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Newspaper reporting, prosecution practice and perceptions of urban crime: the Colchester crime wave of 1765

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Peter King
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Continuity and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , December 1987 , pp. 423 - 454
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Wiles, R. M., Freshest advices: early provincial newspapers in England (Ohio, 1965)Google Scholar; Cranfield, G. A., The development of the provincial newspaper 1700–1760 (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar and The press and society: from Caxton to Northcliffe (London, 1978).Google Scholar

2 Cranfield, , The press and society, 179.Google Scholar

3 A notable exception in the field being examined here is John Styles' work on the impact of newspapers on detection methods. Styles, J., ‘Print and policing: crime and advertising in eighteenth-century provincial England’ in Hay, D. and Snyder, F. eds., Prosecution and the police in Britain: The social history of criminal law (forthcoming).Google Scholar

4 For the best guide to this academic ‘crime wave’ see Innes, J. and Styles, J., ‘The crime wave: recent writing on crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies 25 (10 1986), 380–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Davis, J., ‘The London garotting panic of 1862: a moral panic and the creation of a criminal class in mid-Victorian England’ in Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B. and Parker, G. eds., Crime and the law. The social history of crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980Google Scholar) focuses in part on newspaper reporting.

6 Cohen, S. and Young, J. eds., The manufacture of news: deviance, social problems and the mass media (2nd edition, London, 1981Google Scholar) is the best introduction: Hall, S. et al. eds., Policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order (London, 1978) approaches the widest themes.CrossRefGoogle ScholarCohen, S., Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the mods and rockers (London, 1972).Google Scholar

7 Ibid.; Chibnall, S., Law-and-order news: an analysis of crime reporting in the British press (London, 1977).Google Scholar

8 Cohen, and Young, , The manufacture, 429.Google Scholar

9 Eighteenth-century diaries occasionally describe local crimes, but many years often pass before the diarist records himself as falling victim to crime or as witnessing a crime or a riot. The diary of Joseph Page, a farmer who lived just south of Colchester, exhibits this pattern. Brown, A. F. J., Essex people 1750–1900 (Chelmsford, 1972), 91–103.Google Scholar

10 Cohen, , Folk devils.Google Scholar

11 Goodwyn, E. A., Selections from Norwich newspapers 1760–1790 (Ipswich, 1972), 72.Google Scholar

12 Wells, R., ‘Counting riots in eighteenth-century England’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 37 (Autumn 1978), 69Google Scholar. For a news embargo in a 1775 dispute see Corfield, P., The impact of English towns 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), 162.Google Scholar

13 Archer, J., ‘Rural protest in Norfolk and Suffolk 1830–1870’ (unpublished PhD. thesis, University of East Anglia, 1981), 165.Google Scholar

14 The term moral panic is used here in the same way as the authors of Policing the crisis, following Cohen, used it. Hall, , Policing the crisis, 16.Google Scholar

15 Cohen, , Folk devilsGoogle Scholar; Fishman, M., ‘Crime waves as ideology’, in Cohen, and Young, , The manufacture, 98–117.Google Scholar

16 Throughout the period studied here the Chelmsford Chronicle and Ipswich Journal were four-page weekly papers. Articles were inevitably short, as indeed are many of the routine and brief modern newspaper items about crime. Hall, , Policing the crisis, 67.Google Scholar The number of events reported in the Colchester crime wave is not that dissimilar to the number which formed the basis of the 1972 mugging-related moral panic - the starting point of the Policing the crisis study. Ibid., 71.

17 Fishman, , ‘Crime wave’.Google Scholar

18 Chalklin, C. W., The provincial towns of Georgian England. A study of the building process 1740–1820 (London, 1974), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Ibid., 34. Corfield, P., The impact, 12–14.Google Scholar

20 Brown, A. F. J., ‘Colchester in the eighteenth century’, in Munby, L. M. ed., East Anglian studies (Cambridge, 1963), 146–73Google Scholar. Brown, A. F. J., Essex at work 1700–1815 (Chelmsford, 1969), 98–9.Google Scholar

21 Brown, , ‘Colchester’, 156–8.Google Scholar

22 7.2 per 10,000 inhabitants per year in Colchester, 5.2 in the surrounding parishes, King, P., ‘Crime, law and society in Essex 1740–1820’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984), 52.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 52–3. The borough of Saffron Walden did produce higher rates than the surrounding area. Harwich, which also had a borough court, did not.

