From The Times
August 3, 2009
Chris Smyth
Criminal trials from 18th and 19th centuries go online for first time
On March 2, 1882, Roderick Maclean brandished a pistol outside Windsor railway station and attempted to shoot Queen Victoria.
Things did not go according to plan. The monarch lived and Maclean was charged with high treason, but acquitted on the ground of insanity. Ordered “to be kept in strict custody and gaol until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known”, he spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital.
His case is one of 1.4 million criminal trials from the 18th and 19th centuries that feature in registers that go online for the first time today.
A murderous doctor who claimed to be Jack the Ripper, the crook thought to have inspired Fagin, and a notoriously inept highwayman are all listed in the carefully handwritten ledgers that can be browsed on the ancestry.co.uk website from this morning.
The records, published in a collaboration between the website and the National Archives, include every criminal trial in England and Wales that was reported to the Home Office between 1791 and 1892.
It was a deadly period to be a criminal — the “Bloody Code” when more than 200 different offences carried the death penalty was in place at the start of this era — and the documents detail 10,300 executions as well as 97,000 transportations and 900,000 sentences of imprisonment.
Few crimes were as sensational as Maclean’s. The Queen was unharmed, but The Times said it was “an outrage gross and dastardly in the extreme”.
It even inspired a poem by William McGonagall, widely considered the worst poet to have written in English. One stanza runs: “Maclean must be a madman, / Which is obvious to be seen, / Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot / Our most beloved Queen.”
Also mentioned are Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, a crook who was sentenced to transportation in 1830 but not before an escape from arrest and a high-profile recapture that led to him inspiring, so it is thought, the character of Fagin. The hapless highwayman George Lyon, who was condemned to death in 1815, also makes an appearance.
On a page detailing events at the Old Bailey on October 17, 1892, is a simple entry in curling script for one Thomas Neill. In the column listing his offences is “murder” and under sentence “death”. This was Dr Thomas Neill Cream, executed for poisoning several people and one of those suspected of being Jack the Ripper. But it is, perhaps, details of smaller crimes that give the most telling insights into the way that justice, and injustice, were meted out.
These are the cases that would have gone largely unnoticed at the time but which in some instances demonstrate the harshness of a system that in the late 18th century increasingly relied on deterrence to control a growing population in the absence of a police force.
A woman named Sarah Douglas features in one such example. In 1791, aged 63, she was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to New South Wales after a conviction for “stealing table linen”. In the same year an identical punishment was handed out to Mary Wilson, 65, a widow convicted of “stealing a young child aged about 6 months with its apparel and one woman’s cloak”.
Crimes that were punishable by death included theft of goods worth more than five shillings, forgery, stealing from a rabbit warren and being out at night with a blackened face. As the 19th century progressed, a growing campaign for penal reform swept away this “Bloody Code”, replacing it with a less capricious system, and the records show how punishment changed as result.
In 1892, one John William Aylward was found guilty in London of “carnally knowing a girl under 13” and sentenced to an almost modern-sounding 14 years’ imprisonment.
Anomalies persisted, however. John Walker was given seven years’ penal servitude and seven years’ police supervision in 1874 for stealing onions.
The criminal registers, covering 1791-1892, are described as “key documents for the study of serious crime in the 19th century,” by Dr Paul Carter, special projects manager at the National Archives. “Their significance for 19th-century criminal studies would be difficult to overstate,” he said. “There wasn’t an easy way for government to aggregate numbers of crimes in the 19th century, as there was no central record that brought the information together from assizes and quarter-sessions courts.
“The Government was aware that population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation were causing social dislocation and tension; it was also concerned that these tensions manifested themselves in criminality. Here we have the basis of that desire to collect, collate and retain information.”
The documents, held in 279 volumes at the National Archives in Kew, were scanned in by volunteers for the genealogical website ancestry.co.uk and can be searched by keyword. They are available only to subscribers, although the website is offering a free two-week trial.
Things did not go according to plan. The monarch lived and Maclean was charged with high treason, but acquitted on the ground of insanity. Ordered “to be kept in strict custody and gaol until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known”, he spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital.
His case is one of 1.4 million criminal trials from the 18th and 19th centuries that feature in registers that go online for the first time today.
A murderous doctor who claimed to be Jack the Ripper, the crook thought to have inspired Fagin, and a notoriously inept highwayman are all listed in the carefully handwritten ledgers that can be browsed on the ancestry.co.uk website from this morning.
The records, published in a collaboration between the website and the National Archives, include every criminal trial in England and Wales that was reported to the Home Office between 1791 and 1892.
It was a deadly period to be a criminal — the “Bloody Code” when more than 200 different offences carried the death penalty was in place at the start of this era — and the documents detail 10,300 executions as well as 97,000 transportations and 900,000 sentences of imprisonment.
Few crimes were as sensational as Maclean’s. The Queen was unharmed, but The Times said it was “an outrage gross and dastardly in the extreme”.
It even inspired a poem by William McGonagall, widely considered the worst poet to have written in English. One stanza runs: “Maclean must be a madman, / Which is obvious to be seen, / Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot / Our most beloved Queen.”
Also mentioned are Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, a crook who was sentenced to transportation in 1830 but not before an escape from arrest and a high-profile recapture that led to him inspiring, so it is thought, the character of Fagin. The hapless highwayman George Lyon, who was condemned to death in 1815, also makes an appearance.
On a page detailing events at the Old Bailey on October 17, 1892, is a simple entry in curling script for one Thomas Neill. In the column listing his offences is “murder” and under sentence “death”. This was Dr Thomas Neill Cream, executed for poisoning several people and one of those suspected of being Jack the Ripper. But it is, perhaps, details of smaller crimes that give the most telling insights into the way that justice, and injustice, were meted out.
These are the cases that would have gone largely unnoticed at the time but which in some instances demonstrate the harshness of a system that in the late 18th century increasingly relied on deterrence to control a growing population in the absence of a police force.
A woman named Sarah Douglas features in one such example. In 1791, aged 63, she was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to New South Wales after a conviction for “stealing table linen”. In the same year an identical punishment was handed out to Mary Wilson, 65, a widow convicted of “stealing a young child aged about 6 months with its apparel and one woman’s cloak”.
Crimes that were punishable by death included theft of goods worth more than five shillings, forgery, stealing from a rabbit warren and being out at night with a blackened face. As the 19th century progressed, a growing campaign for penal reform swept away this “Bloody Code”, replacing it with a less capricious system, and the records show how punishment changed as result.
In 1892, one John William Aylward was found guilty in London of “carnally knowing a girl under 13” and sentenced to an almost modern-sounding 14 years’ imprisonment.
Anomalies persisted, however. John Walker was given seven years’ penal servitude and seven years’ police supervision in 1874 for stealing onions.
The criminal registers, covering 1791-1892, are described as “key documents for the study of serious crime in the 19th century,” by Dr Paul Carter, special projects manager at the National Archives. “Their significance for 19th-century criminal studies would be difficult to overstate,” he said. “There wasn’t an easy way for government to aggregate numbers of crimes in the 19th century, as there was no central record that brought the information together from assizes and quarter-sessions courts.
“The Government was aware that population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation were causing social dislocation and tension; it was also concerned that these tensions manifested themselves in criminality. Here we have the basis of that desire to collect, collate and retain information.”
The documents, held in 279 volumes at the National Archives in Kew, were scanned in by volunteers for the genealogical website ancestry.co.uk and can be searched by keyword. They are available only to subscribers, although the website is offering a free two-week trial.
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