Reviews

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews

Since almost before its publication, Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class has been a historical classic. Thompson owes something to the French Annalistes, to the 1960's excursions into folklore and oral history, to regional and local studies, even to the new ecological awareness. In his new book he moves backward in time to the early 18th century, to the forests and woodlands and the proliferation of statutes by which the yeomen, laborers and small freeholders who slew the royal deer, lashed in the private ponds of the gentry, hunted small game and otherwise supplemented their livelihood from the forest, could be fined, transported and hanged. Thompson's starting point is the 1723 Black Act, a spectacular piece of legislation which created, in one fell swoop, fifty new capital crimes. With some astonishment Thompson reports on the disinterest historians have evinced in the law which inaugurated what he calls ""the floodgate of 18th century retributive justice."" Painstakingly working from the scant surviving evidence, Thompson reconstructs the network of spies and agents provocateurs used by Walpole's government to extirpate the ""Blacks"" (poachers and farmers who used blackface disguises to hunt, forage, and intimidate keepers) of Windsor and Hampshire Forest. The quest leads him to the intricate ""forest bureaucracy,"" perquisites and bribes, and a ruthless Whig offense against the forest population, gradually criminalized in 18th century law. When Thompson peers at Walpole (""England's first and least lovely prime minister"") he sees a smarmy Metternich or Kissinger. The forest population, while neither Rohin Hoods nor Vietcong guerrillas, somehow breach the two traditions. Certainly they were an unreconstructed element in the smoothly functioning Whig machine. Thompson, despite the characteristic modesty of all his writings, can't resist thumbing his nose at Professor J. H. Plumb and other admirers and apologists of Whiggery. His account of ""this statute in blood"" is history written ""from below""--small wonder that the perspective is ""treasonable.

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews

Five distinguished British historians gather around Tybum Tree to witness ""the moral drama of the gallows""--the climactic moment of 18th century criminal justice. England, during this period, boasted one of the bloodiest criminal codes in Europe. The gallows tree was the perfect symbol of a system of authority which ultimately rested on terror. This, needless to say, is not the conventional interpretation of the majesty and impartiality of British law--contrasted throughout the century to arbitrary Continental systems with their censors, police spies and lettres de cachet. Hay begins by noting that between 1688 and 1820 the number of statutory crimes increased from 50 to 200; many of them were capital offenses. In a brilliant essay on the ideology behind the hangman, he argues that the English ruling class was embarked on a ""radical redefinition of property"" whereby previously innocent or venial acts were criminalized. Other essays examine the clash of popular ideas of social justice with the absolute claims of property as reflected in the myths of the offenders--the poachers, smugglers and highwaymen who became heroes of broadsides, ballads and local uprisings. The contributors, who include John G. Rule, Peter Linebaugh, Cai Winslow and E. P. Thompson, explore attitudes to hangmen and gibbeters; the riotous carnival atmosphere which prevailed at executions; speeches from the dock; petitions for pardon and the attempts by friends of the condemned man to rescue the body from the agents of physicians and surgeons who snatched corpses for anatomical dissection. It's a remarkable book, one which brings to life the violent Hogarthian world and the endemic guerrilla battles between the lower classes and the men of property who resisted all attempts to rationalize the legal code because they well understood that a judicious mixture of paternalism, terror, caprice and mystery was needed to keep ""loose and disorderly persons"" at bay. As one jurist of the period reminded his brethren, ""physical strength lies in the governed.

User reviews

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England

User Review - Shelley - Goodreads

This book is a reprint of some very important essays in the legal and social history of the 18th century. They range from wrecking law to anonymous letters to smuggling to surgeons' riots. If you dig ... Read full review

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England

User Review - Richard Spilman - Goodreads

My favorite history of the bizarre eighteenth century attitude toward crime in England. We all "know" that tens of thousands of people must have been executed during the eighteenth century, since ... Read full review

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree

User Review - Jonathan - Goodreads

Worth reading for the anecdotes of 18th Century English working class life alone. Of course, underlying the countless accounts of trials, shipwrecks, poachers, and bodies of hanged felons being ... Read full review

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England

User Review - Jane Walker - Goodreads

This is a reprint of a book first published in 1975. It's a collection of essays produced by a group of social historians at Warwick University, including EP Thompson. They examine what can be learned ... Read full review

Review: Albion's Fatal Tree

User Review - Seong Min - Goodreads

There was (probably still is) only a thin line between good and bad criminals. Proliferation of capital punishment in the eighteenth-century England made laws arbitrary, serving the interest of the propertied: an example of absurdity made practical. Read full review