CRIME

Pieter Spierenburg

In the past, no less than today, crime has been seen as a problem and contemporaries have expressed concern about it. Notions of what is criminal and what is not, however, vary over time. These variations are related to changes in both social structure and the material environment. Obviously, an offense like reckless driving can only exist in a world with cars. Similarly, sorcery can only be a crime in a society in which belief in magic is widespread. And the variability of the content of crime extends further. The definition of morals offenses changed as ideas about sexuality and gender and notions of privacy changed. Homosexual activities involving adult men, for example, ceased to be illegal in most European countries since the nineteenth century. Although stealing another's property and assaulting a person are unlawful in almost any society, the meaning and context of these actions greatly differ with time and place. In less developed, feudal regions, for example, cattle rustling was not primarily a means to enrich oneself but a challenge to the power of a rural patron and a test of his capacity for protecting his people and goods. Crime, then, is not a single, straightforward social category but rather a multifaceted phenomenon. Consequently, the historical study of criminality is not just about what some people actually do but also about perceptions, attitudes, and cultural stereotypes.

DEFINITIONS AND SOURCES

Most historians adopt a practical definition of crime, which reflects its diversity. With minor variations in terminology, they define crime as illegal behavior which, if detected and prosecuted, can be punished in a court of law or by some other official agency of law enforcement. Thus crime is simply anything forbidden by the secular authorities. When they determine that blasphemy can be prosecuted and punished in court, it is a crime; should they decide that burglary is no longer punishable, it would not be a crime. Any other definition would be based on the investigator's own sense of right and wrong, bringing the danger of anachronism. Of course, contemporaries never unequivocally agreed with the authorities' demarcation of the range of punishable offenses. Investigating the extent to which various social groups had different views of what is wrong and what is not is an important subject within the historiography of crime. Finally, our definition is not restricted to behavior actually prosecuted: it includes those acts which remain undetected, the so-called dark number.

This practical or institutional definition means that illegality is the sole characteristic all crimes have in common. Criminality is a "container concept." Hence few studies deal with total crime, and if they do, they break it down into categories again. This applies to qualitative as well as quantitative studies. It is not very meaningful to add up figures for theft, fornication, and insulting policemen and present them as a total crime rate. This would be like adding, without specification, corn prices and tax returns and calling them an "economic figure." The diversity of criminal activities also has a distinct advantage: there is a very broad range of historical studies which all, in one way or another, belong to the historiography of crime. Because of the broad range of criminal activities, it is impossible to present a neat chronological account, with crime being like this in the sixteenth century in Scandinavia, Germany, or England, like that in the seventeenth, and so on to the twentieth. The treatment must necessarily be thematic, pointing at change along the way.

By definition, crime is intimately related to the state. Through criminal legislation and court action, the state demarcates the borders of lawful and unlawful behavior. Historically, this implies a parallel relationship between processes of state formation and criminalization. It is only when stronger states emerged that the perception of wrongful acts changed. A number of harmful activities were gradually redefined as being not merely conflicts between private individuals but directed against the state as well. Henceforth they were a breach of the peace, offending the sovereign. While "classical offenses" like theft and assault were thus redefined, a number of newly created offenses—smuggling, begging, prostitution—were included in this category. Consequently, the activities in question came to be listed under the same heading as crimes. This process extended over a long period, but for most of Europe the sixteenth century was the crucial period of transition. We can term this the beginning of criminalization: the creation of the category of crime itself. From the beginning of the period with which this encyclopedia deals, then, crime was a reality, albeit a reality defined from above.

Crime is what you find when you study court records. In the tradition of legal history, criminal records are studied, if at all, as a supplement to legislative sources. To the legal historian, laws and statutes are of primary interest, and the courts' activities are merely the application of the rules. Social historians, by contrast, are interested in court records because crime is a mirror of society. It reflects, among other things, relations between social classes, submerged tensions, the position of immigrants versus natives, gender relations, and structural change over the long term. More particularly, court records are one of the few sources dealing almost exclusively with common people. They reveal things about the way of life of ordinary men and women, not just of the lawbreakers among them but also their families and neighbors. From the beginning, therefore, the study of historical crime received an impetus from the fashion of writing "history from below." Whereas the first generation of crime historians (from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s) was especially concerned with either the quantitative analysis of property crime or particular offenses which revealed social tensions, the second generation (from the late 1980s) preferred violence over property crime, focusing on issues of ritual, honor and shame, and gender.

The extent to which such issues can be studied in depth depends on the quality of the sources. Much of the earlier work on England, for example, has been done with so-called indictments: brief statements in which the defendant's offense is defined in legal terms and not much more. The prevalence of these documents follows from a peculiarity of the English criminal trial, which remained largely accusatory (allowing only private prosecution by a wronged party) until the early nineteenth century and was based on a jury system. Whereas continental procedure was largely based on written records, the oral element remained more important in England. The main part of the English trial was public and oral before the jury. Examination documents merely served to bolster the prosecution's case at this oral trial and were considered of little worth afterward. Few of these documents have survived. However, later British historians discovered that extensive trial papers have been preserved of some of the lower courts, dealing with neighborly conflicts in urban neighborhoods and rural communities. On the Continent, interrogation protocols have been preserved for many of the higher courts as well, due to the greater importance attached to the written dossier in countries such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Incidentally, a Dutch sentence of the early modern period is the opposite of an English indictment: it says what the defendant actually did, often without legally defining the offense.

The records of criminal trials are not the only sources for the historical study of crime. Prison records exist in several countries from the seventeenth century onward, but these are primarily valuable for the history of punishment. When we deal with perceptions of criminality, the contemporary crime literature is an important source, available from the late seventeenth century. From the nineteenth century onward, newspaper accounts inform us about individual cases, but they can also be used to provide supplementary data for quantitative studies. In the twentieth century, finally, police records constitute a source of major importance.

Although no standard categorization of crimes, approved by all scholars, exists, it is common to distinguish four general categories: (1) violence, or crimes against the person; (2) crimes against property, from theft and fraud to robbery; (3) morals offenses, punished either by secular or church courts; and (4) a residual category of offenses against authority, the state, or public order. Historians whose research goes back further in time often add a separate class of religious offenses, such as heresy and blasphemy. With the exception of the third category, especially when prosecution for prostitution was intense, men constituted the majority of offenders. It should be stressed, however, that male preponderance in criminality is much greater in the twentieth century than it was before. In early modern Europe, women often made up 30 to 40 percent of offenders; their share in theft could be considerable. From the late seventeenth century onward, the proportion of women tried in court gradually declined.

PROPERTY CRIME AND THE PROBLEM OF QUANTIFICATION

Quantitative studies of crime mainly deal with violence, in particular homicide, and various types of property offenses. Major issues include the proportional share of categories of offenses, temporary peaks and lows in criminality, trends in property and violent crime, and urbanization and crime. The first of these issues led to the oldest thesis in the historiography of crime. It was developed in the 1960s and early 1970s by French historians, who spoke of a shift de la violence au vol, from violence to theft. They argued that the feudal code of honor led to a preponderance of violent offenses, while the central place of the market in bourgeois society produced a larger share of property offenses. Society still was rough and rife with emotions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in the eighteenth a more pacified and commercialized society emerged. In this view, the modernization of crime took place during the eighteenth century, as a concomitant of the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois society.

Since the late 1970s, the thesis of a shift from violent to property offenses has been under attack. Although the data from France appear to be congruous with it, a later generation of French historians doubted whether these data reflected a shift in real crime. For one thing, the violence-to-theft thesis refers to the ratios of criminal categories rather than the absolute rates; it is about the share of the two categories of offenses in the total criminal caseload of particular courts. This share is mainly the outcome of decisions at the judicial level; it has to do with the priorities of courts. The courts of prerevolutionary Paris, for example, eagerly prosecuted theft of even the smallest item of food, while they cared less for fights among men and women of the lower classes. It is more likely, therefore, that late-eighteenth-century France witnessed an increase in concern for the protection of property than a peak in real property crime.

Finally, the violence-to-theft pattern has not been found in other countries of early modern Europe. In England property offenses accounted for a large share of the courts' business already in the 1590s, in some cases amounting to three-quarters of all indictments. The proportion of property offenses declined as the seventeenth century progressed, and it remained low during most of the eighteenth. Only in the last decades of the eighteenth century did the prosecution of property offenses again reach the level of the late sixteenth. In Amsterdam the proportion of property offenses rose steadily from about 30 percent in 1650 to about 45 percent in 1750. However, since total prosecuted criminality dropped sharply in this period, the rate of property offenses actually declined. It rose again, also elsewhere in the Netherlands, at the very end of the eighteenth century. With converging data from France, England, and the Netherlands, this last trend appears international: ratios and rates of property offenses peaked toward the end of the early modern period.

Determining crime rates. The French studies upon which the violence-to-theft thesis was based remained confined to the the ancien régime. However, for the quantitative study of crime in Europe, the main historical dividing line is between the prestatistical and the statistical periods. During the first half of the nineteenth century, most European countries began to compile criminal statistics. Only from then on is it possible to investigate crime rates on a national scale. Before that period, research is largely restricted to individual courts. The geographic scale constitutes the main difference, rather than the origin of the figures. Well into the twentieth century, national statistics were generally based on figures for prosecuted crimes. This was the case, for example, with the Prussian criminal statistics from 1836 to 1850. From 1857 English criminal statistics included information on main indictable offenses and figures for summary trials before a magistrate; the larger category of crimes known to the police was not reported nationally. The Swedish police did not keep statistics until 1949. Yet most historians accept the opinion of criminologists that every stage of the criminal justice process represents a distortion of the figures and that hence the figures at the first stage, crimes known to the police, are best.

With regard to the quantitative study of crime in both the early modern period and the nineteenth century, then, one methodological problem looms large. How do we know if the level of prosecuted crime reflects the level of real crime? Apart from having police reports available, modern criminologists supplement their statistics with data from victims' surveys. Historians, on the other hand, only have figures based on prosecuted cases. The problem is not the existence of a dark number as such, but the question of whether it remains constant. If the ratio of prosecuted to undetected thefts is always 4 to 2, for example, any increase or decrease in prosecuted theft represents a proportionate increase or decrease in real theft. However, such a situation is unlikely to prevail. If the number of prosecuted thefts rose in a year of hardship, for example, was this because people stole more often or because police and courts were particularly attentive in that year?

One of the earliest answers to that question was based on a negative argument: short-term fluctuations, if not too insignificant, may be taken as meaningful reflections of actual criminal activity, provided that they cannot be due to any legal, administrative, or other change taking immediate effect. This only applies to major fluctuations in crime and in years when the cited counterforces are absent. For the rest, there are two main tools for tackling the problem presented by the dark number. The first is a careful assessment of the influences upon the level of prosecution. For example, English historians emphasize that, in the course of the eighteenth century, concern among the public about the appropriateness of the death penalty for minor crimes against property increased, with a growing reluctance to report and prosecute these offenses as a consequence. This made the rate of indicted property crimes a poorer sample of actual property crime as the century wore on. The second tool is the attempt to look for other indicators to make one's assumptions about the incidence of real crime more plausible. During the crisis years 1771–1772 in Amsterdam, for example, the number of property offenses peaked. Simultaneously, the total amount spent by the various churches on poor relief and the total value of goods brought to the municipal pawn shop were considerably higher than in the years immediately preceding and following.

The two most systematic attempts by historians so far at counting real crime each elaborate one of the tools just mentioned. They refer to the prestatistical and the statistical period, respectively. In his 1982 article "War, Dearth, and Theft in the Eighteenth Century," Douglas Hay examined the impact of war and dearth upon the level of property crime, based on an analysis of Staffordshire cases in the eighteenth century. To distinguish the level of prosecuted from that of real property crime, he referred to the latter as "appropriation." The analysis focused on the influence of two factors, fluctuations in food prices and the alternation of periods of war and peace, upon the level of indictments for larcenies. The data clearly showed peaks in the level of indicted larcenies during the aftermath of war and in years of excessively high food prices.

