eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
The Little Book of Crime and Punishment is a repository of fascinating, obscure, strange and entertaining facts and trivia about the history of the British criminal justice system. Learn of the days when noses, hands and heads were cut off, heretics were burned at the stake and rebels were hanged, drawn and quartered. A reference book and a quirky guide, this can be dipped in to time and time again to reveal something new about the various forms of punishments; from ducking scolds, imposing curfews, tagging persistent offenders and, of course, imprisonment
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750957076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Series: | Little Book Of |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Little Book of Crime and Punishment
By Stephen Halliday
The History Press
Copyright © 2014 Stephen HallidayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5707-6
CHAPTER 1
WHY WASTE MONEY ON PRISONS?
PUT 'EM IN THE CLINK
Before the nineteenth century, criminals were rarely sentenced to prison. Prisons were expensive to build, no one was keen on having one in their backyard and it seemed a pity to waste money on criminals. The purpose of a prison (often known as the bridewell, clink or lockup to give a few local expressions) was to hold prisoners until their trials before magistrates or a judge and jury. When the trial had been held (and the usual verdict was 'guilty'), the convicted prisoner would be sent back to prison for a brief period before the sentence was carried out.
THE KING'S JUDGES
The system started with King Henry II (1154–89) who, when not quarrelling with Thomas Becket, was reforming the English legal system. And as we will see later, Henry had a strong case in his argument with the troublesome priest, even if he did overplay his hand by turning his archbishop into a martyr. Henry instituted the system whereby the king's judges, sometimes referred to as justices in eyre, travelled from Westminster to each county in his kingdom to administer justice. They normally travelled in pairs and before they arrived in a town, the local ne'er-do-wells would be rounded up by the parish constable and incarcerated in the local gaol to await trial by the king's judges. The 'judges' were unlikely to have had much in the way of legal training; the Inns of Court, where barristers and judges were later trained, did not appear for another two centuries. Henry's judges were more likely to be courtiers and nobles who enjoyed the king's confidence and were prepared to do the work at little cost.
The trials became known as assizes, derived from an old French word meaning a legal process carried out while seated. The assizes would begin with the arrival of judges, who would often process through the town with the mayor and other dignitaries before beginning the trials. This continued until 1972, when the assizes were replaced by permanently staffed Crown Courts, of which the Old Bailey is the most famous. When they had finished their work in a county, the judges would return to London and to Westminster Hall where the high court was based, until the reign of Queen Victoria who opened the present Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand in 1882. The judges would compare notes with their colleagues who had been administering justice in other parts of the kingdom, discussing such matters as how evidence was gathered and presented, what credence was attached to testimony from people at different levels in society and what penalties they had imposed for various offences.
In this way a set of common principles or precedents developed to ensure a degree of consistency in the administration of justice. In time this became known as the common law, the application of which is based upon precedents in order to combine consistency with justice. Henry II is thus regarded as the 'Father of the Common Law' and it is not by chance that the year of his death, 1189, is regarded as time immemorial in English law. If an individual can prove, for example, that he has owned a piece of land or other possession since 1189 then no claim prior to that date will be held valid in English law. The Crown Courts continue to hear serious cases which are likely, in the event of guilt being established, to result in long prison sentences.
LOCAL JUSTICE
Less serious infringements of the law would be dealt with not at the assizes by the king's judges, but by quarter sessions or petty sessions. Quarter sessions were held, as their name implies, four times a year at Epiphany (early January), Easter (March/April), Midsummer and Michaelmas (late September). They would be presided over by three Justices of the Peace sitting with a jury. Minor offences such as drunkenness, theft of fairly low-value items and most motoring offences would be dealt with by three Justices of the Peace without a jury, in petty sessions which were often held in a church hall or pub rather than in a purpose-built courthouse. The office of Justices of the Peace (also called magistrates) is an ancient one. It was first mentioned in an Act of Parliament in 1361 but the reference there is clearly to an office that had already existed for some time. In 1195, during the reign of Richard I (1189–99), Keepers of the Peace were appointed and they were probably the forerunners of the Justices of the Peace. They were chosen by the king's local representative, the sheriff, as citizens of good standing with local knowledge and they did much more than hear cases. Their knowledge of the local populace would be used to round up suspects before the assizes or quarter sessions were held (whereas nowadays a justice who knows anything about the criminal past of a suspect is required to stand down from hearing the case). They were not paid (they still aren't) and now have some training in court procedure, but they are assisted by a legally qualified court clerk who advises them, when required, on the law. Before the reign of Queen Victoria they did much else besides. In effect they were the local government authority outside the major towns, with the task of raising money from rates to repair bridges and roads, for example.
BETTER THAN DROWNING
The use of judges, magistrates and juries was a great improvement on what went before. In the early medieval period, trial by ordeal was a common method of establishing guilt or innocence, based upon the assumption that God would care for the innocent. The most common variations were trial by fire and trial by water.
