CHAPTER SIXThe Old Bailey in the Late
Seventeenth Century
We have seen some of the ways in which alterations in the policing of the City of
London in the century after the restoration of Charles II reflected changes in the
society and economy of the metropolis as well as contemporary anxieties about
crime. The following four chapters take up the parallel story of the variety of re-
sponses to the crime problem in the criminal justice system more narrowly, cen-
tring on the changing nature of the law and the work of the most important
criminal court in England, the Old Bailey. We begin with a chapter on the way
trials were conducted in the late seventeenth century, with the nature of juries,
the verdicts reached in property cases, the penal options available to the courts
at the beginning of our period, and the way the criminal law was put into prac-
tice. The following chapter will include an account of the initiatives taken in
parliament, by the central government, and in the City ofLondon to enlarge
the deterrent capacities of the law in the generation after the Revolution of
1689 , as well as an account of the effects of those initiatives on jury verdicts and
the patterns of punishment at the Old Bailey. Chapters 8 and 9 take up the story
of innovations in the criminal law and the work of the court in the generation
following the accession of the first Hanoverian king in 1714.
Trial procedure
The form of trial at the Old Bailey in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies differed in fundamental ways from the modern jury trial, perhaps the most
immediately striking difference being its brevity.^1 Where criminal trials before a
(^1) For the trial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see John H. Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial
before the Lawyers’, University of Chicago Law Review, 45 ( 1977 – 8 ), 263 – 316 ; idem, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-
Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources’, University of Chicago Law Review, 50 ( 1983 ), 1 – 136 ;
idem, ‘The Prosecutorial Origins ofDefence Counsel in the Eighteenth Century: The Appearance of
Solicitors’, Cambridge Law Review, 58 ( 1999 ), 314 – 65 ; Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority, and the Criminal
Law’, in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal
Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England( 1975 ), 17 – 63 (esp. 26 – 31 ); Beattie, Crime and the Courts,
ch. 7 ; idem, ‘Scales ofJustice: Defence Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nine-
teenth Centuries’, Law and History Review, 9 ( 1991 ), 221 – 67 ; J. S. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records: Home
Circuit Indictments, Elizabeth I and James I: Introduction( 1985 ); Thomas A. Green, Verdict According to Conscience: