Welcome to Textory! In this episode we’re having a look at court records from 17th century London - particularly those involving not only petty theft, but the theft of the pettiest kind...
@@ericdale4641sheesh idk if that’s a read or a blessing 😭 imagine thinking “oh thank god! My stuff is still here! Hold on 🤔 what’s wrong with my stuff 🥺”
@ it's ok 🥹❤️ i poured cold water over it immediately and somehow nothing went wrong lmao thanks for going through these records and giving the "thieves" a voice uwu xp that case of a little girl who supposedly stole silver just scares me bc what if the man used her and then she escaped and he reported that (like the bullshit with witch trials)...idk if im reacing, i hope that was not the case🥲
I like that Karolina opened with "I can't really imagine people stealing clothing much nowadays" like her entire wardrobe wasn't snatched a while back 🥲🥲🥲
I know you already did a very deep dive into the inner workings of the 1950s teen dating scene but I loved that diary and if there’s any more to have a discussion on, I’m so interested in seeing that.
25:00 - To be fair, "spinster" was an occupation at the time. It referred to women spinning thread for fabrics, which is something people associated with unmarried women doing, which is where the modern meaning of the word comes from.
Back when that term was common, women rarely were allowed "jobs" & many men died early due to wars, accidents, etc. So, spinning wool, raising chickens for eggs, and brewing ale were some of the few things that women could do without becoming a social pariah. So, spinsters were often widowed women as well. Spinning wool is a pretty intense skill. And it is time consuming. It was also probably pretty common for women to know how to do. If you want to stay warm, wool that you spun, could be made into cloth, or knit/crocheted for garments. Spinning flax (a plant) is a different thing. As is spinning silk.
@@sarahwatts7152The Industrial Revolution was kicked off by the invention of the spinning jenny in 1765. Weaving those threads into cloth by machine didn't reach Britain until 1820. There were no commercially available clothing. You or your servants made each garment one by one from truly raw materials.
@@launderedcotton8070 Buying fabric and thread was a lot more common than making a garment 'from truly raw materials'. Read any book from that era, no one was weaving their own fabric.
I love that "text" can be words and other various documentation, but also you can use it as shorthand for "context", like historical context, and shorthand for "textile" since so much of your topics cover fashion and garments. It just feels so fitting! 😁
Hi! I'm a lacemaker and point lace is probably referring to buck's point (as in Buckinghamshire, UK), the lacemaking style. different styles of lace have different ways to make it, which would look stylistically different to say flanders lace, which would have been more associated to Belgium as it's a regional variant. I'd guess it's probably emphasised where it would be from as imports would have been more costly than something made locally I imagine. Hope this helps for context :)
Bone lace is also called bobbin lace. There is a cushion where the lace is layed on and held in place by the pins in front of it. Bobbins are both a spool where the thread is wrapped on and weights holding the lace down in front of you. You "braid" a pattern. It was very time consuming work and thus valuable.
I once found a beautiful framed cross made of handmade bobbin lace at the triftstore for only 50 cents. For women it used to be a very valuable skill to know how to lace. Funny how the value of things change througout the years.
Oh my gosh, court records can be full of so much great detail! I used to work at a historic house in my city (built in 1855) where the family who built it had kind of a shady history and ended up leaving town, but nobody knew what happened. We found the whole story (including the witness testimonies) in the local court archives! It was so fun to include the information in our tours; one time a descendant of the family (who looked so much like one of the original portraits that we had in the house) attended one of our tours where we talked about this history, not knowing that he was the great-grandson of the couple who had owned the house! Luckily he wasn't offended and gave us a few more details.
Can confirm people still steal clothes even if it looks like a pile of garbage. Just a few months ago an entire load of my laundry was stolen out of the washing machine and the clothes in there were literally at least 5 years old. They were super worn and there was 0 designer pieces in there. I have since learned people will steal anything 🙃
Yeah. I made another comment how I have a sweatshirt that was stolen years back, from someone who had stolen it from someone else… and it just cannot be determined who had it before it ended up at my house. Meanwhile my niece came home with clothes she just took from other kids constantly in 7th and 8th grade.
