Joseph Parker was indicted for that at the Sessions of Gaol-Delivery holden at the Old-Baily… [he] was duly convicted of stealing the Goods of the said Rice Price, to the value of 4 s. and 10 d. and was accordingly ordered to be transported to some of his Majesty’s Colonies, or Plantations, in America, for 7 Years, according to the Statute in that Case made and provided: And that he, (the said Parker) afterwards, to wit, on the 5th of January last, feloniously, and without lawful Cause, was at large, in the Parish of St Michael Quern, before the Expiration of the Term he was ordered to be transported for…¹

It’s a hot summer day on Newgate-street as Rice Price hurries up the road, past the old Franciscan buildings of Christ’s Hospital, weaving through the throng of people.² With Newgate Market just off to the left and Newgate Prison and the Old Bailey courts just at the end of the street, there’s always a crowd. So it’s not surprising in itself that Price sees a familiar face, nor that it belongs to a lawbreaker: a fellow with an unusual mark on his cheek and whose voice he remembers from when he made off with a silver instrument case from Price’s shop last year. But what is he doing here? Isn’t he supposed to be on the other side of the Atlantic?

When it comes to crime and punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, transportation has loomed large in our historical imagination. We tend to think of convicts being shipped to Australia, often for minor offences, never to return to their homeland. Transportation as a criminal punishment in England (and later in Britain) looked quite different for much of this time, however. Offenders were being sentenced to transportation well over a century before the colonisation of Australia and were sent comparatively nearer to home. Until the 1770s, those transported were sent to British colonies in North America, generally Virginia or Maryland. And of course, a transatlantic passage was far quicker and more affordable compared with a voyage to the edge of the southern hemisphere… Between 1720 and 1869, 392 defendants were tried at the Old Bailey for the crime of “feloniously returning from transportation” before their sentence had elapsed.

Transportation had been suggested as an alternative to imprisonment as early as 1584. In his Discourse of Western Planting, the writer Richard Hakluyt suggested that amongst the virtues of an English colony in Virginia would be the useful employment of “the many thousandes of idle persons within this realme… [who] often fall to pilferinge and thevinge and other lewdnes”.³ In 1613, only six years after the establishment of the first permanent colony at Jamestown, the first convicts were sent to Virginia. Other destinations included Maryland and the Carolinas, where labour was particularly needed for tobacco and cotton plantations. Transportation intensified during the eighteenth century; as sentencing became increasingly harsher (see previous post ‘Leopard-Spotted Satin’ for details on sentencing in the 1700s), transportation was offered as an alternative to the death penalty. As stipulated by the 1717 Transportation Act (4 George I c. 11), the shortest possible sentence of transportation was seven years, for minor offences which would usually be punished by whipping, branding or a workhouse sentence. If the crime was punishable by death, the sentence was extended to fourteen years and could be offered if the King approved a defendant’s appeal for mercy.⁴ Between 1700 and 1800, the Old Bailey proceedings document over 15,000 sentences of transportation for crimes ranging from arson to entering a neighbour’s garden and damaging twelve of his cucumber plants.⁵

Returnees usually seem to have been turned in by people they knew, whether neighbours, local police officers or former victims. The case of the unfortunate John Steele deserves special mention here. Having been released a few months early by his master, Steele returned to England only to find his wife had married another man in his absence. Her new husband promptly denounced Steele for early return. “[He] now swears against me only to get rid of me, that he may have my Wife to himself”, a justifiably resentful Steele told the court.⁶ The court often relied on those who had testified in the original case to identify the defendant, with variable results. At Samuel Ellard’s trial, two witnesses were called on to confirm his identity; neither was able to do so. Indeed, the witness John King could not remember whether the man he had testified against three years earlier had had one eye or two!⁷

Defendants gave a wide range of justifications for their early return. Many complained of poor treatment by their masters: Robert Walker testified that he had been “very ill-used in the country and was glad to get home again”.⁸ Those who could not get anybody to buy their labour contract at all likewise suffered. Samuel Johnson (also known as ‘Cabbage’) claimed that nobody would hire him because of “some Hurt or Bruise about his Body, of which he could not be cur’d, till he return’d to England”.⁹ John Oney, aged 74 and partially blind, told the court at his trial that since he was “so aged, and infirm… no one would buy, or employ him”.¹⁰ Several defendants stated that they had not returned of their own free will, but had been “press’d”: abducted and forced to serve on naval ships. This practice became increasingly common during the eighteenth century, given the high death and desertion rates amongst sailors and the fact that wages could legally be paid as much as two years in arrears. And of course there were those who simply told the court of their great homesickness: although Samuel Ellard “lived very well” as a butcher in America, he reported that he “could not be easy till he returned to his native country”.¹¹

Those convicted could be ordered to transport themselves, i.e. pay for their own passage overseas. George Thorpe was accordingly tried in 1785 for return from transportation despite never actually having left the country. Thorpe’s neighbour testified that they had been unable to find a transatlantic passage for any less than ten guineas, around £904 in today’s money, which Thorpe could not afford. Thorpe had told his lawyer that America was “the only place where he could get a livelihood, therefore he did not try to obtain a passage at any other place” and that he had not wished to go to France or Holland because “then he would be a stranger in a foreign land”.¹²

With the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, transported prisoners defended their return to Britain on new grounds: that they had wished to escape service in pro-independence American militias. Pro-independence recruiters saw transported men as potential soldiers who might be persuaded to fight against their country… since that same country had sentenced them to forced labour. According to William Weaver, who had been transported to Virginia, recruiters had asked why he refused to join up “as [the British] had dealt so hard with [him], as to send [him] to that part of the country as a slave?”.¹³ Masters who joined militias might take their convict ‘servants’ with them. William Harding reported at his trial that he had deserted four days after his master took him to fight in Philadelphia and was due to be shot if he did not swear allegiance to the American forces.¹⁴

When the Revolutionary War began, the prevailing view in Britain was that the rebellion would be short-lived and easily suppressed. Once it became clear that this was not the case—the conflict would in fact continue for eight years— alternative plans had to be made for convict transportation. Maryland and Virginia were now out of the question. With the passage of the so-called ‘Hulks Act’ (16 Geo. III c. 43.), men deemed physically fit were sentenced to hard labour on prison ‘hulks’: ships moored at harbours and along the coast, which served as floating prisons. Female convicts, along with any men who were unfit for “raising sand, soil, and gravel from, and cleansing the river Thames” as the act specified, were jailed. Trial records do document offenders being sentenced to “transportation to America” into the 1780s, but in practice these sentences were usually carried out on hulks. Conditions on the hulks were dire and “gaol fever”, as typhus was then known, was especially rife. Lawmakers cast about for an alternative to American transportation.

