Crime and Trial Reporting

Crime and trial reports are a staple ingredient of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print news culture. They feature in almost every form of news print, from occasional pamphlets to newsbooks and newspapers and have been investigated from different methodological perspectives by press historians and news linguists. Although not all countries in the British Isles shared the same very high degree of interest in stories of crime and justice as England and its capital, recent research has shown that printed news informed and constructed public knowledge of criminality and had an impact on the making of the law and the administration. In order to underline the prominent role of crime and trial news reports in shaping the social notion of crime, the paper takes as its focus periodical publications and occasional pamphlets between 1640 and 1800. Different forms of crime news presentation are investigated in terms of participants, deed and punishment. Given the degree of interrelatedness among genres, references are also made to specialised periodicals (the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary Accounts), which from the end of the seventeenth century inform crime and trial accounts. The case study at the end of the chapter is devoted to the press coverage of the murder of the Archbishop of St. Andrews in 1679. The crime news was reported in pamphlets and weeklies throughout the kingdom. The London account was reprinted in Dublin but not in Edinburgh where a different crime version of the murder was published to confute the account coming from the capital.