Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  While the elite knew that the severe system was no substitute for proper policing and detective work, they still did not want a paid police force. It was seen as a foreign idea, a tool of despots that would threaten Englishmen’s liberty, especially in the hands of a government that had passed laws restricting habeas corpus and employed spies to provoke the lower orders into breaking the law. It was one notion that all classes in society were agreed on, if not always for the same reason.

  There was a very approximate link between the crime and the punishment. Fines were used for minor crimes. Three people were fined 3s 4d in Newark in 1819 for drinking alcohol instead of attending divine service. Street vendors without licences selling luxuries like silk and jewellery could expect a fine of less than £1. A group of gentlemen were fined 22s for leaving their team of horses in the street while they went to the public house.

  Violence against the person could also attract a fine of around £1, as John Hall found out when he assaulted Richard Towers and was convicted at Lincoln City Sessions in October 1818. At the same sessions, William Burley was fined £5 for assaulting a constable, and John Watkinson was fined £10 for assaulting the excise officer John Younghusband. Watkinson was caught selling French silk handkerchiefs and offered only minor resistance; he was warned that, had he been guilty of an aggravated assault that prevented the government official from doing his work, the punishment would have been three years hard labour in a house of correction.

  ‘Poor on poor’ serious violence was rewarded with a maximum six months’ imprisonment. An Edinburgh man who lived with a woman who kept a brothel in Cowgate, Edinburgh, was given thirty days for striking a man and making him bleed because he had entered his house of ill repute while drunk.

  There were several ways of being sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. As with Ann Jones, it was often a reduced punishment after being respited for a capital offence. At the other end of the spectrum were cases like that of Samuel Robinson, who stole two books from a schoolmaster in Castle Douglas, Dumfries, and was transported. There are lots of examples of how easy it was to steal from a Georgian shop, when most goods were within reach. Mary McWilliams of Annan stole cotton from the linen shop of Mr Thomas Hewitt. She had form and Mr Hewitt was clearly fed up of Mary coming into his shop and waiting for his back to be turned. Transportation was more likely if the court saw the same face several times. Stealing from houses would attract transportation, as long as the house had not been broken into. In 1819 James Robinson stole a smock coat and a pair of breeches from James Barker of Nocton, Lincolnshire a fellow servant in the house of Robert Wright, and was transported.

  Bigamy was regarded as a serious crime, as Mr Newcomen Edgeworth discovered in 1812 when he married Mrs Townend while his wife Elizabeth was still alive. He was sentenced to live with neither of them as he was sent to Botany Bay. Organising a trade union by administrating illegal oaths would attract a similar sentence, as Thomas Holden of Bolton found out in 1812. He was perplexed by the punishment – he regarded it as what today may be called a ‘victimless’ crime.

  Sometimes punishments were exemplary – a warning to others even when the crime itself was not particularly heinous. Hannah Smith, a 54-year-old mother of eight seemed to have been singled out for stealing butter and a ‘great deal’ of potatoes. She forced Charles Walker of Ardwick, Manchester to sell the butter at 1s per lb, a discount of 3d on the market price. She made it clear that the alternative was to have it all taken away from him. Later she seemed to be involved in stealing potatoes, single-handedly intercepting a cart belonging to James Rawcliffe at Bank Top, Manchester and with a mob encouraging her, distributed the food.

  Her crime was political. She was in the company of Luddites who burned down Westhoughton Mill near Bolton. The stealing and under-pricing was done under the pressure of a mob, which had gone on to destroy the machines and the building that housed them. She was executed for highway robbery alongside four men who attacked the mill. The Morning Post was pleased to announce that all of them, after initially showing no contrition and some indifference to their fate, finally became ‘broken and contrite spirits [who] cried out to Heaven’s throne to have mercy on them’.

