A Poor Man's System of Justice: the London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Of the three major innovations in law enforcement in nineteenth-century England, the penitentiaries, the new police and the stipendiary magistracy, the stipendiary magistracy came first. Three years before Patrick Colquhoun published his influential Treatise on the police of the metropolis, urging the foundation of a centralized preventative police force, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 established a system of paid magistrates for metropolitan London. The stipendiary magistracy sitting in police offices was further reformed in the 1820s and 1830s, the same decades which saw the organization of the metropolitan police. By 1838 the police courts had taken their final shape, remaining largely unaltered into the twentieth century. Side by side with the new police, stipendiary magistrates were the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London.