Crime, Courts and Community in Mid-Victorian Wales

Montgomeryshire, People and Places

Author(s) Rachael Jones

Language: English

Genre(s): Welsh and Celtic Studies, Welsh Interest, History

  • May 2018 · 304 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Paperback - 9781786832597
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781786832603
  • · eBook - epub - 9781786832610

About The Book

This book explores the relationship between the justice system and local society at a time when the Industrial Revolution was changing the characteristics of mid Wales. Crime, Courts and Community in Mid-Victorian Wales investigates the Welsh nineteenth-century experiences of both the high-born and the low within the context of law enforcement, and considers major issues affecting Welsh and wider criminal historiography: the nature of class in the Welsh countryside and small towns, the role of women, the ways in which the justice system functioned for communities at that time, the questions of how people related to the criminal courts system, and how integrated and accepting of it they were. We read the accounts of defendants, witnesses and law- enforcers through transcription of courtroom testimonies and other records, and the experiences of all sections of the public are studied. Life stories – of both offenders and prosecutors of crime – are followed, providing a unique picture of this Welsh county community, its offences and legal practices.

Contents

Acknowledgments
List of figures
List of tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Montgomeryshire
2 The legal system
3 Montgomeryshire Constabulary
4 Petty sessions
5 Quarter sessions
6 Assizes
7 Theft offences
8 Vice
Conclusion
Bibliography

About the Author(s)

Author(s): Rachael Jones

Rachael Jones is Honorary Research Fellow at Leicester University, resident of Montgomeryshire for over twenty years, teacher and local historian specialising in genealogy, gender and crime.

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