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Records of the crimes committed in Oxford, and the punishment meted
out, reveal much of life at the time. Most historical studies of
English justices of the peace have concentrated on the work of
county commissions, leaving the sparser records of city and borough
justices largely neglected. This early order book of the city of
Oxford's justices in quarter sessions illustrates the special
problems of an urban magistracy in a rather special place, at a
time when both university and city were feeling the strain of rapid
population growth in a cramped environment.It shows, sometimes in
harrowing detail, how the Oxford Bench [an unusual mix of
shopkeepers, brewers, lawyers, and university dons] struggled to
control crime, vagrancy, disorder, and poverty in a divided
community. Much of thebusiness of these early seventeenth-century
courts would be all too familiar to the modern magistrate: an
endless stream of cases of petty larceny, assault, abusive
behaviour, unlicensed ale-selling; hopeless recidivists testing the
patience of the court to its limit. The sanctions available to the
seventeenth-century JP, however, were very different, fines and
imprisonment being much less common than consignment to the
whipping post, the cage, the stocks,the ducking stool, the House of
Correction and, when all else failed, the gallows.
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