Old Bailey (II): New York Times

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Two reports from New York Times about Old Baily’s online project. The later one first.

(1) Sandra Blakeslee, Computing Crime and Punishment; Centuries of trial data yield clues to the evolution of a gentler British justice system. New York Times, June 17, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scien ... and-punishment.html

Note:
(a) names:
(i) The English surname Blakeslee is “from a place in Northamptonshire named Blakesley, from an Old English personal name Blæcwulf + leah ‘woodland clearing,’ ‘glade.’”
(A) Old English blæc “black, dark,” also "ink”   (Middle English blak)
(B) wolf (n; Middle English, from Old English wulf; akin to Old High German wolf wolf)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wolf
(ii) The English surname Brownrigg: “from any of several places in Cumbria named Brownrigg, from Old English brun ‘brown’ + hrycg ‘ridge’”
(A) Cumbria
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria
(county town is Carlisle; The names "Cumbria [1974- present]," "Cambria" (the medieval Latinization of Cymru) and "Cumberland" [a historic county 12th century- 1974, roughly co-extensive with Cumbria] are derived from "Cymru" (the native Welsh name for Wales))

Take notice Cumbria and Cumberland on the one hand, and Cambria on the other, are geographically different.
(B) ridge (n; Middle English rigge, from Old English hrycg)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ridge
(iii) The English (mainly southern) surname Hitchcock: "from a pet form of Hick, with the Middle English diminutive suffix -cok."

* Hick is "a pet form of Richard. The substitution of H- as the initial resulted from the inability of the English to cope with the velar Norman R-."


(b) “In 1765, John Ward was hanged for stealing a watch and a hat. * * * In those days, British society and its criminal justice system, did not distinguish between violent and nonviolent crimes. Pickpockets and murderers equally deserved the death penalty. Not so just 60 years later. A murderer might be executed or exiled to Australia, but a pickpocket would probably only pay a fine. Grounds for capital punishment shifted. Violent and nonviolent crimes fell into separate realms. * * * From 1674 through 1913, court reporters wrote detailed accounts of virtually every trial held at the Central Criminal Court, known as the Old Bailey, where all major criminal cases for Greater London were heard. The corpus includes 121 million words describing 197,000 trials over 239 years. According to researchers, it represents the largest existing body of transcribed trial evidence for historical crime; it is, they say, the most detailed recording of real speech in printed form anywhere in the world.”

John Ward, Violent Theft > highway robbery, 16th January 1765 (Reference Number: t17650116-12).
www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.j ... mp;div=t17650116-12
(i) “violently taking from his person one metal watch, value 40 s. and one hat, value 5 s. the property of the said Edward”

shilling
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilling
(The abbreviation for shilling is s, from the Latin solidus, the name of a Roman coin; Before decimalisation [in 1971], there were 20 shillings per pound and 12 pence per shilling, and thus there were 240 pence in a pound)
(ii) "I am a master perriwig-maker"
(A) The "periwig" is the modern spelling of "perriwig."
(B) For periwig, see wig
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wig
(The word wig is short for periwig; Perukes or periwigs for men were introduced into the English-speaking world with other French styles when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, following a lengthy exile in France. These wigs were shoulder-length or longer, imitating the long hair that had become fashionable among men since the 1620s)

Beneath the latter sentence are three portraits. The one on the right--whose legend reads, "Wigs 17th century"--show several men, each with periwigs.
(C) periwig (n; modification of Middle French perruque): “PERUKE”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/periwig
(D) peruke (n): “WIG; specifically :  one of a type popular from the 17th to the early 19th century”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peruke
(illustration)

Not to be confused with the verb “peruse.”
(iii) "I went in at the White Hart, a public-house * * * and called for a pint of beer"

