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488 pages

English

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In this welcome addition to his Crime History Series, Gregory Durston points to the lack of design and short-term expediency that typified Tudor law and order. But he also detects an emergent criminal justice system amidst royal patronage, protection, and the influence of wealthy magnates.

Sujets

Histoire

Inglaterra

Legal history

England

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Publié par	Waterside Press
Date de parution	02 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910979938
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1998€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Jacks, Knaves and Vagabonds
Crime, Law, and Order in Tudor England
Gregory J Durston
Copyright and publication details
Jacks, Knaves and Vagabonds: Crime, Law, and Order in Tudor England
Gregory J Durston
ISBN 978-1-909976-76-4 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-93-8 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-910979-94-5 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2020 This work is the copyright of Gregory J Durston. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2020 Waterside Press.
Printed and bound by Severn, Gloucester, UK.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: +44 (0)1323 521777; sales@gardners.com ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: (+1) 615 793 5000; inquiry@ingramcontent.com
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
Ebook Jacks, Knaves and Vagabonds: Crime, Law, and Order in Tudor England is available as an ebook including via library models.
Published 2020 by
Waterside Press Ltd.
Sherfield Gables, Sherfield on Loddon,
Hook, Hampshire, RG27 0JG.
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Table of Contents
Copyright and publication details ii
About the author v
Acknowledgements vi
Part 1: Preliminary Matters 7
1 Introduction 8
2 Setting the Scene 21
3 The Quest for Order 52
Part 2: The Criminal justice System 69
4 Policing 70
5 The Justices of the Peace 100
6 The Coroner and his Inquest 139
7 Entering the Criminal justice System 170
Part 3: Prosecution, the Courts, Trial, and Punishment 223
8 Methods of Prosecution for Felony 224
9 The Criminal Courts 258
10 Lesser Courts 313
11 Trial on Indictment 331
12 Punishment 396
Part 4: Avoiding the Death-for-Felony Rule 431
13 Sanctuary and Abjuration 432
14 Down-valuing and Lesser Verdicts 466
15 Benefit of Clergy, Pregnancy, and Pardons 477
Part 5: Crime 547
16 Homicide and Violence 548
17 Infanticide and Abortion 597
18 Sexual Offences 635
19 Property Crime 655
20 General Conclusion 683
Frequently Used Acronyms 688
Bibliography 689
Index 720
About the author
Gregory J Durston is a barrister-at-law who has taught in Law Schools in England and Japan. He was for many years Reader in Law at Kingston University, Surrey and is currently an adjunct professor at Southern Cross University School of Law and Justice, New South Wales, Australia. He is the author, among other works, of Whores and Highwaymen: Crime and Justice in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (2012); Fields, Fens and Felonies: Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century East Anglia (2016); and Crimen Exceptum: The English Witch Prosecution in Context (2019)(all published by Waterside Press).
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the assistance provided by the staff of Kingston University Library, Southern Cross University Library, the British Library, and Lincoln’s Inn Library. Additionally, I would like to thank archivists at the National Archives in Kew, the Surrey History Centre in Woking, the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, and the Norfolk Record Office in Norwich, along with those of numerous other counties and institutions who have been generous with their time in helping me, and whose collections are cited in the footnotes. On a personal basis, I would like to thank Rhoda Koenig, Crystal Hollis, and Judge Nicholas Philpot, along with Professors Shannon McSheffrey, Louis Knafla, Randolf Roth, Sara Butler, and Krista Kesselring for their very considerable assistance.
Gregory Durston
London
June 2020
PART I
Preliminary Matters
Chapter 1
Introduction
Parameters
This book examines crime and the criminal justice system in England between 1485, when Henry VII won the Battle of Bosworth and the English Crown, and the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, which brought the Tudor era to a close. Of course, attempting to establish a general identity for well over a century of history, one that witnessed enormous social, religious, political, economic, and (most important for present purposes) legal changes, both in England and throughout the rest of Europe is problematic. In many ways, Henry VII was the last medieval king of England rather than its first early modern monarch. His reign was untouched by the Reformation, although its latter years saw the impact of Renaissance humanism. By contrast, Queen Elizabeth was the monarch of a nominally Protestant and increasingly centralised and administered country, one that had passed through decades of religious strife and upheaval.
