English Crime and English Law.

I.

AMONG remarkable books recently published, is a History of crime in England, compiled from the public records and contemporary sources, by Mr. Luke Owen Pike, whose position as a barrister admirably qualified him to undertake such a work, and whose industry in research has enabled him to render in these volumes a public service. To trace the development of crime in England, and to mark its stages of progression so clearly that its characteristics, at any given period, can be easily contrasted with its modified or opposite characteristics at any other period, to show at each stage of its history its influence in qualifying the genius of the people and the spirit of the laws, to exhibit its remote but powerful effects on modern idea, custom, and administration, made up a great undertaking in an entirely new sphere, and one requiring a boldness, ability, and industry seldom united in one writer. The author of such a history could not avail himself of materials amassed by previous toilers in the same path, nor if such had existed, could he honestly have taken the veracity of their records for granted. He must personally search in the public archives for authentic information. Statute books, Indictments, Charters, Reports, Memorials, Statistical documents, Letters Patent, County Registers, and every description of official record must be consulted with an apathetic patience unknown to any but those who have experienced it. The researcher must also often find the difficulty of discovering the right document only equalled by

the difficulty of perusing it when found-a source of perplexity increased by the circumstance that the most ancient information demands the greatest amount of verification. To have merely attempted a work so laborious was creditable, but to have accomplished it-not only to the extent of amassing the great quantity and variety of facts and references with which Mr. Pike presents us, but to the extent of making the history as complete as, in the presence of its many obstacles and disadvantages, human industry could be supposed to make it is in the highest degree honourable, and entitles Mr. Pike to the warmest congratulations.

That the history is not perfect, Mr. Pike would probably be the readiest to admit; that its imperfections are inseparable from its being the first serious and connected history of crime, no man is in a better position than himself to know. His divisions of the subject into periods is not that which we ourselves should have chosen, but there may be reasons for it which we cannot know without examination of the sources of his information. His epochs are mostly dated from one great political event to another, from this invasion to that conquest, from the accession of this monarch to the death of the other; and so on. Now, the various kinds of criminality, according to the evidence of his own work, display an origin, development, and terminability, more or less distinct. Species of crime prevalent in one age are shown to be comparatively unknown in another. The general characteristics of crime change according to the influences of religion, civilisation, conquest, and penal enactment. To adopt, therefore, periods which naturally arise out of the procession, and what might be termed the advancement of criminal history, seems to us by no means impossible, and far more appropriate to the general plan. If not more easy, at least it would have been more correct. There was a time when brigandage flourished, and when it became extinct; when highway robbery was respectable, and when it became disreputable; when piracy repaid courageous enterprise, and when it became practically impossible; when one particular species of forgery, fraud, or robbery, is first recorded as general, and when it ceased to

be popular. The use of the knife in brawls was once as common in England as in continental countries; it gradually sank into disfavour even among brawlers, until its adoption became an indication of cowardice. Duelling rose, was refined, and studied as an art; it flourished, declined, and disappeared. There was a time when human. life was valueless, when human mutilation and agony were an amusement, when lust was the occupation of life, and women were items of property. These were followed by periods sufficiently marked, when life and person and womanhood became sanctified and sacred. We are fully mindful that no crime has, in any one age, or perhaps any one year, been wholly extinct. We have no faith in originality of crime.. We refer to changes in the prevalence of its species, and in public opinion regarding them. To indicate these, and to explain the probable causes of their popularity in one age and of their final decline in another, would have come properly into the scope of the work. While such a division is not encumbered by insuperable difficulties, it would have been an honest attempt after a natural, in preference to an adventitious, arrangement.

