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² The work of Raymond Williams is especially helpful for thinking about the complexity of cultural change and evolving ideas, esp. The Long Revolution (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

³ Coke's remarks reflect his opinion that drunkenness aggravated the offense. Coke, Edward, Institutes of the Laws of England, first part, Coke on Littleton (1628; 10th ed., London, 1703), sec. 405, 247Google Scholar. Hale admitted that liquor “deprives men of the use of reason,” but he argued that the drunk defendant “shall have no privilege by his voluntary contracted madness.” Hale, Matthew, The History of the Pleas of the Crown (London, 1736), 1:32–33Google Scholar. William Blackstone stated that “the law of England, considering how easy it is to counterfeit this excuse, and how weak an excuse it is, (though real,) will not suffer any man thus to privilege one crime by another.” Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 4, Of Public Wrongs (1769; Chicago, 1979), 25Google Scholar.

⁴ No formal plea of drunkenness existed. I will use the phrase “pleas of drunkenness” to refer to the informal defenses made by defendants or other participants in the legal process who tried to excuse crimes with reference to the offender's intoxication. For more on the legal history of the excuse of drunkenness, see McCord, David, “The English and American History of Voluntary Intoxication to Negate Mens Rea,” Journal of Legal History 11 (1990): 372–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Singh, R. U., “The History of the Defense of Drunkenness in English Criminal Law,” Law Quarterly Review 49 (1933): 528–46Google Scholar. These articles emphasize the lengthy discussion of drunkenness in English legal commentary. Legal prescription regarding the defense of drunkenness in criminal cases was undoubtedly shaped by civil law and, more precisely, by the rules of contracts and torts. Both McCord and Singh cite the important precedents set by Reniger v. Fogossa (1551), which rejected the excuse because of the voluntary nature of drunkenness, and Beverley's Case (1603), in which drunkenness was seen as an aggravation of the offense.

⁵ The language of mental excuse is the subject of my book, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁶ The process of mitigation has received considerable attention since the publication of Hay, Douglas's “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Hay, Douglas, Linebaugh, Peter, Rule, John G., Thompson, E. P., and Winslow, Cal (New York, 1975), 1–60Google Scholar. For more on mitigation, see Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986)Google Scholar; Cockburn, J. S., Calendar of Assize Records, Home Circuit Indictments, Elizabeth I and James I, Introduction (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Herrup, Cynthia, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Law and Morality in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 106 (1985): 102–23Google Scholar; King, Peter, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar, and “Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1820,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The role of the judge is discussed by Langbein, John in “Albion's Fatal Flaws,” Past and Present, no. 98 (1983): 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the jury, see Green, Thomas A., Verdict according to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200–1800 (Chicago, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cockburn, J. S. and Green, Thomas A., eds., Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸ Younge, A sovereign antidote, 7.

⁹ Stockton, Owen, A warning to drunkards (London, 1682), 22–27Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Hart, The dreadful character, 2.

¹¹ Stockton, A warning to drunkards, 24–25.

¹² Bury, Edward, England's bane, or, The deadly danger of drunkenness (London, 1677), 29Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., 28.

¹⁴ Lake, Peter, “Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Sharpe, Kevin and Lake, Peter, (Palo Alto, CA, 1993), 257–83Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The Bloudie booke, or, The tragical and desperate end of Sir John Fites (alias) Fitz (London, 1605), 3, 20Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Ibid., 11.

¹⁷ Ibid., 12.

¹⁸ Ibid., 12–13.

¹⁹ Taylor, John, The Unnatural Father or, A Cruell Murther committed by one John Rowse of the Town of Ewell, ten miles from London in the County of Surry Upon two of his owne Children (London, 1621), 1Google Scholar.

²⁰ Ibid., 3.

²¹ Ibid., 12.

²² Heavens Cry Against Murder, or, A true Relation of the Bloudy and unparallel’d Murder of John Knight (London, 1657), 2, 3Google Scholar.

²³ Ibid., 3, 4.

²⁴ Ibid., 4.

²⁵ Lake, “Deeds against Nature.” Early modern conceptions of the social order are set out by Wrightson, Keith in “The Social Order in Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Bonfield, Lloyd, Smith, Richard M., and Wrightson, Keith (Oxford, 1986), 177–202Google Scholar; and in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John's introduction to their edited collection Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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²⁷ Taylor, Unnatural Father, 14.

²⁸ Ibid., 6.

²⁹ Ibid., 7.

³⁰ Ibid., 24–25.

³¹ Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed. (1694), ed. Fraser, Alexander Campbell (Oxford, 1894), 1:458–59Google Scholar.

³² Ibid., 1:461.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ibid., 1:463.

³⁶ Hale worried that the “easiness of counterfeiting this disability” and “the variety of the degrees of this infirmity” made its legal recognition problematic. Legal commentators expressed similar concerns about authenticating all mental states presented in court as grounds for mitigation. Pleas of the Crown, 1:32–33.