Trial by fire involved walking across hot coals or holding a red-hot piece of metal. After an interval of about three days, the resulting wounds would be examined by a priest, who would decide whether the healing process had advanced sufficiently to show that the deity had indeed intervened. If not, the suspect would be declared guilty.
Trial by water took two forms. The first required the suspect to remove a stone from the bottom of a cauldron of boiling water, following which a priest would decide whether the injuries were consistent with guilt or innocence. The other form, known as ordeal by cold water, involved the accused being thrown into a river or pond, sometimes bound hand and foot. If he floated he was innocent and if he sank he would drown – regarded as a satisfactory outcome to those who believed this was a punishment for his guilt.
In 1215 Pope Innocent III (1198–1215) prohibited priests from participating in these 'ordeals', which put an end to the practice, though in the seventeenth century in England a witch-hunter called Matthew Hopkins briefly revived a form of ordeal by water associated with catching witches. It was assumed that a witch, having renounced her baptism, would be rejected by water. The unfortunate woman would be thrown into water. If she floated, she was rejected by the water and therefore guilty. If she sank, well, that was hard luck but at least she was innocent. In the absence of these crude, swift and unjust methods of determining guilt, other methods had to be found and in England this was the jury.
'GOOD MEN AND TRUE'
The first type of jury was the grand jury, which was created in England by Henry II in 1166. The word 'jury' is derived from a Norman French word meaning 'to swear' and simply meant that a number of local citizens would swear to deliver justice. The grand jury would consider evidence of a crime presented by a prosecutor and decide whether the case was strong enough to proceed to an indictment (in effect an accusation) before the assizes or quarter sessions. This was not a trial. The grand jury only considered the prosecution's case to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to proceed to a trial.
In England, grand juries ceased to operate in 1933, though they were not officially abolished until 1948. The number of jurymen on a grand jury varied, but it was never fewer than twelve and often more. They continue to be used in some parts of the world which practise the common law, notably the United States of America. Their work in England is now done by magistrates who decide whether there is a prima facie case to go to trial, either in the magistrates' court itself or, for more serious indictable offences, in the Crown Court. All criminal matters, from speeding to murder, begin their journey in magistrates' courts and 95 per cent of them are disposed of there. The remaining 5 per cent go to the Crown Court to be heard before a judge and a jury which is, strictly, a petit or petty jury (small jury) consisting of twelve 'good men and true'; this phrase originates in the seventeenth century to describe the trial jury though in the twentieth century women also began to serve on juries. The jury system was implicitly recognised in 1215 in Magna Carta, the same year that Pope Innocent III effectively ended trial by ordeal. The famous clause 39 of the document sealed by a reluctant King John at Runnymede in 1215 states:
No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [i.e dispossessed] or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
The word 'peers' means that citizens have the right to be tried by their fellow citizens. Clause 40 adds that 'To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.' These clauses, which remain a feature of the English legal system, were taken in later centuries to mean that jury trial (i.e judgement by one's fellow citizens) was the right of any subject for serious criminal charges.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE CONVICTS
So in the absence of prison sentences, what was to happen to those who were convicted? As previously noted, not many offenders were sent to prison. In 1582 William Lambarde, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, applauded the English penal code for no longer including 'pulling out the tongue for false rumours, cutting off the nose for adultery or taking away the privy parts for counterfeiting of money', though many equally gruesome punishments remained, which Lambarde divided into three categories: infamous, pecuniary and corporal. Infamous punishments were reserved for crimes such as treason, and pecuniary penalties were usually imposed by Justices of the Peace. Corporal punishments he divided into two subcategories: 'Capital (or deadly) punishment is done sundry ways as by hanging, burning, boiling or pressing. Not capital is of diverse forms as of cutting off the hand or ear, burning, whipping, imprisoning, stocking, setting in the pillory or ducking stool'. Imprisonment is there, but low down in the list of penalties. Some of the more common sentences were:
Fines were commonly imposed for petty offences including swearing, playing a prohibited musical instrument, sport on the Sabbath or failing to attend church. Some sports, such as football, were forbidden at any time because, in the words of an edict of 1314, of 'great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise'.
Fines were also applied to tradesmen who sold defective produce. An alternative punishment in such cases was humiliation. For example, a fishmonger or butcher who had sold produce of poor quality or a baker whose loaves were underweight would be paraded around the town in a cart with the offending merchandise, with a placard describing his offence hanging around his neck.
The stocks, in which culprits were held by their ankles, were sometimes used to detain offenders in the hours before their appearances in court. In 1384 two defendants failed to appear for their trials because they had been put in the stocks and forgotten. Their feet froze and they died.
