The Old Bailey Proceedings
Online

A major recent event for social and legal historians has been the public availability of a computerized database including the records of the principal English trial court addressing crime in the 18th century. The Old Bailey Proceedings (otherwise known as the Old Bailey Sessions Papers) documents all cases of felony, as well as some indictable misdemeanors, prosecuted in the cities of London and Westminster and in the county of Middlesex. Reports of individual cases vary greatly in detail from single paragraph entries to what appear to be full transcripts and collectively they provide sufficient information for quite sophisticated analyses of crime trends and prosecution and conviction patterns to be successfully undertaken. The collection presently includes reports of some 53,000 trials heard between 1674 and 1799 and therefore supports analysis aimed at determining social and legal change over time. Records before the 1720s are, however, incomplete because of the sporadic nature of legal reporting prior to this time. The set will eventually cover trials up to 1834, when the court s scope and jurisdiction were redefined.

The Proceedings have been used extensively by scholars from a variety of disciplines and are universally regarded as accurate, although sometimes limited, accounts of the events they portray. Not surprisingly, they have been used most heavily by legal scholars, such as John H. Langbein, who have gleaned from them details of emerging legal procedure which cannot be found in legal treatises or other contemporary primary sources. An early and imaginative study by Nigel Walker used the OBP to address questions regarding early use of the insanity plea. In his Crime and Insanity in England (1967) he demonstrated that the insanity defense was routinely offered in the 18th century English courts and very often accepted. This was long before the plea was formally embedded in the law in the M Naghten Rules of 1843. Walker s findings provide a dramatic caution against using relying upon contemporary guides to legal practice as adequate documentation of the substance of operational law.

The database includes very extensive bibliographies of secondary works in the law and the social sciences based on analysis of the Proceedings. Not addressed here is the potential of this primary data source for scholars in the humanities. Lengthy descriptions of events and places, as well as the advertisements included, make the OBP suitable for the study of trends in fashion, recreation, custom, and other aspects of popular culture. Inclusion of apparently verbatim testimony of the largely working-class people who testified before the court makes the Proceedings a unique resource for the study of language and dialect. Not much use has in fact been made of them by those in the humanities (although interesting results are obtained by searching the phrases old bailey proceedings and old bailey sessions papers in the full-text fields of Project Muse and the humanities subsets of JSTOR). The potential is nonetheless there.

Other excellent sections of the database discuss the history and legal standing of the Proceedings. These discussions include many links to databases addressing related secondary sources. A very important aspect of the set is the links to citations to related primary sources given within each case, when such information has been identified. These links are to the immense British Trials, 1660-1900 collection published on some 4,400 microfiches by Chadwyck-Healey in the 1990s.

Searching the database can be done in many ways: by name of victim or defendant, crime, keyword, date, verdict, punishment, and so on. As with any database, searching should be done with caution as the results are not always entirely accurate: For example, Samuel Gregory, highwayman and accomplice of the notorious Dick Turpin, was convicted in 1735 of a number of capital felonies, including rape, theft, and robbery. Searching the database by either crime, subject category, or keyword did not yield the several case reports involving this defendant. I was only able to retrieve them by searching Gregory s name. However, the results of a topical search can be checked through browsing by date. An arduous process, but apparently necessary and well worth it if this primary collection is of central importance to the research project.

The Proceedings can be (and have been) the major primary source supporting dissertations and other projects involving original research. They could also provide the substance for an entire credit course. Those who wish to explore this thought should go to the For Schools link within the database, even though this is intended for those teaching high school curricula.
The database can be accessed through Selected Internet Links from the Library home page. Then go to Criminal Justice History. Alternatively, as it is not a subscription database (it s funded by the U.K. National Lottery!), it can be retrieved directly at www.oldbaileyonline.org.

Tony Simpson