concern to the king’s whig opponents. Even if there had been some interest in
strengthening the courts in their management of ordinary felony cases—a
matter in calmer times not likely to have carried much partisan political
significance—the tensions of the decade between the Popish Plot in 1678 and
the flight ofJames II removed the possibility of its being acted upon. Apart from
that, one outcome of the conflict was that parliament met in any case only rarely
and irregularly in that decade. In the event, the only piece oflegislation of major
consequence for the criminal courts was a statute designed to protect the rights
of the accused against the power of the state—the Habeas Corpus Act of
1679.^133
The criminal law on the books thus remained largely unchanged in the gen-
eration after the Restoration. When James II left England the practice of the
courts and the consequences of conviction for property offences remained as
they had been re-established under his brother, almost thirty years earlier. That
was to change in the following thirty years. It is as though the new political cli-
mate released energy and ideas that had not found a means of expression since
the 1650 s. New political circumstances encouraged solutions to widely recog-
nized problems. But the problems themselves also became more visible in the
last decade of the century, when there was to be a heightened awareness of
crime as a social problem and even less confidence in the weapons available to
fight it. All of this combined to encourage a burst of legislative activity that
made the generation following the Revolution very different indeed with
respect to the criminal law and its administration from that following the
Restoration. The Revolution of 1689 produced both a crisis and an opportunity.
312 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^13331) Chas II, c. 2 ( 1678 ).