In the parliamentary session of 1^st April 1779, Joseph Banks suggested Botany Bay (now part of modern Sydney) as a site for convict settlement, the climate being “similar to that about Toulouse” and there being “little Probability of any Opposition from the Natives.”¹⁵ Sites in West Africa corresponding to the modern-day states of Sierra Leone, The Gambia and Senegal, were also considered, probably due to the high cost of shipping prisoners to Australia. However, the parliamentary committee appointed to investigate deemed these locales unsuitable, citing (amongst other concerns) the effect of the climate on labourers and the possibility that the settlement would either be attacked by the local people or that the convicts would themselves prey on and rob nearby communities.¹⁶ The settlement in Sydney Cove thus became the first British penal colony in Australia, following the arrival of the ‘First Fleet’ in 1787.¹⁷

By 1868, more than 162,000 prisoners had been transported to Australia, few of whom would ever return to Britain. Although cases of “felonious return” did continue to be heard at the Old Bailey well into the 1800s, they almost always referred to escape from hulks or from a British jail after sentencing. Only three defendants—Edward George Barrington in 1850, James Owen in 1863 and Charles Leeson in 1881—were tried for return from transportation to Australia and none were found guilty. This reflected not only the increased difficulty of return from so far away but perhaps also changing attitudes towards transportation. Following the 1807 abolition of the slave trade in Britain, comparisons were increasingly being drawn between transportation and slavery. Members of the 1837 select committee report into transportation argued that the condition of the convict labourer differed from that of a slave only in that the master of a convict could not beat him and did not own his labour for life.¹⁸ Yet the alternative offered—imprisonment—often still involved aspects of forced labour. Prisoners performed repetitive, dull labour like picking oakum (unravelling tarred rope) and walking on treadwheels to turn machinery, all in complete silence, with the aim of encouraging reflection on their misdeeds. Perhaps some inmates found comfort in the promise of being able to return home after their sentence, but still others must have wondered during the course of the long, dull days locked up whether labouring on an Australian farm would really have been so bad…

1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 16th April 1740. Trial of Joseph Parker (t17400416-27). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17400416-27 ︎
2. Yes, this was apparently his real name. ︎
3. Richard Hakluyt, A discourse on western planting, written in the year 1584 (Cambridge, MA : Press of J. Wilson and Son, 1877), p. 37. ︎
4. Transportation for life was also a possible sentence but seems to have been less common during the eighteenth century than the nineteenth. ︎
5. This is a hot contender for my favourite crime in the Old Bailey archive, particularly since the accused reportedly lost his shoe whilst attempting to steal the cucumbers and made his accuser help him look for it… (Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 17^th July 1784. Trial of Thomas Chadwick (t17840707-78). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17840707-78 ︎
6. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 13^th October 1725. Trial of John Steele (t17251013-64). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17251013-64 ︎
7. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 17^th October 1744. Trial of Samuel Ellard (t17441017-29). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17441017-29 ︎
8. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 8^th September 1773. Trial of Robert Walker (t17730908-24). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17730908-24 ︎
9. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 17^th October 1727. Trial of Samuel Johnson (t17271017-30). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17271017-30. ︎
10. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 16^th October 1728. Trial of John Oney (t17281016-19). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17281016-19 ︎
11. Trial of Samuel Ellard. ︎
12. Thorpe was probably using foreign in the sense of ‘non-English-speaking’ since he would certainly have been considered just as much of a foreigner in the by-then independent United States. ︎
13. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 6^th December 1775. Trial of William Weaver (t17751206-69). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17751206-69 ) ︎
14. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 15^th July 1778. Trial of William Harding (t17780715-89). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17780715-89 ︎
15. House of Commons, Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 37 (1^st April 1779), p. 311. ︎
16. House of Commons, “First Report From The Committee Appointed To Enquire What Proceedings Have Been Had In The Execution of an Act, passed in the Twenty-fourth Year of the Reign of His present Majesty, intituled, “An Act for the effectual Transportation of Felons and other Offenders, and to authorize the Removal of Prisoners in certain Cases; and for other Purposes therein mentioned” (9^th April 1785)”. ︎
17. Plans to settle in Botany Bay itself were abandoned within a week of landing and the fleet sailed further north to Sydney Cove. ︎
18. House of Commons Select Committee on Transportation, Report from the Select Committee on Transportation together with the minutes of evidence, appendix, and index (HC 1837, 518-19, paras. 4281, appendix 1 no. 7 (despatch from Mr Secretary Stanley to Lieut.-Governor Arthur, 12^th Oct 1833), appendix 2 (despatch from Major-General Bourke to Mr Secretary Stanley, 15^th Jan 1834). ︎

Further reading

Clare Anderson, “Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment, Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939”, Australian Historical Studies, 47:3, pp. 381–397.

Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain’s Convict Disaster in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Hamish Maxwell-Stuart, “Convict Transportation from Britain and Ireland 1615–1870”, History Compass, 8 (2010), pp. 1221-1242.

Graham Seal, Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2021).

The eighteenth-century statutes regarding transportation are all available on the Level 1 open shelves at the Law Library.

The Digital Panopticon is an online collection of millions of records related to convicts in Britain and Australia between 1780 and 1925. Many of these people were sentenced at the Old Bailey so if you’ve ever wondered what became of defendants I’ve written about, you might find the answers here… The site alos has a number of excellent articles related to convict history: I particularly recommend “Convicts and the Colonisation of Australia, 1788-1868” which outlines the connections between penal transportation and the genocide of Aboriginal peoples in Australia.

The website ‘Convict Voyages’ (an output from the 2013-18 European Research Council-funded project ‘Carceral Archipelagos’) provides a fascinating and accessibly-written insight into the global history of criminal transportation. Whilst the site itself has lapsed, you can still access a fully functional web-archived version from 2018 by searching convictvoyages.org on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

1. University Parks
Walk 5 minutes down St Cross Road and you’ll be in University Parks, 70 acres of green space with the River Cherwell running along its boundary. You won’t see sheep and cattle grazing in the meadow here any more (as they did until 1937) but the pond is home to a breeding pair of swans. You might be lucky enough to spot a heron in Parson’s Pleasure… formerly an area designated for male-only nude swimming! In warmer weather, this is a fantastic picnic spot; at this time of year you might prefer to grab a hot drink from the coffee truck and stroll through the autumn leaves.

2. Magdalen College
Walk down St Cross Road/Longwall Street towards the High Street and turn left and you’ll find yourself at Magdalen College. Founded in 1458, Magdalen College can boast the city’s only deer park, home to a herd of around 35 semi-wild fallow deer. In autumn, the deer herd is usually in the central water meadow; the circular walk around the meadow takes around 15 minutes. Look out for breathtaking wisterias in spring and cloisters full of hydrangeas in summertime.

3. Holywell Cemetery
Behind Holywell Church on the corner of St Cross Road and Manor Road, lies Holywell Cemetery, a quiet green space to sit for a while with your thoughts. The area is kept semi-wild as a nature reserve and is home to around 100 species of flora, fauna and insects.

4. Oxford Botanic Gardens
Head down St Cross Road/Longwall Street to the High Street and cross the High Street to find yourself at the Oxford Botanic Garden. The oldest botanic garden in the UK, the Oxford Botanic Garden was founded as a ‘physic garden’ for the cultivation of medicinal plants in 1621. Visit the tropical glasshouse, the water lily room or just sit by the river and watch the world go by. Admission is free for members of the university, but make sure to get there before last admissions at 3pm.

5. Natural History Museum/Pitt Rivers Museum
Take a 10-minute walk along St Cross Road/South Parks Road and turn right to find the Natural History Museum/Pitt Rivers Museum. Built in dramatic Gothic Revival style in 1860, the museum makes a beautiful change of scene from the more austere architecture of the Law Library! Head here for breaks on a rainy day or just when you feel like spending some quality time with an 18-foot plesiosaur.

Main court, Oxford Natural History Museum. Photo: ©Oxford Natural History Museum.

1. For an overview of the current literature, see Albulescu et al. “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLoS One. 2022;17(8) ︎

Your gateway to locating law resources in Oxford libraries is our online catalogue SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online). However, like any search engine, SOLO can sometimes be a little tricky to get used to, so we’ve put together some handy hints to help you find what you need in the Bodleian jungle…

1. What you can find with SOLO

The main search function of SOLO allows you to locate most physical and digital media held in the Bodleian Libraries or in college libraries. However, some legal materials can’t be easily located just using the search function.

