Book Review

Recently Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio have reminded historians and legal scholars that criminal records are not only valuable for what they tell about specific offenses, but also for what they reveal about human experience. Drawing on such insight, historians have done an impressive job in the last decade of reconstructing the legal culture of early modern England. Where we once concentrated upon statutes and legislation, and the mechanisms of Court and Bench, we now have a burgeoning legal-historical literature not only concerned with the legal and the political, but also heavily interested in the social and the cultural dimensions of "law." The discipline has become increasingly sensitive to the social construction and social realities of the law since the path-breaking work of Edward Thompson's Whigs and Hunters and his students' Albion's Fatal Tree in 1975.	1
Peter King's meticulously researched and persuasive book reflects the best of the traditional and this new historiography by revealing that Hanoverian England's legal system and culture was not only predicated on patriarchy, prohibition, propertied and patrician interests, and power relationships, but that it was also pragmatic, permissive, paternalistic, and participatory. Drawing heavily on Essex court records and diverse sources from all over England, King blends these rather dichotomous perspectives by skillfully illustrating the degree to which negotiation and compromise informed every level of the legal process during the long eighteenth century. Central to his thesis is the convincing argument that Hanoverian criminal law was based on exemplary rather than comprehensive punishment and, therefore, that the period was "the golden age of discretionary justice in England" (1, 355). Discretion lent latitude, leniency, and legitimacy to the seemingly rigid and ritualistic bloody code and the theater of Tyburn's gallows pole. Recognizing that inequalities shaped the criminal law and legal system in early modern England, King takes the subject further by arguing that, at every stage--formal and informal--in the legal decision-making process, opportunities existed for legal constraint and for the participation of a wide range of social groups. King is careful to remind his readers that the elites played a central role in the dispensation of criminal justice (356-61). Yet the elites that populate King's eighteenth century look and act more like Paul Langford's "polite and commercial people" than Thompson's proto-Foucauldian "patrician banditti," and, as a result, they were as acutely aware of the value of accommodation as they were of authority.	2
King's perspective is aptly reflected when he notes that "pretrial procedures from the initial contact between victim and accused right up to the grand jury hearing in one of the major courts consisted of layer upon layer of negotiation opportunities and discretionary choices" (125). On the questions of life-cycle and gender-related issues King's sources reveal, yet again, that "between committing a theft and getting prosecuted for it the accused went through several highly selective filters" (217). His findings indicate that the relationship between crime and poverty was far more complex than historians have hitherto recognized. The age groups most vulnerable to extreme poverty--the young, those with large families, and the old--were underrepresented among the indicted and, therefore, King argues eighteenth-century criminal prosecution was "as much about masculinity, mobility and opportunity as it was about poverty" (217).	3
Equally important as his findings on offenses and offenders and, perhaps, the most impressive section of this volume is King's seventh chapter on courtroom interactions. Building on the work of John Langbein, John Beattie, Stephen Landsman, and Douglas Hay, King argues that the court was really "an arena of struggle and negotiation" (360) where "the criteria on which verdicts were reached were not decided by the elite and the judges alone but rather by the interaction between their values and interests, and those of the jurors, prosecutors, witnesses, and court audiences" (258). Some may contest the extent to which "plebeian" voices were heard in this arena and others will continue to rely on Thompson's field-of-force thesis to characterize the legal culture of the Hanoverian period. Yet, by showing the importance of the middling sorts (Roy Porter's "stout midriff of English society") in these legal processes, King offers yet another dimension to our understanding of their place within Georgian society and also an elaboration on their influence on the eighteenth-century criminal justice system.	4
Readers of this journal will find much in Peter King's Crime, Justice and Discretion that reinforces the emerging consensus among early modernists that the "law" was not only an avenue of governance and authority, but also a resource to be shared and coveted, used and abused. Reflecting this school of thought, King concludes the book by observing that "the criminal law was an arena not only of terror, of exploitation, and of bloody sanction but also of struggle, of negotiation, of accommodation, and almost every group in eighteenth-century society helped to shape it, just as their behaviour was partly shaped by it" (373).	5
Peter King has produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking work that, appropriately and thankfully, balances the theories of Michel Foucault with the experiences of Henry Fielding and deserves to be carefully and widely read by legal scholars and historians.	6
Richard Connors University of Alberta

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