Criminology Seminar Series
Samuel Marsden Lays Down the Law: Eighteenth-Century Justice in Nineteenth-Century NSW.
Dr Matthew Allen
Date/Time: Wednesday 12th November 2-3pm
Location: Arts Lecture Theatre 3
Dr Allen is a Lecturer in Historical Criminology at the University of New England. His research interests include the history of alcohol and drunkenness and the history of magistrates and summary justice in colonial NSW. This paper is part of an ongoing project to understand the transformation of NSW from an experimental convict colony to a pioneering liberal democracy through an analysis of the policing and punishment of summary offences, the foundations of colonial law and order.
Abstract:
Magistrates in early NSW employed a remarkably limited knowledge of the English criminal law when enforcing summary justice. Not only did they invent offences like ‘suspicion of robbery’ and ‘overdriving cattle’ to discipline their recalcitrant convict workforce but they showed little consistency in the application of punishments which consequently varied enormously. But this approach to their work on the bench was in fact quite typical of the English tradition they worked within. Sharply divided between a criminal working class and an official elite, early NSW was almost a caricature of the society assumed under eighteenth-century English law.
This paper will look at one of the most famous of the early magistrates, the so-called ‘flogging parson’, Samuel Marsden. Through a detailed examination of his work on the Parramatta Bench between 1815 and 1820 I will try and explore the approach to criminal justice in NSW and how it reflects the larger challenge of imposing public order in a penal colony.
This paper is based on my research as the 2012 Archival Research Fellow with the NSW State Archives. My wider project examines the use of summary jurisdiction by Justices of the Peace to manage offences against public order and decency and focuses particularly on the transition of the magistracy from an institution primarily concerned with disciplining convicts to one managing a free population.