The early Tudor era had numerous continuities with its medieval past. Unfortunately, because 1485 is traditionally taken as the end of the latter period in England, there is a tendency to focus on what came after, rather than what had gone before, although the fifteenth century inheritance was vital. This affected not only systems of law and government but also social trends. Marjorie McIntosh has noted that many of the cities, towns, and villages that reported large numbers of behavioural offences during the late fifteenth century were also disproportionately likely to be receptive to Protestantism in the years between 1530 and 1560, and to a significant Puritan presence (with its attendant antipathy for disorder) in the later Elizabethan period. 1
McIntosh makes a good case for seeing the years from the Black Death of 1348 (the traditional end of the “high” medieval era) to the close of the sixteenth century as a suitable period for study in its own right. In the realm of criminal procedure alone, these years saw three vital and possibly connected developments: justices of the peace started to investigate and process serious criminal matters; the grand jury (largely) finished its metamorphosis from active presenter of felonies to passive indicter of such crimes; and trial jurors began to receive the bulk of evidence at the hearing itself, rather than deciding cases on their own out-of-court knowledge. 2
Tudor criminal law was a pervasive instrument that was used to address a wide range of social evils and problems. To keep the subject within reasonable bounds, this book is primarily about what might, very loosely, be termed “conventional” crime, something that would be recognised as such by a modern reader, rather than, for example, political or religious offences, such as treason, sedition, heresy, recusancy, and witchcraft. This was not a distinction that contemporary observers would necessarily have made. Policing the Reformation was one of the functions of the justice system. Nevertheless, the 275 or so Protestants who, like Edmund and Katherine Allen at Maidstone in 1557, were burned at the stake (the punishment for heresy after 1401) during the reign of Queen Mary, or the Jesuit priests, such as Edmund Campion, who were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason during the Elizabethan period, are not the primary subject of this work, and will be referred to only in passing. 3 Similarly, the growing number of people (mainly women) accused of malefic witchcraft during the Elizabethan period and, at a much less serious level, the many ministers of religion who appeared in court because of disturbances occasioned by their churchmanship, such as Martin Clipsam, who celebrated communion “after the popishe manner”, are largely beyond its remit. 4
In like manner, the dozens (if not hundreds) executed after Kett’s East Anglian Rebellion of 1549, the more than 500 men of the “meaner sort” who were hanged on hastily erected gallows after the 1569 Rebellion (many of them convicted under martial law), when Queen Elizabeth refused to pardon lower-class rebels who had surrendered, or the thousands more who were executed after the numerous other Tudor uprisings, are not the focus of this study, although they, too, will sometimes be mentioned. 5
Nor is this book primarily concerned with what might be termed regulatory or administrative offences, such as a failure to maintain bridges, highways, gaols, and asylums, even though the boundaries between judicial and administrative action were much less clearly drawn during the sixteenth century than is the case today. In the absence of effective local government of a modern type, quarter sessions and, to a lesser extent, the assizes, would receive presentments that identified a specific problem and led to indictments against those who, it was thought, ought to remedy it or be punished for having failed to prevent it. As a result, a “respectable” yeoman who had failed to pay his share of the cost of road repairs might find himself being prosecuted in the same list as a common pickpocket. 6
For example, and fairly typically, at the Epiphany Quarter Sessions for Essex in 1571, and among several cases of petty theft, the Hundred (an administrative district) of Ongar and Harlow presented Bryan Darcy for allowing the mill-bridge at Machen to fall into disrepair, as it was his responsibility as Lord of the Manor of Benton. Additionally, the residents of Shelley were presented for failing to maintain the highway in two places within their parish. 7 Such actions were important; if no person or place could be charged with the relevant repairs, as was the case with the decaying Wye Bridge in Kent in 1602, the expense would eventually have to be borne by the county. 8 Nevertheless, these derelictions were not truly “crimes”.
Many moral offences are also outside the remit of this book. Contemporary writers may, ostensibly, have considered adultery and theft to