Tales from the Hanging Court by Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker

I have a great interest in the history of the legal system in England and how it developed and Tales from the Hanging Court, which looks at crime and punishment in the eighteenth century as illustrated by the Old Bailey Proceedings, covers one of the most interesting times.
This century is the one where formalities were introduced, such as the presence of counsel for the defence and prosecution or the introduction of the Bow Street Runners as the beginnings of a formal police force.
At the start of the century a cry of 'Stop Thief!' or 'Murder!' meant that every law-abiding citizen in the area was honour bound to drop what they were doing and run to help. In an age where we often hear of horrific crimes happening while passers-by do not dare interfere there is a charm to this, but it was also quite anarchic and often violent as the wrong people might be man-handled and the right people could sometimes talk their way out of capture.
There were also rewards for returning stolen property and capturing criminals which led to the development of the profession of 'thief-takers'; at times this role would be doubled with that of a criminal, where goods would be stolen to order then returned for the reward money, and occasionally one of the thieves would be handed over for the reward (presumably if they had been troublesome to their criminal master). It is examples like these that encouraged the implementation of an official force, the Bow Street Runners, by the Fieldings (Henry the writer and his blind brother John) who were London magistrates.
There are a number of misconceptions prevalent about this age, which this book addresses. The main one is that anyone would be hanged for a crime, no matter how trivial. It is true that the 'Bloody Code', the list of offences for which you could be hanged, developed during this century. However, there was often a reluctance to hang miscreants. There is an idea that you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century which is untrue. To be hanged for theft you had to steal goods that were worth 40 shillings or more in value. Often the prosecutor, which in the early part of the century was the victim as prosections were privately brought, would be persuaded to underestimate the value of the stolen goods to save the life of the thief.
Punishment developed during the century too. Hanging was a constant, but as other punishments were devised it became used for more serious cases. Transportation was one punishment that was used in its place, frequently to America until later in the century when the Americans began to object to receiving England's criminals. Then transportation was moved to Africa for a while, and the prospect of this caused great fear among the condemned as the long sea journey was generally believed to be a lingering death sentence. One case described in detail was of a group of women who had been sentenced to transportation who refused to go and held out to be hanged instead seeing it as a quicker death. The court spent many hours persuading them to be transported (the court succeeded in the end and then a number of the women escaped from the ship).
Hanging itself was quite a gruesome event. Until the innovation of the sharp drop it was a case of slow strangulation and if the prisoner had pleased the crowd they would often pull on their legs to speed up the process. This was unfortunate for one highwayman, who had so pleased the crowd that they pulled on his legs to give him a quick death, ruining the plans he had put in place for his rescue. 'Dying game' was the way to please the crowd, which meant not showing too much fear and making a good final speech. Executions were not private affairs until near the nineteenth century.
There were other punishments such as the pillory which could be a death sentence if the crowd hated you enough, and threw mud with stones or dead cats at you. Or it could be a chance for the crowd to show their appreciation, as they did for Daniel Defoe who was pelted with nothing more harmful than flowers when he was in the pillory for seditious libel.
As the century wore on there was a move away from allowing the public to have such a say in the punishment or otherwise of convicts; it became a more regulated process. This was the century of revolution, with the French Revolution that caused great uneasiness in England and the American War of Independence. The Gordon Riots of 1780, which are discussed in great detail in the book, graphically illustrated the danger of allowing the crowds to feel that they were able to force decisions on policy. This century saw a clamp down and removal of the responsibility of ordinary people into the hands of officials, as a rudimentary police force developed, specialist lawyers began presenting and defending cases and executions became less of a public event.
The trials discussed in the book often illustrate the way in which society functioned. As ever, wealth and position would mean you had more chance of leniency. Once case described in detail was that of Joseph Baretti, an Italian scholar who was harrassed on the street by some rough people after a prostitue had pushed her hand in his trousers and grabbed him (a common way of touting for business in the 1700s) and he had panicked and ended up stabbing one of the men who had become involved. The case looked bad for him; as a foreigner he was viewed with suspicion and although it was natural to carry a knife in Italy, in England this was viewed as a low-life's weapon which made his claim to be a gentleman suspect. Luckily for him, Baretti had a lot of influential and powerful friends, a number of whom acted as character witnesses for him, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson. He was acquitted.
One particularly grotesque character was a cut-purse who was accused of stealing from a woman and swore at and fought her pursuers violently, at one point pulling open her blouse and squirting breast milk in the face of one of her accusers. She was hanged.
It is interesting to read of events that are comparable to what happens still; people are still people after all, and eighteenth century Londoners had a lot in common with today's public. An example was the moral panic that broke out as the first recorded serial sex offender struck, the Monster who stalked women and stabbed them through their skirts, reminiscent of the panic over Jack the Ripper a century or so later and the sort of media panics that occur today after sensational crimes.
The eighteenth century saw the move from mob rule to formal legal mechanisms: from thieves being caught and prosecuted by individuals to the rise of the Bow Street Runner and the lawyer, from punishments as a public event to private hangings and the growth of imprisonment. This book gives a fascinating view of the changes in society during this century as the world we know now was beginning to develop; it was a very enjoyable and interesting read.