Introduction


‘One of the most diverting things a man can read in London’

Louis de Muralt (1726)

The eighteenth-century courtroom at the Old Bailey – the most important criminal court in the English-speaking world, and the place where the modern adversarial trial was created – witnessed all the tragedy of human life. Violence, sex, money and drugs; jealousy, love and hate were rehearsed by victims and criminals under the gaze of jaundiced judges and suspicious jurymen. The stories told here were then rendered into print in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. Published eight times a year, after each court session, the Proceedings are the dam and sire of many published courtroom dramas and detective stories and contain in full measure the anger of a victim of a senseless crime and the stark terror of a man condemned to death. In 25 million words, they record the 100,000 trials held between 1674 and 1834. First created to entertain the generation of Samuel Pepys, the Proceedings were published decade after decade throughout the eighteenth century. Within their pages can be found pathetic tales of suffering and mendacious accusations of crimes never committed. There are chilling acknowledgements of violence perpetrated on the innocent, as well as impudent denials. Vivid accounts of murders and riots, robberies and rapes were published for an enthusiastic audience, keen to feast on the lurid details of crime.

Even two centuries later the emotions of the courtroom hold the reader’s attention. But within these 25 million words of crime and courtroom drama, there is much, much more. Everyday life, down to the smallest gesture and most subtle emotion, is recorded: how to order a drink at an alehouse, how to empty a chamber pot or buy a leek; where to sit at the play, what to wear when setting out to beg. The Proceedings teach us how to speak to a hackney coachman, and what not to say when confronted by a highway robber. They introduce us to people like Mary ‘Cut-and-Come-Again’ who, when arrested for theft, took out her breasts and squirted mother’s milk in the eyes of her accuser, who spat at the justice as he recorded her crime, and who went to the scaffold refusing almost to her last breath to give her proper name. They introduce us to Thomas De Veil, the sexually rapacious reforming magistrate who, along with his successors Henry and John Fielding, established the first modern police force. And to Princess Seraphina, the transvestite male prostitute who haunted the balls and masquerades of 1730s London in fine clothes and an elaborate wig; and William Garrow, the first and most eloquent Rumpole of the Bailey. Criminals, pathetic and vicious by turns, thieftakers breaking the law while claiming to enforce it, barristers sometimes brilliant and frequently pompous and foolish and, above them all, the officers of the court sitting in cold judgement, are all here.

Tales from the Hanging Court brings to a modern audience this world of characters, emotions and detail. It recreates the life and death dramas on which Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens based their novels. It presents a few dozen of the most colourful and revealing trials from the 50,000 witnessed by the court in the eighteenth century; trials that evoke this place and time, these fears and emotions; trials that allow the modern reader to feel the grit and humanity of life in eighteenth-century London, its cruelty and its charms.

London was at turns beautiful and squalid, orderly and chaotic. Rebuilt following the disastrous fire of 1666, the City’s medieval streets were now home to brick buildings in the classical style. The fire damaged heart of the City was remade with houses fronted by serried ranks of sash windows; their structures made uniform by some of the most stringent building regulations ever imposed. The major thoroughfares, backstreets and side alleys were filled with houses in a style laid down in the crisp prose of a government commission, making London one of the architectural jewels of Europe. Equally impressive were the aristocratic urban palaces lining the new streets and formal squares of Westminster. Chains, iron railings and padlocks attempted to segregate the inhabitants of these new suburbs from their poorer neighbours, creating gated communities reserved for the powdered and bewigged. But as London spread into the open fields in every direction, other suburban developments, notably those to the east and north of the City, outside the areas governed by planning regulations, were haphazard and of poor quality. Here speculators threw up squalid houses made with poor materials and even poorer workmanship. Every jobbing carpenter who could scrape together a few pounds in capital tried to become a property developer. House collapses in these crowded neighbourhoods were common, with whole families occasionally crushed in their beds.

At the start of the century London had a population of just under 600,000; by 1800 it had reached nearly one million. It had become the largest city in the western world. This inexorable growth, this seemingly unstoppable urban bloat, was almost entirely the result of migration. High mortality rates and unhealthy living conditions, in combination with a relatively late age at marriage, ensured that Londoners could not rely on nature to fill the shoes of the dead. Instead, London depended on the thousands of immigrants, primarily young and predominantly female, who came to the capital each year.

They moved in order to escape poverty and exploitation back home, but as important was the prospect of jobs and adventure in the big city.