Sir John Fielding and public justice: The bow street magistrates' court, 1754-1780

Law and History Review

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 61-100

  Beattie, J M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64949179338     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248000001061     Document Type: Review

References (180)

1. Nicholas Rogers, "Confronting the Crime Wave: The Debate over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749-1753," in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750, ed. Lee Davison et al. (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 76-81
2. J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 1
3. For rewards offered by Parliament and by royal proclamation for the conviction of certain felons, see below, 64
4. For the committee and its work, see Rogers, "Confronting the Crime Wave," 77-98; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 520-25, 551-22
5. Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration since 1750, 5 vols. (London: Stevens,1948-86; vol. 5 with Roger Hood), 1 : chap. 12
6. and Richard Connors, "'The Grand Inquest of the Nation': Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England," Parliamentary History 14 (1995): 301-13
7. See below, 68
8. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), ed. Malvin R. Zirker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
9. For Fielding at Bow Street, see Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, 3: chaps. 1-2
10. Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), Part IV
11. Lance Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (London: Palgrave, 2000)
12. Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office, ed. Bertrand Goldgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Introduction
13. Henry Fielding, "Memorial" on the subject of the Bow Street officers, late 1753 or early 1754: Huntington Library: HM 11617
14. The National Archive [hereafter TNA]: SP 36/153, f. 16
15. Fielding was obliged to request the renewal of these funds every year while accounting for the previous year's expenditures. Seven of his accounts, from the 1750s and 1760s, remain among the Treasury papers at TNA: T 38/671, T 1/387, T 1/414, T 1/449, T 1/454
16. For John Fielding's personal stipend from the Secret Service fund, see Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics and the Accession of George III, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1957), 228
17. There is no extended modern study of Fielding's work at Bow Street. R. Leslie-Melville, The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding (London: Lincoln Williams, 1905) contains useful material, but is largely anecdotal
18. John H. Langbein, "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources," University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 67-76
19. Ruth Paley, "The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792: Its Origins and Effects" (Ph.D thesis, University of Reading, 1983), passim
20. Across the eighteenth century, prosecutions for property offenses in London tended to decline in years of war and to increase sharply with the coming of peace. For these fluctuations and possible explanations, see J. M. Beattie, "Crime and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century London," in Crime and Inequality, ed. John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995): 116-39
21. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, chap. 1
22. Douglas Hay, "War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts," Past and Present 95 (May 1982): 117-60
23. Joanna Innes and John Styles, "The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of British Studies 25 (4 October 1986): 380-435
24. Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), part 2
25. For crime in the 1690s and the statutory rewards, established by Parliament in the 1690s and the early years of the seventeenth century - principally £40 to be paid on the conviction of a robber, burglar, or coiner, see Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, 2: chap. 3
26. Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder, "Using the Criminal Law, 1750-1850: Policing, Private Prosecution, and the State," in Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750-1850, ed. Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3-52
27. Douglas Hay, "Controlling the English Prosecutor," Osgoode Hall Law Review 21.2 (1983), 165-86
28. Tim Wales, "Thief-takers and Their Clients in Later Stuart London," in Londinopolis: Essays in the Social and Cultural History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 67-85
29. Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (London: Hutchinson, 1970)
30. Ruth Paley, "Thief-takers in London in the Age of the McDaniel Gang, c. 1745-54," in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, ed. Hay and Snyder, 301-11
31. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
32. The proclamation reward was to remain in force until 1745. It was renewed in the crime wave around mid-century, when its failure to prevent crime and the corrupt and false prosecutions it encouraged - at least one of which resulted in the execution of an innocent man - was the principal reason the government turned to Henry Fielding in 1753. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 378-80, 383, 401-9