24 Corfield, , The impact, 150Google Scholar; Brown, , ‘Colchester’, 154.Google Scholar

25 If the last five years when Colchester prosecutors had to travel to Chelmsford to prosecute (1759–1763) are compared with the first five years after the reopening of the borough court, the effect is clear. The proportion of Essex assault prosecutions brought by Colchester residents rose from 1.0 to 11.1 per cent, and false weights and measures from 1.0 to 28.6 per cent. However property crime rose only marginally from 8.3 to 10.8 per cent in 1764–1768. In the longer term the effect in property crime cases was minimal. From 1750 to 1763 9 per cent of Essex property crime indictments were brought by Colchester prosecutors. From 1764 to 1777 the figure was 8.2 per cent, reflecting in part the declining proportion of the county's population living in Colchester.

26 King, P., ‘Prosecution associations in eighteenth century Essex’ in Hay, and Snyder, eds., Prosecution and the police.Google Scholar

27 Wiles, , Freshest advices, 403–4Google Scholar, reports a Colchester based newspaper from the 1730s till the early 1750s.

28 Cranfield, , The development, 65–70Google Scholar; Wiles, , Freshest advices, 217.Google Scholar

29 Cranfield, , The press and society, 180Google Scholar, and The development, 29Google Scholar. Local items increased as the century continued. Goodwyn, Selections, 5.

30 Cranfield, , The development, 91.Google Scholar

31 The workhouse building policies of some Suffolk Poor-Law authorities were severely threatened in 1765 by riots. George, D., England in Transition (London, 1953), 98Google Scholar. For reports in local newspapers see Che.C., 9. 8. 1765Google Scholar; I.J., 10. 7. 1765.Google Scholar

32 Local hangings were rarely described in great detail but life stories and the processes by which notorious offenders had been detected were sometimes given a few paragraphs. Che.C., 29. 3. 1765.Google Scholar The ‘Account of the life and exploits of Richard Perry’ was exceptional, however, in taking up several columns. Che.C., 17. 5. 1765.Google Scholar

33 Robbery and to a lesser extent burglary were the most feared and among the most heavily punished types of crime in this period. Beattie, J. M., Crime and the courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 148–61Google Scholar discusses the anxiety and panic robbery created.

34 Che.C., 22. 2. 1765.Google Scholar One other report had come from the three hundreds defined here as the Colchester area (Tendring, Winstree and Lexden) but this involved only a simple theft.

35 Che.C., 4. 10. 1765.Google Scholar

36 I.J.,5. 10. 1765Google Scholar. The Ipswich Journal had agents in Colchester and carried large numbers of Essex advertisements and local news items in the middle decades of the century. Printed less than 20 miles from Colchester it had a clear advantage over its potential rivals which were all more than twice this distance away. Wiles, , Freshest advices, 27Google Scholar, has a map of provincial newspapers in 1758.

37 Che.C., 8. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

38 Che.C., 22. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

39 Bromley is a parish in the Tendring hundred about 5 miles from Colchester. Che.C., 29. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

40 I.J., 23. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

41 Che.C., 29. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

42 I.J., 30. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

43 Che.C., 29. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

44 I.J., 30. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

45 Che.C., 6. 12. 1765.Google Scholar

46 I.J., 7. 12. 1765.Google Scholar

47 Che.C., 13. 12. 1765Google Scholar; I.J., 14. 12. 1765.Google Scholar

48 One summary conviction for yarn embezzelment by a Colchester housewife was included. Che.C., 20. 12. 1765.Google Scholar

