By Cassie Watson; posted 27 June 2025.

In my previous post I argued that assault should be seen as an important avenue of research by crime and legal historians, but noted that it is usually more difficult to study than homicide. This is certainly the case for common assault, which could include anything from pushing and shoving to pub brawls and tended not to lead to indictments at quarter sessions or the assizes. While some records of cases like these do survive, as for example reported in the work of Drew Gray,[1] or recorded in the Crime and Punishment database created by the National Library of Wales,[2] it is likely that more serious cases of wounding, or assault causing actual or grievous bodily harm, will be easier to identify in extant records and news reports. This blog post examines two such types of assault, malicious wounding and acid throwing.

Prior to Lord Ellenborough’s Stabbing and Wounding Act of 1803,[3] wounding was interpreted mainly in relation to injuries caused by a weapon such as a gun or sword, but could include the physical effects of blows from blunt objects if the skin was broken and blood was shed. Essentially, this reflected a surgical definition and thus excluded the effects of acid throwing.[4] Wounding was different from beating, striking or even ‘assaulting’ someone. For example, under a statute passed during the reign of Queen Anne, unlawfully attempting to kill, or unlawfully assaulting and striking, or wounding a Privy Counsellor in the execution of his office, became a felony without benefit of clergy.[5]

The word malicious should be understood to encompass both deliberation and malevolent intent, and so a charge of malicious wounding indicates something both about the injury suffered and the assessment of that injury by the victim/prosecutor.  

Malicious Wounding: Examples from Wales

There is a lot to be learned from listening to the voices of the people who actually experienced violence in the past. Unlike victims of homicide, victims of interpersonal violence survived to tell the tale. The assault deficit is compounded by the relatively small survival rate of the types of legal documents that are most revealing of the experience of sublethal acts of violence — the examinations and witness depositions recorded by magistrates — but because wounding was prosecuted at the assizes it generated a paper trail that survives in some record collections. One of the best, for this purpose, is the records of the Court of Great Sessions, where Welsh felonies were prosecuted until 1830.

My interest in assault developed when I came across the case of Salusbury Davies and George Nailor, both sergeants in the Royal Anglesey Militia who were indicted for rushing through the streets of Denbigh with drawn swords and maliciously wounding two men in July 1780. One of the victims lost a finger, the other was stabbed in the belly. Davies and Nailor were found guilty of attempted murder in the first case, but guilty of assault only for the other victim. Davies was sentenced to 2½ years incarceration and a period of good behaviour; Nailor got just six months less.[6] But that wasn’t the end of their bad behaviour. In August that year, whilst en route to their trial, they assaulted the gaol-keeper in an attempted escape effected with the help of two other men. Davies got 2½ years for that, and Nailor 14 months, presumably to run concurrently with their earlier sentences.[7]

Twelve years later a Salusbury Davies aged 40 was imprisoned in the town of  Montgomery, awaiting a 7-year sentence of transportation for pickpocketing.[8] Unfortunately for him, he never left the prison and was murdered in 1799 by another prisoner.[9] This Salusbury Davies might have been another man entirely, and similarly the John Salusbury Davis arrested in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in August 1786 as a member of a gang of gamblers and sharpers.[10] This individual’s baptismal record is available at FindMyPast and shows that he was baptized in March 1755 in Carnarvonshire.[11] The dates match up — just. So if this was just one man, his varied criminal career and multiple brushes with the law offer an interesting eighteenth-century example of the sort of criminal careers traced by Godfrey, Cox and Farrall, who examined the lives of habitual criminals from the 1840s to the 1940s.[12] 

Other examples show the range of violent behaviours prosecuted (often unsuccessfully, but that’s another story) as malicious wounding in Wales:

1792: Malicious wounding by striking two of prosecutor’s teeth out (no true bill).[13]

1801: Malicious wounding of prosecutor by placing his thumbs and private parts in a vice and torturing him. Second count of unlawful imprisonment (unknown outcome).[14]

1821: Maliciously stabbing and cutting his wife (not guilty, insane).[15]

Phil Handler has shown that in England, the most systematic attempts to reform the law of assault occurred in the period 1803–1861,[16] beginning with Lord Ellenborough’s Act, which created ten new capital felonies including shooting at or stabbing with intent to murder, rob, disfigure, disable, do some grievous bodily harm or to prevent the lawful apprehension of the defendant or accomplices.