33. Paley, "Thief-takers in London in the Age of the McDaniel Gang," 301-40
34. For efforts at the local level in this same period to prevent crime by strengthening the nightwatch and improving street lighting in the City of Westminster and the City of London, see Elaine A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)
35. John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 3
36. The accused's right to full defense by counsel was not to be established until 1836. On the history of the trial in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see also Allyson N. May, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750-1850 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
37. David J. A. Cairns, Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
38. David Lemmings, Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 6
39. Stephan Landsman, "The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England," Cornell Law Review 75 (1990)
40. J. M. Beattie, "Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Law and History Review 9 (1991): 221-67
41. For the Marian legislation - 1& 2 P. & M., c. 13 (1554-5), 1 & 2 P. & M., c. 6(1555) - see John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Gennany, France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), part 1
42. For the "Marian pretrial," see Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 40-47
43. The magistrates in the City of London applied the Marian rules in the late seventeenth century, sending all cases on to trial that were charged as felonies. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 91-99
44. Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 47, n. 181
45. For the discretionary powers that magistrates exercised in dealing with misdemeanors and minor crime in general, the process of prosecution at quarter sessions, and the changing character of summary jurisdiction in the eighteenth century, see Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), part 3
46. Landau, "Appearance at the Quarter Sessions of Eighteenth-Century Middlesex," London Journal 23.2 (1998): 30-52
47. Landau, "Indictment for Fun and Profit: A Prosecutor's Reward at Eighteenth-Century Quarter Sessions," Law and History Review 17 (1999): 507-36
48. Landau, "Summary Conviction and the Development of the Penal Law," Law'and History Review 23 (2005): 173-89
49. Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660-1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 225-37
50. Bruce P. Smith, "The Presumption of Guilt and the English Law of Theft, 1750-1850," Law and History Review 23 (2005): 133-71
51. Smith, "Did the Presumption of Innocence Exist in Summary Proceedings?" Law and History Review 23 (2005): 191-99
52. Langbein provides a great deal of evidence in Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, chaps. 3-4, of the intimate connection between the magistrates' management of evidence-gathering at the pretrial phase and the trials that followed
53. And see his "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources," University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 55-81
54. Ruth Paley's valuable edition of a Hackney magistrate's notebook records the pretrial work of a moderately active justice in the 1730s and provides some sense of the expanding discretionary powers becoming available to magistrates by then in dealing with felonies: Justice in Eighteenth-Century Hackney: The Justicing Notebook of Henry Norris and the Hackney Petty Sessions Book, ed. Ruth Paley, London Record Society Publications, 28 (London: London Record Society, 1991)
55. For changes in the form and substance of pretrial procedures in the City of London in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Beattie, Policing and Punishment, chap. 2
56. As we will see, the justices' pre-trial process was to change even more strikingly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter King has shown that magistrates in Essex were by then exercising much broader choices in their decision-making at the pretrial stage of felony prosecutions than had London magistrates a hundred years earlier: Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England 1740-1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), part 1
57. For the status of Westminster and Middlesex magistrates - who lacked the standing of the landed gentlemen who typically served on the rural commissions of the peace - and for the work of the "trading justices," see Landau, Justices of the Peace, 184-90
58. and Landau, "The Trading Justice's Trade," in Law, Crime and English Society, 1660-1830, ed. Norma Landau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46-70
59. De Veil's important career has yet to be studied in detail. His work is known in general terms - particularly the pretrial examinations he conducted in a number of famous cases. See Anthony Babington, A House in Bow Street: Crime and the Magistracy, 1740-1881 (London: MacDonald, 1969), chaps. 4-5
60. For his vigorous efforts to enforce the unpopular Gin Acts, see Jessica Warner, Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002), 125, 149-51, 169-71
