Sanctions and Rewards in the Legal System : A Multidisciplinary Approach

Less direct though none the less real rewards can be seen to have derived from the exercise of a wide range of discretionary powers that were crucial in the administration of the law before the emergence of the modern machinery of prosecution and more moderate forms of punishment in the nineteenth century - for example, the discretion of the victim of an offence to prosecute or not; the discretion [...] On the contrary, a number of important themes in the history of punishment emerged in the thousand years between the end of the Roman period in England and the end of the Middle Ages. [...] The purpose of the law, and of the local courts that enforced it, was to regulate private acts of revenge and thus maintain some degree of social order.4 The beginnings of a system of criminal law administered across the nation had to await the emergence of an effective central government and the process of state-building: that was clearly going forward in England even before the Norman conquest i [...] They were then sent back into the world as productive citizens, reformed for their own sake and for the sake of the social order they had threatened.'5 This was one response of the state to the growth of poverty, vagrancy, and crime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: to bring in the secular authorities to support and extend the efforts of the church to save men from the con- se [...] From the point of view of the history of punishment, however, the most interesting innovation at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth was not the wave of statutes that inaugurated the making of the eighteenth-century 'bloody code,' but rather the brief experimentation between 1706 and 1718 with imprisonment at hard labour in houses of correction.