Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- 18 The Purity of England's Air
- 19 The Menace of the Mob
- 20 The Fear of the Felon
- 21 Garrow's Law?
- 22 The Tongue of Cicero: Thomas Erskine
- 23 The Drum Major of Liberty: Henry Brougham
- 24 The Bonfire of the Inanities: Peel, Public Protection and the Police
- 25 Lunacy and the Law
- 26 Necessity Knows No Law
- 27 The Apollo of the Bar: Edward Marshall Hall
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
20 - The Fear of the Felon
from PART III - THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I LAYING DOWN THE LAW: 600–1500
- PART II CONFLICT OF LAWS: 1500–1766
- PART III THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LAW
- 18 The Purity of England's Air
- 19 The Menace of the Mob
- 20 The Fear of the Felon
- 21 Garrow's Law?
- 22 The Tongue of Cicero: Thomas Erskine
- 23 The Drum Major of Liberty: Henry Brougham
- 24 The Bonfire of the Inanities: Peel, Public Protection and the Police
- 25 Lunacy and the Law
- 26 Necessity Knows No Law
- 27 The Apollo of the Bar: Edward Marshall Hall
- PART IV THE RULE OF LAW: 1907–2014
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine.
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the LockHe saw a lawyer killing a viper
On a dunghill hard by his own stable;
And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind
Of Cain and his brother, Abel.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Devil's Thoughts'In a land of increasing wealth, where freedom was paramount and police were absent, property crime was a perennial problem. As far back as 1690 John Locke had asserted that ‘government has no other end but the preservation of property’. Blackstone in 1766 opined that ‘nothing so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affection of mankind as the right of property’. It could equally be said that ‘the greatest offence against property was to have none’.
With no police force and no forensic science service, the only means of deterring crime was through exemplary punishment: whipping, transportation and hanging. In the eighteenth century an already sanguinary system was to get even bloodier. The solution to the problem of how to protect movable property – from handkerchiefs to stallions – propounded by such luminaries as Archdeacon Paley was to impose the death penalty for a myriad of offences, including such trivial ones as shoplifting or pickpocketing. In the late eighteenth century, Sir Francis Buller, when consoling a condemned felon at Maidstone assizes, did so with the words, ‘you are to be hanged not for stealing horses but that horses be not stolen’. They encapsulated the theory perfectly.
The Waltham Black Act of 1723, the most draconian statute ever enacted by a British parliament, started the process whereby England was to have more capital statutes than any other country in Europe. Brought in to deal with the threat posed by forest poachers and robbers who blacked up their faces to carry out their depredations, the act created fifty separate capital offences, including wrecking fish ponds and damaging trees.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law, Liberty and the ConstitutionA Brief History of the Common Law, pp. 197 - 200Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015