Crime, Criminals and Catchers: Worcestershire Assize Cases in the 1630s and the 1650s

Crime, Criminals and Catchers: Worcestershire Assize Cases in the 1630s and the 1650s Hangings, floggings, brandings, bloodthirsty judges matched in unpleasantness by ruthless highwaymen, desperate cut-throats and organized gangs of thieves make up the popular image of seventeenth-century crime, criminals, catchers and courts. While examples of them can be found, they were only a small part of a picture which was more mundane, perhaps more interesting and, above all else, more human. Petty theft, neighbourly reaction and painful, public and humtiiating punishment were the more typical picture. The atypical crime was the one which led to a charge of felony in the court of assizes and thus placed the alleged offender in danger of his or her life. There was also a considerable gap between the harsh criminal law and the way it was appUed by the courts. To a very considerable extent the courts, like the people of the localities, bent the law and mitigated its brutality so that only a small percentage of those liable to suffer its strictest penalties actuady did so. C o m m o n law involved the entire population in the detection and punishment of crime. Anyone who knew of a felony and did not report it was guilty as an accessory. All able-bodied men could be caUed out by the hue and cry after a thief. Citizens of aU social levels above the very poor might find themselvesfillingan official, though unpaid, role in criminal jurisdiction as constables,tithing-men,bailiffs, jurors and Justices of the Peace. They could be involved in any of a large number of national, regional, county and local courts. In law the official normally charged with initiating proceedings against offenders was the parish constable. Constables seem, for the most part, to have been farmers and smaU tradesmen; men who, though obscure outside their parish, had standing within it but not always enough to gain them much deference from their neighbours. Nevertheless, constables had a considerable measure of authority. As Blackstone has commented: 'the extent of which powers . . . considering what manner of men are for the most part put into these offices, it is perhaps very weU that they are generally kept in ignorance'.1 Amongst other things, constables were responsible for keeping the peace by acting as mediators and preventing the unlawful carrying of arms; arresting nightwalkers, haunters of houses and taking them before a Justice of the Peace to give sureties for good behaviour; enforcing the keeping of watch and ward, and arresting rioters. They could seize anybody gudty of felony, or held by common fame to be gudty of felony, and keep them in the stocks until it was possible to *R.H. Silcock, County Government in Worcestershire, 1603-1660, University of London, Ph.D. diss., 1974, 64 (hereafter Silcock, Thesis). 180 R.H. Silcock take them to a Justice of the Peace. The constable could call upon all ablebodied vdlagers to assist him when he made an arrest and he was not liable if he caused injury or even death to a person resisting arrest. H e was authorized to inflict summary punishment, such as levying a fine of one shilling an oath on swearer, or those who failed to attend church, and on those who sat more than an hour in an alehouse. He also had a wide range of administrative duties relating to the poor law, bastardy, road works and vagrancy. Although they sometimes needed to be prodded by the Justices of the Peace, constables returned with reasonable regularity the names of persons refusing to undertake civic responsibilities, punished and passed on vagrants, took action against those who brought paupers into the parish and against those who begot bastards. They seem, however, to have taken the initiative in only a tiny proportion of arrests for felony or criminal misdemeanours. In the small communities of seventeenth-century Worcestershire there was a strong preference for punishing minor offenders locally. Thus, nagging wives or scolds were traditionally cooled off in the ducking-stool rather than charged with barratry, adulterers were humiliated by the skimmington, and other undesirables were driven out of town. Petty thieves and minor poachers were rebuked by parson or squire...