Welsh Journals

LIFE AND DEATH IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WALES: A NOTE ONE of the more difficult problems facing the historian of crime and punishment in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries is the lack of information on the sentencing of prisoners. As Dr. Radzinowicz and, more recently, Douglas Hay have shown, the execution of criminals was much less common than the brutal legal code and the stark judicial statistics suggest. In the 160 years following the Restoration the number of statutory capital offences increased by about 190, almost all of them concerned with property. According to Radzinowicz such statutes reflected the fear of the ruling classes and the lack of an adequate police force. 3 Certainly there is considerable evidence that the authorities in the early-eighteenth century did resort to the death penalty quite regularly. In the later period the situation is more complex; in some years and in some counties executions were still common, but frequently capital prosecutions were waived or modified in court and compassionate juries returned reduced or merciful verdicts. Moreover, it had come to be expected that judges would grant most condemned persons a reprieve long enough for the Crown to consider appeals for clemency. It has been estimated that over the century half the men who received the death penalty did not end up on the gallows. 5 This short article is concerned with this question of punishment and pardon. The starting point is the report of the Select Committee on Criminal Laws, set up in 1819 under the chairmanship of Sir James Mackintosh. 6 In the appendices to this report there is interesting information on commitments, convictions and executions for capital offences, and in particular a statistical breakdown of punishment on the Brecon circuit between 1753 and 1818. This is based on the unique Black Books, which are 1 I should like to thank Mr. M. Humphreys for assistance with some of the Montgomeryshire material. 2 L. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law, I (1948); D. Hay, 'Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,' in D. Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree (1975). 3 Radzinowicz, op. cit., pp. 4, 33. 4 Compare T. H. Lewis, 'The Administration of Justice in the Welsh County, in its Relation to other Organs of Justice, Higher and Lower,' Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1945, pp. 157 59. As we shall see later, one can exaggerate the change from the early- to the late-eighteenth century: Hay, op. cit., p. 57. 5 Ibid., p. 43. 6 Parliamentary Papers (P.P.), 1819, VIII.