61. And see the contemporary Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Thomas Deveil, Knight (London, 1748)
62. De Veil also wrote a guide for London justices: Observations on the Practice of a Justice of the Peace: Intended for such Gentlemen as design to act for Middlesex or Westminster (London, 1747)
63. Information about his clerks and their work is contained in the annual accounts Fielding was obliged to submit to the Treasury every year with his request for renewal of the funds (see above, n. 8). For Fielding's use of the press, see John Styles, "Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983), especially 135-49
64. and Styles, "Print and Policing: Crime Advertising in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England," in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, ed. Hay and Snyder, 55-111
65. There is no detailed scholarly study of the runners. For brief accounts, see Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2d ed. (London: Longman, 1996), chap. 1
66. and J. M. Beattie, "Early Detection: The Bow Street Runners," in Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950, ed. Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov (London: Ashgate, 2006). Radzinowicz deals with them only briefly in his History of English Criminal Law, 2: chap. 7, and 3: chap. 2
67. Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 78-79 is dismissive of their importance
68. For the provincial work of the runners after 1792, see David Cox, "'A Certain Share of Low Cunning': An Analysis of the Work of Bow Street Principal Officers, 1792-1839, with Particular Emphasis on Their Provincial Duties" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, 2006)
69. There is a brief account of the substance and argument of the thesis in Eras 5 (Nov. 2003) [www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras]
70. More popular treatments of the runners include: Gilbert Armitage, The History of the Bow Street Runners, 1729-1829 (London: Wishart, 1932)
71. and Patrick Pringle, Hue and Cry: The Story of Henry and John Fielding and Their Bow Street Runners (London: William Morrow, 1955)
72. See below, 73
73. TNA: T 1/372/109; British Library [henceforth BL]: Add Mss 32862, f. 375; Add Mss 32874, f. 379
74. TNA: SP 44/138, p. 182 (I am grateful to Norma Landau for that reference)
75. BL: Add Mss 38334, ff. 75-79 - an abstract of the Plan of Police that Fielding presented to George Grenville, 1762
76. reproduced in Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law, 3: appendix I, 477-79
77. London Metropolitan Archives [henceforth LMA]: MC/SJ (Rotation Committee Papers, 1763-64)
78. On the efforts to create rotation offices in these years, see Paley, "The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792," 187-201
79. Paley, "The Middlesex Justices Act of 1792," chap. 6
80. By the Middlesex Justices Act (32 Geo. III, c. 53)
81. TNA: T 1/449, f. 45
82. Sir John Fielding, Extracts from such of the Penal Laws as Particularly relate to the Peace and Good Order of this Metropolis (London, 1768; 1st ed. 1761), 7
83. According to Edward Sayer (who, as the deputy high steward of Westminster, had good reason to know) a system of stipendiary magistrates was being discussed in 1768 for the City of Westminster. It may have been the failure of that more general plan that enabled Fielding to persuade the Grafton administration to increase its support for his office. Edward Sayer, Observations on the Police or Civil Government of Westminster with a Proposal for a Reform (London, 1784), 32-33
84. Gazetteer, 5 Jan. 1771
85. For the 1742 print showing De Veil examining an accused, see Clare Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914 (London: Ashgate, 2003), 168
86. for the dating to c. 1750 of a drawing of Bow Street by Marcellus Laroon, see Battestin, Henry Fielding, ix-x
87. The Malefactor's Register: or, the Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (1779), vol. 5: frontispiece
88. This engraving is reproduced in Langbein, "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial," 74, in Leslie-Melville, The Life and Work of Sir John Fielding, frontispiece, and in Graham, Ordering Law, 170
89. He had been asked in court if he could identify Fielding's signature and replied that he could do so because he saw his distinctive scrawl on the document accompanying the commitment of accused felons very frequently (OBP, Jan. 1757, Charles Butler [t17570114-30]). Accounts of trials at the Old Bailey were published in pamphlet form after the eight sessions of the court under the title, The Proceedings at the Sessions of the Peace, and Oyer and Tenniner, for the City of London, and on the King's Commission of Gaol-Delivery of Newgate, held in Justice-Hall in the Old-Bailey for the City of London and County of Middlesex . . . followed by the date. In citing these trials, I refer to the digitized version available on-line at Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org). I follow the editors' suggested citation guide: OBP, date of Old Bailey session, name(s) of accused, reference number of the trial. The unique reference number makes it easy to find a trial. Cited quotations can be found by means of a keyword search
