commissions of oyer and terminer and gaol delivery and continued its work on
the bills exhibited against the prisoners in Newgate. A new trial jury was sworn
for the Old Bailey sessions and the trials began. When they were completed
some days later, the City magistrates moved back to Guildhall, if necessary, to
resume their adjourned sessions of the peace. According to the Minute Books,
roughly half the City sessions in the 1690 s had to be resumed after an adjourn-
ment for the Old Bailey sitting.
The fact that the magistrates of Middlesex did not sit on the Old Bailey bench
made for a slightly different arrangement in the county, but the relationship be-
tween the Middlesex (and Westminster) sessions of the peace and the trials at the
Old Bailey was fundamentally the same as in the City. By the end of the seven-
teenth century, the county sessions were being held at Hicks’ Hall in Clerken-
well. On the day appointed for the opening of the sessions, a grand jury and trial
jury began trying the misdemeanour cases which constituted the court’s main
business. The opening of the Old Bailey two days later did not disturb their work
as it did the City sessions because the Middlesex magistrates were not sum-
moned to attend. None the less the two sessions were intimately related, particu-
larly in that—as in the City—there was only one Middlesex grand jury, which
had been charged at the beginning of the sessions of the peace in Hicks’ Hall.
Unlike the City grand jury that had to move to the Old Bailey when the Guild-
hall sessions were adjourned, the Middlesex jurors were able to continue their
work at Hicks’ Hall and send the relevant ‘true bills’ they found the few hundred
yards to the Old Bailey where the county’s prisoners waited to be tried.^39
There was thus a seamlessness between the sessions of the peace and the gaol
delivery sessions at the Old Bailey that was unique to Middlesex and the City.
The clerks of the peace in both jurisdictions provided clerical support for
both courts and conceived their proceedings to be two aspects of one session.
They kept the records of both courts together. Whereas the county quarter
sessions and assizes produced entirely separate and self-contained records, in
London the indictments, recognizance, jury lists, and other essential evidence
from the sessions of the peace in the Guildhall and from the City cases at the
Old Bailey were brought together in one composite file and the record of their
proceedings was kept in a single Minute Book.^40 Similarly in Middlesex. The
close interrelationship of the two courts explains why the magistrates in the City
and in Middlesex were able to maintain such a clear separation between the
16 Introduction: The Crime Problem
(^39) In noting in his memoirs of 1686 details of a case in which he had a personal interest, Sir John
Reresby, a Middlesex magistrate, said that ‘The Sessions began at Hicks Hall [on 18 May], wher [sic] the
bill was found against one Spencer that rob’d me of my plate, and the 19 [i. e. the next day] he was found
guilty at the Old Bailiff [sic] and burnt in the hand’. An earlier reference similarly makes it clear that the
sessions at Hicks’ Hall and the Old Bailey were going on concurrently (Andrew Browning (ed.), Memoirs
of Sir John Reresby, 2 nd edn., Mary K. Geiter and W. A. Speck ( 1991 ), 328 , 426 ).
(^40) For the records of the City courts in the Corporation of London Record Office, see above, n. 11.
The Middlesex records are held in the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) as MJ/SR (Sessions Rolls)
and MJ/GB (Gaol Delivery Books).