Crime, Courts and Community in Mid-Victorian Wales : Montgomeryshire, People and Places

This book explores the relationship between the justice system and local society at a time after the Industrial Revolution had changed the characteristics of mid Wales. The book investigates the Welsh nineteenth-century experiences of both the high-born and the low within the context of law enforcement, and probes the motivations for their behaviour. It is concerned with major issues affecting Welsh and wider criminal historiography: the nature of class in the Welsh countryside and small towns, the role of women, the ways in which the justice system functioned for communities at that time, and the questions of how people related to it, and how integrated and accepting of it they were. The reader hears the voices of defendants, witnesses and law-enforcers through transcription of courtroom testimonies and other written records, and the experiences of all sections of the public are studied. Life stories—of both offenders and prosecutors of crime—are followed, providing a unique picture of this Welsh county community and its offences and legal practices.