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Records from London's Guildhall reveal the workings of the law in
the eighteenth century. For centuries, the City of London's Lord
Mayor and Aldermen have headed various courts and tribunals as part
of their official obligations. In the City's Guildhall, Londoners
from all walks of life could appear before an aldermansitting as a
magistrate in the "justice room" and initiate a criminal complaint
when they were the victims of crime. But what actually happened in
those initial hearings between the accuser, the accused and the
magistrate has remained largely obscured to history. These records
shed light on the earliest phases of a criminal prosecution and
reveal the routines of criminal justice administration in the
eighteenth-century metropolis. From the fragmentaryminutes of the
proceedings conducted before London's aldermen, who sat for a part
of every working day as Justices of the Peace, we learn of the
petty squabbles of the City's poor with parish officials, the ready
resort to physical violence in public and private spheres, the
steady campaign against prostitution, and the growing
professionalism of the parish constables who policed London before
the arrival of the Metropolitan Police.The records will be
ofinterest to historians of London, social historians of crime,
genealogists and scholars interested in summary or pre-trial
procedures in early modern England; they are presented here with
introduction and explanatory notes. Greg T. Smith is Associate
Professor of History at the University of Manitoba.
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