The City of London's stocks were in the heart of the Square Mile and in about 1282 the City's stocks market, a market for fruit and vegetables, was established nearby. It continued to trade until it made way for the residence of the Lord Mayor, the Mansion House, in 1737. Some historians believe that the stockmarket, which began to trade in stocks and shares from nearby coffee houses in the early eighteenth century, took its name from this market and hence from the stocks from which the fruit and vegetable market took its name.
In some cases the stocks were used as a punishment in their own right, usually for petty thieves, drunks and vagabonds. They remained in use in England until 1872. Passers-by were invited – some would say encouraged – to throw things at them, but at least the victims could defend themselves by catching some of the missiles.
The pillory was similar to the stocks but the victims were instead held by the wrists and neck, leaving them without any protection at all. Some people died in the pillory from being struck by hard objects like stones, such as the perjurer John Waller, who was pelted to death in London in 1732. Waller was a highwayman, condemned for providing false evidence which led to the execution of a man called James Dalton. Dalton's brother delivered the coup de grâce that ended Waller's life in the pillory.
Another unfortunate was a man called Penedo who was pilloried in 1570 for forging the seal of the Court of Queen's Bench. His ears were nailed to the pillory and when he was released he left part of them behind.
Daniel Defoe had an easier time in the pillory. The author of Robinson Crusoe was committed to the pillory in London in 1703 for a pamphlet called 'The Shortest Way with Dissenters', which lampooned the government. Such was Defoe's popularity that he was protected from assailants by a London mob who threw flowers. Upon his release Defoe escaped the punitive fine which had also been imposed as part of his sentence by making an ignoble deal with the leader of the Tory government, Robert Harley, to become a government agent and provide intelligence about his former Whig friends.
The most unlikely candidate for the pillory was the Scottish naval officer Thomas Cochrane (1775–1860), who was feared by the forces of Napoleon as much as Nelson was. Cochrane was convicted of spreading false rumours about the death of Napoleon in order to gain from the rise in the value of shares. The evidence was strong, the verdict 'guilty' but the sentence, to stand in the pillory, was revoked for fear of provoking a riot in support of the naval hero. Instead he was fined and stripped of his knighthood, though the title was later restored by a sympathetic Queen Victoria.
The last person to be pilloried in England was Peter James Bossy, who was convicted of perjury in 1830. He was offered the choice of seven years' transportation or an hour in the pillory, and chose the pillory. He survived but disappeared from history, the punishment itself being formally abolished on 30 June 1837.
The ducking stool was a punishment used exclusively for women, commonly for prostitutes and scolds. A scold was defined as 'a troublesome and angry woman who by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours breaks the public peace, increases discord and becomes a public nuisance to the neighbourhood'. Nowadays we have ASBOs (antisocial behaviour orders) instead. It was also used, long after Innocent III banned the participation of clergy in trial by water, to establish whether a woman was a witch.
Whipping was a common punishment for vagabonds and others who disturbed the king's peace. Sometimes the culprit was restrained in the pillory, but specially designed whipping posts were also used, both in public places and within prisons where they were used to maintain discipline. The prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) successfully campaigned to end the public whipping of women in 1817 but the practice continued within prisons in Britain until 1948. Sometimes particularly notorious offenders would be 'whipped at the cart's tail', so tied to a cart and drawn around a town or city as they were whipped.
One of the best known (and perhaps most deserving) victims of this punishment was the perjurer Titus Oates (1649–1705). An early career as an Anglican priest was ended by accusations of blasphemy and buggery, whereupon he briefly entered the Jesuit order in France. He took advantage of anxieties about Catholic traitors in the reign of Charles II by falsely accusing a number of prominent citizens of plotting to assassinate Charles II and replace him with the king's Catholic brother (who eventually assumed the throne as James II). Many innocent people suffered gruesome deaths as traitors on the strength of Oates's perjured evidence. In 1685 he was finally convicted of perjury and sentenced to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn and pilloried every year. It was assumed that this would result in his death but despite the fact that, according to a contemporary account, Oates 'made hideous bellowings and swooned several times with the greatness of the anguish', he survived and was released from Newgate in 1688, dying in 1705 still admired by some Protestants.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Little Book of Crime and Punishment by Stephen Halliday. Copyright © 2014 Stephen Halliday. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Introduction,
Timeline of Criminal History,
1. Why Waste Money on Prisons?,
2. As Black as Newgate's Knocker,
3. Judges and Men of Straw,
4. Who'd Like to be a Gaoler?,
5. Go to Gaol. And Stay There!,
6. Get Out of Gaol Free Card,
7. The Bloody Code,
8. Public Executions at Bargain Rates,
9. The Ones They Couldn't Hold,
10. The Villains,
11. The Fraudsters,
12. The Victims of Injustice,
13. The Ones Who Got Away With It,
14. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
15. Replacing Proper Charleys with Old Bill,
16. Panopticons and Misguided Reforms,
17. 'On going to see a man hanged',
18. Things Can Only Get Better,
About the Author,
Copyright,