Law reports aren’t searchable using SOLO; you’ll need to go to the relevant database and use their search function. The most relevant databases for undergraduate law students are Westlaw and Lexis+ but you can find a full list of the legal databases the LawBod subscribes to here.

2. Optimising your SOLO search

You’ll find a comprehensive guide to SOLO search strategies on Oxford LibGuides but here are a few brief tips…

SOLO is very sensitive to typos and spelling errors so any mistyped names or titles will often produce a ‘no records found’ search result. If you’re getting this result, check your search terms and try again. (N.B. this doesn’t apply to foreign characters, for example, SOLO recognises ä à ā as the same character)

If you want to find out if a particular library has what you’re looking for, you can click on the drop down ‘Search everything’ menu and select a location. The ‘All Bodleian Libraries’ location will eliminate college libraries from the search, so will only list resources that all students have access to.

The first search result might not necessarily be what you’re looking for! Textbooks with many editions will often have a few SOLO entries. If you are looking for the latest edition, you can refine your search by date of publication.

3. Interpreting SOLO entries

SOLO entries list bibliographic information (author, edition, date etc) and indicate whether a given item is on a course reading list. If you’re looking for one of your set readings and the entry isn’t marked ‘Course’, check that the entry is for the right edition! 

If the item is in more than one library, you’ll need to select the library you want. The shelfmark will then display, which tells you where in the library the item is located.

Shelf marks and where to find them

Level 3

Level 2 (where entrance and enquiry desk are located)

Note on K-series: From around 2010, the LawBod switched its classification to the Moys system, a system designed for law libraries. New books which come into the library are catalogued according to Moys shelfmarks which all begin with ‘K’. Non-Moys shelfmarks are followed by a number which indicates if it’s legislation (below 100), a law report (100 and above), a journal (300) or a monograph (510) e.g. General 510 A756a.

Level 1

The most common shelf marks are listed here but if in doubt, don’t hesitate to ask at the desk!

If you can’t find what you want in Oxford at all…

The Bodleian Libraries have enormous collections but they aren’t all-encompassing! If you need a physical book that the Law Library doesn’t have, you can request to borrow it from another library through the Inter-Library Loan scheme- just click on the ‘Need More?’ option on the SOLO homepage to fill out a request form. You can also suggest that we purchase a print item or e-resource and the library team will consider the request (based on our budget and overall collections strategy).

Remember, your friendly Law Library staff are always happy to help: you can find us in person at the enquiry desk on Level 2 or email us at law.library@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

“Born on the Fourth of July” is the catchy title of a celebrated film, based on a book, which references a humorous patriotic American song with roots going back to the 18th century. Although in the film and the book the words are used in an ironic way, the tone is very different in the song where the singer describes himself as “a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July”.¹

The 4th of July has long been celebrated as the birthday of the United States, but the key events of 1776 occurred over a period of several weeks, and it has sometimes been suggested that the 2nd of July was of equal or even greater importance.

Beginning in 1754, representatives from the various colonies met in a number of congresses, initially to discuss matters of common interest, and later to co-ordinate their responses to certain British policies that were causing increasing discontent.

The last and most important of these was the Second Continental Congress which first met in May 1775 and rapidly evolved into the de facto governing and legislative body of the American colonies in their collective capacity. It was this body that on July 2nd, 1776, approved a resolution, known as the Lee Resolution, actually declaring independence (with the delegates voting in accordance with instructions from their own state legislatures). In anticipation of the vote, a committee (including Thomas Jefferson) had already been appointed to draft a formal proclamation of independence, and this document, known as the Declaration of Independence, was approved on July 4th. Both the Resolution and the Declaration contain the key words, “that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states”.

At the time, considerable importance was attached to the vote on 2 July. The authority of the Declaration was, after all, based on the authority of the Resolution. The distinguished legal historian Charles Warren stated,

It was this action by Congress which was recognized by the newspapers and other records of the time, as constituting the effective declaration and proclamation of independence.²

In a much-publicized letter to his wife, future president John Adams (one of the co-authors of the Declaration) wrote,

The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.³

[“Epocha” – an early form of the word “epoch”.]

But two days later, the Declaration itself was approved and, as stated by Charles Warren,

. . . the stirring and magnificent text of the . . . [Declaration] entirely wiped from the public mind the high significance and importance of the original action of Congress in voting for independence. As Mellen Chamberlain has said: “The glory of the act was overshadowed by the glory of its annunciation.⁴

Additionally, the formal engrossed version bears at its head, in large lettering, the words “In Congress, July 4, 1776”. The prominence of the July 4th date in this document must surely be a further factor in cementing it in the public consciousness.

Surprisingly, for a document that is at the very pinnacle of the American pantheon, there is very little definitive evidence about how and when the final engrossed copy was prepared and signed. Part of the problem was that many of the actions of Congress were carried out in secret and that record keeping was very inconsistent. In the years following American independence it was generally assumed that preparation of the engrossed copy had been completed by 4 July and that it was signed on that day. But in later years, as more accounts of the events became available, a new consensus emerged, holding that the engrossed copy was prepared in response to an order of Congress of 19 July and was signed on 2 August, with a few signatures being added even later. Supporting this view is the fact that the engrossed copy bears the title “The Unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America” yet unanimity was not attained until New York indicated its approval on 9 July. Additionally, not all the signers were even present on 4 July.⁵

On the other hand, several of the key players of the time, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, maintained throughout their lives that the Declaration was signed on 4 July, and some historians believe this is correct, pointing out that it is unlikely that all three would have suffered from failing memory, and that non-unanimous wording could have been altered after 9 July to indicate unanimity, and that a signing on 4 July does not preclude some signatures being added at later dates. Wilfrid J. Ritz, a very persuasive proponent of this view, suggests that the Declaration should be subjected to advanced scientific testing to try to obtain more information about how it was prepared and whether it could have been subsequently altered,⁶ but unfortunately there does not appear to be any evidence that this was ever done.

Although the events described here occurred two and a half centuries ago, they involve many issues that are still relevant today:

– How does one define “one people”, in the sense of a body of people reasonably entitled to (in the words of the Declaration) “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”?

– How does one decide whether a quasi-legislative body is the legitimate voice of the people?

– What are the criteria for statehood under international law?

– Why are some revolutions regarded as legitimate and others not?

There are undoubtedly many other such questions that could also be asked. None lend themselves to easy answers, and all of them involve political realities just as much as legal or political theory. What is certain is that discussion of these issues can easily fill the pages of law journals for many years to come.

(The author of this post, though long resident in the U.K., is a nephew of Uncle Sam and writes from that perspective.)