To show that these peaks reflected increases in the amount of appropriation, Hay argued by way of deduction. In hard years, he noted, poverty was an acute affliction rather than a routine experience for a greater number of people. Consequently, he expected not simply more appropriation in those years but also a change in the nature of the offenses and the offenders. These expectations proved true. Among the offenders, for example, the proportion of women increased in years of high prices, suggesting that more people who did not otherwise run the risk of appearing before the courts stole in those years. The offenses included a disproportionate amount of lesser charges, rather than capital crimes, and the sort of appropriation committed without much planning increased in frequency. A parallel argument pertained to the alternation between war and peace. Demobilization increased the number of men who were likely to resort to appropriation. In the aftermath of war, then, one would expect the proportion of serious property crime to rise, and indeed professionally committed thefts predominated and the number of women decreased. The traditional factors influencing the level of indicted offenses, such as the formation of associations for the prosecution of felons, were unlikely to have operated to any special extent in years of dearth or following wars.

This analysis has a wider relevance. Studies done in other European countries have revealed similar patterns with respect to peaks and lows in property crime. Even though the data precluded a refined methodological analysis along the lines just described, we may assume that, parallel to the English case, peaks in prosecuted property offenses reflected peaks in appropriation. Generally, years of dearth were years of increased property crime throughout Europe, well into the nineteenth century. Regarding the aftermath of war, matters were a little more complicated. Unlike England, continental countries did not simply send away soldiers and navy men and take them back again. Notably in regions where military operations were held, war itself could equally lead to increases in vagabondage and appropriation, in particular by deserters. For the local population, to be sure, it may have made little difference whether they suffered from robbery by deserters or pillage by regular soldiers.

For the statistical period, V. A. C. Gatrell (1980) assessed the influences upon the level of prosecution over a longer term rather than in peak years. He dealt with property crime and serious violence, two types of offenses about whose heinous character and the desirability of a reaction there was widespread consensus during the period he investigated. In England and Wales, prosecutions for these crimes peaked in the 1840s, but from about 1850 until 1914 the rates, relative to the population, steadily declined. The national scale and longer term of this decline ruled out any influence of incidental or local circumstances. Only two important factors remained: the efficiency and determination of police and courts on the one hand and citizens' cooperation with the law on the other. Both factors had a steadily increasing impact throughout the nineteenth century. As a consequence, the dark number must have steadily decreased, or, as Gatrell put it, recorded and real crime converged. For the period from 1800 to 1850, when recorded crime rose sharply, this convergence can be consistent with either an increase or a decrease in real crime. For the period from 1850 to 1914, however, it necessarily implied that actual crime rates declined even more rapidly than the statistical record indicated. Although the method is adequate, Gatrell's "convergence principle" has a limited applicability. It only works when the efficiency and determination of police and courts and citizens' cooperation with the law are increasing, and it only leads to a meaningful conclusion when recorded crime rates decline or at least stay constant.

Again, these British findings have a clear relevance for other European countries, several of which appear to have partaken of the decrease in prosecutions for property crime since the middle of the nineteenth century. In Prussia, for example, prosecutions for theft started to decline in the 1850s. The rates for simple theft declined further in the statistics of imperial Germany from 1882 until 1914, although this trend was offset somewhat by a rise in other property offenses like embezzlement and fraud. In most of Europe, the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of expanding industry and rapid urbanization. Hence the data about criminality in this period are relevant for a debate about the "modernization" of crime, in which historians have engaged for long. The English and German figures contradict earlier notions that urbanization and industrialization brought about a greater preponderance and rising rates of property crime. Hence Eric Johnson (1995) argued against the thesis of Howard Zehr (1976), who stated that modernization led to an increasing preponderance of property crime, not only in Germany but also in France. Johnson believed that his own thesis, that modernization did not necessarily bring an increase in property crime, holds for Europe generally, but he admitted that more research, in various countries, is needed.

Informal handling of crime. This debate about "modernization" and crime refers to an early phase of urbanization and industrialization, roughly from the 1840s until the 1920s. In the course of the twentieth century, levels of crime, in particular property crime, increased again, especially since the 1960s. Throughout Europe, the level of prosecuted property crime in the second half of the twentieth century was much higher than in the early modern period, in absolute numbers of course but also relative to the total population. Part of the difference probably is real, as the opportunities for theft and fraud are so much greater in the modern world. Another part of the difference, however, is due to a combination of two factors characteristic of the early modern period: the lesser grip of police and courts on illegal behavior and the tendency of private individuals to solve their own problems. The result was that a lot of illegal behavior was dealt with informally at the community level. Historians commonly refer to this world of partly hidden crime and the reactions to it as the infrajudiciary.

Researchers discovered the world of the infrajudiciary because it occasionally surfaces in the judicial records themselves. Some defendants were charged by their neighbors with a long series of offenses, most of which dated back years. The last theft had finally prompted the victim to take legal action. Alternatively, it was simply mentioned that the defendant had a longer history of wrongdoing, which up to then the community had dealt with informally. A particularly illustrative example comes from a nonlegal source, the chronicle which the seventeenth-century yeoman Richard Gough wrote of his parish, Myddle:

But I must not forgett John Aston, because many in the Parish have reason to remember him. Hee was a sort of silly fellow, very idle and much given to stealing of poultry and small things. Hee was many times catched in the fact, and sometimes well cajoled by those that would trouble themselves noe further with him. Butt at last hee grew unsufferable, and made it his common practice to steal henns in the night and bring them to Shrewsbury, where hee had confederates to receive them att any time of night. Hee was att last imprisoned and indicted for stealing twenty-four cocks and henns. (Gough, 1981, p. 145)

John Aston's neighbors finally took him to court because he had become "unsufferable," but they did not want him to run the risk of hanging, so they fixed the worth of the stolen poultry at eleven pence.

The example from this chronicle highlights a common practice: a complaint to the court often was a last resort. Before it came that far, the neighbors dealt with the offender in an informal manner, as they also did with occasional thieves. Sometimes victims were able to recover their stolen property. Or they acquiesced when, for example, a poor neighbor had stolen their chicken and eaten it. In such cases they might give the thief a beating, as happened to John Aston. These types of informal reaction to crime were typical of an agrarian world in which villagers knew each other well. Well into the nineteenth century, the majority of Europe's population lived in such villages, which means that the informal system was a very common one. Moreover, even in a metropolis like Amsterdam it happened occasionally that victims came to the house of a thief to demand back their stolen goods. The pattern by which charges against fellow villagers often were the culmination of a series of complaints has been found in France, England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia, from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the early nineteenth. Although the list of prior complaints can be included in crime figures, these cases are only the tip of an iceberg. For one thing, they only involve habitual malefactors, tolerated for some time but finally prosecuted.

