Crime Courts And Community In Mid Victorian Wales

This book explores the relationship between the justice system and local society at a time when the Industrial Revolution was changing the characteristics of mid Wales. Crime, Courts and Community in Mid-Victorian Wales investigates the Welsh nineteenth-century experiences of both the high-born and the low within the context of law enforcement, and considers major issues affecting Welsh and wider criminal historiography: the nature of class in the Welsh countryside and small towns, the role of women, the ways in which the justice system functioned for communities at that time, the questions of how people related to the criminal courts system, and how integrated and accepting of it they were. We read the accounts of defendants, witnesses and law- enforcers through transcription of courtroom testimonies and other records, and the experiences of all sections of the public are studied. Life stories – of both offenders and prosecutors of crime – are followed, providing a unique picture of this Welsh county community, its offences and legal practices.

"An ideal introduction to the rich history of criminal justice charting all its main developments from the dooms of Anglo-Saxon times to the rise of the Common Law, struggles for political, legislative and judicial ascendency and the formation of the innovative Criminal Justice System of today."-back cover.

The Unwritten Law examines the values and assumptions of mid-Victorian England as revealed in the actual workings of the criminal justice system. The working definitions of criminality and justice were often influenced more by certain tacit assumptions than by the written law. Through a careful study of the ways that the status and circumstances of victims and suspects influenced judicial decisions, Conley provides important new insights into Victorian attitudes toward violence, women, children, community, and the all-important concept of respectability. She also addresses issues that continue to be of concern in today's society: How can equal justice be preserved when social and economic conditions and expectations are not equal? How can the rights of the accused be reconciled with those of victims--especially children? Can and should the courts interfere with the traditions of family and community? What standards can determine the criminality of a particular act and the justice and efficacy of punishment? This original analysis will hold special interest for students and scholars of British history, social history, and criminality and the law.

Land of White Gloves? is an important academic investigation into the history of crime and punishment in Wales. Beginning in the medieval period when the limitations of state authority fostered a law centred on kinship and compensation, the study explores the effects of the introduction of English legal models, culminating in the Acts of Union under Henry VIII. It reveals enduring traditions of extra-legal dispute settlement rooted in the conditions of Welsh Society. The study examines the impact of a growing bureaucratic state uniformity in the nineteenth century and concludes by examining the question of whether distinctive features are to be found in patterns of crime and the responses to it into the twentieth century. Dealing with matters as diverse as drunkenness and prostitution, industrial unrest and linguistic protests and with punishments ranging from social ostracism to execution, the book draws on a wide range of sources, primary and secondary, and insights from anthropology, social and legal history. It presents a narrative which explores the nature and development of the state, the theoretical and practical limitations of the criminal law and the relationship between law and the society in which it operates. The book will appeal to those who wish to examine the relationships between state control and social practice and explores the material in an accessible way, which will be both useful and fascinating to those interested in the history of Wales and of the history of crime and punishment more generally.

Using detailed case studies, Beyond Deviant Damsels undermines many of the conventional assumptions about how women committed crime in the nineteenth century. Previous historical accounts generally constructed gendered stereotypes of women acting in self-defence, being lesser accomplices to male criminals, committing crimes that require little or no physical effort, or pursuing supposedly 'female' goals (such as material acquisition). This study counters these gendered assumptions by examining instances where women tested society's boundaries through their own actions, ultimately presenting women as far more like men in their capacity and execution of criminal behaviour. The book shows examples where women acted far beyond these stereotypes, and showcases the existence of cultural discussion of open-ended female misbehaviour in Victorian Britain - leading us to question the very role of stereotyping in the history of criminality. These individual challenges to a supposed gendered status quo in Victorian Britain did not produce spontaneous outrage, nor were attempts at controlling and eradicating such behaviour coherent or successful. As such Victorian society's treatment of women emerges as uncertain and confused as much as it was determinedly moralistic. From this, Beyond Deviant Damsels seeks to re-evaluate our twenty-first-century perception of female criminals, by indicating that historiography may have been responsible for limiting the picture of Victorian female criminality and behaviour from that time until the present.

This monograph makes a major new contribution to the historiography of criminal justice in England and Wales by focusing on the intersection of the history of law and crime with medical history. It does this through the lens provided by one group of historical actors, medical professionals who gave evidence in criminal proceedings. They are the means of illuminating the developing methods and personnel associated with investigating and prosecuting crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when two linchpins of modern society, centralised policing and the adversarial criminal trial, emerged and matured. The book is devoted to two central questions: what did medical practitioners contribute to the investigation of serious violent crime in the period 1700 to 1914, and what impact did this have on the process of criminal justice? Drawing on the details of 2,600 cases of infanticide, murder and rape which occurred in central England, Wales and London, the book offers a comparative long-term perspective on medico-legal practice – that is, what doctors actually did when they were faced with a body that had become the object of a criminal investigation. It argues that medico-legal work developed in tandem with and was shaped by the needs of two evolving processes: pre-trial investigative procedures dominated successively by coroners, magistrates and the police; and criminal trials in which lawyers moved from the periphery to the centre of courtroom proceedings. In bringing together for the first time four groups of specialists – doctors, coroners, lawyers and police officers – this study offers a new interpretation of the processes that shaped the modern criminal justice system.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Katharine Briggs Award This is a study of law, wrongdoing and justice as conceived in the minds of the ordinary people of England and Wales from the later eighteenth century to the First World War. Official justice was to become increasingly centralised with declining traditional courts, emerging professional policing and a new prison estate. However, popular concepts of what was, or should be, contained within the law were often at variance with its formal written content. Communities continued to hold mock courts, stage shaming processions and burn effigies of wrongdoers. The author investigates those justice rituals, the actors, the victims and the offences that occasioned them. He also considers the role such practices played in resistive communities trying to preserve their identity and assert their independence. Finally, whilst documenting the decline of popular justice traditions this book demonstrates that they were nevertheless important in bequeathing a powerful set of symbols and practices to the nascent labour movement. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of legal history and criminal justice as well as social and cultural history in what could be considered a very long nineteenth century. Stephen Banks is an associate professor in criminal law, criminal justice and legal history at the University of Reading, co-director of the Forum for Legal and Historical Research and author of A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750-1850 (The Boydell Press, 2010).