  It would be untrue to say that society did not care about the treatment of children. In 1810, Mary Godby, a slum dweller of Angel Street, Covent Garden, was found guilty of beating her child and leaving her in a locked room until 9pm when she went out to sell vegetables bought from Covent Garden. Local people had tried to feed the child through a window, but the poor mite had its hands tied behind its back. On other occasions the child had had its toes stamped on; its hair pulled out and had been placed under cold running water in the middle of winter. Mary had to be rescued from the London mob and in court she was called an ‘unnatural’ parent. However, local people had been witnessing these cruelties for three years and had done nothing themselves. The father, who was not implicated in the cruelty, told people to mind their own business, and they did.

  The punishment for Mary Godby is not known but it’s likely it would have been a prison sentence. This seems shocking when minor property crimes carried the death penalty. Anne Wright of Yorkshire received a twelvemonth sentence for mistreating her 9-year-old daughter. In a coarse age, this crime was still regarded as being one of singular cruelty. Her neighbour, Stephen Lockington, could hear the child being beaten every day through the thin walls of their adjoining houses. She was severely beaten by her stepfather for asking for a piece of cake, imprisoned in one room for five weeks, and died with a body full of bruises, cuts to the limbs, and in an emaciated state. Wright was found guilty of child cruelty and sentenced to fifty weeks in prison followed by two weeks of solitary confinement. A further charge of murder was added after this indictment but it was impossible to prove legally that this mistreatment was the actual cause of Ann’s death.

  To put this crime into context, there were other crimes at the same sessions that attracted one year’s imprisonment: stealing a £1 note from the Post Office; highway robbery (both capital crimes, in theory), and bigamy. Attracting a death sentence were the crimes of horse stealing, sheep stealing, burglary, forgery of banknotes and rape.

  In the case of the rape of Harriet Halliday, the judge, Baron Wood, indicated that all of these accused, apart from the rapist William Hodgson, could hope for a reprieve. Hodgson was told in no uncertain terms to prepare for a ‘future state’. The court officials were aghast at these comments. It was expected that Hodgson would be respited and the legal establishment was very much perturbed by how the judge had behaved. It turned out to be a historic turning point in women’s legal rights in cases of sexual assault. Halliday’s evidence was strong, witnesses had seen her dragged into a stable by Hodgson, a local surgeon had heard her screams, rescued her, and financed the prosecution against Hodgson. Harriet was a servant, and would not have the £10 or so to pay for a trial – she was probably earning around £4 a year and the state provided no funds to prosecute. This was another weakness of the system.

  In the face of such strong evidence, Hodgson’s defence became aggressive. They called Halliday’s former employer and were about to ask why she had discharged Harriet after a mere two weeks. They were then stopped by the judge, who ruled that this question was not relevant to the case. The defence then asked her whether she had had any ‘connection’ with any boys in the past. Judge Baron Wood then made a novel and important ruling: ‘witness was not bound to answer these questions as they tend to criminate and disgrace herself and there was not any exception to the rule in the case of rape’.

  The prisoner’s counsel called a witness to prove that the girl had been caught in bed a year before this charge with a young man. This second piece of evidence was ruled inadmissible and Harriet’s evidence stood. The rule was extended in 1817 to cover the crime of attempted rape and although it did not ban general questions about the woman’s lifestyle, it did rule inadmissible specific ones, such as were asked in this case.

>   Sodomy was a capital crime in the Regency, usually reported in the newspapers as ‘unnatural’ or ‘detestable’. It was rare to read about examples; it was only discovered if there was a complaint by one of the participants or, as in the special example of 1816, the crew of a whole ship was suspected. Blackwood’s Law Commentary said that sodomy was such a terrible crime, and so easy to fabricate, that only the very strongest proofs would be accepted.

  John Eglerton was accused of sodomy with his groom in 1816, on the evidence of the young man himself. The judge condemned John’s actions as ‘a crime subversive of every idea of virtue and manliness’, but his treatment was similar to others accused of capital crimes. However, the similarity ended when most of the people indicted with him were eventually pardoned. The draconian punishments of the Regency’s bloody code were a pantomime of condemning people to death and then pardoning them. This did not apply to John. According to the Morning Post (15 July 1816)

  The jury retired for ten minutes, and returned with a verdict of Guilty. – Death. When the Prisoner heard the verdict pronounced against him, he fell into tears, and begged the Judge to recommend him to mercy on account of his family.