Informal handling explains part of the difference in levels of prosecuted property crime between the early modern and the modern age. Although individual victims of crime were capable of acting on their own, historians assumed, upon discovering the infrajudiciary, that specific persons or institutions were involved in out-of-court settlements. French historians, for example, found that socially recognized arbiters such as the seigneur of a village or the parish priest sometimes acted as mediators. Notaries could be involved, too. In a sample of Parisian notarial acts from the first half of the seventeenth century, 153 acts concerned infrajudicial settlements. However, the overwhelming majority of cases concerned assault or verbal attack, not theft. Similarly, in Dutch notarial archives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one finds depositions about conflicts among neighbors and marital quarrels but hardly anything about stolen property. In three-quarters of the Parisian cases, moreover, the wronged party had started judicial proceedings. Withdrawal of the complaint usually was one of the provisions of the settlement. These cases were not purely infrajudicial; rather, one of the parties had used a judicial complaint as a means of forcing the other to agree to an extrajudicial settlement. Thus, as far as mediation is concerned, we are left with the verbal intervention of local notables and clergymen, which left no trace in written records.

One type of ecclesiastical institution remained where historians hoped to find informal handling of illegal behavior: Protestant associations exercising discipline over church members. In particular, Calvinist consistories were active to promote harmony within the religious community. These institutions dealt with a broad range of activities deemed undesirable, including matters of doctrine, church attendance, morals, sexuality, marital harmony, and the maintenance of friendly relations between neighbors. Sometimes they dealt with violent conflicts among church members, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, studies done so far on Protestant discipline in several countries have hardly disclosed any cases of conflicts arising from theft. In the case of Lutheran Sweden we know that the agencies involved in parish justice were interested in property crime, but the parishioners refused to cooperate. When the ecclesiastical committee visiting the village of Riklea in 1752 inquired about it, the villagers responded that a number of thefts had been committed during the previous year and that they had some idea who were guilty, but they refused to mention names. To conclude, the bodies exercising church discipline in the early modern period were important agencies of social control, but they hardly dealt with crimes, certainly not with property crimes. We know that the subterranean stream of property crime existed, but it is almost impossible to quantify.

VIOLENT CRIME

Whereas most of the important work on property crime was done in the 1970s and 1980s, violence, in particular homicide, is a central concern of today's crime historians. They consider homicide rates as an indication of the level of serious violence generally. Homicide is an attractive subject because the problems of method are less serious than in the case of property crime: it is difficult to hide a dead body, and records exist of bodies found (called coroner's reports in England). Hence in this case it is feasible to count real crime, with only an insignificant dark number. As with property crime, the count is always relative to the population, the homicide rate being defined as the annual average, over a specified period, per 100,000 inhabitants in a specified area.

Yet there is no universal agreement about how to count killings. For one thing, some historians still accept rates of prosecuted homicide instead of only taking figures based on body inspections into consideration. This can make a difference. In early modern Amsterdam, for example, the ratio of detected to prosecuted homicide varied from 9:1 to 3:1. Therefore the homicide rate should always be calculated from reports about bodies found. For scholars investigating recent periods, this is the standard procedure. In most European countries, medical statistics about the causes of death are available from the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth. A second disagreement concerns the figures for infanticide, commonly defined as the killing of a baby at birth or shortly after. Some historians insist that infanticides should be included in the homicide rate, whereas others reserve the latter concept for the killing of adults and adolescents. This, too, can make a difference, notably for the sex ratio among the killers. The solution adopted by most historians is to present both homicide and infanticide rates. Third, there is the problem of counting homicide in small towns and regions, especially acute for the period before 1500. Because of low population figures, the homicide rate depends too much on chance. For example, if a town has four thousand inhabitants, six killings per decade already make a homicide rate of 15. Because of this, and the great variation in the English medieval rates, J. S. Cockburn (1991) advocated discarding all figures prior to 1500. Twentieth-century rates, on the other hand, are somewhat less comparable to earlier ones, due to the influence of increased medical expertise and medical infrastructure such as fast ambulances. As a consequence, more people survive an attack, who, in an earlier period, would have died from their wounds.

Trends in homicide rates. The method adopted influences one's conclusions on the long-term trend of homicide, although, in all cases, this trend turns out to be one of decline. England was the first country for which a graph down the centuries could be constructed. The homicide rate in England declined from about 20 per 100,000 in 1200 to about 15 in the later Middle Ages, between 6 and 7 in the Elizabethan period, and then further down (with the most dramatic fall from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century), until the figure stood at 1 around 1900. These figures are averages in a double sense, representing the combined rates of several towns and regions, and, moreover, they are partly based on studies which counted prosecuted cases only. If these studies were discarded, the pre-1500 figures, in particular, would end up higher. The available data for the Continent in this period are suggestive. Towns in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden had homicide rates of 50 or more in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In Amsterdam, the rate still approached 30 in the sixteenth century. Thereafter, both the Dutch and Swedish trends resemble the English one. In Dutch cause of death statistics, kept since 1911, the homicide rate was under 0.5 until 1970, except in the 1940s.

For the statistical period, figures are available for all European countries. By the late nineteenth century the long-term decline in homicide had affected the whole of western, northern, and central Europe. The Prussian rates, for example, fluctuated between 1 and 2, and the French rate was under 2 as well. The decline set in later in southern and eastern Europe. The Italian homicide rate still stood at 9 around 1880. In Rome alone, the figure was 12.3 in the years 1872–1879, but then it declined to 4.8 in the years 1910–1914. Throughout southern and eastern Europe, homicide rates declined until they were mostly under 5 in the 1930s. After World War II the rates in most European countries tended to converge, which implied a slight rise for some. Since about 1970, however, homicide has been on the rise throughout Europe (and in the United States), reversing an agelong trend. This rise affects the big cities in particular. In Amsterdam, for example, the figure was 6 in the late 1980s and 1990s, and if correction is made for greater medical expertise it increases to 8. This nearly approaches the figure for the early eighteenth century. It is unclear yet whether the contemporary European-wide rise in homicide is temporary.

