As the Gavels Fell: 240 Years at Old Bailey
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/books/old-bailey-trials-are-tabulated-for-scholars-online.html?_r=1&ref=global-ho
The Old Bailey offers a unique window into the criminal justice system and, by extension, British culture. The free searchable online archive, oldbaileyonline.org, contains accounts of nearly 198,000 trials between 1674 and 1913. “It’s the largest body of accurately transcribed historical texts online,” said Tim Hitchcock, a historian at the University of Hertfordshire in England and part of the team. “All of human life is here.”
Par exemple :
The Confession, last Speeches, and Execution of the Prisoners at Tyburn, on the 30th of Aug. 1676.
At the Sessions held for London and Middlesex, August the 23, 1676.there were in all Sixteen persons Condemned to be hang’d for several great and notorious Crimes: And though, for the most part, they were persons that all-along, both at their Apprehension, Imprisonment, and Tryals, carried and behaved themselves with too much Confidence, yet when Sentence of death came to be pronounced upon them (which was done in a most pathetick Oration and a Gravity suiting the solemness of the occasion, by that worthy person whose Charge it was) it could not but much affect the hearts of all present to hear the sad Cries and doleful Lamentations which these miserable Wretches made, begging and importuning the Court for mercy, when their own repeated offences had excluded it, and left room for nothing but Judgment.