digitalcommons.nyls.edu Faculty Scholarship Articles & Chapters 1981 Suppression of Popular Gatherings in England, 1800-1830 Frank W. Munger New York Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_articles_chapters Part of the Judges Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation 25 Am. J. Legal Hist. 111 (1981) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at DigitalCommons@NYLS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles & Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@NYLS. Suppression of Popular Gatherings in England, 1800-1830 by FRANK MUNGER* Recent works on crime and society in eighteenth century England have reported challenging questions about the exercise of legal authority and the maintenance of control over the working classes.1 It has been suggested, for example, that the manipulation of sentencing for capital offenses at eighteenth century assizes re- flected a deep concern for maintaining the legitimacy of class rule through the legal system apart from any immediate concern with crime. 2 It has also been argued that while the creation of capital offenses under the Black Act of 1722 reflected class struggle over the uses of property, the commitment of the English legal system to even-handed justice tempered the effect of the Act in certain in- stances. 3 Thus, by two different routes, recent historians have ar- gued that the English criminal justice system produced more temp- erate and "just" results than the context of class rule might suggest. Such studies suggest that a legal system, and specifically the legal system of Industrial Revolution England, was a complex sys- tem.