1. “Born on the Fourth of July” was the title of a 1989 film by Oliver Stone about the war in Vietnam, based on the best-selling autobiography with the same title, published in 1976, by Ron Kovic, a paralyzed veteran of the war who really was born on that day (in 1946). (It has often been suggested that Kovic’s book was also an indirect influence on Bruce Springsteen when he wrote his song “Born in the USA”.)
   The humorous patriotic song is “The Yankee Doodle Boy” from the Broadway musical “Little Johnny Jones” by George M. Cohan, which opened in 1904 and thus was one of the first American musicals. The song is also known as “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, and this was the title of a 1942 biographical film about Cohan, starring James Cagney.
   The origins of the song go back at least as far as the 18th century when the tune, with varying words, was popular with British troops in America, and then, with other words, was adopted by American troops as a song of defiance and of national pride, and in the latter form is the basis of the song as it is usually sung today. ︎
2. Charles Warren, “Fourth of July myths”, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3 (July 1945), pp. 237-272 at 240. ︎
3. John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, quoted in “John Adams’s vision of July 4 was July 2” (authorship unclear, but apparently by Jim Worsham or Jessie Kratz), U.S. National Archives blog “Pieces of History”, 2 July 2014, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2014/07/02/john-adams-vision-of-july-4-was-july-2/ (last accessed 4 July 2025). ︎
4. Charles Warren (in part, quoting Mellen Chamberlain), op. cit., p. 242. ︎
5. The prevailing view (that the Declaration was signed chiefly on 2 August) is most notably described by Charles Warren, op. cit. It is also the view taken by the U.S. National Archives and is described with great clarity on the National Archives website. See https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-history (last accessed 4 July 2025). ︎
6. Wilfrid J. Ritz, “The authentication of the engrossed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776”, Law and History Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 179-204. ︎

Resources

These can all be found in the Official Papers collection of the Law Library on the Ground Floor.

• Hansard
  • House of Commons, 6^th August 1885 (Vol. 300), columns 1397-1398.
  • House of Commons, 4^th August 1921 (Vol. 145), columns 1799-1806.
  • House of Lords, 15^th August 1921 (Vol. 46), columns 570-575.

Introduction

On 4^th August 1921, Frederick Macquisten, Conservative MP for Glasgow Springburn, proposed an amendment to the 1921 Criminal Law Amendment Bill, then being debated in Parliament:

‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, cols 1799-1800)

Macquisten claimed that there was a scourge of ‘abandoned females’ seducing wives and destroying families and that the ‘falling away of feminine morality’, which had already brought down ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, was set to destroy the British Empire. Apparently, the only solution was to criminalise lesbianism.

            The proposal led to two debates in the House of Commons, on August 4^th 1921, and House of Lords on August 15^th. It was the first-time lesbianism had been debated in Parliament and, perhaps surprisingly, ended with Parliament voting notto criminalise it. However, these debates show the perception, legality, and treatment of queer women during this period and how anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria was weaponised to prevent the passage of legislation intended to protect young girls and reform the agent of consent laws in the United Kingdom.

            My intention with this post is to try and show of the incredible and fascinating items we have in the Bodleian Law Library collections. Much of what I will be citing comes from Hansard, which refers to official records of debates held in Parliament. These can all be found in the Official Papers collection on the ground floor of the library. These debates, and their records, are fascinating sources for early-20^th century queer history and, in honour of Pride Month, I hope to show how useful the Bodleian Libraries’ collections can be for studying LGBTQ+ topics.

1885-1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Acts

To understand the debates which took place in 1921, it’s worth discussing the background to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill and its predecessor, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885. Both pieces of legislation set out to do the same thing: to reform the laws governing age of consent in Britain and fight human trafficking.

            The late 19^th century had seen increasing public concern about the trafficking and exploitation of young girls living in poverty in Britain. Campaigners sought to institute further protections for girls and for the age of consent to be raised higher than 13. In July 1885, journalist W. T. Stead published ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, a series of articles exposing the experience of human trafficking in London brothels. The subsequent public outcry increased the pressure on the government to act. In August, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, the age of consent was raised to 16 and a host of other protections against human trafficking were instituted.

            However, during the Bill’s consideration stage (the last chance for significant amendments to be made to new legislation), Henry Labouchère, MP for Northampton, introduced an amendment:

‘Any male person who… commits, or is a party to the commission of… any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and… shall be liable, at the discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding one year with or without hard labour.’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 6^th August 1885, vol 300, cols 1397-8) 

One contemporary journalist accused Labouchère of proposing this amendment as a ‘wrecking amendment’, an addition to a piece of legislation intended to be so controversial as to prevent the legislation’s passage through Parliament. However, Parliamentarians passed the amendment nearly unanimously without further debate except to increase the punishment to two years. The passing of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act brought Labouchère’s amendment (also known as Section 11 of the Act) into law. Indeed, it would remain the primary piece of legislation used to punish male homosexuality until its legalisation in 1967.

           Aside from this, the Criminal Law Amendment Act provided only limited actual protections for girls. For example, it allowed only a three-month window after the initial act in which to bring prosecutions for violations of the age of consent law. Since many cases went undiscovered during those three months, many perpetrators escaped prosecution. Additionally, Sections 5 and 6 permitted the so-called ‘Reasonable Belief’ defence through which a defendant could claim that they were under the ‘reasonable belief’ that the victim was over 16 when they committed the act.

Campaigners thus turned their attention to campaigning for new legislation intended to strengthen the laws set down in 1885. Driven by feminist organisations such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH), the campaign picked up pace in the early-20^th century. This was a period of significant change in the political landscape of Britain; in 1918, women over 30 granted the right to vote and be elected to Parliament and, by 1919, Viscountess Astor had become the first woman to sit in Parliament. In this changing social climate, campaigners proved successful in getting legislation introduced into Parliament to reform the 1885 Act. Thus, in 1921, a new Criminal Law Amendment Bill was born.

1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Bill

Amongst other protections, the 1921 Bill proposed to abolish the ‘reasonable belief’ defence and extend the window for prosecutions to 12 months. While the Bill had wide support in Parliament, it was not universally popular. A common criticism of the Bill was the perceived threat of blackmail, with some MPs suggesting that the longer window for prosecutions and the removal of the reasonable belief defence would lead to people inventing false claims to blackmail young men.

During a second attempt to pass the Bill in 1922, an MP, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore-Brabazon, claimed that the government had given in to feminist ‘hen-pecking’, that this legislation represented an attempt at ‘eugenics’, and that it didn’t propose ‘equal treatment, but [this] is legislation directed entirely towards one sex’ (Hansard HC Deb. 5^th July 1922, vol. 156, cols. 408-409). The Bill had only a set amount of time in which to pass through Parliament, if a compromise between MPs could not be reached within that timeframe, then the legislation risked not passing. Enter: Frederick Macquisten.

Macquisten’s amendment was consciously modelled on the Labouchère Amendment, directly imitating its wording and even citing the 1885 Act:

‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, cols 1799-1800) 

Like Labouchère, Macquisten was accused of proposing this as a wrecking amendment, hoping to shut down the new Bill before it could become law. If this was Macquisten’s intention (as Derry, 2018 has suggested), his rhetoric in support of the amendment remains illustrative of contemporary views of lesbians.

            Throughout his speech, Macquisten cast lesbians as a threat to the security of the British empire, implying that the ‘falling away of feminine morality’ was a threat to the British Empire (after all, it had already brought down Greece and Rome – why not Britain?). This wasn’t new rhetoric; during the First World War, one MP named Noel Pemberton-Billing had claimed that there were some 47,000 British subjects (many of them gay men and lesbians) who were working for Germany to undermine the empire.

            Not just that, but lesbians were destroying families; according to Macquisten there was an ongoing problem of men whose families were being torn apart by ‘the wiles of one abandoned female, who had pursued his wife’. Even worse, lesbianism was contributing to ‘dreadful nerve deterioration’ which, in turn, was causing the spread of cocaine throughout Britain. Lesbians, apparently, were a national crisis. Another MP agreed, claiming that according to one neurologist:

‘no week passes that some unfortunate girl does not confess to him that she owes the breakdown of her nerves to the fact that she has been tampered with by a member of her own sex’

And that:

‘asylums are largely peopled by nymphomaniacs and people who engage in this vice’.

