A simple English and Welsh crime Timeline (17c to 19c) ****************************************************** Included are some random references to individual crimes and their punishments to emphasise just how attitudes to 'crime and its punishment' changed over the centuries and how this translated into a general move away from death or physical punishment towards long term incarceration in gaols etc. The book (CPEW) has a table from Dolby's Parliamentary Register showing the number of people executed, and their crime, in England and Wales in the years 1805 - 1818. Here are details of the 5 categories of crimes, which make up the bulk of the total, for the year 1818 in which 95 people were executed ; Murder; 13 Burglary, housebreaking etc; 19 Forgery and uttering; 24 Robbery on the person, and on the highway etc; 13 Sheep stealing; 14 1615-1776 'Idle beggars and disorderly persons' were transported to the colonies (such as the West Indies and North America)". (CPEW) 1648 Royalists routed at Battle of St Fagan's - hundreds of Welshmen transported to Barbados. 1679 Habeas Corpus Act during reign of Charles II (CPEW) - this legislation was to stop the practice of detaining people ad infinitem without trial. 1685 "At the 'Bloody Assizes' conducted by Judge Jeffreys over 1000 followers of the Duke of Monmouth were sent to the West Indies as slaves and another 300 were hanged, drawn and quartered". (CPEW) 1713 Branding was abolished. (CPEW) 1716 "A nine year old girl was hanged as a witch in Huntingdon". (CPEW) 1718 An Act which broadened and regularised the system of transportation of convicts to the colonies. 1736 The Witchcraft Act, controversially declared witchcraft no longer to be a crime. 1779 "...an Act introduced a new concept of hard labour for prisoners in the hulks..." (Home Office) 1782 "A girl of 14 was hanged for being found with gypsies". (CPEW) "Before the end of the C18th there were more than 150 offences for which death was the specified penalty". (CPEW) 1787 First convicts transported to Australia in what is known as the First Fleet - the Second Fleet followed in 1790. 1791 There are annual Criminal registers for 1791-1892 at the Public Records Office, Kew, London. 1801 "A boy of 13 was hanged for stealing a spoon". (CPEW) 1823 Sir Robert Peel became Home Secretary "and introduced far-ranging criminal law and prison reform " via the Gaol Act of 1823. From the CPEW et al; The number of offences carrying the death penalty was reduced by over 100. Justices of the Peace were now required to inspect and report on prisons every three months. Houses of Correction and County Gaols were amalgamated - and the word prison is first used. Men and women were now to be separated in prisons. Whipping, expulsion, the stocks etc ceased to be the punishment for 'idle beggars and disorderly persons', and seven years transportation was replaced by 2 years in prison. 1824 "A Vagrancy Act replaced all previous legislation and identified three classes of offenders; 'Idle and disorderly persons', Rogues and vagabonds', and 'Incorrigible rogues' ". (CPEW) 1829 Metropolitan Police force established in London. 1830 Abolition of Courts of Great Sessions of Wales. 1834 "The Poor Law Amendment Act set out to make provisions for the 'law abiding poor' and workhouses under the control of locally elected Guardians of the Poor were established." & "Gradually it was accepted that mere poverty was not a punishable crime". (CPEW) Tolpuddle Martyrs - transported for forming a trade union. The Old Bailey becomes known as the Central Criminal Court. 1838 Debt was now distinguished from premeditated fraud and ceased to be an offence punishable by a prison sentence unless the debtor was likely to abscond. 1839 The County Police Act passed. 1840s "...in the six years after the building of Pentonville [1842] fifty-four new prisons were built providing 11,000 separate cells..." (Home Office) 1843 A Report on the Turnpike Trusts: "It was to be expected that the government should institute an enquiry into the (Rebecca) rioting." Edwin Chadwick, the secretary of the Poor Law Commission, who had paid some attention to conditions in Wales in preparing a report in 1839 on the best means of establishing a constabulary force, wrote to the home office on 11 July 1843 to suggest that an enquiry be held. 1859 "Hulks continued to be used until 1859 and at one time contained 70,000 prisoners, many being French prisoners of war captured after the defeat of Napoleon". (Home Office) 1860s "An Act allowed long periods of solitary confinement on bread and water, flogging, and the use of chains and irons". (CPEW) 1865 "Despite this legislative activity and the work of penal reformers, conditions in prisons continued in general to be appalling and attempts to impose common standards achieved very little. In 1863 the deficiencies of local administration were catalogued by a Select Committee of the House of Lords on Prison Discipline. In 1865 the Prisons Act made it possible for the grant from central government to the local authority to be withdrawn if the provisions of the Act were not implemented". (Home Office) 1867 Transportation to the colonies effectively ended. 1869 Debt is now finally decriminalised and routine imprisonment for debt ceased, other than in cases of fraud or deliberate refusal to pay. 1877 "..in 1877 legislation was passed to transfer the powers and responsibilities from the local justices to the Home Secretary who also took over from local rate payers the cost of the system..". (Home Office) 1878 Edward du Cane and the Prison Commission. (Home Office) "..the Commissioners close[d] 38 out of a total of 113 local prisons. Within another ten years another 15 had been abandoned.." "The regime ... imposed in the local prisons was based on the principle of separate confinement, which ... reflected the view that imprisonment was a punishment intended to deter the offender from further crime. For the first month the prisoner was required to sleep on a plank bed, and to work alone in his cell. The work would be tedious, unpleasant and unconstructive; at this stage it would usually consist of picking oakum. Later on, he might find himself working the crank or tread wheel. ... The food consisted basically of bread, meal and potatoes .......No letters or visits were allowed for the first three months, and thereafter were permitted only at three monthly intervals. " "Conditions in the convict prisons were based on similar principles. A convict was sentenced to penal servitude, not to imprisonment, and spent the first nine months of his sentence in solitary confinement. The convict crop and the prison uniform with its broad arrows were intentionally demeaning and unsightly..." 1895 Gladstone Report (Home Office) "Towards the end of the century belief in punishment and deterrence as the main objects of imprisonment, and confidence in the separate system as a desirable and effective means of dealing with prisoners, came increasingly under question. The Report of the Gladstone Committee in 1895 reflected this change in attitudes towards prisoners. 'We start', said the Committee, 'from the principle that prison treatment should have as its primary and concurrent objects, deterrence and reformation'. In this spirit, the Committee recommended that unproductive labour, in particular the crank and tread wheel, should be abolished and that the principle of labour in association, practised for many years in the convict service, should be extended to local prisons..." 1898 Oscar Wilde wrote 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' which had some influence on public perception of what life in gaol was like "He was sentenced to two years imprisonment for homosexuality, ...During his jail term, first at Wandsworth prison and then at Reading, Wilde underwent a transformation. The indulgent, witty playwright and author was released a broken man, humiliated and bankrupt" (BBC) Refs: (Home Office) 'Home Office 1782-1982' written to commemorate the Bicentenary of the Home Office in 1982 (CPEW) 'Crime and Punishment in England and Wales: an Outline History' by Eldon Smith, Gomer, 1986. (BBC) British Broadcasting Corporation http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ukwales2/crime.html