  He was executed at Newgate on 23 September 1816, and the same conventions were used as with other prisoners. He was reported to have died with ‘perfect resignation’ (Cambridge Chronicle) and was fully penitent.

  In the same year, the Reverend William Woodcock was sentenced to four years in the House of Correction. His young partner, aged ‘around 16’ according to the judicial proceeding, was sentenced to three years as a willing participant.

  The crime of sodomy was never reported in detail. However, a particular event in 1816 allows more details to be gathered. The whole crew of the Africaine was suspected of being a centre of ‘unnatural crime’. The naval authorities had difficulty in finding those who were guilty. By December 1815, their on-ship investigations had produced twenty-three suspects. This was far too many to be hanging from the yardarm in Portsmouth, so the numbers needed to be reduced.

  It was difficult to find a reliable witness, who wasn’t also implicated, to prove that a crime had taken place. Initial suspicion fell on four men: John Westerman, Joseph Tall, Ralph Serraco and Raphaelo Troyac. The last two men were Italian. Many in Britain called sodomy ‘le vice italien’ – it was believed to have originated from ancient Lombardy. The newspapers certainly thought that it was significant that half of the accused were foreigners. Four men, including the two Italians, were hanged; other sailors were found guilty of unclean acts, and received two years’ solitary confinement in the Marshalsea prison.

  As part of the random nature of punishments for crimes in the Regency period, many attracted an hour in the pillory; a spectacle that usually took place at lunchtime to encourage the crowds, and was used as an addition to imprisonment for crimes that demanded public humiliation. Arsonists, thieves, perjurers, and pimps were subject of the pillory, but increasingly it was used as a way of punishing acts of sodomy.

  When Joshua Vigners (or Viggers) was pilloried as part of his punishment for sodomy in September 1810 at Cornhill, he was at first pelted with eggs, mud, and potatoes but later in the hour he was pelted with stones which blinded him. Spectators climbed on to a balustrade in Charlotte Row for a better view. It collapsed and many were rushed to St Bartholomew’s hospital with cracked skulls. The streets in the surrounding areas of Poultry and Cornhill were blocked and their shops closed. There was no doubt who was in charge during these exemplary punishments, and it was certainly not the government.

  As with public hangings, the ruling classes needed to control other spectacles of justice. While the pillory did offer an opportunity to provide a punishment that was feared, there was a problem that the nature of the process actually put more power in the hands of the mob, leading to a diminution in respect for the law.

  Another objection to the pillory was one based on class distinction. Humiliation was more of a punishment for those with some social standing and something to lose. This is what one caring MP said in the 1816 abolition debate:

  The punishment, he insisted, was unequal: to a man in the higher walks of life, it was worse than death: it drove him from society, and would not suffer him to return to respectability; while, to a more hardened offender, it could not be an object of much terror, and it could not affect his family or his prospects in the same degree.

  Reformers such as Cobbett and traditionalists such as the reactionary Lord Ellenborough agreed that the pillory brought an unwanted degree of inequality and uncertainty. It was abolished for general use and reserved for perjurers until 1830, but this was not an act of humanitarianism, merely political pragmatism. That would also be a good description of the whole system of punishment and justice in the Regency.

  Chapter 17

  Retribution

  In 1819, James Bilsham was found guilty of stealing ten bushels of rapeseed from the Great Ellingham estate of Nathaniel Weston of Norfolk. His crime was ‘grand larceny’– theft of items worth more than one shilling. This was not very much money even then, but it was an indication of how seriously property crime was regarded. He was unlucky to be caught; most people were not. His luck deteriorated when he discovered that his twelve-month incarceration was to be at one of the worst houses of correction in Norfolk, and possibly the country.