Most historians explain the downward trend in homicide from the thirteenth century to 1970 with reference to Norbert Elias's theory of civilization. According to this theory, the increasing differentiation and complexity of society forced people increasingly to control their impulses, violent and otherwise. Several historians paid attention to the social context in which homicide took place in different periods. In every period, this context includes gender. Homicide, and serious violence generally, took place in a male world. In periods of high rates, such habits as knife fighting among men accounted for the majority of cases. Killers as well as their victims were overwhelmingly male. In periods of low rates, on the other hand, while the great majority of killers still were men, women got greater prominence among the victims. The few existing studies counting killer-victim relationships over a longer term confirm this pattern. In Amsterdam a shift occurred by the middle of the eighteenth century, when homicide rates were dropping rapidly: the share of female victims rose, as well as the proportion of victims involved in an intimate relationship with the killer. In England, the long-term decline in homicide was accompanied by a parallel increase in the proportion of cases taking place within the biological family: from 8 percent in the fourteenth century to 45 percent in the second half of the twentieth. As still another way of placing homicidal violence in context, one can distinguish two axes, one with the opposite poles of impulsive versus planned violence, the other with poles of ritual versus instrumental violence. These axes show that the long-term decline in homicide was accompanied by an increasing prominence of instrumentality and planning in violence.

Violence and gender are linked in another way in infanticide. Rather than reflecting aggressive impulses or revengeful desires, this crime tells the story of shame and desperation. The criminal records from England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany confirm that infanticide was committed almost exclusively by unmarried mothers, often servant girls. The interrogation protocols reveal that most of the women involved saw no way out, because of shame but also because of the material consequences. A servant girl who bore a child was dismissed right away, left without a legal income for herself and her baby. The courts considered infanticide a serious offense against Christian morality in a double sense: illicit sexuality and the taking of human life. They were especially severe from the middle of the sixteenth until the middle of the eighteenth century. Then it was even a punishable offense, capital in France and England, for a woman to give birth to a dead baby if she had concealed her pregnancy and refrained from calling upon a midwife. There was no need to prove actual killing. Later, the male judges gradually became more merciful, often paternalistically seeing the accused as poor misled women. In the course of the twentieth century, as the social acceptance and material possibilities of raising children outside marriage increased and, finally, with increased availability of contraceptives, infanticide became a marginal crime.

Arson and minor violence. The attack on and destruction of a person's property is usually classified as a violent offense. Arson occupied a prominent place in the criminality of preindustrial Europe. It was a typically rural crime, facilitated by the material environment. A farmer's house, his barns and haystack, highly flammable, were easy targets for local people who knew their way. No nightwatchmen patrolled in villages, which also lacked public illumination. Arson has been investigated in Germany, France, and England. It was either a form of extortion by wandering groups or, more often, a product of conflicts within rural communities. The motive was to hurt or take revenge on the other party, for which the maiming of cattle sometimes served as an alternative. In the mountainous districts of Bavaria, arson was still a common means of taking revenge in the second half of the nineteenth century. Villagers resorted to it in order to maintain their honor when no other way of redress seemed possible. The perpetrators waited until the wind blew in the right direction, so that only the target farm would burn down. With less flammable material used for the construction of farms and the spread of insurance, arson is less of a threat in the modern world. Today criminal arson is rather the work of the proprietors themselves, wishing to cheat on the insurance company.

Minor violence and conflict in urban and rural communities have received ample attention from crime historians since the 1990s. In this case, the focus is less on quantification than on the character of communal relations. The lower courts in rural areas during the ancien régime dealt largely with petty conflicts among neighbors. Accusations of slander, for example, mostly brought forward by women, were often numerous. Rural lower courts, then, were involved in questions of gender, honor, and neighborliness. An example is the village of Heiden in the German county of Lippe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The villagers and the local authorities shared a common outlook as far as the sanctity of property and the code of honor were concerned, but their opinions diverged about violence as a means of solving conflicts and such public-order measures as the regulation of alcohol consumption.

POPULAR PERCEPTIONS OF CRIME

For many people in Europe's past, crime was essentially something "the others" did. Contemporaries handled their fears of crime and made sense of it by locating it in specific social groups. Thus the supposed existence of a "criminal class," ready to infect the whole of the working class, haunted the bourgeoisie of Victorian England. At the same time, the French spoke of "the dangerous classes." Older studies saw these French and English fears as largely realistic. They viewed criminality in terms of a professional underworld: a criminal class existing in symbiosis with the working class as a whole and therefore posing a major threat to social order. They saw the urban proletariat as a permanent reservoir of criminality and revolutionary ferment, chaotic and irrational. This view, however, since the 1970s has been criticized by historians of popular protest as well as by crime historians. The former emphasized the rational character of collective action by the lower classes, while the latter showed that nineteenth-century lawbreakers did not form a group acting in conjunction with the working class as a whole. Workers who considered themselves respectable and abided by contemporary standards of morality distanced themselves from the "roughs." There was a widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of the rule of law. In the English Black Country, for example, workers themselves often acted as prosecutors in cases of theft. The public-order panics which occasionally broke out were staged by the media to promote the introduction or expansion of the police.

In the early modern period, vagrants were the group held accountable for a large part of criminality. Early modern Europe indeed knew a marginal population, recruited from the semiemployed and unemployed in towns and the landless proletariat in the countryside. Fears for the criminal potential of vagrants date back to the sixteenth century. Historians who studied the way of life of these marginal groups in France, England, and Germany came up with a nuanced picture. Certainly, vagrants were obliged to steal at times, but they were even more adroit in devising techniques for raising pity when begging. Sometimes this entailed purposely mutilating a child. Marginal people did not live according to the ethics of comfortable society, but they were masters in the art of survival. Although individuals gave alms at times, the majority of the settled population of early modern Europe expressed a hostile attitude to vagrants as a group. France introduced special courts in the eighteenth century to deal with vagrants. If any group in history approached the image of a "criminal class," they did. However, they did so not because all marginal people had the habit of stealing but because begging, vagabondage, and the mere fact of being born as a gypsy were offenses in themselves. Hence it is better to speak of a criminalized class.