49 Che.C., 3. 1. 1766.Google Scholar

50 I.J., 18. 1. 1766.Google Scholar

51 For the purposes of this paper a ‘crime wave’ is defined as a rise in public consciousness of, and anxiety about, a certain type of crime, followed, once the wave is over, by a corresponding if often more gradual decline in these forms of social awareness. A crime wave may or may not coincide with a real increase in lawbreaking but, following Fishman, its use in this paper is primarily intended to describe a short-term upsurge in newspaper reporting of a particular type or types of crime in a specific area. Fishman, , ‘Crime waves’, 98–100.Google Scholar

52 An exact count is impossible since some reports do not specify precisely how many separate robberies they are referring to.

53 P.R.O., Assi 35/206/1. One indictment for the lesser charge of stealing from a dwelling house did arise from Harwich, but it cannot be linked to any of the offences reported in the newspapers during this period. The Assizes met twice a year in March and July. This was the first sitting since the crime wave.

54 P.R.O., Assi 35/206–208.Google Scholar

55 I.J., 18. 1. 1766.Google Scholar Bussell was initially committed for breaking into a Lexden dairy but was indicted on the lesser charge of grand larceny. Although the Colchester borough subscription appears to have been offering rewards for robbery convictions only, the wording is loose and prosecutors such as this farmer, who was a borough resident, may have been hopeful of receiving a reward.

56 Excluding Colchester prosecutions in the borough court the inhabitants of the three hundreds produced an average of between 9 and 10 quarter sessions or assize indictments a year 1763–1770. At the March assizes and the January and April quarter sessions 1766, which would have roughly covered committals made in the last quarter of 1765 and the first quarter of 1766, these hundreds produced only 6 indictments one of which was that of Butcher. P.R.O., Assi 35/206/1; E.R.O. Q/SR 763–4 and Q/SPb 15.

57 The two indictments, which were ‘not found’ by the grand jury, were for small thefts of peas and wheat. The link with the subscription was a tenuous one since the prosecutions came from Kirby and Great Holland, parishes not specifically mentioned in the report of the subscription's formation, and the offences concerned were much more minor than its ‘purse’ was intended to prevent.

58 The Tendring hundred produced only 0.3 of an indictment per January quarter sessions hearing in this period.

59 E.R.O. Colchester Borough sessions files and books.

60 E.R.O. Colchester D/P 203/13/4B. On average less than one person a month was taken from this parish to the magistrates to be examined about their settlement 1763–1766. In December 1765 five such hearings took place - a higher number than in any other month recorded in the examinations books. The aim seems to have been to remove intruders and thus discourage outsiders from coming into the parish.

61 44 per cent of the property offenders tried at the Colchester borough sessions 1740–1800 were either acquitted or had their indictments not found by the grand jury.

62 Of Colchester borough property offenders, 8.7 per cent were transported 1740–1800. A further 1.4 per cent were sent to the Thames hulks.

63 King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 346–8Google Scholar. for the 1718 act see Beattie, , Crime and the courts, 503.Google Scholar

64 Colchester, E. R. O., Borough sessions books, 7. 4. 1766Google Scholar. Colchester did have a deeper judicial tradition than some of the other Essex boroughs. In the sixteenth century it had capital felony jurisdiction. Samaha, J., ‘Hanging for felony: the rule of law in Elizabethan Colchester’, Historical Journal 21(1978), 763–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 King, , ‘Prosecution associations’.Google Scholar The local movement to set up prosecution associations against horse theft seems to have begun in Suffolk in the early 1760s and to have spread into Essex in 1766, in the wake of the initiatives analysed here. I.J., 19. 9. 1761Google Scholar; Che.C., 22. 8. 1766.Google Scholar

66 Other initiatives may of course have gone unreported or unadvertised due to the lack of a local newspaper before 1764.

