory obligation to work on the highways, and of 652 persons for various offences connected with the drink trade.¹⁴ Work on petty crime in Middlesex in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has unearthed a fascinating pattern of minor offences, and also a considerable official flexibility in dealing with them.¹⁵ Moreover, ignoring petty crime not only obscures the reality of the pattern of prosecutions and punishment, but also loses sight of one or two important points about the objectives of central and local government. One of the distinctive features of law enforcement in the first half of the period covered by this book was the prosecution of regulative offences, of which infractions of the drink laws perhaps loom largest in the archives of the criminal courts. To ignore this phenomenon is to ignore much of what the authorities of the period would have regarded as the essence of crime control, but to understand its full dimensions the historian must extend his or her researches into the records of local and minor tribunals, not least the ecclesiastical and manorial courts. The parish constable sending the unlicensed alehouse-k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface to the First Edition and Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1. Definitions, Methods and Objectives
• 2. Courts, Officers and Documents
• 3. Measuring Crime, Measuring Punishment
• 4. Controlling the Parish
• 5. The Criminal Orders of Early Modern England
• 6. Social Crime and Legitimizing Notions
• 7. Elite Perceptions and Popular Images
• 8. Continuity and Change in Crime and Punishment 1550–1750
• Bibliographical Note
• Index