The crime literature of the past offers another possibility to study popular perceptions, but in Europe this is still an underresearched subject. Rather than expressing collective fears of crime, we find it mostly concerned with notorious individual cases. In the early modern period, a large part was also punishment literature, since the pamphlets and small booklets of which it mostly consisted were usually published on the occasion of the offender's execution. Examples are the life accounts by the ordinary, or chaplain, of Newgate prison of the criminals hanged in London. This type of literature was highly moralistic in tone, explaining how the offender's ungodly life necessarily led to robbery or murder. Another type of crime literature was primarily sensational. One study (Wiltenburg, 1992) compared broadsides dealing with family violence in early modern England and Germany. While the majority of English ones were about husband murderers, the authors of German pamphlets focused on women and men who slaughtered their entire families in a moment of madness. Newspaper accounts and novels about crime after 1800 have hardly been studied yet by European historians.

CRIME AND SOCIAL PROTEST

Whereas in popular perceptions and literature crime was often portrayed as more fearful and atrocious than in actual reality, some actual criminal activities were not seen as crimes by a large part of the population. Sometimes offenders even enjoyed support. British historians in particular have argued that the offenses in question formed a category in itself, which they called "social crime." Others, while agreeing that popular support for offenders is an important subject, have objected to that term. It implies an antiquated understanding of the word "social," meaning "for the benefit of the poor or the lower classes" or "in the service of class struggle." In a modern, neutral definition "social" refers to the interaction of people; hence every crime is a social activity. Nevertheless, the question of whether certain crimes were an expression of popular protest is a valid one.

Eric Hobsbawm was the first to posit a link between crime and protest. His Bandits (first published 1969) dealt with bandits within a geographically wide range of peasant societies, including preindustrial Europe, and in particular with bands enjoying a measure of support. These bandits, he argued, were peasant outlaws, whom the state or feudal lords regarded as criminals but who actually remained part of the peasant world. The people regarded them as heroes, avengers, fighters for justice, or even leaders of liberation. The relatively long life of many of these bands could only be explained by the active or passive support they enjoyed from the peasant population. Hence their actions constituted an "archaic" form of protest against the prevailing order of society. Hobsbawm's thesis drew an obvious parallel between the bandit and the guerrilla soldier, who, in Mao Tse-tung's famous phrase, found a haven in the peasant population like a fish in the water. Simultaneously, the thesis was inspired by the image of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and distributing the proceeds to the poor.

We know for sure that the Robin Hood myth played an important role in the popular culture of preindustrial Europe. Noble robbers abound in chapbooks, for example, but most historians doubt whether this type existed in reality. Significantly, Hobsbawm's European data were mostly from eastern or Mediterranean Europe. In ancien régime France, for example, although some rural bands could count on a degree of popular support, this remained largely confined to accomplices. After 1789 it was the counterrevolutionary forces in particular who recruited former criminals and bandits. Neither do the data for eighteenth-century Germany provide much support for Hobsbawm's thesis. Although Carsten Küther (1976) accepted this thesis, distinguishing the peasant bandit, who enjoyed popular support, from the common outlaw, recruited from the marginal population or a minority group, the latter type appeared at least as numerous as the former. Uwe Danker (1988) criticized Küther, pointing out that most bandits were either Jews or people with "infamous" occupations, two groups despised by the peasants. Moreover, the peasants themselves often were victims of the operations of bandits. Danker explained the successes of robber bands primarily by the relative weakness of the German states.

Anton Blok provided the most explicit critique of Hobsbawm's thesis. He emphasized the weakness of the peasants in this context. Preindustrial peasants were so powerless that they hardly would have been able to support bands over a longer period. Thus he formulated a counterhypothesis: the more successful a person is as a bandit, the more extensive the protection granted him. This protection primarily came from powerful persons or groups, in the form of acquiescence or tacit support from landlords or regional elites. Bandits' activities often ran counter to peasant interests. Moreover, most members of successful bands were relative outsiders in the peasant world. They had been or were peddlers, skinners, or innkeepers, working in occupations involving a high degree of geographical mobility or offering special opportunities to cover illegal activities. Finally, most bands operated especially in areas where state authority was weak. In the Netherlands, for example, they enjoyed a longer life in border areas than in the urbanized western part. Throughout Europe, the chronology and geography of banditry confirmed its inverse relationship with the growth of state power. After the revolutionary period large bands disappeared from the scene in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, whereas Mediterranean areas remained infested with banditry until the early twentieth century.

Although the homeland of the Robin Hood story, England has been relatively free from banditry since the beginning of the early modern period. Yet the country had its own peculiar offenders who enjoyed local support, in particular in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. As rule, they were involved in collective activities not viewed as crimes by most of their neighbors. Rather than robbery, the offenses were poaching, smuggling, wrecking, and, in one case, coining. Local people considered these activities as lawful, often as ancient rights. They felt entitled to shoot deer in the nearby forest, for example, but the forest now belonged to the king, and his officials considered the poachers thieves of the king's property. Likewise, the law denied the inhabitants of coastal villages any entitlement to the goods in stranded ships. As in the case of banditry, the research into these crimes was motivated by a desire to find archaic forms of social protest. And again, the results were ambiguous.

For one thing, the protagonists' methods were ruthless at times. The wreckers in Cornish villages, for example, rather than waiting for a ship to run ashore, lured it to the rocks with false lights. This hardly qualifies as protest against social injustice. Generally, wrecking was not so much an activity of the poor as the favorite pursuit of an entire community. When news that a ship had stranded reached the inhabitants of one seaboard village during religious service, they all ran out of church, with the parson yelling after them, "Wait for me." In such cases, support for offenders simply meant local defense of the community's collective complicity against outside agents of law enforcement.

In a similar vein, poachers thought of themselves as defenders of local custom. The Blacks of Windsor Forest, a more or less organized group of deer poachers in the 1720s and 1730s, were experts in age-old privileges. The majority belonged to ancient local families, wealthy and respectable but not of the highest rank. Their opponents were agents of the bureaucracy administering the royal forests. Coining, on the other hand, never was viewed as an ancient right. Yet the so-called Yorkshire Mint, an organized group of counterfeiters and dealers in false gold coins in the 1760s, also enjoyed widespread protection in the county. The coins of this mint were widely accepted, to the advantage of local businessmen operating in a regional market. They were the counterfeiters' staunchest supporters. Other inhabitants of Yorkshire, businessmen and gentry with a concern for their long-term economic interest viewed in a national perspective, cooperated with the law to suppress the illegal mint. Thus the confrontation was between two groups with antagonistic interests, located within a regional and national context, respectively. In a similar vein, poachers, smugglers, and wreckers were locally or regionally bound. The poor never played a leading role in any of these groups of offenders. The laws they impinged upon mainly upheld the fiscal and economic interests of the national state.