³⁷ Locke, Human Understanding, 1:463.

³⁸ For more on the Athenian Mercury, see Starr, George, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, NJ, 1971), chap. 1Google Scholar.

³⁹ Athenian Oracle: Being an Entire Collection Of all the Valuable Questions and Answers In the Old Athenian Mercuries (London, 1704), 3:40, 13, 62Google Scholar, respectively.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 3:40. The editors did not address the question of whether the man was legally married.

⁴¹ Ibid., 3:13.

⁴² Ibid., 3:62.

⁴³ Ibid.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Mandeville, Bernard, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions, Vulgarly called Hypo in Men and Vapours in Women (London, 1711), 265–75Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Mandeville, Bernard, Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), ed. Kaye, F. B. (Oxford, 1924), 1:91–92Google Scholar. The place of alcohol in the British army is explored by Kopperman, Paul E., “‘The Cheapest Pay’: Alcohol Abuse in the Eighteenth-Century British Army,” Journal of Military History 60 (1996): 445–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Mandeville, Bernard, Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (London, 1725), 21Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., 35.

⁵² Ibid., 35; Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 1:89.

⁵³ Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 1:89.

⁵⁴ In view of what could be called a more “sympathetic” analysis of drunkenness, some mistook Mandeville for an apologist for intemperance. Goldsmith, M. M., Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville's Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, 1985), 143–50Google Scholar; and Monro, Hector, The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford, 1975), 250–51Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Fielding, Henry, An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers (1751), in An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings, ed. Zirker, Malvin (New York, 1988), 89Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 77. Jonathan White surveys the discussion of class in the debate that surrounded the Gin Act of 1751 in “The ‘Slow but Sure Poyson’: The Representation of Gin and Its Drinkers, 1736–1751,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 53–63Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Fielding, Enquiry, 77.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 78, 82.

⁶¹ Ibid., 83, 83–84.

⁶² Ibid., 84–85.

⁶³ Ibid., 89.

⁶⁴ Fielding's discussion of drunkenness is part of a vast literature of the mid-eighteenth century attacking gin drinking. For a reassessment of the “gin craze,” see Clark, Peter, “The ‘Mother Gin’ Controversy in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Transactions for the Royal Historical Society 38 (1988): 63–84Google Scholar. See also Warner, Jessica, “The Naturalization of Beer and Gin in Early Modern England,” Contemporary Drug Problems 24 (1997): 373–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “In Another City, in Another Time: Rhetoric and the Creation of a Drug Scare in Eighteenth-Century London,” Contemporary Drug Problems 21 (1994): 485–511CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Warner, Jessica and Ivis, Frank, “Gin and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 85–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “‘Damn You, You Informing Bitch’: Vox Populi and the Unmaking of the Gin Act of 1736,” Journal of Social History 33 (1999): 299–330CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, “Slow but Sure Poyson.”

⁶⁵ Gentleman's Magazine 3 (1733): 201.

⁶⁶ Trotter, Thomas, Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical on Drunkenness and its Effects on the Human Body (London, 1788)Google Scholar. For more on addiction prior to the eighteenth century, see Warner, Jessica, “‘Resolv’d to drink no more’: Addiction as a Preindustrial Construct,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 55 (1994): 685–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of the social history of alcohol and alcoholism, see Porter, Roy, “The Drinking Man's Disease: The ‘Pre-History’ of Alcoholism in Georgian Britain,” British Journal of Addiction 80 (1985): 385–96CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁶⁷ White, “Slow but Sure Poyson.”

⁶⁸ Legal commentators compared English law favorably to Continental law shaped as it was by canon law and Roman law, which allowed that drunkenness could mitigate one's responsibility for crime.

⁶⁹ This study is based on the depositions from the Northern Circuit from 1660–1800 as well as all the cases from the OBSP from 1680–1714 and a sample of every fifth year between 1715 and 1800. Of the mental states mentioned in court, drunkenness was brought most frequently as an excuse. These rates of mitigation are based on a sample of all the cases recorded in the OBSP for 1681, 1691, 1711, 1721, 1731, 1741, and 1751. These numbers give us only the barest outline of the role of drunkenness in the eighteenth-century courtroom and must be used with care. Because no records of the jury's deliberation exist, it is impossible to know which factors affected the jury's decision. One may be able to show correlation but not causation. Furthermore, the OBSP strove to be more comprehensive and exact after 1730, but counting the number of drunkenness pleas for the latter part of the seventeenth century and the first third of the eighteenth is unreliable at best. These problems of sampling obscure the more important question of defendant agency and what it reveals about popular attitudes toward alcohol and cultural definitions of criminal responsibility. For more on these issues, see my book, Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility, 6–8, 51–53. John Beattie's statistics for punishments at the Old Bailey are found in Beattie, J. M., Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar. For more on the Northern Circuit, see Cockburn, J. S., “The Northern Assize Circuit,” Northern History 3 (1968): 118–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the OBSP, see Langbein, John, “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” University of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978): 311–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,” University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 1–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1664: Assi 45/7/1/155. No indictment was found in this case. Assi 44/12.

