Shaping the reception of trials in late 17th-century Old Bailey Proceedings: A corpus-assisted discourse study

In the second half of the 17th century the interest in crime news was enhanced by the appearance of the Old Bailey Trial Proceedings as a specialised periodical publication recounting trial narratives in a condensed form. Despite their formulaic character, the Old Bailey Proceedings provided middle- and upper-class readers with an insight into the dynamics of the courtroom and were therefore important vehicles for the dissemination of specialised knowledge. In my study I adopt a corpus-assisted discourse approach in order to identify collocational patterns around key words and investigate their role in the construction of meaning and ideology in discourse. Findings show that while most of the accounts encode the reporter’s alignment with the jury’s decision, some occasionally go offscript by problematising the logical coherence between evidence and verdict through a skilful packaging of the information which ultimately challenges the myth of an infallible justice system.