Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800

In theory the eighteenth-century criminal law was a rigid, fixed and bloody penal code laying down the penalty of death for a broad range of property crimes. In practice it was a flexible and highly selective system. The legal process had no effective police force to provide an organizational core and it was therefore a private and negotiable process involving personal confrontation rather than bureaucratic procedure. All the major published studies of the administration of the criminal law in this period have stressed its highly discretionary nature. They have also shown that the law was important as ideology. The widely held notions that every freeborn Englishman was protected by the rule of law and that all were equal before the law both constrained authority and legitimized and strengthened it.