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Zusatztext Peter King's Crime! Justice and Discretion in England 1740-1820 is on a par with the groundbreaking research of Thompson and his students ... every paragraph teems with evidence of King's mastery of the secondary sources! his painstaking archival research! and judicious consideration of the material he has assembled. Informationen zum Autor Peter King has always been interested in writing, and decided to take his interest further by writing a book during the COVID-19 lockdowns from his job as a Teaching Assistant at a primary school. Prior to working at a school, he trained as a design draughtsman, working on domestic and industrial controls. Another passion of his is sport-Peter is a keen badminton player and golfer. He also enjoys angling and following football and cricket. Peter spends as much time with his grandchildren, who share the same interests. Being a father and a grandfather, this has given him plenty of experiences that he has been able to build into his book. Klappentext The criminal law has often been seen as central to the rule of the 18th century landed elite. Within detailed studies of every stage of the criminal process this volume explores key issues such as who used the law! for what purposes and with what effects It then challenges the view that the law was primarily the instrument of a small elite! portraying it instead as an arena of struggle! negotiation and compromise used by many different social groups. The criminal justice system may have sometimes been vulnerable to power but it was also useful in limiting it. Zusammenfassung The criminal law has often been seen as central to the rule of the eighteenth-century landed élite in England. This book presents a detailed analysis of the judicial processs - of victims' reactions, pretrial practices, policing, magistrates hearings, trials, sentencing, pardoning and punishment - using property offenders as its main focus. The period 1740-1820 - the final era before the coming of the new police and the repeal of the capital code - emerges as the great age of discretionary justice, and the book explores the impact of the vast discretionary powers held by many social groups. It reassesses both the relationship between crime rates and the economic deprivation, and the many ways that vulnerability to prosecution varied widely across the lifecycle, in the light of the highly selective nature of pretrial negotiations.More centrally, by asking at every stage - who used the law, for what purposes, in whose interests and with what social effects - it opens up a number of new perspectives on the role of the law in eighteenth-century social relations. The law emerges as less the instrument of particular élite groups and more as an arena of struggle, of negotiation, and of compromise. Its rituals were less controllable and its merciful moments less manageable and less exclusively available to the gentry élite than has been previously suggested. Justice was vulnerable to power, but was also mobilised to constrain it. Despite the key functions that the propertied fulfilled, courtroom crowds, the counter-theatre of the condemned, and the decisions of the victims from a very wide range of backgrounds had a role to play, and the criteria on which decisions were based were shaped as much by the broad and more humane discourse which Fielding called the 'good mind' as by the instrumental needs of the propertied élites. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of Figures and Maps List of Tables List of Abbreviations 1: Introduction Part I: Pretrial Processes 2: Victims, Informal Negotiations, and Prosecution Options 3: Resources Available to Victims: Public Funding, Prosecution Associations, Print, and Policing 4: Magistrates and Summary Courts Part II: Offences and Offenders 5: Patterns of Crime and Patterns of Deprivation 6: The Offenders: Property Crime and Life-Cycle Cha...