67 Brown, , ‘Colchester’, 155–60.Google Scholar

68 Ibid., 158.

69 Victims' occupations were not always given but they included four farmers, a farmer's servant, a barber, a shopkeeper, a blacksmith, a carter, an innkeeper, a butcher, a soapboiler, two clergymen, an attorney, an excise officer, two apprentices with Colchester masters (one was a bricklayer), a servant and a sailor. Only one report named a female as a victim.

70 I.J., 7. 12. 1765.Google Scholar

71 The area around Colchester was well endowed with heaths and woods and it was very difficult to find a route into the town that did not go through such an area.

72 I.J., 5. 10. 1765Google Scholar. ‘The fellows hid themselves in hedges one on each side and rushed out about three rods before Mr Stewart came up to them and seizing his horse's bridle pulled him off and in a whisper demanded his money…they wore long hairy false beards to disfigure themselves.’

73 Graber, D. A., Crime news and the public (New York, 1980), 47.Google Scholar

74 I.J., 23. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

75 Thompson, E. P., Whigs and hunters: the origins of the Black act (London, 1975), 194.Google Scholar

76 Ibid., 194–5.

77 For the evidence system see Langbein, J. H., ‘Shaping the eighteenth-century criminal trial: a view from the Ryder sources’, University of Chicago Law Review 50 (Winter 1983), 84–105.Google Scholar

78 Che.C., 22. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

79 Red wheat (per quarter) averaged 27.1 shillings 1760–1763, 34.5 August 1763 to August 1764, and 41.1 in the following harvest year. Prices based on London prices quoted in the Ipswich Journal, Norwich Mercury and Cambridge Chronicle.

80 Wheat prices reported in the Norwich Mercury were 27 per cent lower in April 1766 than in April 1765. The monthly average fell gradually from September 1765 until April 1766.

81 Williams, D. E., ‘Morals, markets and the English crowd in 1766’, Past and Present, 104 (08 1984), 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rude, G., The crowd in history (New York, 1964), 40–42.Google Scholar

82 Ibid., 40; Williams, , ‘Morals’, 65Google Scholar; Goodwyn, , Selections, 73Google Scholar; Che.C., 21. 11. 1766.Google Scholar

83 Although weaving work was increasingly confined to Colchester itself spinning remained an important source of income in the surrounding rural hundreds so that the whole area would be affected to some extent. Brown, , Essex at work, 2Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., 16; Che.C., 28. 2. 1783.Google Scholar

85 This analysis is based on a Bocking clothier's comments; see Brown, , Essex at work, 8.Google Scholar Colchester clothiers may have had a different experience. Brown mentions a cloth-manufacturing boom in Colchester in the 1760s but does not specify to which part of the decade he is referring.

86 King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 62 and 64–6.Google Scholar

87 1765 = 56, 1766 = 66.

88 The workhouse riots in Suffolk (I.J., 10. 8. 1765Google Scholar) may have raised anxieties in Essex but the Suffolk Poor-Law incorporations, whose activities had created these disturbances, had virtually no equivalents in Essex.

89 Che.C., 29. 11. 1765.Google Scholar

90 It is possible that other victims were traced but were reluctant to go to the trouble of bringing an indictment. However, multiple indictments were fairly common in the eighteenth century and it seems more likely that Butcher could not be linked to other Essex offences.

91 Sharpe, J. A., Crime in early modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1984), 111Google Scholar. McMullan, J. L., The canting crew. London's criminal underworld 1550–1700 (New Jersey, 1984), 2.Google Scholar

92 Sharpe, , Crime in early modern England, 106–7Google Scholar; King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 135–6.Google Scholar

93 Although lifestories tend to overemphasise the offenders' full-time commitment to crime (Ibid., 140) even in these documents the associations formed by highway robbers are usually portrayed as short-term. Sharpe, , Crime in early modern England, 108.Google Scholar For an exception Che.C., 5. 3. 1784.Google Scholar

