War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts

Hay, Douglas

doi:10.1093/past/95.1.117

Cited by 94 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…A handful of other new offenses, such as theft of lead (1731), theft from a ship (1753), theft from a post office (1765), and embezzlement (1795) affected people (and especially males) in urban areas (Hay 1982;Hall 1935;Radzinowicz and Hood 1986), but only a few such cases appeared in our sample.…”

Section: Shifting Jurisdictionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…This graph is based on a 25 percent sample of indicted defendants-taken at roughly 3 Some have argued for the value of indictment records as a measure of overall criminal patterns, suggesting that insofar as forces affecting prosecution did not change wildly from year to year, the indictments may be interpreted as reflective of changes in offense rates (see, e.g., Emsley 1987; Sharpe 1984;Beattie 1986;Hay 1982). 4 See, e.g., Smart 1979Smart , 1977aSimon 1975;Adler 1975;Leonard 1982;Heidensohn 1985;Naffine 1987;Hagan, Simpson, andGillis 1989, 1979; Chesney-Lind 1989; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990;andZedner 1988, 1991.…”

Section: Patterns Of Female Criminality 1687-1912mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The eighteenth century appears to produce a different story; it was a period of expanding, not contracting, jurisdiction for the Old Bailey (and equivalent courts elsewhere) as a vast array of new capital crimes were created (see, e.g., Thompson 1975a;Hay 1975;Radzinowicz and Hood 1986;andBeattie 1975, 1986). Although these newly created offenses added substantially to the numbers of cases heard by the courts, their greatest impact was on those living in rural areas.…”

Section: Shifting Jurisdictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rising commercial classes called for deterrents against property crimes (Hay 1975;Thompson 1975a). Criminal control mechanisms were primarily informalthere was no organized system of police and prosecution depended on private initiative.…”

Section: The Vanishing Female: An Exploratory Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some would turn to crime and thus increase the crime rate (and decrease the proportion of women offenders). Douglas Hay (1982) reports such a finding in his study of Staffordshire crime in the eighteenth century. 25 We found no such pattern; while indictments increased in the aftermath of war, it is not clear that war and peace are linked to the pattern of women's involvement in the Old Bailey.…”

mentioning

confidence: 94%

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The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912

Feeley¹,

Little²

1991

Law Soc Rev

147

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This article challenges the prevailing scholarly belief that women have always been at the periphery of crime and argues that a central issue for those studying the criminal process should be the decline over time of women as criminal offenders and defendants. Our argument rests on examination of criminal cases in the Old Bailey in London for 1687–1912, as well as of data drawn from English and some American courts for this period. For much of the eighteenth century women made up a substantial portion (over 45 percent at times) of all those indicted for felony offenses, in sharp contrast to contemporary levels of less that 15 percent. We conclude that the change is “real”—it cannot be explained away as an artifact of selective reporting, shifting jurisdiction, short-lived idiosyncratic enforcement policies, etc. We argue that these changes parallel and may be explained by significant shifts in the roles accorded women in the economy, the family, and society, and we conclude that the vanishing female in the criminal process may reflect a shift to more private forms of social control brought on by shifting social attitudes and the rise of industrialism.

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Section: Shifting Jurisdictionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Patterns Of Female Criminality 1687-1912mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Shifting Jurisdictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Vanishing Female: An Exploratory Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 94%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912

Feeley¹,

Little²

1991

Law Soc Rev

147

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Introduction: Chronicling Poverty — The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840

Hitchcock¹,

King²,

Sharpe³

1997

Chronicling Poverty

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Contextualising the Punishment of Death

Bennett

2017

Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740–1834

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Legal writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries recognised not only the differences between the legal systems north and south of the border, but also the differences in their use of capital punishment. An awareness of Scotland's lesser recourse to the death sentence was praised in the legal commentaries cited in Chap. 2 and Scots law was held up as a bastion of Scottish identity that had been maintained after the Union. 1 However, in conducting the first extensive examination of the court records, as well as sources rich with qualitative material such as newspapers, state papers and Home Office records, this study demonstrates that Scotland witnessed significant fluctuations in its execution rate and a more frequent recourse to the death sentence for particular crimes in certain decades. This chapter will examine three key periods in Scotland's capital punishment history. It will demonstrate that, while there were discernible similarities north and south of the border in terms of an increase in the sheer number of executions as well as an intensification of debates over criminality, the drivers behind this and the responses to it in Scotland differed markedly. In turn, an investigation into the previously neglected Scottish experience offers a unique perspective of Britain's use of the death sentence at these three crucial junctures. The opening section of this chapter will demonstrate that the mid-eighteenth century was a focal period in Scotland's penal history. It was a time when the country, particularly the Highlands, was reeling from the events of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion (the '45) and the British government was determined to penetrate the CHAPTER 3

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War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts

Cited by 94 publications

References 0 publications

The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912

The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687-1912

Introduction: Chronicling Poverty — The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840

Contextualising the Punishment of Death

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