an audience; and, at the same time, as an opportunity to discover the de-
fences that prisoners would put forward at their trials so as to forewarn their
prosecutors and improve the chances of defendants being convicted.^93
Fielding’s own account emphasized the value of the re-examinations to the
prisoners, since it gave them time to produce their own witnesses who might
persuade the justices that the prosecutor’s evidence was flawed or that there
were other reasons why they should not be ‘unwarrantably precipitated into
Trials for Fraud or Felony.. .’.^94 And in light of the increasingly judicialized
character of preliminary hearings in the eighteenth century (about which Miles
appeared to have no knowledge), Fielding’s explanation of the value and pur-
pose of a second hearing is persuasive. Indeed, the process of re-examining the
accused as a way of balancing the disadvantages under which those who were
charged with felonies had laboured under the terms of the Marian bail and
commitment statutes gave institutional form to changes that had occurred in
magistrates’ practice over the previous forty years. The court settings in which
pre-trial hearings were being held by the second half of the century, settings that
not merely allow the public to observe the first stage in criminal prosecutions
but positively invited an audience by making provision for seats and galleries,
encouraged more open forms of justice that helped to change some of the as-
sumptions about the rights of the accused under the law that had hitherto struc-
tured the trial. Certainly, the court setting made it possible for the accused to be
more easily accompanied by lawyers and to have the benefit of legal counsel as
they answered the charges brought against them and sought to have them dis-
missed. It is in the period in which such courts were taking shape that the first
evidence appears in London of solicitors helping their clients to prepare for
trial—solicitors for both the prosecution and the defence. At the same time, a
number of prosecutors and defendants were acquiring the assistance of barris-
ters at the trial itself.^95
By mid-century magistrates’ courts were well established in London, both in
the City and in Bow Street. The number of such institutions was further in-
creased with the establishment of two new ‘rotation offices’ in the 1760 s. The cul-
mination of this expanding network of courts came in the Westminster Justices
Act of 1792 , which created seven ‘police offices’ manned by professional—
‘stipendiary’—magistrates who took all preliminary hearings concerning crim-
inal offences into their own hands.^96
112 City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
(^93) William Augustus Miles, A Letter to Sir John Fielding, Knt, occasioned by his extraordinary Request to
Mr Garrick for the Suppression of the Beggars Opera( 1773 ), 19 – 23.
(^94) Ibid., 7.
(^95) Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 278 – 9 ; Langbein, ‘Prosecutorial Origins of Defence Counsel’, 314 – 65 ;
and see below, Ch. 8.
(^96) Radzinowicz, History, iii. chs 2 , 4 – 5 ; Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’,
55 – 76 , 81 – 4 ; Philips, ‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’, 168 – 71 ; Paley, ‘The Middlesex Justices
Act of 1792 ’, passim.