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Book Review: Crime, justice and discretion in England 1740-1820

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 January 2003
DOI10.1177/146247450300500115
AuthorPeter Rushton
Date01 January 2003
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-17BMPNibfDExlX/input 06book revs (ds) 30/10/02 2:21 pm Page 128
PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 5(1)
Sharpe, J. (1999) Crime in early modern England 1550–1750, 2nd edn. London:
Longman.
Peter King
University College Northampton, UK
Crime, justice and discretion in England 1740–1820, Peter King. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000. 383 pp. £55 ($95) ISBN 0–19–822910–0.
This book is the long-anticipated culmination of many years’ work, and it has been
worth waiting. Peter King is rightly well known for standard papers on the process of
decision-making in the judicial process of the 18th century, and the role of age and
gender as factors in those decisions. The study here is a mature reflection on this past
work, but adds much more in that data from Essex and the Home Counties have been
combined with insights from other areas in lowland England. It therefore cannot be
stressed too much that this is not the book-of-the-Ph.D. What is immediately striking
is the sheer amount of original research behind almost every careful judgment. The social
character of the players in the judicial process, whether victims or accused, constables
or jurors, are analyzed with extraordinary thoroughness. A brief comment in support of
an argument sometimes hides what anyone with archival experience would recognize as
the product of days of drudgery and effort. Overall, the book impresses with the compre-
hensive character of the research, and the care with which the data are analyzed. Each
interpretation is supported by overwhelmingly convincing statistical data.
The book takes as a continual focus the process of making decisions in the judicial
system. The 18th century (the ‘golden age of discretionary justice’ King says) is shown
as possessing a complex judicial process in which many factors affected whether an action
was treated as a crime, whether that crime resulted in a committal for trial, whether the
charge was downgraded by the trial jury, and whether the sentence, say, of hanging, was
carried out. At each stage...

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