94 King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 137.Google Scholar

95 Cranfield, , The development, 245–54.Google Scholar

96 Cranfield, , The press and society, 186.Google Scholar

97 The Essex quarter sessions bench recognised this by using the Ipswich Journal to advertise its formal pronouncements, e.g. I.J., 9. 2. 1760.Google Scholar For a more detailed analysis of this circulation war and of the development of the Chelmsford Chronicle between 1764 and 1800 see King, P., ‘Newspaper development in eighteenth-century Essex’ (forthcoming).Google Scholar

98 Che.C., 10. 8. 1764.Google Scholar

99 The paper had been going for more than a quarter of a century; see Watson, S. F., ‘The history of printing and publishing in Ipswich’, in Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 24 (1949), 202–7.Google Scholar

100 For the need for fillers in peacetime see the comments of the printer in Che.C., 11.8. 86.

101 Wiles, , Freshest advices, 172Google Scholar; three quarters of the Ipswich Journal was devoted to advertisements. Cranfield, , The press and society, 185Google Scholar; I.J., 20. 2. 1762Google Scholar for an announcement that the printers were ‘obliged to leave out many advertisements this week and also to abridge several others for want of room, notwithstanding the present scarcity of news has left us at liberty to fill up a greater part of our paper with them than we desire’.

102 ‘The profits of a newspaper arise only from the Advertisements’ one printer commented in 1797. Cranfield, , The press and society, 184.Google Scholar

103 Wiles, , Freshest advices, 25.Google Scholar

104 Hassall's, name first appears on the paper in Che.C., 28. 6. 1765Google Scholar. Strupar's disappears Che.C., 25. 10. 1765Google Scholar just before the beginning of the crime wave.

105 Che.C., 28. 5. 1765Google Scholar, 12. 7. 1765.

106 Che.C., 5. 7. 1765Google Scholar; 12. 7. 1765; as early as May 1765 they were claiming to be printing 2,000 copies and to ‘pass the inspection of 20,000 people’ but this figure seems wholly unrealistic being nearly equivalent to the size of the entire literate adult population of the county Che.C., 28. 5. 1765.Google Scholar

107 King, , ‘Newspaper development’.Google Scholar

108 Che.C., 12. 7. 1765.Google Scholar

109 Che.C., 24. 1. 1766.Google Scholar

110 91 per cent of the advertisements about stolen goods placed in the Chelmsford Chronicle 1764–1765 came from the Chelmsford hundred or from hundreds immediately adjacent to it.

111 Che.C., 7.2. 1766.Google Scholar

112 Che.C., 22. 11. 1765Google Scholar. This passage was specifically highlighted by the use of italics.

113 The Chelmsford Chronicle's printer may also have been upset by the fact that all the five individual advertisements about lost or stolen goods (mainly horses) placed by Colchester area residents during November and December 1765 had gone to the Ipswich paper.

114 A small minority related to unspecified travellers who had easily rebuffed their assailant.

115 When the two papers reported the same unresolved crime one did not simply copy the other. The accounts differ in many minor details such as the value of the goods stolen or the precise occupational status of the victim but when put together the two sets of reports strongly confirm all the main elements of each story.

116 Davis, ‘The London garotting’. For penal policy and moral panics in the nineteenth century see also Sindall, R., ‘The effect of the media on urban courts’ (paper given to the Urban History Conference 1986).Google Scholar

117 Neither the Cambridge Chronicle nor the Norwich Mercury carried crime reports from this area in November and December 1765 and I have not yet found any London papers that did so.

118 The 1862 crime wave did; see Davis, , ‘The London garotting’.Google Scholar In the London based events of the 1860s, ‘moral entrepreneurs’ are easily recognizable in reports of contemporary debates about penal policy. In Colchester in 1765 there may have been a debate on the borough court bench about similar issues at the local level, but we know very little about these decision-making processes and debates such as these, if they occurred, were never recorded. It is possible that the Colchester bench had its ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who used the aftermath of the 1765 crime wave to push for tougher sentencing policies, but the eighteenth-century sources offer no concrete support for such a view, and given the very different nature of politics, policing and newspaper reporting by the mid-nineteenth century it may not be possible to apply the lable ‘moral entrepreneur’ in any useful way a century earlier.

