For their second-year Working with the Past project, UoP history students Daniel Rickler and Sebastian Burgess chose to research the history of crime and punishment in Hampshire. In contemporary Britain, we have moved beyond the need to deter crime through humiliation, physical punishment and execution. But as we look to Hampshire from the 1600s onwards, we see a brutal and bloody history including, in Portsmouth in 1782, the last person to be hung, drawn and quartered for treason. Daniel and Sebastian examined both the wider policies of government and individual cases alongside the ritualistic nature of these punishments, to show how unnecessary they were and how far we’ve evolved. Both […]
Tag Archives | capital punishment
Criminal punishments in Devon, 1598-1638
In the second-year UoP history module, Underworlds: Crime, Deviance & Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900, taught by Dr Fiona McCall and Professor Brad Beaven, students study the history of crime and punishment between 1500 and 1900. Students can take this option on a range of courses at Portsmouth, including History, Criminology and English Literature. In this blog post, based on his work for the module, second year UoP history student Edward Sainsbury discusses what can be learned from a detailed table of statistics on sentences given to criminals at the Devonshire assizes and quarter sessions courts between 1598 and 1638. Over the course of an almost 30-year period almost 10,000 punishments […]