The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750–1850

Abstract

The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750–1850. By ALLYSON N. MAY (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2003; pp. 361. £37.50). ACROSS the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the English criminal trial underwent an astonishing transformation from a lawyer-free proceeding into the precursor of today's lawyer-dominated adversary system. Trial had been a judge-supervised ‘altercation’ between citizen-accuser and citizen-accused, an occasion for the accused to answer the charges in person. The accused was forbidden to have counsel, and apart from cases involving treason and other crimes of state, the prosecution was also virtually never represented. The lawyers entered slowly. By the early eighteenth century, solicitors were sometimes being used to conduct pretrial investigations, and barristers sometimes took over the work of presenting prosecution evidence at trial. In the 1730s the judges began permitting the accused to have the assistance of counsel to examine and cross-examine witnesses, although subject to restrictions that were not lifted until the Prisoner's Counsel Act of 1836 allowed counsel to take over from the accused the work of making opening and closing statements and critiquing the prosecution case. The adversary criminal trial appears to have developed in the Old Bailey, London's court for cases of serious crime, then spread to the rest of England and the colonies. Much has been learned in recent years about when, how, and why this system of adversary trial developed, but, until this book appeared, relatively little has been known about the lawyers who figured in the events. Allyson May's history of the Old Bailey bar brings these people out of the shadows, giving us the first detailed account of the formation and character of the early criminal bar. She has not been able to shed much light on the solicitors, whose work of investigating and preparing cases is thinly evidenced in the surviving sources. The sources for the criminal bar are also fragmentary into the 1780s, but May has been able to identify all the barristers who practised at the Old Bailey from 1783 to 1850. Her book examines their background, work, and career lines, as well as the influence they came to exert on criminal justice.