The New Newgate Calendar

The London Times of April 7, 1832 brings us this arson double hanging evidencing the extension of the rural Swing Riots labor rebellion from its southern... read more »

The Thames Police court magistrate, Mr Lushington, enjoyed a reputation as the scourge of the ‘drinking classes’. In the late 1870s and ’80s... read more »

To wrap up this month, this post is just a few notes – half-formed thoughts, not ‘conclusions’ – on some recurring themes that... read more »

March 30, 1702 was the date colonial New York spared Col. Nicholas Bayard from undergoing a hanging scheduled later that same day. A “puzzling affair,... read more »

It is probably reasonable to say that for some people – the church, police, social reformers, and government – the consumption of alcohol has... read more »

On this date in 1929, Washington state hanged bootlegger Luther Baker for murdering Clark County Sheriff Lester Wood during a Prohibition moonshine raid.... read more »

In February 1783, Belinda Sutton petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a pension from the estate of Isaac Royall Jr, her late master. (In this... read more »

From early 1832 to the last outbreak in June 1866 Londoners experience the full horror of cholera as it ravaged communities in the nineteenth century.... read more »

The Albert Hall was designed by local architect John Duncan and built by J.T Farmils at a cost of 14,000 pounds in 1891 to house the Tasmanian Industrial... read more »

On this date in 1741 ended at Dorchester “a young Man of great Hope, who was of a proper Stature, and of a handsome Personage, of a gentle and winning... read more »

Henry and Eliza Hendry appeared in the dock at Mansion House Police court as a married couple. The pair were charged with ‘forging and uttering a... read more »

(Thanks to Sabine Baring-Gould for (another) guest post. This report in Baring-Gould’s Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events glosses a... read more »

As a crowd gathered around a speaker at Packington Street, Islington, one Sunday in 1866 the police felt obliged to intervene. It wasn’t the first... read more »

On this date in 1437, the Earl of Atholl finally reached the end of a three-day carnival of public tortures and lost bowels, heart, and head for assassinating... read more »

My apologies if the headline caught you but after all that is what headline writers do. This isn’t a story about two boxing legends but instead a... read more »

I’m going to round off WHM2017 with a couple of posts indulging my current interests in petitions. Today I have two petitions from the London Lives... read more »

By Cassie Watson; posted 25 March 2017. In contrast to the extensive historiography on homicide, as yet we know comparatively little about severe non-fatal... read more »

Charles Dickens had some experience of the law. As a young freelance reporter he had covered the civil law court of Doctors’ Commons before... read more »

(Thanks to Dr. Robert Macnish, a young Scottish surgeon, writer, and polymath whose wide-roaming intellect earned him the nickname of “the Modern... read more »

This blog has covered the difficult topic of suicide in several posts over the past year; Londoners in despair quite frequently attempted to ‘destroy’... read more »

In October 1704, Sarah Knight left her home town of Boston, MA, for a five-month journey on horseback to New York, which she recorded in a travel diary... read more »

From the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, March 31, 1823. SHOCKING MURDER — At Shrewsbury Assizes, on Saturday, John Newton, a Farmer, living... read more »

(Thanks to James Boswell for the guest post. The Dr. Johnson biographer was a ravenous gallows-haunt whom we have encountered repeatedly in these pages;... read more »

Yesterday a tragedy unfolded in central London. I am writing this in the evening of the 22 March 2017 as the news of what seems to have been a major terrorist... read more »

British-occupied Egypt on this date in 1945 hanged two young Jewish assassins for slaying the British plenipotentiary to the Middle East. Walter Edward... read more »

The Police Courts of Victorian London were open to the public (as magistrates courts are today) but it is rare that we get any sense of what those attending... read more »

Registration is open for my courses at UConn-Hartford’s new downtown campus next fall. Courses are open to all UConn students from all majors: read more »

(Thanks to novelist and archaeology enthusiast Thomas Hardy for the guest post, which originally appeared in the October 9, 1908 issue of the London Times.... read more »

Mary Saxby’s Memoirs of a Female Vagrant was published posthumously, with the twin goals of raising some money for impoverished relatives and... read more »

On the 11 February 1866 John Loveman was standing with his omnibus at the Archway Tavern on Highgate Hill. Loveman was a driver for John Wilson, whose... read more »

On this date in 1954, East Germany beheaded Ernst Jennrich for the previous June’s short-lived popular protests. A Magdeburg gardener of socialist... read more »

By Kellie Moss   Fremantle Prison, Western Australia (authors own image).   The history of convict confinement in Western Australia has been... read more »

  In the years following the murders of several women in Whitechapel in 1888, rumours of ‘Jack the Ripper’ continued to haunt the capital.... read more »

On this date in 1824, David D. Howe (or “How”) was publicly executed at the upstate New York town of Angelica. Up to five or six thousand souls... read more »

The Crimean War had raised some concerns about the quality of recruits to the British army and about the diseases they were exposed to at home and abroad.... read more »

On this date in 1563, Jean de Poltrot de Méré was ripped apart in the streets of Paris for assassinating the Duke of Guise. The opening act... read more »

It seems appropriate, on the day after St Patrick’s Day, to tell the story of an Irish pauper who appeared in court on her nation’s saint’s... read more »

Today’s offering, courtesy of the National Library of Wales’s rather amazing Welsh Wills Online project, is the 1619 will of Elen ferch Lewes... read more »

In March 1878 there was a ‘row’ in Hyde Park. So far I can find no particular  reason for this although the park was often used for demonstrations,... read more »

(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this day in 1784, 28-year-old Anne Castledine was executed at Retford, Nottinghamshire... read more »

On this date in 1946, the Dutch journalist/propagandist Max Blokzijl was shot at Scheveningen for wartime Nazi collaboration. Blokzijl (English Wikipedia... read more »

Guest post by John M. Collins; 16 March 2017. “Emergency” paints a picture of a fire. Crown attorneys in seventeenth-century England often... read more »

Assault was one of the most frequently prosecuted offences at summary level in the police courts of London, as it was in all the studies we have to date... read more »

On this date in 1718,* the vengeful tsar Peter the Great staged a horrible execution on Moscow’s Red Square. Stepan Glebov was the collateral damage... read more »

This new, two-part posting takes the unusual step of using only one source…G W Keeton's brilliant re-assessment of the crime of Daniel M'Naghten... read more »

Walter Dew was the policeman who famously caught ‘Dr’ Crippen and Ethel le Nève as they tried to escape from England on a ship... read more »

Ann Harrison came from a Hertfordshire Royalist family whose lives were turned upside down by the Civil Wars. She married her husband Sir Richard Fanshawe... read more »

Eleanor, Emma and Larissa at the Sheffield Showcase. On Saturday 11th March, myself, Emma Watkins and Eleanor Bland ran a Digital Panopticon stand as part... read more »

Eleanor, Emma and Larissa at the Sheffield Showcase. On Saturday 11th March, myself, Emma Watkins and Eleanor Bland ran a Digital Panopticon stand as part... read more »

Middlesex Street (‘Petticoat Lane’) market c.1894 On most occasions London’s police  magistrates (men from a legal background... read more »