Not everybody agreed; many MPs felt that most women didn’t know that lesbianism existed and that, by legislating against it, the British government was likely to make it a much bigger problem. Moore-Brabazon, an opponent of the amendment and the Bill as a whole, stated that there were:

‘Only three ways of dealing with perverts. The first is the death sentence. That has been tried in old times, and, though drastic, it does do what is required – that is, stamp them out. The second is to look upon them frankly as lunatics, and lock them up for the rest of their lives. That is a very satisfactory way also. It gets rid of them. The third way is to leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them.’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, col 1804) 

MPs appeared uncertain as to how many lesbians there were and, even, how much people knew about them. While Wild had claimed that lesbians were popping up all over the place, others claimed that only one in every thousand women had even heard of lesbianism, much less done anything.

            A common view was that lesbians were simply heterosexual women gone wrong; Macquisten described them as ‘abandoned females’ and Wild described women as being ‘tampered with’. This was a popular view at the time; queer women were nothing more than straight women who, for some reason, had been corrupted. The fear was that advertising lesbianism risked making the ‘problem’ worse, alerting women to the fact that lesbianism was possible and thus threatening to corrupt them further. If women didn’t know lesbians existed, then they couldn’t be corrupted. As far as MPs were concerned, they were not only defending British family values but selflessly protecting women.

Despite opposition in the House of Commons, the amendment passed and was added to the Bill. However, on the 15^th August, the debate played out again when the Bill reached the House of Lords. Essentially the same points were raised but, in contrast to the Commons, the Lords decided that the risk of advertising lesbianism was simply too great. The amendment was rejected and, with it, the compromise upon which the Bill had been built collapsed and the entire Bill, including its reforms to age of consent laws, failed.

Conclusion

Macquisten’s amendment had done its job; the Bill was sunk and important reforms intended to protect girls from exploitation were delayed… for a time. Public pressure didn’t disappear and, a year later, the government was able to force a similar piece of legislation through Parliament which became the 1922 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Lesbianism would never end up being directly criminalised but other laws and legislation were used to punish lesbianism. In 1928, for example, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian romance The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity in the UK and had to be smuggled across the English Channel from France.

            The debates which took place in August 1921 are a fascinating source for studying the perceptions of queer women in the early 20^th century. They tell us a lot about the way that lesbians were presented and how the identities of LGBTQ+ women were punished and perceived in law. They also show just how important our collections can be for studying this history and how, by looking through sources like Hansard, we can begin to see how anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria was weaponised to prevent real advancements in protections for women throughout the country.

Further Reading

Ayers, D. (2009), English Literature of the 1920s. Chapter 4. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma991026780085307026

Cohler, D. (2010), Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma991022087449607026

Derry, C. (2018), ‘Lesbianism and Feminist Legislation in 1921: the Age of Consent and “Gross Indecency between Women”’, History Workshop Journal 86, 245-267. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma991025398501707026

Derry, C. (2020), Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma990228439840107026

Fize, W. (2020), ‘The Homosexual Exception? The Case of the Labouchere Amendment’, Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens 91, 1-14. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/ao2p7t/cdi_crossref_primary_10_4000_cve_7597

Oram, A. and Turnbull, A. (2001), The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780-1970. https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/permalink/44OXF_INST/35n82s/alma991022190177207026

Woven silk brocade in leopard-spot pattern, France, 1760s, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

By Natasha Bailey

William Eastman was indicted for that he on the 11th of September, about one in the night, the dwelling house of Daniel Clarke, did break, and by force enter, with intent, feloniously and maliciously to cut and destroy silk manufactory, being in the loom in the said house, and did cut and destroy twenty yards of certain wrought silk…¹

It is early morning, around one or two o’clock, when the silk-weaver Daniel Clarke is woken by a racket outside his front door. “Open up, Clarke!” he hears several voices demand in unison. Clarke approaches the window and calls down: “Gentlemen, what do you want?”

“Clarke, come down and open the door! We will not hurt you,” one of the men shouts back. Another pipes up besides him: “You can afford it, you have got good business.”

Not good enough business for what these men intend, Clarke fumes to himself. He knows once he lets them in, they will rush to his workshop and cut to shreds all the woven silks they find. Each represents weeks of painstaking work by Clarke and his wife Elizabeth. Silk-weavers don’t own the raw silk they work into fabric; all the pieces in the workshop belong to his master Thomas Cook. Mr Cook might well demand that Clarke compensates him or, worse, switch to using a different weaver altogether.

He’ll test their resolve; if they want to ruin his silk so badly, he’ll make them work for it. Clarke waits until he hears the splintering of the door under an axe and crowbar and a crash of breaking glass. It’s no good. Unless he wants to get better acquainted with the broadsword one of them is swinging, he’ll have to open up…

Why such a fuss over a few yards of silk? And why destroy this valuable material rather than steal it? Several Old Bailey cases from the 1760s paint a vivid picture of London’s silk-weaving communities at breaking point, and their decision to make their discontent known even at the risk of their own lives.

We don’t typically think of London, or even the UK, as a hub for silk craftmanship. Whilst raw silk has never been produced here—the mulberry trees whose leaves silkworms eat prefer a temperature of 24°C-28°C— silk processing industries have existed in England from at least the 13^th century. By the 18^th century, the beating heart of the British silk-weaving industry was London’s Spitalfields. The area’s reputation for silk-work was intensified by the mass settlement during the seventeenth century of Huguenot Protestant refugees from France who had worked in sericulture and silk processing for generations. As in many skilled trades, silk-weavers would begin as apprentices then progress to the status of ‘journeyman’, from the French journée, indicating that their labour was paid by the day. Some journeymen might eventually become master weavers, who commanded far higher wages and contracted much of the actual weaving out to journeymen like Daniel Clarke, who would usually work the silk in their homes. Silk was woven on hand-operated looms, on which the pattern had to be set before weaving could begin [Fig. 1]. For a complex pattern, this threading alone might take up to five weeks.

Underpaid and overworked, journeyman weavers were particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the silk market; lower prices for British-manufactured silks meant even less trickled down to those who wove them. Weavers blamed French, Italian and Indian imported silks for a downturn in their trade and pushed for a ban on all foreign silks. The ensuing Act for Encouraging the Silk Manufactures of 1753 did little however to raise the wages of journeymen, whose pay was determined by their masters. As journeymen weavers found themselves struggling to make ends meet, they became increasingly frustrated with the failure of parliamentary acts.² If Benjamin Thatcher, tried for “seditious words” in 1722, did indeed say that he “wish’d he had never been a Weaver” and that “we shall never have any Good Trade while [King George is] alive”, his would have been a common sentiment.³