A similar clash of interests was visible in other countries, in particular with smuggling. In Dutch cities in the eighteenth century it was a collective enterprise to sneak boats loaded with untaxed grain into town. The smugglers could count on the sympathy of a large part of the urban population. In Prussia's western provinces the smuggling of salt, tobacco, or coffee was a thriving business in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although increasing in intensity during manufacturing slumps, it was no poor man's game. Local merchants were involved, and the Prussian administration tried to counter the practice by setting up antismuggling cartels. The authorities were only partially successful.

The conclusion on smugglers, poachers, and their kind parallels that on bandits. The fact that the people refused to see some offenses as crimes cannot be explained by a simple model of class struggle such as that posited by Hobsbawm. Rather than archaic protest by the poor against the social order, these crimes represented local and regional resistance to the intrusion of the modern state.

CONCLUSION: THE TRANSFORMATION OF CRIME

Several major trends formed the changing face of crime from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Foremost among them was the inclusion of certain forms of behavior into the category of crime and the exclusion of others from it. There was a steady increase in criminalization from the sixteenth century until the first half of the nineteenth. At the same time, however, decriminalization took place in certain fields.

The early modern process of criminalization first hit the marginal population of vagrants and beggars. Before the sixteenth century, these groups had been largely tolerated. Both begging and giving alms were viewed in religious terms, the wandering beggar following the footsteps of Jesus and his apostles. From the sixteenth century onward, beggars and vagrants increasingly came to be considered a nuisance or even a threat to public order. Increasingly, they were hunted and often committed to prison workhouses. By the early seventeenth century, vagrancy and unlicensed begging were defined as offenses throughout Europe, and licensed begging was severely restricted. The prosecution of these offenses was largely a matter of summary justice, leaving behind few quantifiable records.

Another wave of criminalization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to do with the expanding power of the state. As governments increasingly taxed the population and set up tariff barriers, the law defined evasion of the tax as another crime. Smuggling was the result, with smugglers often enjoying support from local communities. Internal tariff barriers largely disappeared after the ancien régime, but in the border areas between European states, smuggling remained a lucrative business until the middle of the twentieth century.

An extension of the range of property crime represented the third wave of criminalization, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taking away small "perks" from the workplace, for example, came to be treated as a criminal activity. Workers themselves thought they were entitled to perks, provided the commodities taken had a low value and it concerned small quantities. The prosecution of workplace offenses was mainly an urban affair, but around 1800 this wave of criminalization hit the rural population in particular. The forces of ongoing commercialization and an expanding state bureaucracy resulted in an intensified prosecution of various activities hitherto considered as the exercise of traditional rights by inhabitants of rural communities.

Poaching, redefined as stealing the game belonging to the owner of the land, has been mentioned already. In the Bavarian mountains, despite vigorous prosecution, poaching remained a favorite pastime of rural youths until the early twentieth century. With increasing urbanization and a dwindling number of wild animals, this crime became relatively marginal. Likewise, gleaning, the collection of leftovers from a harvested field, is no longer a frequent practice. It was a customary practice, usually performed by women and children, well into the nineteenth century. The English Court of Common Pleas declared in 1788 that no one had a right to glean without the permission of the owner of the land. Still, prosecutions for this offense remained infrequent in England. Unauthorized gathering of firewood, on the other hand, was frequently prosecuted in several European countries. A Prussian law of 1821 made the traditional gathering of wood punishable, going into the detail of specifying three types of the offense. The majority of the rural population continued to consider the use of the old common woods and meadows as their traditional right. The level of prosecutions for theft of wood remained high in all Prussian provinces between 1815 and 1848. Nowadays, mainly the rich have fireplaces in their homes, and they buy their firewood at gas stations. Thus this wave of criminalization has rolled back again because most of the activities involved have become obsolete.

Processes of decriminalization date back to the late seventeenth century. In many cases, decriminalization was directly or indirectly related to secularization. Secular courts stopped prosecuting people for blasphemy, for example. With the separation of church and state, most religious offenses disappeared from the books. We can add witchcraft and sorcery here, which the courts in most European countries no longer considered a crime by 1700. Suicide, for a long time punishable by exposing or piercing the dead body, was decriminalized in the eighteenth century. Other sins stopped being crimes, too, with the advent of the liberal state. Offenses such as simple fornication, bestiality, and, in most countries, sodomy have not been prosecuted since the nineteenth century. England and the Netherlands, however, witnessed a revival of criminalization for certain morals offenses around 1900. In the late twentieth century, sexual activities involving children increasingly became a target for prosecution. In 1998 a Swedish law made soliciting a prostitute a punishable offense for men. Criminalization has also extended to a violent offense with sexual overtones, rape. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, judges made it clear that only forced sex with a respectable woman could attract their attention. Well into the twentieth century, rape victims had a hard time proving they had not provoked the act, but under the influence of the feminist movement since the 1970s this situation has changed.

Apart from social views about which activities are criminal, there were broad changes in the character of crime from preindustrial to modern society. Property offenses became more dominant among total criminality, a development which initially reflected an increasing concern of the courts for the protection of property. In modern society the preponderance of property offenses among total criminality is even more marked. For example, in the Netherlands in the 1980s, the ratio of violent to property crime was 1 to 32. This figure can hardly be the result of prosecution policies alone. The high crime rates of modern society are largely due to higher levels of theft and burglary. In their turn, those levels are related to the greater opportunities for appropriation compared to preindustrial Europe.

In connection with this, the traditional pattern whereby property offenses peaked in years of demobilization and especially economic crisis has disappeared. In England economic depressions still caused peaks in property crime in the nineteenth century, but after 1880 this correlation gradually weakened. French criminal statistics reveal a quite similar pattern: food prices explain most of the variance in theft rates until the 1870s and then no longer. Prior to German unification, Prussian and Bavarian statistics reveal a correlation between grain prices and thefts. This correlation significantly weakened in the statistics of the German Reich, available from 1882 onward. Factors such as ethnic discrimination became more important in explaining concentrations of property crime. In Sweden, finally, the correlation between economic hardship and property offenses decreased from the 1870s onward. Since industrialization came to Sweden much later than to England, factors such as the growth of a social welfare system partly explain the shift. Historians refer to this sea change as the shift from poverty-related to prosperity-related property crime. For ages people had stolen out of sheer necessity, but in twentieth-century Europe this was no longer the case.