I like how the actual first comment doesn't say first, then the second one is "FIRST", and then the person after actually paid attention to the previous comments and wrote "third" 😂😂
Bone lace is the type of lace that is made with a lot of small weights on each thread (now they're typically wood but I guess they were made of bone in the past) that you cross over and "braid" in different patterns to form the lace. The threads are attached to a cushion so the little weights hang out and you just cross them and pin the lace into the cushion. I feel like I explained it very badly but I'm sure you know what it is 😅
@@JustSilviaD Yes! I'm Spanish so that's why my explanation is a bit off. Been studying English most of my life but when you get into these detailed descriptions you notice it's not your first language 😅
Amazing podcast! And on the note of the varying punishments, when I visited an old court museum in England, who also had the same varying levels of punishment in their records, a guide explained to us that it was not so much about what they stole but, like Karolina thought, who they stole from, and what connections that person had. If someone stole from a wealthy person the punishments were harsher, because other rich people were afraid that person/people like them would steal from them too. But if someone stole from a poor/low social class person then the punishments were less harsh because the rich didn’t care what the poor did amongst themselves as it was less likely to affect them. (Disclaimer this is just what the guide told me, it might not be completely correct)
Related to stealing clothing: You could do a whole show about the old-clothes trade as it existed before industrialized production made new clothes relatively affordable for everyone. By some accounts, used-clothes dealers had much the same reputation that used-car dealers do today.
Even the ordinary woolen and linen that lower-class people wore today would be unimaginably expensive to us because the fiber was fashioned by hand at every stage. The number of human hours that went into even work garments was enormous...
@@LM-fn6qb when you look at images from the early Middle ages of women wearing dresses that puddle around their feet, or that they had to hold up, it's the same thing. They didn't yet have the trade routes for jewels or silk, but the yards of extra fabric were the standard statement of wealth back then. I heard it described that what a working person wore on their body would cost the equivalent of a car for us. The thing with slow fashion is that mending takes time and most people work and don't have time to mend, but don't make enough to pay someone else to do it.
My 5 times great grandmother was deported to Australia on one of the first convict ships. She stole a piece of linen. Her whole family went with her, and i am in contact with one of her other 5 times descendents. Her criminal record is in the old Baileys archive . It is still a very high court in the UK.
About the varied punishment, just like now it was who did the theft (or was believed to have) and who they were stealing from. Bribery was also rampant.
This was great. Love a good bit of history! I went to a country prison museum near where I live (South West UK) and it was wild hearing that the youngest inmate had been like 7. The idea of locking up some little kid who stole a spoon or something is absolutely wild, I don't even want to think about the worse punishments.
Back then 7 was considered the beginning of the age of accountability, where you are old enough to know right from wrong. And for a long time they treated the children the same as the adults. Age related prison reforms came in later, mostly under the argument that being around all those adult criminals just inclined the children to worse crime, thus reformatories were created.
About the girl who was branded, I'd be more upset with the judge than the man who turned her in. There was no published schedule of sentences at that time, so the judge had very wide discretion. The guy who turned the girl in may not have even imagined that the punishment would be so severe. The judge could have imposed a lighter sentence if he wanted. (On the other hand, he could have imposed the death penalty.)
Thank you so much, love this new format! True crime but with headdresses is an interesting twist, and reading out those documents is a good way of making people acquainted with them❤
Historically speaking, the distinction between felonies and misdemeanors in common law countries was that felonies were punishable by death. Prisons, as we know them today, where people can be incarcerated for years at a time, really didn't come along until the 19th century. The original idea was that by isolating and giving prisoners enough time they would repent and be rehabilitated. The word penitentiary comes from the word penance after all. If you think about it, it's not surprising that long term incarceration is a fairly recent phenomenon. It's expensive to feed, house, and guard inmates. It was easier and cheaper to flog, brand, or hang criminals. Nowadays, the distinction between felonies and misdemeanors is, depending on your jurisdiction, whether the person convicted could potentially do more than a year in custody.
[18:05] I am not sure if it is the ‘point lace’ or them calling it a headdress which is interesting to you. And I am also unsure if this was the case in the 17th century but from what I know, point lace is a type of crochet. When making a friend’s wedding garter I used a Romanian point lace chord as the base and let me tell you: it is time consuming. It is gorgeous and it creates a lovely lace chord, but it is very dense so you have to use a lot more crochet thread per inch than if you had just done a regular crochet chain as a base. It can be used as an outline or base for embroidery or needlework lace as well.
This was sooo interesting to listen and part hilarious, part honestly horrifying?? Looking forward to more episodes, definitely a new fav podcast! This made me think about Three musketeers' Milady who was also branded for "felony", definitely adds some perspective into the word "felony" which I thought was like. grave crimes, but seeing some people were executed for a theft?.. blows my mind
This new format S L A Y S and I am loving it! Maybe someday you can do a bit on the impact of Napoleonic looting on mideuropean monastic records? I have a piece of monastic literature (In Canada) that made it from Rebdorf, Deutscheland to Ontario, Canada which is fascinating as hell. Some peculiar custom German translation of Frankish death rites by some monk guy. The handwritten note is rather worn and faded what with it being from 1759 so thats all the info I have. But I bet tons of other books were taken, and it'd be interesting what impact that had on long and short term records in the areas they were taken from.
How exciting! An awesome pod theme! This might be a little out of your wheelhouse but some historical text I love are the Bath Curse Tablets, I'd love an episode on those!
