Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900 Punishing the English Edited by Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900 This page intentionally left blank Penal Practice and Culture, 1500–1900 Punishing the English Edited by Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths © Selection and editorial matter © Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths 2004 Chapter 3 © Paul Griffiths 2004 Chapter 10 © Simon Devereaux 2004 Chapters 1–2, 4–9, 11 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-0-333-99740-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. 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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Penal practice and culture, 1500–1900: punishing the English/edited by Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Corrections – England – History. 2. Punishment – England – History. 3. Violence – England – History. 4. Social control – England – History. I. Devereaux, Simon, 1966– II. Griffiths, Paul, 1960– HV9649.E5P45 2003 365Ј.942Ј0903 – dc21 2003056400 10987654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Contents List of Plates and Tables vii Notes on the Contributors viii List of Abbreviations x Introduction: Punishing the English 1 Paul Griffiths 1 Shame and Pain: Themes and Variations in Tudor Punishments 36 Martin Ingram 2 Dead Men Talking: Truth, Texts and the Scaffold in Early Modern England 63 Katherine Royer 3 Bodies and Souls in Norwich: Punishing Petty Crime, 1540–1700 85 Paul Griffiths 4 Punishing Pardon: Some Thoughts on the Origins of Penal Transportation 121 Cynthia Herrup 5 Public Punishment and the Manx Ecclesiastical Courts during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 138 J.R. Dickinson and J.A. Sharpe 6 Sanctifying the Robe: Punitive Violence and the English Press, 1650–1700 157 Philippe Rosenberg 7 The Grotian Moment: Natural Penal Rights and Republicanism 183 Mark Rigstad 8 The Problem of Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England 210 Randall McGowen 9 Streets of Shame? The Crowd and Public Punishments in London, 1700–1820 232 R.S. Shoemaker v vi Contents 10 Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder’s Report Revisited 258 Simon Devereaux 11 ‘I Could Hang Anything You can Bring Before Me’: England’s Willing Executioners in 1883 285 Greg T. Smith Index 309 List of Plates and Tables Plates 1.1 Penitential whipping 38 1.2 Riding backwards: the punishment of Dr John London and William Simons, 1543 41 1.3 The pillory: the punishment of Robert Ockham, 1543 44 1.4 Judicial whipping 54 1.5 Beating with rods: Bishop Bonner whips a protestant suspect, 1558 56 9.1 Christopher Atkinson in the pillory, 1783 234 9.2 ‘The manner of Whipping at the Carts Tayle For petty Larceny and Offences’ 238 9.3 Daniel Defoe on the pillory (c. 1730–50) 246 Tables 6.1 Titles containing specified keywords per each 25-year period 160 9.1 Whipping sentences in London and urban Middlesex, 1723–1811 (annual averages) 239 9.2 Sex of convicts whipped by location of whipping 242 9.3 Responses of crowds to those placed on the pillory in eighteenth-century London 244 10.1 Capital punishment at the Old Bailey (excluding murder), 1813–37 261 10.2 Numbers executed on individual hanging days at the Old Bailey, 1820–30 262 vii Notes on the Contributors Simon Devereaux is Lecturer in History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the co-editor of Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New (Toronto University Press, 1998), and his monograph Convicts and the State: Criminal Justice and English Governance, 1750–1810, is forthcoming from Palgrave. J.R. Dickinson took his BA and PhD in History at the University of Liverpool. He has worked on a number of research projects, including two major projects with J.A. Sharpe, the first on crime, litigation and the courts in the Isle of Man c. 1580–1700, and the second on a regional study of vio- lence in England, 1600–1800. He has published articles on the history of the early modern Isle of Man, and is the author of The Lordship of Man under the Stanleys: Government and Economy in the Isle of Man, 1580–1704 (Cheetham Society, 1996). His future projects include acting as a volume editor for the New History of the Isle of Man. Paul Griffiths is an Assistant Professor at Iowa State University and was a fellow at The National Humanities Centre, North Carolina, 2002–03. He is the author of Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford University Press, 1996), and co-editor of The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Macmillan, 1996) and Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester University Press, 2000). He is currently preparing Lost Londons: Crime, Control, and Change in the Capital City, 1545–1660 for publication. Cynthia Herrup is Professor of History and Law at Duke University. She is the former editor of the Journal of British Studies as well as the author of The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987), and of A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford University Press, 1999). She is currently completing a study of pardoning in seventeenth-century England. Martin Ingram is a Fellow, Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford. His publications include Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and numerous articles on crime and the law, sex and marriage, religion and popular customs. He has also published on the history of climate. Randall McGowen is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is co-author with Donna Andrew of The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and viii Notes on the Contributors ix Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century England (California University Press, 2002), and he has written many articles on the death penalty and the criminal law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Mark Rigstad received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2001, and he is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University. He is currently completing a book about natural law theory in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political thought. Philippe Rosenberg teaches in the programme in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 2002–03 and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History, 2000–02. He is completing a book entitled Negative Enlightenment: Cruelty, Polemics, and Restraint in the British Isles, 1640–1700. Katherine Royer is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus. She is currently working on a book on capital punish- ment in late medieval and early modern England. She has also written on the rhetorical construction of disease, published an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine on renal disease, and practiced medicine for over a decade. J.A. Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of York. He has published extensively on the history of crime and punishment and, more recently, on the history of witchcraft in early modern England. His current research interests include further work on these topics, on the legal history of the Isle of Man in the early modern period, and the Dick Turpin legend. He is also author of Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760 (Edward Arnold, 2nd edn, 1997). R.S. Shoemaker is Reader in History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c.1660–1725 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Longman, 1998), and is currently working on a study of public conflict in eighteenth- century London, The Rise and Fall of the London Mob. He is also co-director of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online project Ͻhttp://www.oldbaileyonline. orgϾ. Greg T. Smith is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Manitoba. He completed graduate studies at the University of Toronto, after which he held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Guelph. He is the co-editor of Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New (Toronto University Press, 1998), and is currently completing a monograph entitled Violence and the London Metropolis, 1760–1830.