Books & Poetry

Looking back with modern eyes, London in the eighteenth century was a fascinating mix of the familiar and the alien. A new book by the historians Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Tales from the Hanging Court’, paints a picture of a city struggling towards modernity, as market capitalism and Enlightenment thinking battled to streamline the chaotic discourse of urban life.

Their source text, the ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, was a record of crime and punishment published continuously from 1664 to 1913, and is a treasure trove of social, political and legal history. In its heyday, it provided a soap opera of scandalous goings-on that appealed knowingly to the prurience and voyeurism of a newly literate public, and Hitchcock and Shoemaker have understandably succumbed to the temptation to include plenty of hair-raising tales of murder, sexual assault and prostitution. But they have an academic point to make as well: eighteenth-century London, they observe, was ‘a city policed by consent’; Londoners’ sense of being free men meant that any idea of state intervention was anathema, so thieves and murderers were generally apprehended by members of the public, and prosecutions brought by the victims (or their families) themselves. Arrest and prosecution could therefore just as easily be motivated by prejudice, profit or personal grudge as by a genuine desire for retribution, and by the same token verdicts (usually reached within minutes) were often influenced more by public opinion, and an assessment of the gentility and trustworthiness of the parties involved, than a careful weighing of the facts.

For London’s outsiders – especially Jews, Catholics, gay men and black people – there was very little chance of a fair trial. When John Cooper, a well-known transvestite and male prostitute, was robbed at knifepoint by Thomas Gordon in 1732, Gordon used the threat of a counter-charge of sodomy to try to dissuade Cooper from prosecuting. Cooper pressed charges anyway, but was undermined by his own (mainly female) witnesses, who insisted on referring to him as ‘Princess Seraphina’ and disclosed that they often lent him their clothes; Gordon, though plainly guilty, was duly acquitted.

But bigotry could work both ways; when Benjamin Bowsey, a black footman, was accused of looting during the anti-Catholic riots of 1780, the court found it hard to believe that he could be positively identified, since it was impossible to tell black people apart. Having been found in possession of the looted articles, however, he was sentenced to hang all the same, although a royal pardon later spared him from the gallows.

The famous case of Joseph Baretti in 1769 shows how finely balanced these ethnic and class assumptions could be. Baretti was a myopic Italian scholar who was in the wrong place at the wrong time one night in Soho. When he was propositioned by a prostitute who ‘clapped her hands with such violence about my private parts, that it gave me great pain’, he promptly hit her, and was set upon by a group of Londoners who mistook him for a Frenchman. They chased after him and he ended up stabbing one of them with a knife. At his trial, his foreignness and Catholicism were a clear disadvantage, but Baretti was a gentleman and duly played his social ace: calling in character witnesses including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and, for good measure, a grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwynn. ‘There were divers other gentlemen in court to speak for his character,’ the ‘Proceedings’ noted drily, ‘but the court thought it needless to call them.’ Baretti was acquitted.

This was a time when a homeless orphan could live for a week by stealing a single handkerchief, but be hanged for less; when stocks and pillories were still in use, duels were still fought, and the medieval punishment of ‘pressing’ to death – spreadeagled on the ground and piled with heavy weights – was still on the statute books; when your jailer could invite you upstairs for a beer, or leave you in an airless dungeon with no water or ventilation, on a whim; when you might be murdered in your bed for some linen and a silver tankard. Hitchcock and Shoemaker feel no need to jazz up all this rich period detail to bring it to life, and they maintain a scholarly distance from the material, which shows laudable self-restraint, but will probably keep them off the bestseller lists. But in doing so, they leave room for an even more interesting account of a society’s dawning realisation, over the course of a revolutionary century, that crime and punishment needed to be taken out of the hands of the mob and set up upon rational lines. This project, they strongly imply, remains a work-in-progress.

‘Tales from the Hanging Court’ by Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker is published by Hodder Arnold at £20.