accused. The few rough minutes of these encounters that remain in the State
Papers, taken by one of the secretaries of state, resemble the document from
1704 we examined in Chapter 7 : against each name there is the barest note of the
offence, the cabinet’s decision to pardon the defendant or to leave the law to
take its course, and occasionally some hint as to why that decision was made.^73
It seems clear, at any event, that the recorder did not bring a written report; if he
did, it was not used by the secretary who kept the minutes and recorded the cab-
inet’s decisions. But a written report was being prepared at least by 1719 and was
to become increasingly elaborate thereafter. Such a document was created be-
cause the lords justices who were left in charge of domestic matters when the
king went to Hanover in 1719 thought it prudent to send him an account of their
management of the Old Bailey capital cases, along with the minutes of their
meetings. The first report was very brief—not much more than a list of offend-
ers and their offences and a note indicating the decisions taken. But by 1725 at
the latest the recorder was preparing a fuller report ahead of the meeting, a re-
port that could be sent to the king, though written in the form of notes from
which the recorder would speak.^74
At some point between 1725 and 1740 these written reports became much
longer, until the evidence presented in each case and other relevant information
could occupy four or more manuscript pages.^75 By the second quarter of the
century recorders were much better prepared to give an account of the evidence
presented in the trials that had resulted in capital convictions. Whether that
made for longer and fuller and fairer presentations to the cabinet and lords just-
ices remains unclear. But if they gave oral versions of the reports prepared for
the lords justices and sent to Hanover, they would have been giving brief ver-
sions of the evidence presented at the trial, and, by the 1740 s, including the testi-
mony presented on behalf of the defendant and anything he or she might have
said in their own behalf. Indeed, the written recorder’s report so closely re-
sembles the printed accounts of trials in the Old Bailey Sessions Paper that it raises
the issue of the relationship between these two documents. The Sessions Paper
had provided only the briefest accounts of Old Bailey trials from its inception in
the 1670 s until 1729 , when, as we have seen, its length and the detail it provided on
some trials significantly increased. One need not rule out a narrowly commercial
William Thomson and Transportation 451(^73) See, for example, the document headed ‘Minutes taken upon ye Report of ye Recorder to ye
King in Cabinet, May 171717 ’ (SP 35 / 9 / 6 ). For other examples, see SP 35 / 8 / 78 , SP 35 / 9 / 22 , and
SP 35 / 9 / 125.
(^74) A surviving example from December 1725 is at SP 35 / 60 / 25.
(^75) The four long reports that remain in the State Papers, Domestic, series were all addressed to the
lords justices: SP 36 / 56 / 79 – 85 (recorder’s report on the May 1741 session); SP 36 / 60 / 254 – 8 (February
and April 1743 ); SP 36 / 62 / 165 – 78 ( 3 sessions 1743 or 1744 with ‘H’ or ‘T’ against some of the names);
SP 36 / 114 , 183 – 93 (September 1750 ). There is evidence that by the 1740 s recorders were preparing such re-
ports for their attendance at the cabinet. In November 1742 , Simon Urlin, the recorder, sent a secretary
of state ‘a true copy of the Report of Robert Budd’s Case, as I made it in Council’. It takes exactly the
same form as the cases included in the four reports noted above (SP 36 / 59 / 180 – 1 ).