Enter the “cutters”, journeyman weavers who broke into silk workshops to destroy the woven fabrics. If a weaver was known to be accepting wages that undercut his fellow craftsmen or if a master refused to pay living wages, the cutters would target their looms. The Old Bailey cases offer an intriguing window into community relations between weavers who cut work and those whose work was cut. Cutters’ “committees” or “sloops” (as they were called in the court record) met in various local taverns to hear petitions from weavers but also to decide on punishment for those who fell out of line.⁴ . Plaintiffs usually knew who the cutters were in their community, not least because these groups also functioned as informal trade unions. Concern about being recognised (rather than a jaunty sense of fashion) certainly seemed to be the reason the cutters in the Daniel Clarke case had worn women’s bonnets.  This did not stop him from identifying William Eastman’s voice; although Eastman was “no particular acquaintance of [his]”, Clarke had “[known] him four or five years before, and [had] often discoursed with him about weaving”.⁵ Another weaver, Thomas Poor, was also able to name the defendant William Horsford as one of the cutters who attacked his workshop from his voice.⁶ Poor’s wife Mary seems to have believed that Horsford owed her some kind of debt of friendship and confronted him at a tavern, asking how he could bring himself to break into her house.⁷ Exceptions were, however, not to be made this easily. Horsford allegedly responded that he “could not have spared her if she was his own sister“.⁸ By identifying the cutters, moreover, Poor and Clarke broke a code of silence. Diana Eagan, a neighbour’s housekeeper, told the court that although many weavers around Spitalfields had their work cut, “they always declared they did not know one of [the cutters]”.⁹

Tensions also seemed to be rising in the weaving community regarding the involvement of women in the trade. Elizabeth Clarke testified that she had been able to make out little of what the cutters had said, save the ominous “blast [her], we’ll learn her to make Leopard sattin [sic]”.¹⁰ When asked by the court why she thought the cutters had been so incensed by the leopard-spot satin, Elizabeth Clarke replied that it was because she had made it and “they were offended because it was a work too good for a woman to have a hand in”. With the rise of mechanised looms during the nineteenth century, weaving would become increasingly demasculinised; the relative ease of working these looms removed the need for lengthy apprenticeship and made them accessible to women working in their homes.¹¹ Yet as early as the 1760s, some women like Elizabeth Clarke were proving just as skilled as the journeymen and some seemed to resent it bitterly…

The act of cutting silk-work or destroying silk-making equipment carried the death penalty.¹² This was not an uncommon sentence during the eighteenth century and was in fact specified for a wide range of offences, including theft. Because theft was so commonplace, however, even if a judge passed the death sentence required by a conviction, it was often reduced to a non-capital punishment (e.g. transportation) or a pardon was extended. Yet not only were William Eastman and William Horsford both hanged for destroying silk work and weaving equipment, their sentences were carried out only two weeks after their trials. John Doyle and Thomas Valloine, who had broken into Thomas Poor’s house along with Horsford, were hanged in their own neighbourhood of Bethnal Green rather than at Tyburn, clearly as a warning to their fellow weavers. Cutters’ activities were often referred to as ‘riots’ and therefore a menace to public order. It cannot have helped either that attacks on silk manufacturing could be interpreted as attacks on British trade and production itself.

It’s hard to know where your sympathies should lie in these cases where community members were pitted against one another. On the one hand, cutting was clearly a last resort where campaigning had failed to bring about the kind of legislation needed, one that would force masters to pay fair wages. The anger and sense of injustice felt by cutters and their supporters almost radiate from the written record. The Bath and Bristol Chronicle reported that the crowd at the execution of Doyle and Valloine became so restive and threw so many bricks and stones that “the poor wretches [Doyle and Valloine] were dispatched almost as soon as the gallows were erected…a full quarter of an hour before the execution was generally known.”¹³ Following the hanging, the spectators rushed to the house of Lewis Chauvet, the silk manufacturer who had allegedly offered £500 for the apprehension of the cutters. There they broke all the windows and destroyed much of Chauvet’s machinery and silk wares. On the other hand, it was hardly the fault of the weavers whose work was cut if their masters would not pay decent wages. The Poors and the Clarkes clearly felt just as wronged by the cutters as the latter did at their “disloyalty” in accepting low wages. Aware as they must have been that a guilty sentence meant death for their fellow weavers, plaintiffs insisted they had “a good right to have looms worked, and [the cutters] had no right to cut [them]”.¹⁴

The cutters’ protests were not completely in vain, however. The first of the so-called Spitalfields Acts came into force in 1773, charging magistrates with the responsibility for regulating wages in the silk industry.¹⁵ Any journeyman who accepted either more or less than the set wage would forfeit 40 shillings, whilst a master who committed the same offence would pay £50, almost £4500 in today’s money. It might have come too late for the likes of William Eastman and William Horsford but perhaps we might see this as a cutters’ victory nonetheless…

Look out for the next post in the series…. you can keep updated on all things LawBod on Bluesky (@thelawbod.bsky.social) and on Instagram (@thelawbod).

1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, December 1769. Trial of William Eastman (t17691206-31). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17691206-31?text=silk (Accessed: 27th February 2025). Text in italics indicates verbatim quotes from primary sources. ︎
2. For more on silk politics and the Weaver’s Company appeals to Parliament, see William Farrell, Silk and globalisation in eighteenth-century London: commodities, people and connections c. 1720-1800 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birkbeck, 2014), ch. 3 “The politics of silk”. ︎
3. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 12^th January 1722. Trial of Benjamin Thatcher (t17220112-19). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17220112-19?text=weaver. (Accessed 4^th April 2025). The “seditious” part of the charge came from his reply to a fellow drinker who cited an earlier ban on Indian calicos as an example of the King’s concern for weavers, to which Thatcher allegedly replied “God damn King George and his Laws too!” ︎
4. Weavers mentioned in their testimonies that they were obliged to give money to the committees but it seems unclear whether this was a form of dues payment or something closer to extortion. ︎
5. Trial of William Eastman. ︎
6. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, December 1769. Trial of William Horsford (t17691206-34) Available at https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17691206-34?text=silk (Accessed 14th April 2025). ︎
7. It’s not entirely clear where this expectation of solidarity came from, though the Poors and Horsford did share a common background. Thomas Poor revealed in his testimony that he and William Horsford were both Irish and that Horsford had asked Poor in court (in Irish) to show him compassion. ︎
8. Trial of William Horsford. ︎
9. Trial of William Eastman.  ︎
10. Trial of William Eastman ︎
11. For more on this, see Hilda Kean and Bruce Wheeler, “Making History in Bethnal Green: Different Stories of Nineteenth-Century Silk Weavers”, History Workshop Journal, Vol 56 (2003), pp. 217-230. Apprentices were almost always young men, effectively shutting many women out of the trade, though the latter often worked in making silk thread (‘throwing’). ︎
12. “A Bill, intituled, an Act for laying Several additional Duties upon the Importation of Wrought Silks and Velvets, for the Encouragement of the Silk Manufactures of this Kingdom; and for preventing unlawful Combinations of Workmen employed in the said Manufactures”, House of Lords Sessional Papers (1714-1805), vol. 1, pp. 291-296. ︎
13. Bath and Bristol Chronicle, Thursday 4^th December 1769, p. 1. ︎
14. Trial of William Eastman. ︎
15. Public Act 13 George III c. 68 (1773), An act to impower the magistrates therein mentioned to fettle
    and regulate the wages of persons employed in the silk manufacture within their respective jurisdictions. ︎

Alt text: “A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men &c,” from Nathan Bailey’s The new universal etymological English dictionary (1760). Image courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera (Crime 7 (25)).

By Natasha Bailey

Sarah Page, Catharine Goodwin, Mary Allaway, and Elizabeth Talbot, spinsters, were indicted for making an assault on Diana Sawbridge, widow, in a certain field and open place, near the king’s highway…¹

The parish constable of St Pancras hurries down the Kentish-town road towards London. He spots his quarry, a group of four women—two running, two steadfastly walking —matching the description he’s just received from a woman who was mugged for her cloak.  