⁷¹ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1670: Assi 45/9/3/98. Thomas Wilson was found not guilty. Assi 44/18.

⁷² William Logans and Elizabeth Larmore, OBSP, February 1681. Logans was not sentenced to death, but it is unclear from the proceedings whether he was transported, burnt in the hand, or whipped.

⁷³ Elizabeth Scot, OBSP, January 1682. Scot was condemned to death.

⁷⁴ Richard Dounes, OBSP, December 1697. Dounes was found guilty and condemned to death.

⁷⁵ Chaytor, Miranda, “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,” Gender and History 7 (1995): 378–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an analysis of the structure of depositions and their interpretation, see Gibson, Marion, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁹ 1 Ann, sec.2., c. 9 (1702).

⁸⁰ 4 Geo. I, c. 11 (1718), and 6 Geo. I, c. 23 (1720).

⁸¹ For more on the emergence of counsel for the prosecution, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 352–56; Langbein, John, “Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” and “The Prosecutorial Origins of Defense Counsel in the Eighteenth Century: The Appearance of Solicitors,” Cambridge Law Journal 58 (1999): 314–65Google Scholar.

⁸² The work on sensibility is tremendously rich and provocative. See Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; Benedict, Barbara, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; McKenzie, Alan T., Certain Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose (Athens, 1990)Google Scholar; Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Pinch, Adela, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Palo Alto, CA, 1996)Google Scholar; Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, 1986)Google Scholar; and Sant, Ann Jessie Van, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁸³ Todd, Sensibility, 9.

⁸⁴ Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, intro. and chap. 1; Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, chaps. 2–3. For sensibility and the courtroom, see Rabin, Dana, “Searching for the Self in Eighteenth-Century English Criminal Trials, 1730–1800,” Eighteenth-Century Life 27 (2003): 85–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Bodies of Evidence, States of Mind: Infanticide, Emotion, and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Infanticide, 1550–2000, ed. Jackson, Mark (Ashgate, 2001), 73–92Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Most defendants conducted their own defense until the introduction of defense counsel began in the 1730s. Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 353–62, and “Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 9 (1991): 221–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, Verdict according to Conscience, chap. 7; Landsman, Stephen, “The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary Procedure in Eighteenth Century England,” Cornell Law Review 75 (1990): 498–609Google Scholar; Langbein, “Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” 282–83, “The Prosecutorial Origins of Defense Counsel,” and “Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial,” 123–34.

⁸⁶ For more on women and alcohol in England, see Peter Clark, “`Mother Gin,'” 70–71; Warner and Ivis, “Gin and Gender”; and White, “Slow but Sure Poyson.” Women are more visible in the insanity-drunkenness cases. This is consistent with ideas about insanity in the early modern period: the high consumption of alcohol by a woman would have been considered one more sign of the outlandish, antisocial behavior of the insane.

⁸⁷ For more on the culture of drinking, see Clark, Peter, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London, 1983)Google Scholar. For a discussion of gender and honor in early modern England, see Walker, Garthine, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 33–39, 230–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. David Sabean discusses the centrality of the tavern in daily life in early modern Germany: “There was a good deal of steady drinking. … It is safe to say that a good many men were under the influence of alcohol during most hours of the day.” Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1990), 174–79Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1740: Assi 45/21/4/83. Thwaites was found not guilty. Assi 44/55.

⁸⁹ Hannah Hore, OBSP, October 1750, no. 636. Hore was found guilty and sentenced to transportation; McDaniel was acquitted. Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1752: Assi 44/24/4/98. Assi 44/67. Fuddle means “to drink, liquor, ‘booze’”; “to stupefy, muddle, confuse.” One who is fuddled is “intoxicated; also, muddled.” (Definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary.)

⁹⁰ No verdict was recorded on Richardson's indictment. Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1756: Assi 45/25/4/129; Assi 44/73; Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1768: Assi 45/29/1/88; Assi 44/83.

⁹¹ James Cartwright, OBSP, July 1772, no. 520. Cartwright was found guilty and sentenced to transportation.

⁹² Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1728: Assi 45/18/5/34.

⁹³ This description of drunkenness contrasts sharply with Dalton, Michael's in The Countrey Justice (London, 1618)Google Scholar. Dalton's advice manual for justices of the peace defined someone as drunk when “the same legs which carry a man into the house cannot carry him out again.” (29). No indictment survives for the Heavysides case. This might indicate loss or damage, or suggest that the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence for trial. Baker, “Criminal Courts and Procedure,” 18–20; and Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records, Introduction.