  Aylsham gaol was a poor and ill-favoured place. Although officially a House of Correction, such institutions were often called Bridewells, after the original prison in London of that name. Aylsham was constructed in the 1780s, just as prison building and reform stopped for the war emergency; it was built by private contractors for their own profit and the build quality reflected this. When Bilsham arrived in November 1819 there were about a dozen inmates, although a year earlier the number was nearer thirty. There were fourteen useable cells and he may have had one of these to himself, due to the unusual lack of overcrowding. There were also four new cells built to accommodate the wave of crime since 1815, but they were poorly built and some had windows on the external wall which allowed contraband to be passed through – and criminals to pass out. The governor of the prison, who had been there for twenty-three years, admitted during the 1819 visitation by the magistrate that a cripple had escaped from the establishment a year earlier after just an hour’s incarceration. James was one of the prisoners during the inspection.

  There were no baths, no infirmary and only two privies for the eighteen cells. Every morning, James would have taken a stone pitcher to the single water pump in the yard, washed, breakfasted, and then taken his container of water back to his cell. James would spend the day either in solitary confinement or walking around the small rubbish-strewn yard. There was no segregation of prisoners, either by sex or nature of crime. James probably didn’t find prison a corrupting experience; most of the inmates were there for property crime of a similar level to his. The youngest inmate, Charles Rennet, was a 14-year-old illiterate burglar who had received no trade or education, and had no family. At the end of the two years, young Rennet would simply leave prison a better criminal, with new connections and no alternative but more crime. He was one of thousands in this situation.

  Neither James nor young Charles worked in prison, contrary to an Act of Parliament. There was corn-grinding equipment in the prison but no corn. The prisoners made shoes and did a little tailoring for each other – out of necessity, as they did not receive a fresh shirt every week as the rules demanded. They did not even whitewash their own cells. It was done by outside contractors, not that it would take long as most cells were 9ft x 6ins. They slept on straw in vermin infested wooden beds and subsisted on broth and 2lbs of bread per day.

  Even if they wanted to be penitent, they had little opportunity. The chapel was a 9ft high hut with two perfunctory services a week and no individual pastoral care for the inmates. For this service a local cleric earned £50 a year. There were only three bibles available to the prisoners, which was not too much of a problem becaus
e only four prisoners were literate. Of the fourteen basic rules laid down by parliament, eleven were broken.

  Not all prisons were terrible, but even those with a good reputation were getting worse. Things had certainly got worse at Bodmin gaol. Before 1815 it would have one of the best in the country. It was one of the few new prisons built in the period after 1780. Unlike Aylsham, it was not built by private enterprise, but by the local community:

  It was light & airy and therefore healthy; it had different isolated areas for felons, misdemeanants and debtors. Males & females were totally segregated. There was hot water, a chapel, an infirmary for sick prisoners and individual sleeping cells. Prisoners were paid for their work from the profits from the products sold by the governor.1

  After the post-war crime wave, the prison became disease ridden, and overcrowded, with many more prisoners in each cell. It started to look more like Aylsham. It was now a place to be avoided at all costs.

  When the corrupt MP Sir Massanah Lopes was convicted of bribery in 1819, his special pleading – he had asthma – got him a stint in Exeter while his poorer fellow criminals were crammed into Bodmin.

  Improvements continued, but not ones that we would recognise as a step forward today. In November 1818, additions to the Hampshire County Gaol and Bridewell were completed. They had succeeded in meeting the government’s standards. A new drop was built at the gaol to execute people more effectively, and chapels were built and repaired. The chair of the Committee for Improvements had some strong words for those rebuilding the prisons. He commented ‘on the structure of some prisons, which instead of being loathsome dungeons were built like palaces’. He also understood that ‘it was generally admitted that vice should be hidden from the public view’. He went on to say that £7,500 paid for the new door of Maidstone prison suggested that people now glorified in crime; and that care should be taken not to make the prisons as attractive as the workhouses.