The fact that Britain keeps all these court reckords also has to do with how law works in Britain (and the US, where I'm from) vs how it works in Europe. I'm not a lawyer, never studied law, so I only have a very shallow understanding of this, but the English and American legal traditions are what's known as "Common Law," meaning our judges figure out how things should be decided by looking at precedent, ie how things were decided before. Thus records of past trials, going back as long as possible, are super important. Continental Europe uses a legal system known as Civil Law, which is based on codifying as much as possible into the law, rather than looking to precedents. In such a system, records are maybe not as important. I'm sure war destroying records, lack of continuity of governments, etc. are much bigger factors, but I do wonder if the fact that Britain uses common law lead to more records being made in the first place.
Yass gimme thisssss. Thanks for the reminder I am going to add it to my podcast rotation! I'm so down for salacious history. I love uncovered gossip from the past!!!
Only speculation about the one who got killed instead of whipped: She had sent her cap to get washed, and stole the items while she was at the washerwoman. Could it be those items actually belonged to the washerwomans other clients? Hence, if the real culprit hadn't been caught, the washerwoman would have been framed, and that's why it was considered a worse crime than regular stealing?
Learning from old convict records for 1700s england: Stealing yards of a material was usually done so you could resell it in smaller portions and make a good profit from it
Wouldn't it also be a good way for a master to get rid of their servants by accusing them of something that dinst even do? The servants couldn't say something against the riches, so they would loose either way?
If they wanted to get rid of servants I think they'd just chuck them out. I don't imagine there were a lot of employee protections. But if they really hated the servant or the servant was blackmailing them I'm sure some would make false claims to get them punished.
Still happens. I got accused of stealing a designer purse so that i woulnt come back to clean a ladies house. She could have just decided to not hire me again.
Since 1834 it is properly referred to as the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, so the name has changed but a lot else is the same still. It is named after the street on which it is located, which itself follows the line of the original fortified wall, or “bailey”, of the City (which is very cool I think). It is still in the same place but has been remodelled and rebuilt several times, most recently in 1907.
i really enjoyed this content and im excited for the next ep! I found myself on the old bailey website a few months ago when i was researching a convict sent to australia (where im from) for a uni assignment. i was also looking at felonious theft. in the 1800s-1810s, 100+ years after the sources you discussed, the punishments for the same crime, with similar value of goods stolen, still seem wildly inconsistent. punishment ranged from convict transportation sentences of several years, to a single days stay in newgate prison & fine of 1s. i wondered why that could be,. these crimes were often heard by the same judge on the same damn day! the only reason i could think of was whether or not the accused was a repeat offender and was already known to the court, and therefore punished more harshly. as others have said , its cool seeing someone discussing the working class and the grim realities of an era we can easily romanticise . thanks karolina!
What's really interesting is that the crime of rape was not what it is for us. Back then, it was kidnapping a woman and forcing her to marry you in order to get her money. I read cases where wealthy heiresses were snatched off the street, held prisoner at inns or hostelries, and married against their will by corrupt ministers. Sexual assault doesn't seem to have been handled by courts. I'm guessing people to justice into their own hands in those cases..
Omggg Carolina in polish sounds A LOT how it’s pronounced in Portuguese! Every time I read the name written in polish I would think that it had a very different sound, it doesn’t!
I remember when people were getting killed here in the US for their Nike shoes, so, things never change. I imagine the branding was to make evident to prospective employers that this person wasn’t trustworthy as horrendous as it was.
My brother in law used to live by the main highway leading through town. He had a pair of worn out old shoes stolen from his house one day, and nothing else. I suspect a hitchhiker whose shoes had worn out
The case of that 7-year-old kid really makes one understand how romanticised is our imagination of kids treatment is, even when we take into account our collective concept of "Victorian Era Child". Even the writers of the past of the later centuries and especially in modern movies often show a dope slap as a disciplinary measure, not freaking hot metal torture
Well, giving my input as someone who comes from a country (Brazil) where you can still be a victim from petty thefts and not so petty thefts, you could be surprised by how much unsatisfaction you can find in the more popular classes (who suffer the most with this criminality) than in the richer ones. They are not punished harshly (or at all), and I believe most people (specially the poorer ones) would all be for more strict measures. Perhaps not as hard as the ones mentioned in the text, but well, maybe those values mentioned in the text are not so far from the current situation in countries where criminality runs high.
I suddenly thought it could be interesting if you used some sounds in the background so that we can imagine the situations better. Tho I can guess it would probably be quite complicated.
My best guess as to the difference in those whom accrued a death penalty as opposed to those whom were only whipped for stealing approximately the same things would be that the lesser penalty was applied due to the stolen goods being returned in fine quality and that perhaps the lesser penalty was applied due to admittance and a will to no longer steal and find forgiveness on behalf of the thief?
