Making the links
'Making the Links': Judges' Reports and the Old Bailey Online, c.1784-1830
On 19 June 1788 the Home Secretary, Viscount Sydney, wrote to James Adair, the most senior judge of the City of London (known as the Recorder of London), in some distress. The cause of the Home Secretary's distress appears to have been prison overcrowding, a problem that still plagues present-day ministers and officials. Yet, while modern judges are frequently criticised for being too lenient on criminals, the reverse was true in Hanoverian Britain, renowned for its infamous 'Bloody Code', which saw the death penalty routinely handed down for all manner of crimes against property.
What the Home Secretary wanted from the Recorder of London was judicial guidance on how the statutory severity of the criminal law might be moderated in particular cases. Since the re-organisation of Whitehall departments in 1782, the Home Office had been responsible for processing all pleas for clemency. These usually took the form of a petition, written either by the individual seeking royal mercy, or written on his or her behalf by a relative, friend or associate.
The aim of petitioning was to secure either a reduced sentence or an outright pardon. During the first half-century or so of the Home Office's history, petitions were routinely referred to trial judges with the standard instruction to report 'for His Majesty's information, a State of his [or her] case, as the same appeared to You upon his [or her] Trial, together with your Opinion how far he [or she] may be an object of the Royal Mercy.' If the judge's report was favourable, clemency would usually be forthcoming. A large number of these reports (and sometimes the accompanying petitions), favourable and unfavourable, survive in the record series Home Office 47 (HO 47).
One of the obvious limitations of the reports in HO 47 (which cover all of England and Wales) is that they offer modern readers only a snapshot view of a particular case's life-cycle. Though details of the original indictment and trial can often be gleaned, these are transmitted to us through the memory of the reporting judge. However, thanks to the digitisation of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (the published record of trials held at the Old Bailey), available at www.oldbaileyonline.org, and the item-level calendaring of HO 47, available through The National Archives' catalogue, it is now possible to link up reports on Old Bailey convicts to the original trial proceedings.
During the course of a three-month ESRC-funded internship, over 1,000 individuals convicted between 1779 and 1827 who appear in HO 47 have been linked to their original Old Bailey convictions. This figure, it should be noted, represents a tiny proportion - less than three per cent - of the nearly 40,000 defendants found guilty by Old Bailey juries in this period, and an unknown fraction of either all petitioners, or all recipients of mercy. Nonetheless, by systematically linking the Recorder of London's reports to Old Bailey trial records historians will be able to build up a more comprehensive picture of the judicial mind in particular, and the unreformed criminal law more generally.
Stephen Thompson is currently completing a PhD on 'Census-taking, political economy and state formation, c. 1790-1840' at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, University of Cambridge.