119 Fishman, , ‘Crime waves’.Google Scholar

120 Ibid., 114.

121 The pattern would have been even more similar but for the interruption caused by a presidential election. Ibid., 101.

122 Ibid., 101, 114.

123 Hall, , Policing the Crisis, 71Google Scholar. The number of alleged robberies reported to the police rose from 2 in September 1862, to 12 in October. They reached a peak of 32 in November before falling away to 14 in December and 2 in January 1863. Davis, , ‘The London garotting’, 205–7Google Scholar. This study does not present any statistics about numbers of newspaper reports.

124 Fishman, , ‘Crime waves’, 112.Google Scholar

125 Hall, , Policing the crisis, 71.Google Scholar

126 Ibid., indicates the importance of such an approach.

127 Fishman also points out that although the media can identify a ‘crime theme’, a unifying idea they want to develop in their selection and presentation of crime news, such themes do not become ‘crime waves’ unless there is a continuous supply of incidents that can be seen as instances of the theme. This way of thinking about crime reporting offers support to the view put forward here that the 1765 crime wave would not have occurred without both the desire of the Chelmsford Chronicle's printer to develop such a theme and a supply of actual incidents which could at least be interpreted as robberies, although only some of them may actually have been intended as such. Ibid. 105–11.

128 Cranfield, , The development, 29.Google Scholar

129 Ibid., 81.

130 Ibid., 150.

131 The admission made by the Chelmsford Chronicle halfway through the crime wave that they had got much of Leach's story wrong would have made it clear that the reports were not always to be trusted.

132 See footnotes 6 and 7. In 1800 the Chelmsford Chronicle was clearly considering whether to ‘withold that painful information which we are daily receiving of fires in this country’. Che.C., 13. 10. 1800.Google Scholar

133 The distribution of riots in northern Essex in the late eighteenth century has recently formed part of the evidence cited in the Wells-Charlesworth debate; see Charles-worth, A., ‘The development of the English rural proletariat and social protest, 1700–1850: A comment’, Journal of peasant studies, 106–9Google Scholar, but some of the difficulties of using this kind of evidence to support the view that agricultural workers ‘rarely participated’ in food riots can be seen from the map of 1793–1796 riots found in this study. In north-east Essex the riots in the local market town, Saffron Walden, are acknowledged but those that took place in the relatively isolated agricultural parishes of Great Chesterford and Hadstock(E.R.O.Q/SPb. 17, October 1795 and January 1796) are not.

134 Hay, D., ‘War, dearth and theft in the eighteenth century: the record of the English courts’, Past and Present, 95 (May 1982), 135–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

135 Ibid., 156.

136 Cranfield, , The development, 93.Google Scholar

137 King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 32–3Google Scholar. Hay, , ‘War, dearth and theft’, 145.Google Scholar

138 Che.C., 19. 4. 1782Google Scholar; 4. 10. 1782. King, , ‘Crime, law and society’, 392–3.Google Scholar

139 Davis, , ‘The London garotting’.Google Scholar The 1782 reports coincided with important changes in penal policy and this issue will be explored in more detail in King, P., Crime, justice and discretion. Law and society in Essex and south-eastern England 1740–1820 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

140 The extent to which newspapers were used to reinforce the majesty of the law and to school the common people ‘in the lessons of Justice, Terror and Mercy’ (Hay, D., ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’ in Hay, D. et al. eds., Albion's Fatal Tree (London, 1975), 63Google Scholar, also requires investigation. The impact of newspaper coverage has been largely ignored so far by all the contributors to the debate about the role of the criminal law in eighteenth-century social relations; ibid.; Langbein, J., ‘Albion's fatal flaws’, Past and Present 98 (February 1983), 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, P., ‘Decision-makers and decision-making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800’, Historical Journal 27, 1 (1984), 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Chelmsford Chronicle detailed reports of assize sermons and judges' remarks seem to have only become important during the 1790s.