Crime Protest Community And Police In Nineteenth Century Britain

This study, first published in 1982, is concerned with the nature of crime in nineteenth-century Britain, and explores the response of the community and the police authorities. Each chapter is linked by common themes and questions, and the topics described in detail range from popular forms of rural crime and protest, through crime in industrial and urban communities, to a study of the vagrant. The author pays special attention to the relationship between illegal activities and protest, and emphasizes the context and complexity of official crime rates and of many forms of criminal behaviour. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

The history of modern crime control is usually presented as a narrative of how the state wrested control over the governance of crime from the civilian public. Most accounts trace the decline of a participatory, discretionary culture of crime control in the early modern era, and its replacement by a centralized, bureaucratic system of responding to offending. The formation of the 'new' professional police forces in the nineteenth century is central to this narrative: henceforth, it is claimed, the priorities of criminal justice were to be set by the state, as ordinary people lost what authority they had once exercised over dealing with offenders. This book challenges this established view, and presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of everyday crime control in Victorian provincial cities - revealing the tremendous activity which ordinary people displayed in responding to crime - alongside a rich survey of police organization and policing in practice. With unique conceptual clarity, it seeks to reorient modern criminal justice history away from its established preoccupation with state systems of policing and punishment, and move towards a more nuanced analysis of the governance of crime. More widely, the book provides a unique and valuable vantage point from which to rethink the role of civil society and the state in modern governance, the nature of agency and authority in Victorian England, and the historical antecedents of pluralized modes of crime control which characterize contemporary society.

This book illuminates the origins and development of violence as a social issue by examining a critical period in the evolution of attitudes towards violence. It explores the meaning of violence through an accessible mixture of detailed empirical research and a broad survey of cutting-edge historical theory. The author discusses topics such as street fighting, policing, sports, community discipline and domestic violence and shows how the nineteenth century established enduring patterns in views of violence. Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of modern British history, social and cultural history and criminology.

This book illuminates the origins and development of violence as a social issue by examining a critical period in the evolution of attitudes towards violence. It explores the meaning of violence through an accessible mixture of detailed empirical research and a broad survey of cutting-edge historical theory. The author discusses topics such as street fighting, policing, sports, community discipline and domestic violence and shows how the nineteenth century established enduring patterns in views of violence. Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of modern British history, social and cultural history and criminology.

This pioneering work is based on entirely original research. It gives a detailed assessment of the pattern of crime and of developments in policing during the twentieth century, a period for which little historical analysis of crime has been published. The author focuses upon a specific police authority area which typifies the challenges faced by the police in Britain this century. The area covered by the South Wales Police contains a rich tapestry of communities, from isolated, rural villages to urban industrial centres including Cardiff and Swansea. It has the geography of a county police force and some of the problems of a metropolitan police area. It also has some well preserved police records which have here been analysed in depth. This volume points up clearly the changes in the nature of crime and policing in the last hundred years. In 1900, the modern problems of motoring and drug offences, for example, were hardly mentioned, and police work early in the century was similar to that of fifty years earlier. The years of the late 1950s and 1960s witnessed major changes in criminal activity and transformed policing and public attitudes. This work will be vital for all those who need to set the current debates on crime, punishment and the performance of the police in a historical context and to trace the historical roots of today's fears, myths and prejudices.

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain presents 33 essaysby expert scholars on all the major aspects of the political,social, economic and cultural history of Britain during the lateGeorgian and Victorian eras. Truly British, rather than English, in scope. Pays attention to the experiences of women as well as ofmen. Illustrated with maps and charts. Includes guides to further reading.

Evidence from the west of England balances that already available from the eastern regions of England. Rural Conflict, Crime and Protest makes a major contribution to the historiography of nineteenth century crime. The work presents a new analysis of several important and controversial themes: the concept of social crime, petty crime and protest in the English countryside between 1800 and 1860. The bulk of the research into rural crime has traditionally emanated from East Anglia, the south and the east; however, the bulk of the evidence for this bookhas come from Herefordshire, in the west of England, adding to the historiography of nineteenth century rural crime. Based upon a rich vein of primary source material and liberally interspersed with court room revelations and newspaper reports this work is both informative and scholarly and would make a useful addition to the bookshelves of academics and students alike, without excluding the casual reader. TIMOTHY SHAKESHEFF is lecturer in modern British social history at the University College, Worcester.

An account of the 19th-century criminal justice system as a whole, from the crimes committed and the classification of offences to the different courts and their procedure. The author describes the stages of criminal prosecution -- committal, indictment, trial, verdict and punishment -- and the judges, lawyers and juries, highlighting the significant changes in the rules of evidence during the century. He looks at reform of the old system and assesses how far it was brought about by lawyers themselves and how far by external forces. Finally, he considers the fairness of the system, both as seen by contemporaries and in modern times.

How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.