The long-term trend in violent crime was unequivocal: homicide rates declined from the thirteenth century to about 1970; among the violence which remained, encounters of an instrumental type and conflicts among intimates occupied a greater share. Even though total prosecuted criminality now consists overwhelmingly of offenses against property, and today's homicide levels are far below those of the sixteenth century, the recent upsurge in homicide constitutes a puzzling countertrend, not yet satisfactorily explained by historians or criminologists. In eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union obviously plays a part. Homicide rates in Estonia, for example, moved up from about 7 in 1989 to over 25 in 1994. It is more difficult to explain the rise in homicide in western and central Europe. Some of it is due to the increased availability of firearms, although these are much less common than in the United States. Other possible factors include the immigration of men from societies more accustomed to violence and the spread of organized crime with its violent elimination of competitors.

Finally, modern petty crime differs from its preindustrial counterpart. Minor conflicts in villages and neighborhoods no longer constitute a concern even for the lower courts. Sensitivity to personal honor has decreased. When neighbors are in conflict, it is largely subject to mediation by the police. Today's petty cases are traffic violations, breaches of administrative rules. The result is an intensification of the link between illegal behavior and state control.

See alsoRoma: The Gypsies (volume 1);Modernization; The Industrial Revolutions; War and Conquest; Urbanization (volume 2);The Military; Marginal People (in this volume);Honor and Shame (volume 5); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beattie, J. M. Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800. Princeton, N.J., 1986.

Beier, Augustus L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640. London and New York, 1985.

Blok, Anton. De Bokkerijders: Roversbenden en geheime genootschappen in de Landen van Overmaas (1730–1774). Amsterdam, 1991.

Blok, Anton. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent PeasantEntrepreneurs. New York, 1974.

Brewer, John, and John Styles, eds. An Ungovernable People: The English and TheirLaw in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London, 1980.

Castan, Nicole. Les criminels de Languedoc: Les exigences d'ordre et les voies du ressentiment dans une société prérévolutionnaire, 1750–1790. Toulouse, France, 1980.

Chevalier, Louis. Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Frank Jellinek. New York, 1973.

Cobb, Richard. The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820. Oxford, 1970.

Cockburn, J. S. "Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent, 1560–1985." Past and Present 130 (1991): 70–106.

Danker, Uwe. Räuberbanden im alten Reich um 1700: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte von Herrschaft und Kriminalität in der frühen Neuzeit. 2 vols. Frankfurt, Germany, 1988.

Dinges, Martin. Der Maurermeister und der Finanzrichter: Ehre, Geld, und sozialeKontrolle im Paris des 18. jahrhunderts. Göttingen, Germany, 1994.

Dülmen, Richard van. Frauen vor Gericht: Kindsmord in der frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt, Germany, 1991.

Egmond, Florike. Underworlds: Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 1993.

Eisner, Manuel. Das Ende der zivilisierten Stadt? Die Auswirkungen von Modernisierung und urbaner Krise auf Gewaltdelinquenz. Frankfurt, Germany, and New York, 1997.

Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900. 2d ed. London and New York, 1996.

Emsley, Clive, and Louis A. Knafla, eds. Crime History and Histories of Crime: Studies in the Historiography of Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern History. Westport, Conn., 1996.

Faber, Sjoerd. Strafrechtspleging en criminaliteit te Amsterdam, 1680–1811: De nieuwe menslievendheid. Arnhem, Netherlands, 1983.

Feeley, Malcolm M., and Deborah L. Little. "The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687–1912." Law and Society Review 25 (1991): 719–757.

Frank, Michael. Dörfliche Gesellschaft und Kriminalität: Das Fallbeispiel Lippe,1650–1800. Paderborn, Germany, 1995.

Gatrell, V. A. C. "The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England." In Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500. Edited by V. A. C. Gatrell et al. London, 1980. Pages 238–370.

Gough, Richard. The History of Myddle. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Hey. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1981.

Hay, Douglas. "War, Dearth, and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts." Past and Present 95 (1982): 117–160.

Hay, Douglas, et al. Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland. New York, 1975.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. 1969. Rev. ed. New York, 1981.

Hoffer, Peter C., and N. E. H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England andNew England, 1558–1803. New York and London, 1981.

Johnson, Eric A. Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871–1914. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Johnson, Eric A., and Eric H. Monkkonen, eds. The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages. Urbana, Ill., 1996.

Küther, Carsten. Räuber und Gaunerbanden in Deutschland. Göttingen, Germany, 1976.

Muchembled, Robert. La violence au village: Sociabilité et comportements populaires en Artois du XVe au XVIIe siècle. Turnhout, Belgium, 1989.

Österberg, Eva, and Dag Lindström. Crime and Social Control in Medieval and EarlyModern Swedish Towns. Uppsala, Sweden, 1988.

Roeck, Bernd. Aussenseiter, Randgruppen, Minderheiten: Fremde im Deutschland der frühen Neuzeit. Göttingen, Germany, 1993.

Rule, John, and Roger Wells. Crime, Protest, and Popular Politics in Southern England, 1740–1850. London, 1997.

Schulte, Regina. The Village in Court: Arson, Infanticide, and Poaching in the CourtRecords of Upper Bavaria. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.

Schwerhoff, Gerd. Köln im Kreuzverhör: Kriminalität, Herrschaft, und Gesellschaft in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt. Bonn and Berlin, 1991.

Sharpe, J. A. Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750. 2d ed. London and New York, 1984.

Spierenburg, Pieter. The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe. New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 1991.

Spierenburg, Pieter. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.

Spierenburg, Pieter, ed. Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in ModernEurope and America. Columbus, Ohio, 1998.

Tobias, J. J. Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century. London, 1967.

Ulbricht, Otto. Kindsmord und Aufklärung in Deutschland. Munich, 1990.

Wiltenburg, Joy. Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of EarlyModern England and Germany. Charlottesville, Va., 1992.