Acid Throwing in Scotland

Meanwhile, in Scotland the example of the 1803 Act helped to prompt the first Scottish law specifically designed to impose the death penalty for assaults which amounted to attempted murder, passed in 1825. It criminalised acid throwing as a response to recent events in Glasgow, and its replacement in 1829 included suffocation, strangulation and drowning.[17] The image below shows part of a list of sentences for acid throwing compiled for the justiciary court in 1920.[18] This was part of a series of similar lists which enumerated the sentences imposed for dozens of crimes, including aggravated assault and attempted murder by stabbing. The pictured list notes that “In no case during the last 40 years has there been a conviction or plea to throwing vitriol in contravention of the Act of 10 George IV.” This indicates that the public prosecutors were choosing not to use the capital statute but instead usually accepted a plea to common assault. Unlike in England and Wales, where sentences were dictated by the terms of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which gave judges a fair amount of discretion, Scottish judges tended to view five years as standard for the most serious cases. This was the shortest sentence allowed by the Penal Servitude Act of 1864.[19]

Researching Serious Assaults

Research carried out in national archives can in theory be augmented by work in local archives (for example, quarter sessions records), genealogical databases (to identify named individuals), and by using published legal texts and newspapers. The latter is more difficult for Wales, where the first newspaper was not published until 1804, but some information is to be found in English newspapers published in bordering counties like Cheshire and Herefordshire.

This is how I approached the systematic study of acid throwing as a specific form of assault. A similar methodology could be used to investigate common assault, though I admit it would be labour intensive. Such an approach is increasingly facilitated by the growing number of digital resources available to historians, which permit new search methods and both qualitative and quantitative inquiries. Digitized texts can be searched by keyword, and newspapers can be searched by keyword, date, region, names, and phrases. Even with poor OCR, it would be possible to compile lists of people prosecuted for assault, and then to trace them through the criminal justice system. Government records exist for the late eighteenth into the twentieth century, and where once it was rather difficult to wrestle with the huge Home Office criminal registers listing the people prosecuted at the assizes and quarter sessions, these volumes and others have now been photographed and transcribed and can be searched systematically at Ancestry or FindMyPast.

Newspapers published reports from police courts and could be searched for defendants accused of or charged with more minor forms of assault. The benefit of newspaper reports is the added level of detail that they provide, albeit not systematically, about the nature of the violence and the context within which it occurred.

This variety of records enabled me to compile a list of 515 persons charged with throwing acid. Ongoing digitization by the British Newspaper Archive allowed me to push the date of the earliest known prosecution for this offence back to 1722 – it was a London case that I had not noticed when I searched the Old Bailey website a few years earlier, because it did not mention acid but aqua fortis, an old term for nitric acid. 

Acid Throwing: Motives and Prosecutions

The tables I was able to compile are quantitative, but also to some extent reflect the qualitative approach that news reports and pre-trial depositions provide about perpetrators’ motives — that’s the table at the left. I identified what would today be called stalking as a behaviour of a small number of acid throwers, and showed that the concept of provocation, generally discussed in relation to the history of homicide, was also an important mitigating factor in trials for acid throwing. The table on the right shows the range of sentences imposed on those convicted. It would be more useful to show this broken down by decade, but even at a surface level the list of sentences demonstrates changing judicial options that can themselves be linked to wider changes in society. The use of hospital orders, for example, reveals a growing sensitivity to mental ill health in the twentieth century.

