On the distribution of pardon requests between circuits, see Simon Devereaux, The Criminal Branch of the Home Office, 17821830, in Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May and Simon Devereaux (eds. Our data for 175075 suggests an overall figure of 1.2 for all types of offender and 0.9 for property crime alone. KIRBY, PETER 137 And before Blackstones brief but influential passage in his Commentaries, on which, see Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration, i, 3, 27686, 3456. in the 1800s you could be hanged for: There were many reasons why the English legal system was so harsh at this time. Individually they do not entirely explain the twenty- or thirtyfold differences between London and the far western periphery, but interactions between these different decision-making patterns almost certainly created a particularly potent set of mutually reinforcing mechanisms for mercy. 7 Punishments - changes to capital punishment The crime rate was rising in the first half of the 19th century. Why was the Bloody Code abolished in the 1820s - 1830s? By the 1630s almost every area of England had implemented the legislation requiring the building of county houses of correction, but the central state had to wait another century before most of Wales came into line.147 Taxation policies could be equally difficult to enforce on the western periphery. glove money at the conclusion of a maiden assizes. tude compare / Centre and Periphery: A Comparative Study of Brittany and Cornwall & Devon Compared (Exeter, 1991), 228. Local elites in every part of the country involved themselves deeply in the pardoning process, but at this stage of research it appears that it was only on the periphery that local officials were fairly regularly prepared to delay or directly connive against the execution of property offenders.97, On the periphery this especially strong reluctance to hang property offenders extended right across the social scale. "useRatesEcommerce": true According to Philip Jenkinss estimates, national hanging rates peaked at between 25 and 30 per 100,000 population per year in the crisis period around 1600.17 However, they then rapidly declined to about 10 per 100,000 in the 1630s, to under 5 by 1700, and to 1.3 by 1750, after which they remained very stable until the late 1770s.18 By 1750 capital punishment was playing a completely different role from the one it had performed in 1600. figures like John Howard campaigned for the prison reform in the 1800s. today. On Bentham, see Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration, i, chs. Evidence suggests that fewer people were actually hanged under the Bloody Code than before it. Hilary M. Thomas (Cardiff, 1987), 130. This law would become known as the Hard Labour Act and the Hulks Act for both its purpose and its result. Eighteenth-century land tax burdens were lightest in the north, Wales and to a lesser extent in the south-west, and heaviest in the south and east, which carried burdens six or more times greater than those of Cumbria and western Wales.148 The avoidance of customs and excise duty, while widespread everywhere, was also particularly prevalent in areas like Cornwall, where the jurors simply refused to convict. Forgery aroused more controversy than any other species of capital crime in the 1820s and became the focal point for opposition to the capital laws. Sentences were for seven years, 14 years, or life. 97 Further research is needed, but a fairly extensive search of pardoning cases not arising from the periphery has failed to find similar cases in which sheriffs deliberately subverted the system. However, the subsequent assize records indicate that Williams was later transported. Its typicality is also hard to gauge, in part because underlying attitudes were often made explicit only in moments of crisis. 1829 When were the Tolpuddle Martyrs arrested? Petitions such as that sent to the Home Office by the sheriff of Cornwall pleading in mitigation that the number of offences contained in the calendar at the late and the Spring assizes was very inconsiderable and that the crime of housebreaking did not occur in the late calendar except in this single incidence were not confined to the periphery, but they had particular force there because indictment rates were so much lower.75 Just as high indictment rates could lead to harsher pardoning policies, as they did in the 1780s, so low indictment rates in particular regions on the periphery tended to reduce the desire to hang property offenders. Ph.D. thesis, 1997), 31923. The systematic county-based data on England and Wales for 175075, seen in the Map, indicates that there were clear and stark regional contrasts in the use of capital punishment for property offenders. On the Home Circuit the figure was 17 per cent; on the Western Circuit 25; on the Northern Circuit 35; in Wales 41; in Scotland 53.32 At the centre hangings were clearly about preserving property, but as we move away from London the gallows ceased to be dominated by those executed for property crimes and became increasingly a matter of an eye for an eye.33 If you killed someone and were found guilty of murder rather than manslaughter, you would almost certainly hang in later eighteenth-century Britain. For example, destroying Westminster Bridge was the same kind of offence as destroying Fulham Bridge, but each offence had a separate capital statute (act). 105 Hay, Property, Authority and the Criminal Law, 50. Conditions inside prisons were not given much thought, as they were run by individual towns rather than by central government, and gaolers were not paid. 44 Lord Byron, Don Juan (181924), canto xiii, stanza lxxxviii. It has been argued that the case for distinguishing Welsh from English policies is much weaker than that for distinguishing Scottish from English, but in relation to the Bloody Code this does not seem to have been the case.142 Although Scotland had a different legal system from that of England and Wales, the actual policies it pursued in relation to capital punishment had much in common with the latter and very little with the former. 123 S. J. Connolly, Unnatural Death in Four Nations: Contrasts and Comparisons, in Connolly (ed. ), Kingdoms United?, 21011; S. J. Connolly, Albions Fatal Twigs: Justice and Law in the Eighteenth Century, in Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (eds. 78 For the expense of elections that year, see Public Advertiser, 11 Aug. 1767. 