The Prosecution of Heresy in the Henrician Reformation (Paul Cavill) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2024.2320968
Abstract:
At the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, the prosecution of heresy was based on three statutes of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Under this system, the Church tried the crime with the assistance of secular authority. Juries presented suspects, whose cases were then transferred to the church courts for determination. In 1532, the Supplication against the Ordinaries challenged the conduct of heresy trials. It invoked common-law principles about due process and standards of proof. Two years later, a new statute modified the system, although less drastically than had been proposed. The royal supremacy and new religious policies changed the context in which heresy was prosecuted. Up until 1539, however, the church courts still determined accusations. Thereafter, in the case of specified heresies, the Act of Six Articles made lay juries responsible for determining guilt or innocence. Commissions under this act combined elements of canon law and common law. These reforms were, however, not seen to have improved the conduct of heresy trials. It proved easier to criticize the traditional method of prosecution than to devise a better one.
More Than a Species of Larceny: Fraud Laws and Their Uses in the Eighteenth Century (Cerian Griffiths) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2024.2320967
Abstract:
This article explores the under-researched area of fraud in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fraud offences rarely feature in criminal law historiography, and where they do, they are positioned as an afterthought to theft and forgery. This article redresses this oversight and presents an in-depth analysis of eighteenth-century jurisprudence around frauds, providing a long-overdue mapping of the most common offences within this diffuse area of law. This article reveals the ways in which fraud offences were situated in the wider criminal law, and how frauds interacted with other property offences. This article maps the contours of the emerging modern offence of fraud, and in doing so makes the case for a rethinking of the significance of the criminal law of fraud and its place in the development of the modern criminal law. Finally, by assessing the ways in which fraud straddled the line between felony and misdemeanour, this article provides a lens through which to better understand eighteenth and early nineteenth century criminal procedure.
Abstract:
For much of the twentieth century, the standard characterization of the relationship between the English common law metropole and the Dominion periphery has been one of the subservience and deference of the latter to the former. While the relationship was hierarchical, such characterizations undersell the innovation and ambition that the periphery, working within imperial legal constraints, could bring to the shared common law of the empire. This article considers the introduction of survival of actions legislation in two Australian jurisdictions, South Australia and Victoria, in the early 1940s. While based on the antecedent English legislation, both jurisdictions toyed with – and in South Australia’s case delivered – a much wider reform than took place in England. Rather than being mechanical recipients of law crafted in the metropole, Australian jurisdictions were well able to decide whether the English model was the best reform for their common law.
Scottish Legal History Group Report 2023
Migrations of Manuscripts 2023 (John Baker)
Book reviews:
- Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law: Essays in Comparative Legal History from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Centuries edited by William Eves, John Hudson, Ingrid Ivarsen and Sarah B. White, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, x + 338pp, £85.00 (hardback, also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core and in paperback), ISBN: 978-1-108-92512-9 (Joyman Lee)
- Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400–1700 by Ron Harris, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020, xi + 465 pp. (including index), £40 (hardback), ISBN 9780691150772 (Jonathan Hardman)
- Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581, by Jessica Winston; Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe, by Julie Stone Peters; Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts. 1670–1792, by Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, vii & 270 pp., £20 (paperback), ISBN 9780192872326; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, xiv & 350 pp., £70 (hardback), ISBN 9780192898494; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, xii & 326 pp., £70 (hardback), ISBN 9780192846150 (Ian Ward)
- Palles: The Legal Legacy of the Last Lord Chief Baron, edited by Oonagh B. Breen and Noel McGrath, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2022, 256 pp (including index), €55.00/£50.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781801510356 (Richard McBride)
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