public house (n): “chiefly British :  a licensed saloon or bar”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/public%20house
(iv) “the prisoner called for a pewter dish, to shew [Modern English: show] a knack of trundling it on the table”
(v) “On taking him out of the coach [after an arrest by a constable], he [Ward] made his escape: upon this, I went to Sir John Fielding , and gave information of him [Ward], and took a warrant out * * * [After Ward was spotted and arrested again] he was taken before Sir Robert Kite , on the Monday, at Guildhall”
(A) John Fieldingen.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fielding
(1721-1780; a notable English magistrate)
(B) Robert Kite
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kite
(was appointed Sheriff of London for 1761 and Lord Mayor of London for 1766)
(vi) “Prisoner's Defence.  I came out of this alehouse, about 11 o'clock at night; a young man [Francis Atoway, ‘not taken’ in the first sentence means Francis remained at large when this trial was underway] was with me * * * we went together, and said we would have a tankard of beer in going along; we went to see this gentleman [Edward Williams] home * * * there came two men, one ran up to me, and said, d - n [ellipsis for ‘damn’] your eyes, where are you going? and hit me in the face as hard as he could”
(vii) “For the Prisoner.  Thomas Walsham . I live in Old-street, and am a coach-harness-maker: I believe I have known the prisoner two years since he came from sea.”

That means a (character) witness for the prisoner, whom we now call a defendant.


(c) “Scientists have now carried out a computational analysis of those words showing how the British justice system created new practices for controlling violence. The study, ‘The Civilizing Process in London’s Old Bailey,’ in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a collaboration between two computer scientists, Simon DeDeo of Indiana University and Sara Klingenstein of the Santa Fe Institute, and a historian, Tim Hitchcock of the University of Sussex in England.”

* Klingenstein S, Hitchcock T and DeDeo S, The Civilizing Process in London’s Old Bailey. Proc Nat Acad Sci, _: _ (online publication June 16, 2014)
www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1405984111.abstract

(d) “Steven Pinker, the Harvard linguist and author of ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,’ said the new study offered a valuable quantitative analysis of a major development: Europe’s “civilizing process,” in which violence was increasingly deemed unworthy of respectable citizens. Formerly, ‘cultures of honor’ had valued violence as an appropriate response to insults and offenses.”

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature; Why violence has declined. Penguin, 2011.
(e) “The Old Bailey archive was digitized a decade ago into a free and searchable database (oldbaileyonline.org) in which every defendant’s name is tagged by gender, crime, location, the victim’s name and address, verdict, and any punishment.  All that information, along with the trial transcripts, constitutes a trove so vast that no one can hold it all in mind — a classic ‘big data’ problem. * * * One key finding is the gradual criminalization of violence. In the early 1700s, violence was considered routine. A trial about theft, Dr DeDeo said, might include testimony ‘in which people gouge out each other’s eyes, are covered in blood and get killed.’ But by the 1820s, the justice system was focused more on containing violence — a development reflected not just in language but also in the professionalization of the justice system. ‘The changes occurred under the radar,’ said Dr Hitchcock, the British historian. One such change revealed by the study is that trial records became medicalized. In the mid-19th century, doctors start showing up in large numbers to give evidence and evaluate causes of death. * * * The Old Bailey transcripts ended in 1913 as publication costs grew prohibitive and newspapers took over the role of covering trials.”

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(2) Patricia Cohen, As the Gavels Fell: 240 Years at Old. New York Times, Aug 18, 2014.
www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/books ... cholars-online.html

Quote:

(a) “Beginning in 1825 they [researchers of the online projects] noticed an unusual jump in the number of guilty pleas and the number of very short trials. Before then most of the accused proclaimed their innocence and received full trials. By 1850, however, one-third of all cases involved guilty pleas. Trials, with their uncertain outcomes, were gradually crowded out by a system in which defendants pleaded guilty outside of the courtroom, they said.

“Conventional histories cite the mid-1700s as the turning point in the development of the modern adversarial system of justice in England and Colonial America, with defense lawyers and prosecutors facing off in court, Mr Hitchcock and Mr. Turkel said. Their analysis tells a different story, however.

“'Mapping all trials suggests that the real moment of evolution was in the first half of the 19th century,' with the advent of plea bargains that resulted in many more convictions, Mr Hitchcock said.

(b) "Profound shifts were behind the turn toward negotiated agreements. The class of professional lawyers, police officers and judges was growing quickly at the same time that prison began to be used as an alternative to exile or capital punishment, historians have noted. (The first modern prison in Britain can be dated to 1792.) As Mr Hitchcock said, 'It’s hard to have plea bargaining when all they are going to do is hang you.'