13 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), Sheriffs Cravings, T 64/262, T 90/14866, Sheriffs Assize Calendars, E 389/2428. Penal reformers in the 1810s and 1820s condemned the English criminal law as a 'bloody code': a monolithic mass of draconian statutes inherited from a former, less civilized age. This pattern was also mirrored after the trial in the geography of pardoning. a creative residency at the National Justice Museum in 2023 with 1,000 budget On the western and northern periphery of England, in most of Wales and in Scotland outside the south-central belt, the Bloody Code was very rarely used in relation to property offenders. When did crime levels begin to fall again? Many landowners of the period also happened to be MPs, which ensured that it was swiftly passed into law. We don't share your data with any third party organisations for marketing purposes. 127 Sharon Howard, Crime, Communities and Authority in Early Modern Wales: Denbighshire, 16601730 (Univ. The country people, being too numerous to be repelled, had pillaged the stranded vessel and, as there were many common people in court, the judge took the opportunity of inveighing against so savage a crime, and of declaring publicly that no importunities whatever would induce him to reprieve. Moreover, if Douglas Hay is correct in suggesting that the violence of the law, measured by prosecutions and punishments, was largely determined by the need to contain the effects, direct and indirect, of substantial social inequality, then the propensity to prosecute and the willingness to hang may well have been lower in areas like Wales, Cumberland and Cornwall than they were in the south and east of England because levels of inequality were also much smaller.130. docx, 971.25 KB. 31 Using population estimates for 1760 based on Scottish Population Statistics including Websters Analysis of Population, 1755, ed. It was widely believed in this period that robbery could not be reduced to simple theft and partial verdicts were very rare.61 By contrast, in housebreaking and burglary cases juries frequently brought in verdicts such as guilty of stealing only, not guilty of breaking and entering, and the same was true of stealing in the dwelling house without breaking in, which was only a capital offence if the goods stolen were worth at least 40s.62 Since these four offences robbery, burglary, housebreaking and stealing from a dwelling house were also the main forms of property crime that created large numbers of capital convictions in both rural and urban areas, this analysis focuses mainly on them.63, When the data for both grand and petty jury decisions is put together, a quite startling difference emerges for the offence that was the greatest source of candidates for the gallows: robbery. those sentenced to death might not be executed. 1948. This new research raises several broader issues that can only be briefly discussed here. These changes were known as the Criminal or Bloody Code. 14 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. We should also like to thank our colleagues on the project for their helpful comments on previous drafts of the work, namely Rachel Bennett, Owen Davies, Zoe Dyndor, Elizabeth Hurren, Shane McCorristine, Francesca Matteoni, Sarah Tarlow and Floris Tomasini. 7 J. S. Cockburn, Punishment and Brutalization in the English Enlightenment, Law and History Review, xii (1994), 159. W. Henley (New York, 1902), pp. 62 Juries often brought in verdicts of guilty of stealing goods to the value of 39s even when the evidence clearly indicated that the goods were worth much more: Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 424. In the counties of Kent, Surrey and Essex, for example, indictment rates for 180511 were three times higher (at about 60 indictments per 100,000 population per year) than those on the Brecon Circuit (which averaged 20 per 100,000). You can unsubscribe at any time. In 1689 there were 50offences on the statute book punishable by death in England and Wales, but that number had almost quadrupled by 1776,[5] and it reached 220 by the end of the century. and Leon Radzinowicz listed 49 pages of "Capital Statutes of the Eighteenth Century" divided into 21 categories:[13]. It was custom for the sheriff to pay 5s. These results suggest that differences in overall pardoning rates were not created primarily by the different mixes of capital crimes in different regions but by real differences in pardoning policies between the centre and the periphery. On north and west against south and east spatial divisions in the nature and levels of eighteenth-century poor relief, see Steven King, Poverty and Welfare in England, 17001850 (Manchester, 2000). As the rich made the laws they made laws that protected their interests. See answer Advertisement avalon23413 Answer: Sir Samuel Romilly. In the provinces the key decisions were usually made by the assizes judge, but in London the recorder reported to a committee which included key members of the government and the king himself.71 The attitudes and policy imperatives that leading political figures brought to these discussions, and the more diffuse nature of patronage networks in the metropolis, may well have been part of the reason why pardons were more difficult to obtain.72 However, this cannot explain the systematic variations in pardoning rates outside London, where counties nearer to the capital also had much lower pardoning rates than those on the periphery. However, the geography of executions for non-property crime, primarily murder, was very different. [1][2][3][4] It was not referred to as such in its own time, but the name was given later owing to the sharply increased number of people given the death penalty, even for crimes considered minor or misdemeanor by 21st century standards. Perhaps in areas like Wales and Cornwall the elite were able to reinforce their reputations as the natural leaders of the community by using their roles as sheriffs, magistrates, Members of Parliament and so forth to engage deeply and effectively in the various processes that prevented property offenders from being hanged. Bloody Code The bloody code, refers to a series of severe laws and punishments, that were introduced in the early 1700's; this was a time when capital punishment was extended to cover many more offences. 26 White gloves were traditionally given to the assize judge if the assizes had been a maiden, one with no capital convictions: see Jones, Crime in Nineteenth-Century Wales, 1. However, the convict here had committed murder: Cambrian, 28 Aug. 1830. In London the year 1785 saw a doubling of the number hanged and 1787 witnessed a similar number before a return to the levels found in the late 1770s: see Simon Devereaux, Imposing the Royal Pardon: Execution, Transportation, and Convict Resistance in London, 1789, Law and History Review, xxv (2007), 122. Penal reformers in the 1810s and 1820s condemned the English criminal law as a bloody code: a monolithic mass of draconian statutes inherited from a former, less civilized age.