Phillip Taylor MBE review. Jacks, Knaves and Vagabonds

BOOK REVIEW

JACKS, KNAVES AND VAGABONDS
Crime, Law, and Order in Tudor England

By Gregory J Durston

ISBN 978 1 90997 676 4

WATERSIDE PRESS
Putting justice into words

www.watersidepress.co.uk



AN ENERGETIC SUMMARY OF CRIMINAL LAW IN TUDOR TIMES

An appreciation by Elizabeth Robson Taylor MA of Richmond Green Chambers and Phillip Taylor MBE, Head of Chambers, Reviews Editor, “The Barrister”, and Mediator

Any lawyers and historians who hold an interest in the history of the Tudor period will relish this excellent new statement on what we know of the criminal process at that point in our history. Waterside Press, with its slogan “putting justice into words” have published this fascinating account about criminal legal history in Tudor times. It is called “Jacks, Knaves and Vagabonds”, with the subtitle “Crime, Law, and Order in Tudor England”. It has been written by a barrister, Gregory J Durston.


We find this book to be a welcome addition to Durston’s “Crime History Series”. He points to what he describes as “the lack of design and short-term expediency that typified Tudor law and order”. But Durston also identifies from rather limited sources “an emergent criminal justice system amidst royal patronage, protection, and the influence of wealthy magnates”. Throughout this meticulously researched book, the sources are both sporadic and peripheral in places, reliant on sometimes unreliable personal notes from the law-givers of the time.

We feel that students of English history will have heard some of the procedures of the time which Durston sets out. They include some curiosities such as “how benefit of clergy and the ‘neck verse’ might avoid a hanging”. Also, “other stratagems such as down-valuing stolen goods, cruentation, chance medley, pious perjury or John at Death (a non-existent culprit blamed by the accused and treated by juries as real)”. Frankly, all these rather sickening devices used to “mitigate the all-pervading death-for-felony rule” illustrate the sordid and horrendous methods of so-called “crime, law and order” of the time: quite obnoxious for 2020 values.

Durston also reviews “other artifices deployed by courts” which aimed to make its way around the “black-letter law” of the time. The author also set out in very readable modern prose how the poor, the marginalized and the illiterate citizenry were those most likely to suffer the cruelty of Tudor unfairness, injustice, and draconian punishment: certainly no glamour with the emphasis on the sordid, the nasty, the brutish and the short lives so many lived at that time

We did like the commentary on the political intrigue and widescale corruption so symptomatic of the era. Durston examines such diverse aspects as “forfeiture of property, evidential ploys, the rise of the highwayman, religious persecution, witchcraft, and infanticide crazes”.

It was a time of shifting allegiances with the Crown in Tudor England. The institutions of the church, judiciary, magistry, and officialdom “wrestled over their jurisdictions” at central or local level.

Durston describes ‘ungodly customs’, laws of convenience or malleable definitions in a most “matter of fact” way, writing that “never perhaps were facts or law so expertly engineered to justify or defend often curious outcomes”. Such were the priorities and processes of that time. His Crime History Series covers the length of the Tudor period, basing it on first-hand historical research which is fully referenced to hundreds of sources, and making it a great read for lawyers and historians.

The date of publication of this paperback edition is cited as 2nd September 2020.