376 Crime and the State
fundamental turning point in the history of the trial occurred in the second quarter
of the eighteenth century, when lawyers began to take part in trials at both the
Old Bailey and in the assize courts. They did so in small numbers, but their pres-
ence in the courts and their influence on criminal procedure was such as to nudge
the trial into a course that was to transform it in essential ways over the next cen-
tury. The arrival of the lawyers was directly a consequence of the changes we will
be concerned with in this chapter, in particular, the encouragements to effective
policing and prosecution emanating from the central government in the 1720 s.
The large rewards that the government began to offer for the conviction of rob-
bers in the metropolis and the resources they made available to improve the
preparation of prosecution cases and their presentation in court encouraged
some prosecutors to seek the help of lawyers. That did not in itself breach the
rules governing trial, since prosecutors always had had the right to have their
cases presented by counsel. Few, however, had done so previously. Even more im-
portant perhaps than the presence of prosecuting counsel is the evidence that
John Langbein has uncovered of the increasing use of solicitors in the pre-trial
stage. Of course, the two are linked. Counsel would almost certainly have been
briefed, and that implies the investigative and organizational work of a solicitor.
But even without counsel to carry on prosecutions in court, a case presented by
the victim of the offence would have been strengthened if supplementary evi-
dence was gathered and organized by someone with experience and if witnesses
were prepared. Langbein has found evidence that solicitors were at work in these
ways by the 1720 s. This in itself shifted the advantage towards the prosecution in
a trial that was expected to be a confrontation between two equally unprepared
amateurs. The balance was even more obviously undermined when the pros-
ecution was presented by counsel who had been carefully briefed. It was to re-
store that balance, out of a sense of fairness one might presume, that the judges
by the 1730 s were allowing defendants who could afford it to engage counsel
themselves, breaking what had always been an inviolable rule of court that men
and women on trial had to conduct their own defences.^22 That was one of several
consequences that flowed from the interventions of the central government in
the administration of the criminal law in the second quarter of the century—
consequences that we shall examine in this and the following chapter.
The policy of massive rewards
The government established by the Hanoverian monarchs after 1714 made
conscious efforts to improve the administration of the criminal law, largely in the
interest of defending the new regime from its enemies, internal and external,
(^22) For work on the history of the trial, see Ch. 6 , n. 1. The fullest and most persuasive explanation of
why the judges allowed defendants to engage counsel in the 1730 s, emphasizing the importance of solici-
tors, is John H. Langbein, ‘The Prosecutorial Origins of Defense Counsel in the Eighteenth Century:
The Appearance of Solicitors’, Cambridge Law Review, 58 ( 1999 ), 314 – 65.