Before proceeding to examine the contents of these volumes one other tribute of admiration is due to their author. It was to be anticipated that two portly volumes on any subject relating to criminality must contain many records disgusting, humiliating, and shocking to feelings of humanity. It is mere justice to Mr. Pike to acknowledge the extreme delicacy and good taste with which, in a thousand pages of villainy, necessarily embracing corruption and cruelty of the most atrocious and horribly revolting kind, he has handled many a subject and narrated many a crime which a less polished and expert writer would have made sensational and obscene. He has treated a most exciting and morbidly attractive subject with a truly philosophical moderation. But while it is easy to observe that half the tale of hideous and degrading crime, and of extravagantly cruel punishment has not been told, we honestly confess to knowing no volumes which generate such feelings of disgust and horror at the enormous wickedness of which human nature is capable, such de

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spair of its ennoblement, such loathing for the shocking cruelty alike of ancient crime and of ancient penalty, as these volumes excite. Language fails us, and will again fail us, in attempting to express what we feel on this point.

The broad lines and characteristics of crime have never changed. Crimes against the person, and crimes against property are the two general and natural divisions. To these, ecclesiasticism added a third class-offences against supernatural existences, against creeds, against ideals, and against their human representatives. It is highly significant of the cruel temper in which Error propagates what it wishes to be generally believed that the dogmas of the Middle Ages were enforced by the rack, the stake, and the anathema, often by them all in succession, and that the penalty for infidelity and transgression appears to have increased in severity in exact ratio as the doubted doctrine decreased in tangibility and substantiability. No crime of past ages was so unpardonable as to be unable to believe what one's neighbours believed. Hence the most intolerant and oppressive laws, and the most horrible and revolting punishments were originated by the priesthood. If a man accepted a doctrine contrary to that held by his spiritual father, his mind must be tortured into a better, or, at least, a more pliable mood by the mechanical action of the rack. Common sense would say that what the man believed or disbelieved was really not the business of anybody else but himself. The Church thought differently, having formulated the creed which he was to believe. If he could not see the infallibility of the Church, and accept her dogmas on trust, the tendons and nerves of his body must stretch or scorch for it. Not that the man's tendons or nerves, or anything affecting his sensorium could be at all to blame, or in any way concerned in the heresy. Not either that these tortures, while they might extort an agonised recantation, could in the least affect the man's real belief. But such were the methods adopted by the ignorant and intolerant for coercing the dissentient and helpless. Such were the iniquities wrought upon the body by those who had no power to affect the soul.

It would be a curious inquiry, but one we fear which could not be even approximately successful, to find out the extent to which the Church and her ministry, the very agents of sanctity and social virtue, have been instrumental in originating and developing crime. We do not refer to any individual Church or ecclesiastical system. Still less do we refer to religion in the true sense of the term. But the priestcraft of every religious faith has, in all past ages, and in every country, produced influences as corrupt and cruel as it is known to have produced in England in the Middle Ages. Scattering abroad on society, ecclesiastical orders ostensibly of the most sacred and ascetic discipline, and yet known to practise the most abhorred wickedness with a pertinacity and refinement of villainy unknown to the untaught laity, the various Churches seem to us to have been largely responsible for the infidelity and wickedness of which they loudly complain. The inconsistency of life among the clergy was accompanied by a remarkable intensity in faith on the part of the laity, probably because their destitution of logic was fully supplied by a morbid energy of the imagination. While the priesthood were most flagitious in profligacy, rapacity, and oppression, the greatest credulousness prevailed regarding sacred orders, holy men, sanctified maids, and beatified saints. This ignorant, and no doubt remunerative, faith reacted and invited crimes in the priesthood. The Abbey of Bodmin rejoiced in possessing the bones of St. Petroc. Martin, a canon of Bodmin, was induced to steal the sanctified relics, and convey them to an abbey in Britanny. The monks of Breton received the blessed spoil with holy joy, which was apparently undisturbed by the least compunction. Nor would they yield up the relics when detected until a justice, duly provided with warrant, threatened to take the precious bones by force. Even after the restoration of the sanctified remains, the Prior of Bodmin could not feel satisfied that his thievish brethren had not defrauded him by substituting less holy relics for Saint Petroc's, until they had sworn a solemn oath to the contrary on the relics of their own house. These peccadilloes, and a trifling forgery of a charter or title to land, apparently common enough to ancient monks,