Crime and the State 399previous City sessions. Any complaint they made—particularly one as funda-
mental as this—was likely to be based on their experience of more than one ses-
sion and on something approaching common knowledge among grand
jurymen. In addition, the issue they complained about in September 1733 arose
from the duty they had just performed of listening to the evidence presented be-
fore them by prosecutors in support of bills of indictment, when, it is clear from
their verdicts, they had acted on their suspicions by throwing out almost 28
per cent of the bills they heard.^101 Several points are worth making about their
presentment and the aldermen’s response to it.
Perhaps the most interesting, in light of our previous discussion of the en-
gagement of lawyers in the preliminaries to criminal trials in this period and in
the courtroom itself, is the jury’s reference to ‘Newgate Sollicitors’, or rather
what the aldermen made of that term, with the aid quite possibly of a verbal
gloss provided by the jurymen when they read their presentment at the conclu-
sion of the court session. The aldermen inscribed a copy of the presentment
with this revealing order: that
no person or persons whatsoever shall practice as Attorneys or Sollicitors in the Courts
of Sessions either at the Guildhall or Old Baily by carrying on Prosecuting or Defending
any Cause or Causes either for Prosecutors or Defendants except such persons that have
been admitted Sworne Attorneys in Some of the Courts at Westminster and are
Ameniable to Justice for such their practice.
In making this order the aldermen were drawing on the distinction estab-
lished in a statute of 1729 for the regulation of the lower ranks of attorneys.^102
And by insisting that only barristers who had been admitted to practice in the
high courts be allowed to address the sessions of the peace or of gaol delivery,
they seem to confirm the assertion made by the author of the 1728 pamphlet that
attorneys were accompanying prosecutors into the Old Bailey. The grand jury
had clearly made a distinction between ‘solicitors’ who acted before trial, and
‘Newgate solicitors’ who (attorneys or not) had pushed their way into the court-
room itself. The aldermanic order that followed was designed to bring some
regulation to what was developing in a chaotic way. For our purposes, perhaps
its greatest significance is that the aldermen had clearly accepted the possibility
of lawyers appearing on behalf of defendants as well as prosecutors, and in
felony trials at the Old Bailey as well as the misdemeanours in which lawyers
had played a part routinely at the Guildhall sessions of the peace. They would
have been within their rights to forbid defendants engaging lawyers to act for
them in court, other than to speak to the narrowest points of law. They did not,
but allowed the continuation under the conditions they laid down of a practice
that must have been of some years’ duration by 1733.
(^101) This compares to an average for the London grand juries over the two years 1732 – 3 of about 18 %
(CLRO: SF 704 – 719 ).
(^1022) Geo. II, c. 23 ( 1728 ).