F for Felon

Roy Porter

• Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror by J.M. Beattie
  Oxford, 491 pp, £48.00, July 2001, ISBN 0 19 820867 7

Given their importance as an instrument of social regulation, it’s odd that the law and law enforcement were so long cold-shouldered by historians. From the time of Blackstone, legal history remained the province of lawyers, whose labours of love bore more relation to the apologetic hermeneutics of Bible scholars than to ‘historical method’. Common law was wisdom to be worshipped, rather than social text to be demystified. The history of policing and punishing had its shortcomings, too. In Britain, it took the form of a Whiggish story of progress, narrated in support of reformist agendas. Fabian historians homed in on an ‘Age of Reform’ from the late 18th century: Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian penology, prison reform, campaigns against the death penalty and (the great watershed) the setting up of the Metropolitan Police by Peel in 1829. Before then, all was ancien régime darkness. Rejoinders naturally came from early Marxists, but their thinking was no less doctrinaire: law and policing were hammers of the poor, weapons of class oppression serving the privileged interests of landed capitalism.