90. The figures quoted here are based on a 10 percent sample of the Newgate gaol calendars - the lists of accused being held in gaol awaiting trial on the eve of the Old Bailey sessions, which include the names of committing magistrates - between 1756 and 1780. The calendars formed the outside wrapper of the sessions roll. (LMA: OB/SR). The data over three periods in Fielding's years are as follows: Period Sessions Total commitments Bow Street commitments Percent 1756-66 6 303 109 35.9 1767-73 8 626 304 48.5 1774-80 6 564 213 37.8 In a sample of eight sessions in the years 1780-92 (following Fielding's death), commitments from Bow Street were to fall to a level of just over 20 percent as a result of the increasing numbers of defendants committed by the other public offices
91. Observations on the Police or Civil Government of Westminster, iv
92. Langbein, "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial," 69
93. Landau has shown that Fielding was criticized by the Middlesex bench on at least one occasion for interfering in the prosecution of a case that had originated with another magistrate: "The Trading Justice's Trade," in Law, Crime and English Society, 58
94. OBP, Dec. 1765, Stephen Wheat and Robert Tull (t17651211-48)
95. OBP, May 1780, William Lessingham and Peter Brown (t17800510-40)
96. OBP, May 1780, Thomas Humphreys and Thomas Johns (t17800510-33)
97. OBP, July 1770, John Stretton (t17700711-26)
98. OBP, July 1784, Robert alias John Moore (t17840707-2)
99. For example: OBP Feb. 1767, Joseph Guy (t17670218-38)
100. OBP, May 1767, Thomas Donnelly (t17670429-10)
101. OBP, April 1773, William Collins, Thomas Oats, Thomas Spooner (t17730421-10). In a deposition given before the Bow Street magistrates, Moses Morant, a runner, testified that he had found a pawn ticket on Alexander Duff. This led him to the pawnbroker who had taken a stolen cloak in pawn and eventually to the shopkeeper who had lost it and the woman who had made it for him (LMA: OB/SP/April 1783/49)
102. William Augustus Miles, A Letter to Sir John Fielding, Knt., occasioned by his extraordinary request to Mr. Garrick for the suppression of the Beggar's Opera (London, 1773), 21
103. OBP, Jan. 1759, Anne Gyles, alias Friday (t17590117-25)
104. OBP, Jan. 1759, Edward Cleaver and Elizabeth Sharp (t17590117-30)
105. Langbein has traced the emergence of the "confession rule" in Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 218-23
106. OBP, January 1780, John McCormick (t17800112-3)
107. A judge refused to allow a written confession to be read in court in 1774 when John Leigh, the chief clerk at Bow Street, acknowledged under questioning from the bench that Fielding had told him that if he confessed "he would endeavour to save his life." (OBP, September, 1774, Amos Merritt (t17740907-62). Henry Morgan, on trial for murder in 1784 claimed that the Bow Street magistrate, William Addington, had pressured and persuaded him into signing a confession. He had taken him into a room by himself, Morgan said, and told him that "if I did not make some confession or other I should be sent to prison, and locked up, and loaded with irons, and nobody should see me; and if I would make any confession I should have every thing done that could be, and should be pardoned." Addington was not in court to be questioned, but Nicholas Bond, the clerk who had recorded the confession, was able to persuade a sceptical court that Morgan had given it freely and voluntarily and it was admitted. OBP, September 1784, Henry Morgan (t17840915-1)
108. OBP, Feb. 1784, John Jacobs, Samuel Selshire, and Richard M'Donald (t17840225-H)
109. A lawyer prosecuting a former servant who had confessed to Jealous and Carpmeal when they apprehended him in Bath, assured the bench that he had said nothing to induce his confession and that "I take it for granted the officers are too much used to propriety in business, to do anything of that kind." (OBP, Dec 1785, Charles Seymour, alias Moore (t17851214-1)
110. The first surviving example is dated 28 October 1783 (LMA: SP/OB/Oct.1783/52)
111. Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 158-63
112. OBP, May 1756, Charles Cane and Thomas Williams (t17560528-22); General Evening Post, 20-2 July, 1773
113. OBP, Oct. 1772, James Kennedy and James Divert (t17721021-54)
114. OBP, Dec. 1765, James Wilkins and Robert Scott (t17651211-6)
115. OBP, Feb. 1784, John Fox and John Jones (t17840225-8)
116. General Evening Post, 28-30 Jan. 1772
117. Langbein, "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial," 91-95. For the case, see Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
118. His reasons for refusing to admit men as king's evidence were rarely stated. He refused one man on the grounds that he was an "old offender" (OBP, Dec. 1768, John Andrew Martin (t17681207-9). He told another man that he could not be admitted an evidence "as part of the property was found upon him" (OBP, June 1770, James Lee and Thomas Cook (t17700630-24)
119. Others may have been refused because their evidence was not required (OBP, June 1772, Joseph Guyant and Joseph Allpress, alias Allprice (t17720603-44)
120. OBP, April 1773, John Birch, Richard Bolton, and John Duffey (t17730421-39)
121. And see, Morning Chronicle, 11 June 1772; General Evening Post, 1-3 Feb. 1774
