The 18th Century Language of Crime and Punishment

Hannah and Paige

Contextual Information

• The text for our investigation is taken from records of court cases tried at the Old Bailey. (This is the Central Criminal Court in London).

• Recorded from a case in 1719.• The basis of the case is that William Marvell (a hangman) is being

tried for stealing ten silk handkerchiefs from a shop in London. The text contains witness statements and although the defendant had positive referees and pleads innocent, the court continues to finds him guilty.

• G – Legal Document/record • A – Court/legal personnel and law enforcement• P – Inform accurate information• £500 worth stolen….. ish he could have earnt approx. the

equivalent of £850 an execution

Lexis and Orthography

• ‘The handkerchiefs were upon the Compter when he was there’. A compter was the shop counter, probably derived from the French to become the word we use today.

• ‘He was taken by one the Beadles in the field’. A Beadle was a minor parish official who occasionally dealt with petty offences.

• ‘Missed’ is spelt as ‘mist’, a phonetic spelling – this also links to a semantic change as well.

• ‘Carried’ is also spelt phonetically as ‘carry’d’• It is clear that specialist lexicon is

being used in this text. Looking

at the word Indicted and comparing

it to its modern comparative,

Prosecuted:• Specific jargon is used ‘prosecutors shop, guilty, enquiry, indicted.’

Semantics

• The word ‘missed’ is written as ‘mist’, although me no longer use this spelling to express that we ‘missed out’ or ‘missed the bus’, we do use ‘mist’ in a very different way to name and describe weather. (This is debatably lexis)

• ‘Cheapen’d’ – today means that something is inexpensive, however in the text refers to the fact they were stolen.

• ‘Lock’ refers to a flint-lock pistol, not a door lock or padlock etc…

Grammar

• ‘but he was got out of sight’ – word order. Either 1) added the extra verb ‘got’ 2) used the word ‘was’ instead of ‘had’

• ‘on the 7th of August last’ – today we would say 7th of august last year. This 18 century form is a much more elliptical and concise way of writing the date.

• ‘with a Lock under his Arm and an Apron on.’-Apparently random capital letters

• ‘carry’d’ ‘confirm’d’ – A variety of contractions. However it’s not a concrete rule as we see in ‘Apprehended.’

Pragmatics

• All in all, the text reads very similarly to a modern day text and there are a very limited number of words and phrases which we do not use today.

• This shows us that crime was taken very seriously during the 18th century.

• After looking at a variety of words, there was a clear difference between legal and everyday language.