- THE WITHAM FIRES AND THE 1820S
- THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK AND THE WITHAM FIRES
- The initial reaction to an offence
- Whether to prosecute
- The trial
- Sentences and Petitions
- THE SOCIAL BACKGROUND
- CONCLUSION
The initial reaction to an offence
In the past, most offences were not even recorded, and thus formed what is now known as the 'dark figure'. Official documents only mentioned cases where a suspect was found and prosecuted. A few offences were spectacular enough to be mentioned in records such as newspapers, even if the case went no further; examples are the three fires which took place in north Essex in January 1829 during the period of the Witham scare.67 And Edmund Potto at Witham was not committed for trial until over five months after the first of the fires of which he was accused, so if that had been the only case, it seems likely that it would also have gone unsolved.68
Skill, determination, luck and money were among the items needed for successful detection. This stage of the proceedings was often still a private affair. The main free and public service available was that of the parish constables, who were elected and unpaid; only their expenses were re-imbursed by the county.69 In the Witham Division they were generally tradesmen, with a few farmworkers; they were of lower social status than the overseers of the poor, which limited their authority. There were many signs and examples of competence amongst them, as other studies have found. However, in this area only a minority of victims appear to have used the parish constable to search for a suspect.70 And the Witham fires seem to have been regarded as much too serious to leave to the parish constable; Petty Sessions appointed ten special constables for a 'twelvemonth'. They were of higher social status than the usual parish constables, and for their pains three of them later had fires on their premises and one received a threatening letter.71
London policemen were sometimes used in Essex, but outside London they demanded sizeable fees.72 So although they were in a sense a public service they required private initiative, and were only available to those who could afford them. The same was true of two other supplementary agents, the prosecution associations and the reward system, both of which were used during the Witham fires. Subscriptions were required for the associations. In the 1820s they seem to have been a temporary phenomenon in the Witham Division, and often to have arisen only after a particular crisis; in the town of Witham itself there were three successive bodies.73 One of them was set up, with a committee of thirty men, solely in response to the arson in 1829, and probably wound up thereafter. Not much is known about what it actually achieved. It does seem to have raised the money for the new fire engine in December 1828, and its aims included the appointment and 'compensation' of fire-men. But less than a year later it was 'the parish' which had to pay for a building to accommodate the engine, as the old engine house was too small.74 This illustrates neatly the limitations of both the private and the public body. During the arson scare the Association's membership must have overlapped so much with the other agencies such as the vestry and the special constables, that it may not have had a very distinct function except as a morale-booster. Its success in this role is illustrated by the 'utmost hilarity' which prevailed at its dinner in November 1829 after the fires had ceased.75
Radzinowicz suggests that offering a reward was at this time as much a matter of course after an offence as sending for the police would be today.76 There were statutory rewards for some types of offence dealt with summarily.77 However, for most offences rewards had to be privately funded. For instance, Lewis Way of Great Yeldham and William Green of Witham offered rewards after the arson of 1828 and 1829. They also secured an offer of pardon from the Home Office to an accomplice giving evidence.78 It is probable that in fact, a whole unrecorded network of informal reward, bribe, threat and social pressure acted at this early stage in the processing of an offence. Otherwise it is hard to see any incentive for potential witnesses to admit their knowledge and become liable for enforced appearance at court; there is evidence for the strong disapproval that this could provoke amongst their neighbours.79
Once it had been decided to seek the offender by one of the means outlined above, public intervention was allowed to the extent of obtaining a warrant from a magistrate to enable searches to take place. There was rarely much research expended in deciding where to search. Out of twenty-eight cases from the Witham Division at Quarter Sessions in 1824 and 1829, there were as many as nineteen (68 per cent) where the suspects were found by 'suspicion'. Six of these had at least been seen at the scene of the crime, in the same way that Edmund Potto was at the Witham fires, and four of them were 'followed'. But in nine, the 'suspicion' was not defined.80 The thinking behind it is probably summed up by a newspaper comment on the Potto case, that 'when crimes are committed, it is not unusual to suspect men of bad character who may reside in the immediate vicinity of the place where such are perpetrated'.81
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