“You there!”, he calls. “You are to come along with me.” The women stop and square up to him. One lets off a burst of particularly unladylike language and her companion eyes the constable. “We’re not going anywhere with you”, she snaps. “If you will not go quietly then I shall have to use such means as you will not like,” he replies, letting the head of his truncheon show from his pocket. Once he has wrangled the unruly females back to Kentish-town, they are identified by their victim, who holds her cloak, dirtied from where the women dropped it while fleeing.  

“What have you to say to this? Did you rob Mrs Sawbridge?” he asks sternly. One claims she knows nothing of the matter, as does a second woman.  Catharine Goodwin (who had given the unfortunate Mrs Sawbridge a good thump during the robbery) follows suit and glares at the fourth accomplice. “Don’t you turn pastry-cook“, she growls threateningly.² 

Pastry-cook? What on earth can she mean?  

The note below this piece of testimony in the Old Bailey record of this trial explains it as “The cant word, Not to puff”, i.e. not to tell on someone. Witness testimonies were frequently glossed in this way, as witnesses either made use of these “cant” words themselves or reported defendants having done so. But what exactly was cant and what did it mean for people to speak in it? 

The earliest instance of “cant” in written sources to refer to spoken language dates from 1640, when it was used to describe “a whining manner of speaking, especially of beggars”.³ Vagrancy had been an offence in English law since the fourteenth century, so this early association with poverty and lack of a fixed abode already suggested a connection between cant language and crime.⁴ By the late sixteenth century, “canting language” was understood not as a tone of speech but as a separate register of speech that used unusual slang terms.⁵ This register was understood generally to be spoken by criminals, who used it to conceal their activities. 

The opportunities that cant offered for discussing plans in public and still keeping them secret must have been invaluable. The Old Bailey records testify to the popularity of taverns and coffee-houses as meeting places for all kinds of illegal doings, from selling on stolen goods to lying low from the police after committing a crime. By using cant, even if these acts were overheard, there was relatively little chance of the average person understanding them. Cant language even allowed its speakers to communicate within earshot of their victims as they were about to commit the crime. Catherine Walker, tried in 1757 for pickpocketing, had apparently issued instructions to her husband and an acquaintance whilst standing next to Elizabeth Riley, whose watch she was accused of stealing.⁶ The unfortunate Mrs Riley could hardly have expected that Catherine Walker’s hiss of ‘Gammon’ was a sign that her accomplices should walk in front of Riley to slow her down whilst Catherine took the watch. 

When witnesses used cant words in testimony, they often translated the terms unprompted, though some had to be asked for further explanation.  There were even disagreements as to whether a witness who claimed to understand a cant word was interpreting it correctly. At the trial of Thomas Denton and John Jones for counterfeiting in 1789, the policeman John Clark explained to the court that crowns and half-crowns were known amongst coiners as “bulls” and “half-bulls”, whilst shillings were referred to as “bobs”. The defence lawyer, Mr. Garrow, responded that he “fanc[ied] you are not in this case so accurate as to cant language”, since if these words did indeed mean crowns and shillings, the account books presented as evidence would show the wrong amounts!⁷

The idea of a secret criminal language held a powerful fascination for many people. This curiosity manifested in the popularity of cant dictionaries.⁸ For many readers, these works were doubly appealing. Not only did they suggest the reader could avoid falling victim to crime by being able to decode the language of criminals, but the unfamiliarity of these words to a literate, largely middle-class audience provided a kind of exotic novelty.  B.E.’s A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699) promised that besides “being useful for all sorts of People (especially Foreigners) to secure their Money and preserve their Lives”, the work was moreover “very Diverting and Entertaining, being Wholly New.”  Accounts and confessions of well-known criminals—printed in great numbers both as moral instructions and to satisfy an increasing thirst for what we might now call true crime — often had cant dictionaries attached. Included in the Old Bailey proceedings from January and October of 1708 was an advert for the “Memoirs of the right Villanous John Hall, the late famous and Notorious Robber”, which promised to acquaint the reader with “the Cant generally us’d by those Sort of People to conceal their Villanies; and Rules to avoid being Robb’d or Cheated by them”.⁹

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, suspicion of cant was increasingly giving way to a certain appreciation of this “vulgar tongue”.¹⁰ There were significant class divides between “high” and “low” society and culture during the 1700s, yet this was also a time where “common” popular culture was increasingly being praised as an authentic expression of British identity.  Many words previously identified as cant became so widely intelligible that they evolved into slang- you’ll probably recognise some of the words in this glossary…

Cant in Old Bailey trials (pre-1800), a completely non-authoritative short glossary

Look out for the next post in the series…. you can keep updated on all things LawBod on Bluesky (@thelawbod.bsky.social) and on Instagram (@thelawbod).

1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, April 1770. Trial of Sarah Page, Catharine Goodwin, Mary Allaway, Elizabeth Talbot (t17700425-40). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17700425-40?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025. Verbatim quotes from trial records are indicated in italics. ︎
2. This was preceded by much harsher language, which appears in redacted form in the court record but I thought best to omit here… ︎
3.  “Cant, N. (3).” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1195136820 ︎
4. Unfortunately, homelessness also increased greatly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As more parishes were given the power to administer their own funds for the poor, they preferred to give relief only to those few they saw as the ’deserving poor’. The enclosure of common lands also meant that traditional means of sustenance for the very poor, like cutting and selling wood from common land, were no longer available.  ︎
5. Some early modern writers believed that this so-called “criminal cant” originated from Romani, but there is little correlation between vocabularies of criminal cant and Romani or Angloromani vocabularies. This association should probably be taken as a reflection of contemporary anti-Romani attitudes that portrayed them as “vagabonds” and criminals.  ︎
6. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, April 1757. Trial of Catherine, wife of Thomas Walker (t17570420-23). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17570420-23?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025). ︎
7. Old Bailey Proceedings Online, June 1789. Trial of Thomas Denton , John Jones (t17890603-50). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17890603-50?text=cant (Accessed: 24th January 2025). ︎
8. For an excellent overview of cant dictionaries between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, see Julie Coleman, A history of cant and slang dictionaries, vols. 1-3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ︎
9.  Old Bailey Proceedings Online, January 1708. Advertisements (a17080115-1). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/a17080115-1?text=cant (Accessed: 20th January 2025).  ︎
10. For more on this development, see Janet Sorenson, “Vulgar Tongues: Canting Dictionaries and the Language of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37.3 (2004), pp. 435-454.  ︎

This post is the first of a series looking at the LawBod’s pre-1800 collections (yes, we do have them!) and one of (hopefully) several on cases that have caught my eye from the proceedings of the Old Bailey. The original print copies of these proceedings from the early 1700s onward are in the LawBod’s Official Papers collection but thanks to the wonderful ‘The Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, you can now search over 190,000 trial records online. Now without further ado, let me introduce you to…

Alt text: Jane Tease, wife of Peter Tease, was indicted, for that she, after the 24th day of June 1736, to wit on the 23d day of June in the 16th year of our Sovereign Lord George II… falsely and feloniously did utter and publish as true a certain false and counterfeit paper writing…¹

A woman and her friend enter the Naval Pay Office. She’s dressed in black and holds a handkerchief to her face, sniffling. She produces a piece of paper and hands it over for inspection. Scanning the page, George Purvis, the official on duty, sees it is the will of Richard Clarke, a deceased sailor. According to this paper, the wages Clarke was due from the Navy at the time of his death are to go to his “dearly beloved wife, Alice Clarke.”  “What is your name?”, Purvis asks the woman, and she looks back at him, bemused.

