The chapter introduces the material used for the study, that is, the Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) as well as the Old Bailey Online resource and the Proceedings that the OBC has been based on. The analytical frameworks adopted are also discussed, comprising the corpuslinguistic approach, and the historical sociopragmatics, the language variation and change, and the grammaticalization and pragmatic-semantic change frameworks. Attention is also paid to the late modern courtroom and to the issues of relevance to the study of past spoken interaction based on written records.