122. In the mid-1780s the judges undermined the force of the corroboration rule in a judgment that changed its basis: rather than excluding as unsafe the uncorroborated evidence of a witness who was testifying to save his life, the judges agreed in Atwood and Robbins that such evidence could be retained if judges cautioned juries about its inherent dangers. Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 212-17
123. The runners gave evidence, for example, in felony cases tried at the assizes on the Home Circuit-the counties surrounding London. In four assize sessions in Surrey, surveyed between 1770 and 1790, a total of 18 Bow Street officers gave evidence in 26 cases; in Essex in four sessions in the same years, 12 runners appeared in 7 cases; and in Kent, 8 testified in 5 trials (TNA: ASSI/94/1059-62, 1124-7, 1329-35, 1258-61). For the runners' involvement in cases in Essex in the 1780s, see King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion, 78
124. In January, 1753 a defendant was said to have been "brought from New Prison [to Bow Street] a second time." OBP, Jan. 1753, Joseph Hall (t17530111-27)
125. 25 Geo. II, c. 36 , s. 12 (1752). According to Fielding's account of a Bow Street session at which he examined thirty "idle, dissolute, and suspicious persons," several members of parliament who were present "declared themselves sensible of the Necessity of a Law to detain all such suspicious Vagabonds, till they can be advertized, and seen by Persons lately robb'd." The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Universal Register Office, ed. Goldgar, 403
126. For Fielding's interest in this addition to magisterial authority, see King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion, 94-95
127. Langbein discussed the importance of the re-examination session at Bow Street under the Fieldings in "Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial," 64, n. 243
128. The Public Advertiser, 10 August 1757 (repeated in the next five issues)
129. The Public Advertiser, 1 September 1757
130. The Public Advertiser, 8 September 1757; on 26 September, Fielding announced in the same paper that "the supposed Highwayman Henry Clarke" had been arrested, and he encouraged victims of robberies near London over the previous three months to come to Bow Street the following day at 2 p.m. when Clarke was to be re-examined
131. Fielding, Extracts from such of the Penal Laws, 7
132. See above, 74-75
133. Andrew and McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd, 26-27
134. Miles, Letter to Sir John Fielding, 22
135. General Evening Post, 6-8 April 1773
136. General Evening Post, 3-6, 6-8 April 1773
137. OBP, April 1773, Thomas Broadhead (t17730421-29)
138. Journals of the House of Commons, XXXII, 878-82
139. Parliamentary History, XVI, cols. 929-43
140. London Evening Post, 9-11 February 1775
141. Based on the Bow Street reports in the Morning Chronicle, Public Advertiser, and Gazetteer for 5, 12, 19 January 1775. The Old Bailey trial of Thomas Tunks and John Hines (at which they were both convicted and sentenced to death) is at OBP, April 1775 (t17750426-57)
142. Morning Chronicle, 13 Jan 1780
143. A woman charged with theft of bank notes testified at the Old Bailey that, having asked John Clarke, a runner, if she should tell Fielding that she had found them, he replied that "that was as good a defence as she could set up." OBP, Sept. 1776, Ann Seabright, alias Forbes (t17760911-50). Newspaper accounts occasionally noted that accused felons had "set up a defence" at Bow Street (Morning Chronicle, 14 Sept. 1780) or had been asked what defense they had to make, that they had said little in defense or had made a poor defense (General Evening Post, 20-22 April 1773, 8-10 Feb. 1774
144. Gazetteer, 15 Jan 1778
145. Morning Chronicle, 29 Jan. 1778, 20 July 1780
146. British Mercury, 1 Dec. 1780)
147. Public Advertiser, 8 July 1779
148. General Evening Post, 8-10 Feb. 1774
149. OBP, July 1774, John Mattsham alias Matchem (t17740706-1)
150. For defense counsel at the Old Bailey, see the literature cited above, n. 17
151. Morning Chronicle, 7 July 1774
152. General Evening Post, 7-9 May 1776
153. For barristers at Bow Street, see also May, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 89-90
154. and for Silvester's career, see ibid, 36-40
155. For Miles, who was about twenty years old in 1773, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
156. Morning Chronicle, 25 Feb. 1773
157. James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 1992), 2:1025
158. Browne's General Law-List, 3d ed. (London, 1778), 20
159. This account of the quarrel is based on the reports of the subsequent trial in the British Mercury and the Morning Chronicle, cited below, and on Lord Mansfield's notes on the case, in Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts, 2:1023-26
160. Having reported Bow Street examinations on 7 December 1780, The Morning Post, Gazetteer, and Public Advertiser declined to do so a week later
161. Miles, Letter to Fielding, 18-25. The author of a pamphlet noted by a correspondent to the London Courant on 19 December 1780 (below, n. 127) also thought that justices of the peace were taking it upon themselves to "sit in judgment on [accused] men, as if brought before them for trial instead of commitment. . . ."
