By Cassie Watson; posted 23 December 2024.

If you could submit a large grant application with a guarantee of success, what project would you pitch to the amazingly generous funding council? That was the question (more or less) posed to those who attended an interactive workshop, Mapping the Past, Present and Future of Criminal Justice History, at the most recent British Crime Historians Conference. The organisers (Lucy Faire, Denise McHugh, and Chris Williams of the Open University) placed the attendees in groups and, among other activities, asked us to design an ideal research project. My group, which included a lawyer and three historians whose collective expertise covered the late medieval period to the twentieth century, decided to focus on the county of Cheshire.

Why Cheshire? Two reasons. Well, three, really. Firstly, we wanted to study criminal justice history across a long period of time and from an interdisciplinary collaborative perspective (historians, lawyers, criminologists, perhaps archaeologists). Then, some quick research in the online Discovery catalogue confirmed my recollection that the National Archives holds many centuries of Cheshire’s legal records. And lastly, although some relatively recent publications address criminal justice history in the county,[1] they tend to focus on a single century, or two at most, and thus the potential offered by the numerous boxes, bundles and files archived at TNA has not yet been fully explored.  

So we designed, in 20 minutes or so, a project entitled Legal Process in the Palatinate, conceived as both a work of digital history and history from below — assuming that what had worked so well for the Proceedings of the Old Bailey could work for Cheshire. We had a central research question: How did ordinary people utilise and experience the legal system in Cheshire? We thought this offered plenty of scope to create several sub-projects that, when completed and viewed as a whole, would answer the main question; but we didn’t get as far as deciding how the work packages should be organised. But it would be a big project, covering the late medieval period through to about 1851.

Why these dates? The CHES 24 series includes civil and criminal cases “in the Chester county court, which runs, with many gaps, from 1342 to 1542. From 1543 there are two separate sub series of sessional files of the court, which by then was becoming better known as the Court of Great Sessions of Chester: one, running until the date of the court’s abolition in 1830 and covering criminal proceedings,” and another covering civil causes to 1659. Additionally, the records in CHES 18, Coroners’ Inquisitions Files c.1339 to c.1851, would be valuable to our hypothetical project. They include not only the inquisitions themselves but also related documents such as witness statements and coroners’ expenses claims. As I have noted elsewhere,[2] what the legal system cost the state and its citizens is an important but under-unexplored aspect of criminal justice history.

Forays into CHES 24

Several years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to use records created by the Court of Great Sessions of Chester, along with those of the Welsh Court of Great Sessions, the Oxford Circuit and London’s Old Bailey / Central Criminal Court, in researching medico-legal practice in England and Wales. I began by compiling a list of all the individual catalogue entries that fell within my timeframe, from the early eighteenth century to the First World War. This resulted in a list of 255 court sessions — each stored in one or two boxes — covering the first year of the reign of Queen Anne to the start of William IV’s reign when the court was abolished and the county was absorbed into the assize system.

Undaunted, I decided to do a recce and investigate several boxes from different decades: 1750s, 1770s, 1790s, 1810s, 1820s. I discovered that there was something of an infanticide epidemic in the late 1770s, a pair of coroners named John Hollins (1750s to 1840s; the elder one died in 1787,[3] the younger one in 1841 aged about 95[4]), an infuriating rapist (a constable “told him he was charged with committing a rape on a child and he said ‘oh if that’s all’”),[5] the indictment of Samuel Thorley of Congleton for the murder of Ann Smith on 20 November 1776 “by cutting her neck with a knife and cutting her head off of which she instantly died,”[6] and a variety of other ne’er-do-wells. In total I found 26 cases useful for the book I was then writing, but this was a significant endeavour: the boxes are big, the files inside voluminous and often tightly bound, and there are no finding aids. You just have to open a box and get stuck in. I gave up after a couple of weeks and returned to the tidier post-1830 murder files in ASSI 65. But I have not forgotten the sense of excitement occasioned by opening those boxes.  

Conclusion

Our hypothetical project met with approval from others at the workshop, and I remain convinced that in an ideal world of funding opportunities, it would be among the most interesting and potentially transformative projects, not just for academics but for the general public too. Just think what family historians could do with thousands of digitized and transcribed pages detailing the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors. All I want for Christmas…

Images:

Main image: Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677), Cheshire (State 6), n.d. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Chester Mainprize April 1787, list of prisoners tried. The National Archives, Kew, CHES 24/174 piece 3 (reproduced by permission; image not to be copied).

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References

[1] Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); James Sharpe and J. R. Dickinson, “Coroners’ Inquests in an English County, 1600–1800: A Preliminary Survey,” Northern History 48 (2011): 253-269; James Sharpe and J. R. Dickinson, “Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Cheshire”, Social History 41 (2016): 192-209; J. A. Sharpe and J. R. Dickinson, “Revisiting the ‘Violence We Have Lost’: Homicide in Seventeenth-Century Cheshire,” English Historical Review 131 (2016): 293-323; John Walliss, “Crime and Justice in Georgian Cheshire: The Chester Court of Great Sessions, 1760–1830,” Journal on European History of Law 6 (2015): 38-55. In a more popular vein, see: Alan Hayhurst, Cheshire Murders (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006); Derek Yarwood, Cheshire’s Execution Files (Derby: Derby Books Publishing Company, 2011); Paul and Rose Hurley, Cheshire Murders and Misdemeanours (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2023); Tony Bostock, Murder & Mayhem: Criminal Cases In Early-Tudor Cheshire (Independently published, 2024).

[2] Katherine D. Watson, Medicine and Justice: Medico-Legal Practice in England and Wales, 1700–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 221-226.

[3] Sharpe and Dickinson, “Coroners’ Inquests,” 256.

[4] The Tablet, 14 November 1840, 432; Macclesfield Courier and Herald, 3 July 1841, 2.

[5] The National Archives (hereafter TNA), CHES 24/190/1, deposition of Francis Donavan, 23 November 1822.

[6] TNA, CHES 24/171 Box 1. The inquisition (24 Nov 1776) notes that Thorley did sever and cut off her head “and otherways disjointed the legs and arms” of which “said severation” she died. I had not previously heard of the Congleton Cannibal, one of Cheshire’s more infamous killers.