History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | crime

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The Forty Elephants – a forgotten female gang of South London

Last year Emily Burgess produced an outstanding dissertation on the all-female working-class gang from South London known as the Forty elephants.  Here she writes about how she came up with the idea and carried out the research, with Rob James as supervisor.  Emily concludes with some useful advice for all our students currently writing proposals for their third-year dissertation.  Emily has since set up her own consultancy for historical research and consultancy – see our previous post. From a young age I was fascinated by criminal history. My grandmother and family from the East End of London would often tell me tales about the Krays and other villainous figures from […]

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Not so merry England: a Swiss visitor comments on Elizabethan criminal justice

English people tend to think highly of our long-established legal system.  But as second-year student Liam Fisher explains, visitors from Europe didn’t always see things the same way.  Liam’s blog is based on work he did for the second-year module: Underworlds: Crime Deviance and Punishment: 1500-1900, taught by Fiona McCall and Brad Beaven. The English justice system during the early-modern period was iconic both socially and politically, ingrained into English culture and minds as something to be proud of. While the wider European population were no strangers to barbaric forms of punishment, the extent of English glorification and creativity of punishment would no doubt come as a shock to outsiders.  […]

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Cut-throat communities, angry noblemen, and a noseless pirate! My journey through the joys and horrors of writing a dissertation

Below, the first of a series on this year’s bumper crop of student dissertations, from my own supervisee Tom Underwood.  Tom was one of the most prepared and organised students I’ve ever supervised, but as he mentions below, also still honing his dissertation down to the wire, and we were blown away with the results.  Tom is planning to continue onto an MRes, where his impressive skills at reading early modern handwriting, and patience with sifting his way through basement archives should come to further good use. – ed Whether its Errol Flynn’s smooth-talking Captain Blood, or Johnny Depp’s rum-soaked Jack Sparrow, the pirate occupies a special place within popular […]

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