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Proceedings of the Old Bailey Digitized

From LibraryBoy:

Two professors in England have digitized the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, the digest of more than 100,000 trials that took place in the famous London criminal courts between 1674 and 1834.

The website includes a publishing history of the Proceedings, a list of notable trials that reveal a lot of the context of policing and community life at the time, historical background about crime, punishment and gender roles in early modern England, a bibliography (with sections on the publishing history of the Old Bailey Proceedings, advertising, the literature of crime, criminal biographies, last dying speeches, newspaper history, British novels about crime, etc.), etc.

bailey.jpg There is additional background about the project in the April 2007 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine in an article entitled Digitizing the Hanging Court.