162. At least one newspaper thought that in some cases the magistrates at Bow Street made judgments about the evidence they heard. A case involving theft from the mail was put off for a week because depositions had been taken in Bedfordshire where the offense had occurred and had to be sent for. The Morning Chronicle (6 Jan. 1780) reported that "the matter will undergo a more judicial investigation" when they arrived
163. London Courant, 14 Dec. 1780
164. London Courant, 14, 16 Dec. 1780
165. On the 17th the Courant also published a letter from a correspondent that included passages transcribed "from a pamphlet published last year" critical of public examinations and their publication. The correspondent thought that the anonymous pamphlet may have been written by Manasseh Dawes, a barrister and writer on political and legal subjects, but I have been unable to confirm that. It is not included in his work listed in Hugh Mooney's biography of Dawes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)
166. The question of whether "publick examinations of prisoners and afterwards publishing the same" was "proper or improper" was proposed for debate at the Westminster Forum debating society in the week in which the Attorney General's opposition was revealed in the press, suggesting the possibility that someone might speak in their favor. The result of the debate was not subsequently disclosed, but the issue had clearly attracted public attention. See Donna T. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 1776-1799 (London: London Record Society, 1994), 121
167. The question of the fairness or otherwise of pretrial publicity was to remain a controversial subject well into the nineteenth century. See, for example, David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), chap. 5
168. Gazetteer, 15 August 1782
169. The Times reported four in 1788 (21 July, 20 August, 7 and 16 October) and the same number in 1789 (2 June, 7 and 8 October, 17 November)
170. OBP, Dec. 1786, James Watts and Francis Hardy (t17861213-2)
171. OBP, Dec. 1787, Darcy Wentworth and Mary Wilkinson alias Looking (t17871212-7)
172. For lawyers at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see above, n. 17. For the ten-fold increase, Beattie, "Scales of Justice," 227
173. See above, 91, for John Silvester representing a defendant at Bow Street; for other examples of barristers acting at Bow Street, see May, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 89-90
174. The questions and answers were published in pamphlet form in Copy of Case [submitted to counsel by the Magistrates of the County of Lancaster]
175. and Opinions (Liverpool, 1801). The pamphlet contains the answers to three queries from five members of the bar, including Edward Law, the future Lord Ellenborough and Lord Chief Justice, Spencer Percival, the solicitor general, and William Garrow, who had made his name in the 1780s as the leader of the Old Bailey bar. A copy of the pamphlet is in the British Library at shelfmark T.1177 (1)
176. Copy of Case, 4
177. The first of Sir John Jervis's acts ( 11 & 12 Vict., c. 42) dealt with the duties of justices of the peace out of sessions with respect to persons charged with indictable offenses. For this legislation and the history of pretrial procedures in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England (London, 1883), 1:220-21
178. David Freestone and J. C. Richardson, "The Making of English Criminal Law (7): Sir John Jervis and his Acts," Criminal Law Review (Jan. 1980): 5-16
179. W. Wesley Pue, "The Criminal Twilight Zone: Pretrial Procedures in the 1840s," Alberta Law Review 21 (1983): 335-63
180. Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century, chap: 3