“Jane,” she answers. Her companion gives her a sharp prod in the ribs. “Your name is Alice!”, she hisses and turns apologetically to Purvis.² “She’s not been the same since poor Clarke died.”

Something doesn’t seem quite right, but she does have the will after all. And who would turn up to claim Richard Clarke’s pay, if not his wife?

The woman leaves the office clutching a ticket which entitles her to the eighteen pounds, five shillings and sevenpence that poor, drowned Richard Clarke was still owed as pay… but of course, she isn’t Alice Clarke at all. Two years later, the fake widow—real name Jane Tease —would appear in the Old Bailey dock accused of deception and fraud.

Why pretend to be a sailor’s widow?³ The eighteenth century was a time of global sea warfare, where some of the most decisive battles were fought on board ship, and sailors were always in high demand. This huge navy was eyewateringly expensive: on average, the Royal Navy requested between £1 million and £2million per year from Parliament in the last half of the 1700s.⁴ The navy was also in constant debt. Sailors’ pay was often years in arrears… so when Richard Clarke died at sea in 1740, there was still a considerable amount to collect.

Jane Tease played a crucial role in the fraud as the grieving widow, but she was not the ringleader. The key witness against her, Francis Sherlock, freely admitted that he made his living from forging seamen’s wills. Indeed, when asked at the trial of Frances Stanton (another female accomplice) how many times he thought he had carried out the ruse, Sherlock replied it was “so often, that really I can’t remember.”

The scheme usually went like this. First Sherlock would ask about for news of any sailors who had recently died. Given the constant docking of ships on the Thames, sailors were not hard to find in London taverns. Sherlock also mentioned being tipped off when a ship had arrived with “something worth picking up”. Next, he would locate a woman in need of money and persuade her to take part. Rather than partnering with professional frauds, Sherlock targeted working women who had good reputations in their communities. Character witnesses for Jane Tease and another accomplice, Mary Cooke, both described them as “honest hardworking wom[e]n”. How unaware the women really were of the illegality of the scheme is unclear. Most claimed they did not realise how “wicked” the plan was and that they would never do such a thing again, but they would hardly have been the first defendants to plead ignorance in the hope of an acquittal! Indeed, if Sherlock was to be believed, Frances Stanton had already worked with him once, but had run off with the claims ticket…

The false sailors’ wives—Jane Tease, Mary Cooke, Frances Stanton and Mary Ogden— were all tried in the same session. Francis Sherlock was more than happy to testify against all his former accomplices. “I think I did very well,” he told Mary Cooke, “to bring you all to justice, or else you would have brought me to it, I only catched you first.” The court did not quite share his opinion; every woman charged with fraud for assisting Francis Sherlock was acquitted. Sherlock himself does not seem to have been tried for leading the scheme. It’s quite possible that he was indeed caught but denounced his accomplices in exchange for freedom from prosecution… and perhaps before they got the idea to turn him in first.

I’d be the first to admit I have a weakness for stories of clever scams, however, this case does reveal quite a bit beyond the immediate oddness of the identity theft. Word clearly travelled fast between ships and land once they docked; as a port city, London was a hub for all kinds of information from overseas. Taverns and coffee-houses were not just places to enjoy a drink but also to seek out news. In the hands of enterprising folk like Francis Sherlock, this news had real monetary value.

Women could become embroiled in certain kinds of crime by virtue of their gender. The ‘sailor’s wife’ scheme played on a recognition of grieving women as more deserving of pity and assistance than male relatives, hence the choice of widows or sisters as claimants. A widowed woman cut a far more vulnerable figure than a widowed man. Working women frequently combined several forms of low-paying labour to make ends meet and were probably reluctant to ask too many questions, when each job was sorely needed.  The promise of a few guineas for only a day’s work must have seemed very attractive to someone like Jane Tease, a market gardener’s wife who took in washing, nursed children and had four young children of her own to care for. Equally, however, Sherlock’s female accomplices had a certain amount of power in the scheme; since it only worked with a woman to make the claim, he could hardly threaten to cut them out and proceed on his own. Lastly, there’s a certain sadness to the whole endeavour. Death or injury at sea was commonplace and the uncertain frequency of ships docking must have meant that many genuine wives and families waited years for news of their loved ones. Eighteen pounds might have been a welcome sum to Jane Tease and Francis Sherlock, but for the many real Alice Clarkes of eighteenth-century London, their claims tickets probably offered little consolation for their lost sailors.

Look out for the next post in the series…. you can keep updated on all things LawBod on Bluesky (@thelawbod.bsky.social) and on Instagram (@thelawbod).

1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) May 1744. Trial of Jane Tease (t17440510-28). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440510-28?text=tease  (Accessed: 7th January 2025). Verbatim quotations from the trial record are given in italics. See also the associated trials of Frances Stanton (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440728-33?text=stanton), Mary Cooke (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440510-30?text=cooke) and Mary Ogden (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17440728-31?text=Gulleland), mentioned later in this post.
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2. Reportedly, Jane Tease did in fact forget to answer to the false name of Alice and gave her own name instead! ︎
3. For a more detailed exploration of naval ticket fraud as a social phenomenon, see Margaret Hunt. ‘Frauds on Navy Pay and the Men and Women of Maritime London, c. 1620-1740’, Past & Present, Vol. 65 Issue Supplement 17, pp. 108-138. ︎
4. See Clive Wilkinson, The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), ch. 3 ”Treating the House with Contempt’: British Naval Finance in the Eighteenth Century’. ︎

Readers still enter via the original wood and glass doors and step into the reading room which is filled with light from the skylight above. The desks, chairs and lamps which fill the central section of the reading room are original as are the bookcases and the desks situated next to the windows.

As readers look up to the Gallery floor, they will see the original white panels that surround the reading room. Above their heads is the skylight which was completely removed and replaced in 2019-2020.

Walking up to the Gallery floor reveals original 1960s seating, desks, and shelving with views over to the centre of Oxford and University Parks.

The lower two floors of the library are where most of the changes have been made.

The 2016 refurbishment included a lift to all floors. The first floor is home to the Law Library’s Seminar Room with its round wooden table and booklined shelves.

It is on the ground floor where modern times really make themselves felt. The floor houses the collection in rolling case stock. As well as law materials, the Bodleian’s Official Papers collection can be found here. The floor is also home to three small discussions room and a large IT Room.

Operating a huge library within a Grade 2* listed building has its challenges, most notably the lack of power sockets!. But, the beautiful finish of the Law Library creates a warm and welcoming atmosphere. The light cascades through the skylight to create lovely shadows and catches the warmth of the wooden shelving and desks.

The Law Library staff are immensely proud to work in such a wonderful library and we look forward to celebrating the LawBod’ s 100^th birthday in 2064!

Michaelmas term 2024 marks 60 years since the opening of the Bodleian Law Library.  Many of the original 1960s fittings and furnishings are still in use today!  Please help us keep the Law Library pristine for another 60 years by not eating inside the library and being careful with hot drinks by using firm-sided reusable cups with secure lids.

Over the summer vacation we have had new lighting installed on levels 1 and 2 and the effects of this new lighting should be felt as the autumn nights draw in.

Several of our rooms can now be booked using the Bodleian’s online booking system

Our website contains a lot of helpful information including a listing of our legal databases as well as links through to our online guides to legal resources.

We would like to wish all our students a happy and successful Michaelmas Term!