Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900

THIS is an unusually useful example of a genre of academic publishing that all too often goes astray—the collection of essays. The individual contributions range over four hundred years and stretch in content from a study of the seventeenth-century ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Isle of Man to Mark Rigstad's fascinating account of the way Hugo Grotius’ theory of natural rights was applied by English thinkers to the concept of punishment. The volume's coherence and consistently high quality will recommend it to scholars as well as undergraduate students. Most recent writing on crime has focused on criminals, their offences, and quantitative approaches to how they were dealt with by the authorities. Penal Practice, by contrast, contains a series of investigations into the ways crime was punished and what punishment, or attitudes towards it, can tell us about how the criminal legal process was understood and changed over time. Of course, punishment has in one respect always been on the agenda. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians have long been interested in both the impact of the Bloody Code and the widespread application of the death sentence before 1800, as well as its gradual decline thereafter as alternatives, first transportation and then reformatory imprisonment, came to take its place. Several of the contributions in Penal Practice and Culture probe these issues, and all of them add a fresh and informative perspective. Katherine Royer interrogates what she describes as a significant change from late medieval accounts of public executions that stressed the dismemberment of the body and physical anguish, to sixteenth-century ones, which concentrated instead on the demeanour of the convict on the scaffold and paid particular attention to their last words. Cynthia Herrup outlines the early seventeenth-century use of royal pardons in connection with the reprieving of capital executions, and then explains how this practice was transformed in the 1650s into a process whereby it became more common to grant pardons conditional on the acceptance by the convict of transportation to the colonies. As is well known from John Beattie's work, by the second decade of the eighteenth century transportation had, after some ups and downs, become a standard alternative to the death penalty in a number of categories of capital felony, most notably theft, and, as Randall McGowan shows in this volume, there was already in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a fairly lively debate among pamphleteers that reflected considerable unease about the death penalty—partly because of moral scruples but also because of doubts about its efficacy in solving the problem of crime. In common with most students of the subject, McGowan accepts that the debate over capital punishment became much more intense in the later eighteenth century than it had been before, but Simon Devereaux's detailed study of the process by which the government decided who should be hanged and who reprieved during Robert Peel's years at the Home Office in the late 1820s and 1830s concludes that the question of efficacy remained paramount. Peel, according to Devereaux, was quite willing to hang convicts but ultimately concluded that the penalty was not effective in reducing crime, thereby leading him to concentrate instead on crime-prevention—most notably by instituting the Metropolitan Police. Nevertheless, Gregg Smith's grimly amusing study of nearly 1,000 applications submitted in 1883 for the vacant post of Public Hangman demonstrates that there was apparently still considerable support for the ultimate sanction among all social classes even after it had begun to be inflicted less and less commonly

Criminology · Imprisonment · Jurisdiction · Political science · Publishing · Punishment (psychology · Sentence · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• The Historiography of the English State during ‘the Long Eighteenth Century’

  Open Access•Simon Devereaux•History Compass•2009

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