Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England

By Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow

From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with its settled aristocracy and gentry, its polite arts and culture, its urbane politics of interest and influence, appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. Historians have often described it as such. From another point of view it appears very differently. Year after year new capital offenses were enacted. In the heart of London great crowds asembled at hte regular publichang- ing days, and there were riots beneath the gallows at Tyburn for the possession of the bodies of the condemned. Highwaymen beset the roads of London. Large parties of armed smugglers invested parts of the coast. The estate papers of the great some- times reveal that they were more concerned about wholesale poaching on their lands than they were about rentals or crops.

This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a popu- lace deferential by day but deeply insubordinate by night; a class justice which defended property through the fair form of law. Instead of general description, the authors offer a number of detailed studies. An important introductory chapter discloses the way in which the law replaced religion at the center of the ideology of England's rulers, and analyzes the astonishing adaptability of the legal system to the same pressures of ni- fluence, interest, and property which dominated political life.

NY. Pantheon. 1975. 357p. CONTAINS MARK-UP