Committed by Justice Fielding: Judicial and Journalistic Representation in the Bow Street Magistrate's Office January 3-November 24, 1752

Abstract

Committed by Justice Fielding: Judicial and Journalistic Representation in the Bow Street Magistrate’s Office January 3–November 24, 1752 Lance Bertelsen (bio) On Tuesday last William Neal was committed to Prison by Justice Fielding, for stealing several iron Rails, the property of Sir Francis Head: as was Christopher Emners, for picking the Pocket of Mr. Rolte of a silk Handkerchief; and John Marsh on an Indictment of wilful and corrupt Perjury. The same Day one Thomas Halwyn, charged Catherine his Wife, and Benjamin and Samuel, two young Lads, her Sons by a former Husband, with beating him. Covent-Garden, Jan. 24. I This essay offers a tabulated record and abbreviated analysis of the clientele and cases to come before a practicing English magistrate between January 3 and November 24, 1752. That the magistrate was Henry Fielding, and that the tables were prepared from a column running in his twice-weekly periodical, The Covent-Garden Journal, lends a significant literary historical dimension to the study while at the same time raising questions about the basic accuracy of the primary material and [End Page 337] its particular value as a source for legal and social history. 1 The facts of Fielding’s appointment to the Commission of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex are well known. Fielding took the oaths for the Westminster magistracy on October 25, 1748; on November 2 he began holding court in the famous house in Bow Street, Covent Garden, formerly occupied by the magistrate Thomas DeVeil. The following January 12—primarily for economic reasons and with significant help from the Duke of Bedford—he added the Middlesex County magistracy to his appointments. 2 Fielding was a “court JP”—a specially-appointed urban magistrate with a heavier workload and correspondingly higher level of government financial support and judicial power than his gentleman-amateur counterparts in the country. 3 Martin Battestin has called Fielding’s office “among the most cheerless and despicable in the kingdom,” one that daily brought him face to face with “a horrid parade of thieves and cheats, robbers and murderers, rapists and sodomites; many who reveled in cruelty, who battered women and ravished children” 4 —a description that may be usefully compared with the partial record of the Bow Street Magistrate’s office presented below. About a year later, on January 16, 1750, Fielding joined his half brother John in launching the Universal Register Office, a multi-purpose intelligence office dealing in job placement, the brokerage of property, and so forth. Two years later, to advertise simultaneously his business and judicial offices, he began writing The Covent-Garden Journal, a twelve-column periodical engaging literary, social, legal, and commercial topics. Fielding’s role as a working magistrate was to preside over what amounted to a daily series of pretrial hearings. J. M. Beattie writes that the justices of the peace “formed an essential link between the victim and the courts . . . It was their duty to bring the parties in conflict before them, to take depositions of the complainant and his witnesses, to examine the accused, and to ensure that they appeared at the next sitting of the appropriate court.” 5 Moreover, during the course of the eighteenth century, the role of the magistrate as interpreter expanded as “the magistrate’s examination ceased being simply a means of assembling the best evidence against the prisoner and took on some of the characteristics of a judicial hearing. Magistrates began to feel more obligation to make some assessment of the evidence being presented and to assume more right to dismiss charges when they thought the case too weak to justify a trial.” 6 In their expanded role, magistrates could also function as mediators, encouraging the negotiation of extrajudicial settlements between parties. In the cases from Bow Street, we find Fielding acting in all of these capacities: interrogator, interpreter, judge, mediator, and, in the journalistic record of the hearings, moralist and entertainer. The cases in question appeared in The Covent-Garden Journal as a regular feature under the heading “Covent Garden.” 7 Flanked by advertisements and news, and edited with an eye toward entertainment value, the “Covent Garden” columns obviously cannot pretend to the comprehensiveness or accuracy one...