The middle table shows how rare the crime was in Wales, and further research revealed that it was very much an urban crime associated with a few areas — especially London, Lanarkshire and Lancashire. I am confident that these trends were real, not simply products of my research methodology. The regional issues relate, I believe, to the early association of the offence with conflicts arising in textile industries like weaving.

Conclusion

This raises questions about assault more generally that may be amenable to study using a similar methodology. How and why do forms of assault change with wider socio-legal changes? In the case of acid throwing, I concluded that after World War 2 when the strongest corrosives were much harder to get hold of, fewer people really thought about using them, and also had fewer reasons to do so because they had easier access to justice, and to divorce. The crime at that point became more closely associated with male perpetrators in a way it had not previously been. However, it may be that more female perpetrators were diverted away from the criminal justice system, as Feeley and Little first suggested,[20] in a process explored more recently by Jo Turner.[21] The point is that it is possible to research assault, and doing so yields not just interesting but historically important results.

Images

Main image: Fureur bachique. One man punches another in a drunken tavern brawl, two others shout encouragement. Engraving by J. Levasseur (1734–1816) after A. Brouwer (1605/6–1638). Source: Wellcome Collection, public domain.

Crown copyright, National Records of Scotland, JC 49/1, Notes on Justiciary Court procedure, types of cases, and sentences 1591–1920; Tables with notes and rough index of various sentences 1855–1920; Sentences in cases of throwing acids, 1920. Reproduced by permission.

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References

[1] Drew D. Gray, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The Summary Courts of the City of London in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 96-98.

[2] The database lists 3,596 individuals accused of, though not necessarily actually tried for, assault (including wounding, but not malicious wounding), 1730–1830.

[3] 43 Geo III c.58.

[4] Katherine D. Watson, “Is a burn a wound? Vitriol-throwing in medico-legal context, 1800-1900,” in Lawyers’ Medicine: The Legislature, the Courts and Medical Practice, 1760–2000, ed. I. Goold and C. Kelly (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009), 65-70.

[5] Theodore Barlow,  The Justice of Peace: A Treatise (London, 1745), 114.

[6] National Library of Wales [NLW], GS 4/59/6, Rex v Salusbury Davies and George Nailor, Denbighshire, 19 July 1780.

[7] NLW GS 4/59/7, Rex v Salusbury Davies and George Nailor, Denbighshire, 9 August 1780.

[8] NLW GS 4/194/8, Rex v Salusbury Davies, Montgomeryshire, 28 June 1792.

[9] NLW GS 4/196/7, Rex v Aaron Bywater, Montgomeryshire, 10 August 1799.

[10] Derby Mercury, 3 August 1786, 1.

[11] FindMyPast, Caernarvonshire Baptisms 1750-1812, Gwynedd Archive, Diocese of Bangor, Llandudno.

[12] Barry S. Godfrey, David J. Cox, and Stephen D. Farrall, Serious Offenders: A Historical Study of Habitual Criminals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[13] NLW GS 4/194/8, Rex v Evan Hughes, Montgomeryshire, 5 July 1792.

[14] NLW GS 4/828/2, Rex v Caleb Evans, David Harry, John Howell, William Jones, John Lewis, and Phillip Phillip, Pembrokeshire, 2 January 1801.

[15] NLW GS 4/636/5, Rex v John David, Glamorgan, 18 February 1821.

[16] Phil Handler, “The Law of Felonious Assault in England, 1803-61,” Journal of Legal History 28 (2007): 183-206.

[17] Watson, “Is a burn a wound?”, 71-73.

[18] National Records of Scotland, JC 49/1, Notes on Justiciary Court procedure, Sentences in cases of throwing acids, 1920.

[19] Katherine D. Watson, Acid Attacks in Britain, 1760–1975 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 88-91.

[20] Malcolm M. Feeley and Deborah L. Little, “The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687–1912,” Law & Society Review 25, no. 4 (1991): 719-758.

[21] Jo Turner, “The ‘Vanishing’ Female Perpetrator of Common Assault,” in Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914, ed. M. van der Heijden, M. Pluskota and S. Muurling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 72-88.