The Old Bailey in Numbers
Two Centuries of London Trials, Juries and Verdicts

About this book:

Two hundred thousand lives. Two hundred and forty years. One extraordinary dataset. *The Old Bailey in Numbers* transforms the world's largest continuous record of criminal trials into a riveting, data-driven portrait of justice in the making. From the Bloody Code's paper severity to the jury box's quiet rebellion, from the economics of a stolen spoon to the geography of a growing metropolis, this book reveals what anecdotes cannot: the daily, grinding reality of a legal system negotiating order in the world's first industrial city.

Forget the highwaymen and the gothic melodramas. The numbers show a court overwhelmingly occupied with property—servants pilfering silver, apprentices snatching cloth, the hungry pawning the borrowed. They expose the "pious perjury" of jurors who deliberately undervalued stolen goods to spare defendants the gallows, the surge in prosecutions that followed every war's end and every grain shortage, and the moment defense counsel turned seven-minute summaries into day-long battles. Here are the shifting fates of women and children, the rise of the Met and the fall of transportation, the birth of the prison, and the slow, messy invention of modern justice—all quantified with precision and narrated with force.

This is history at scale, but never at the expense of the human. Behind every data point lies a fractured household, a desperate choice, a life interrupted. By mapping two centuries of trials, verdicts, and mercies, *The Old Bailey in Numbers* restores agency to the thousands whose names never made the broadsides but whose collective passage through the dock forged the law we live under today. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how justice actually works—and how it came to be this way.