(c) “Scholars have long considered the Old Bailey an invaluable resource. The court’s practices not only deeply influenced the authors of the American constitution and the young nation’s developing legal code, but the files are also the only large-scale printed source of how ordinary Englishmen actually spoke in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

(d) “Dan Cohen, a historian of science at George Mason University * * * found other revelations in the data. He noticed that in the 1700s there were nearly equal numbers of male and female defendants, but that a century later men outnumbered women nearly 10 to 1. The shift may reflect a change in the type of cases adjudicated, Mr. Cohen said. Adultery and theft of food or animals were crowded out by highway robbery, pickpocketing and other crimes common to an increasingly industrial and urbanized center. One exception was bigamy. After 1870 there was a small but significant rise in cases brought against women at the same time that the penalties meted out became much less severe. * * * As Britain expanded its colonial empire around the globe, more husbands were separated from their wives for years at a time, making it more understandable that women might seek new spouses without being able to get proper divorces. The trials may reflect a measure of control that Victorian women began to exercise over their own lives, Mr Cohen said.


Note:
(a) “It’s hard to have plea bargaining when all they are going to do is hang you”

David Friedman, Making Sense of English Law Enforcement in the 18th Century. 2 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 475, Jan 1, 1995 (author was on faculty of School of Law, Santa Clara University).
digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1558&context=facpubs

Quote:

“The criminal justice system of England in the eighteenth century presents a curious spectacle to an observer more familiar with modern institutions. The two most striking anomalies are the institutions for prosecuting offenders and the range of punishments. Prosecution of almost all criminal offenses was private, usually by the victim. Intermediate punishments for serious offenses were strikingly absent. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, in the early years of the century, English courts imposed only two sentences on convicted felons; either they turned them loose or they hanged them.”  paragraph 1

Later there was “The shift in the early 19th century towards punishment by imprisonment and law enforcement by paid police, and the later shift to public prosecution”  paragraph 2

“England in the 18th century had no public officials corresponding to either police or district attorneys. Constables were unpaid and played only a minor role in law enforcement. A victim of crime who wanted a constable to undertake any substantial effort in order to apprehend the perpetrator was expected to pay the expenses of doing so.”  paragraph 3

(i) There is no need to read the rest.
(ii) “2 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable 475”:  University of Chicago Law School Roundtable, volume 2, page 475

(b) in 1763 “William David was executed for robbing a man of his watch and hat, or in 1910 that Stanley Dennis was guilty of murdering his wife, Violet, but was found insane. The spread of newspapers and a hike in publishing costs abruptly ended the Proceedings in 1913.
(i) William David was sentenced to death but was pardoned (because he was only 14 years old and remorseful?)
(A) William David, William Bragger, James Murphy, Violent Theft > highway robbery, 6th July 1763 (Reference Number: t17630706-41; Related Material: Ordinary's Account, 24th August 1763, Associated Records [which said Mr David received “conditional pardon” and Mr Murphy was hanged])
www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t17630706-41
(“On the Saturday after the boy David was taken, he confessed where the watch was sold. My hat I have seen at the pawnbroker's * * * [verdicts and sentences:] David and Murphy Guilty . Death .   Bragger Acquitted”)
(B) Ordinary's Account, 24th August 1763 (Reference Number: OA17630824; Related Material: t17630706-41)
www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.j ... ts%2FOA17630824.xml
(“3. William David, William Bragger, and James Murphy, were indicted for robbing John Nelson on the King's high-way of a watch, value 30s. and a hat, value 10s. his property, May 27.
On this charge Bragger was acquitted, as it appeared by the confession of William David, he only had received the watch and ran off with it, after David had taken it out of the prosecutor's pocket by the help of a third accomplice, who held him. David being condemned, was respited; he is a lad of about 14 years, was instrumental in getting the watch restored to the prosecutor, and detecting the other accomplices: so that it only remains to give an account of Murphy”)
(C) Old Bailey Proceedings punishment summary, James Anderson, Thomas Thompson, William Hall, Elizabeth Jones, Joseph Johnson, John Edinburg, John Brown, William David, Sebastine Hogan, Daniel Shields, John Hunt, John Dean, Joseph Stride, John Barret, Michael Kennedy, George Kelly, Mary Williams, 22nd February 1764. (Reference Number: s17640222-1)
www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=s17640222-1
(“Those capital convicts received his Majesty's most gracious pardon, on the following conditions. [names and descriptions] John Brown , and William David , convicted in July, 1763”)
(ii) Stanley Dennis, Killing > murder, 6th December, 1910 (Reference Number: t19101206-12)
www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.j ... mp;div=t19101206-12