⁹⁴ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1742: Assi 45/22/2/48G. Foster was found not guilty of felony. He was found guilty of misdemeanor and fined ten shillings. Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1742: Assi 44/57.

⁹⁵ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1756: Assi 45/26/1/153. Wharton was acquitted. Assi 44/72.

⁹⁶ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1796: Assi 45/39/1/142. Wardle was found guilty, fined, and imprisoned in the house of correction “for twelve months or until fine paid.” Assi 44/111.

⁹⁷ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1768: Assi 45/29/1/78C. Heron was found guilty of simple felony. Assi 44/83.

⁹⁸ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1750: Assi 45/24/3/16C. The final outcome of this case is unknown. According to the gaol book, Clark was removed to Wales by a writ of habeas corpus. Assi 42/5.

⁹⁹ John Moer, OBSP, January 1716. Moer was acquitted. At their courts-martial, soldiers who deserted often claimed they were drunk at the time. For an example of such proceedings, see McCorry, Helen, ed., “‘Besides, he was very drunk at the time …’: Desertion and Discipline, North Britain, 1751–1753,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 70 (1992): 189–97Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1743: Assi 45/22/4/48B.

¹⁰¹ Ibid. No indictment survives for this case. Perhaps the victim decided not to press charges any further, or maybe he initiated legal proceedings as a means of urging Harwood not to engage in such unlawful behavior in the future. Elizabeth and William may have disagreed about the severity of the crime, or perhaps the complainant received some compensation from the accused in exchange for dropping the case. Robert Shoemaker discusses how the early stages of the legal process were used to reach negotiated settlements in Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, 1660–1725 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Strangers in a community who lacked the support of character witnesses often suffered harsher penalties. Beattie, J. M., “Crime and the Court in Surrey, 1736–1753,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S., (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 155–86Google Scholar; Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records, Introduction; King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion, and “Decision-Makers.”

¹⁰³ For more on the alehouse, see Clark, The English Alehouse.

¹⁰⁴ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1758: Assi 45/29/1/42. No indictment survives for this case. Coultherd's name was found on a jail delivery list for 1768, ten years after the depositions were taken. Assi 44/83.

¹⁰⁵ Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1758: Assi 45/26/2/95G. Purchas survived the attack, which probably explains the dismissal of the case “upon consent of the prosecutor.” Assi 42/7.

¹⁰⁶ Cynthia Herrup discusses seventeenth-century appeals to the doctrine of universal human depravity in “Law and Morality,” 110–11, and The Common Peace.

¹⁰⁷ English legal tradition recognized insanity as an exculpatory state of mind since the earliest legal codes. During the eighteenth century, participants in the legal system employed the language of mental excuse to augment the definition of mental incapacity. For more on the insanity plea in the eighteenth century, see Eigen, Joel, Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (New Haven, CT, 1995)Google Scholar, and “Intentionality and Insanity: What the Eighteenth-Century Juror Heard,” in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 2, Institutions and Society, ed. Bynum, William, Porter, Roy, and Shepherd, Michael (London, 1985), 34–51Google Scholar, and “Delusion in the Courtroom: The Role of Partial Insanity in Early Forensic Testimony,” Medical History 35 (1991): 25–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Nigel, Crime and Insanity in England, vol. 1, The Historical Perspective (Edinburgh, 1968)Google Scholar, and “The Insanity Defense before 1800,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 477 (1985): 25–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Lawler was found guilty to the value of 10d. She was sentenced to transportation for seven years.

¹⁰⁹ Nathaniel Packhurst, OBSP, April 1715. Pankhurst was found guilty of willful murder under the Statute of Stabbing. The Statute of Stabbing (1 Jac. I, c. 8; 1604) made stabbing a capital, nonclergyable offense that could not be downgraded to manslaughter. Radzinowicz, Leon, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750, vol. 1, The Movement for Reform, 1750–1833 (New York, 1948), 630, 695Google Scholar.

¹¹⁰ Sarah Hatchet, OBSP, August 1726.

¹¹¹ Ibid. Hatchet was found not guilty.

¹¹² For a comprehensive discussion of lay definitions of lunacy in early modern England and the significance of babbling speech to such a diagnosis, see MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹¹³ William Smithson, OBSP, December 1778, no. 65.

¹¹⁴ Ibid.

¹¹⁵ Ibid.

¹¹⁶ Ibid. Smithson was found guilty of theft and was sentenced to navigation for three years.

¹¹⁷ Robert Stephenson was found guilty of manslaughter. Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1737: Assi 45/21/2/53–57; Assi 44/52. No indictment was found in Downham's case, but his name appears on the jail delivery list “for not finding sufficient sureties for his keeping the peace to Alice Downham his wife.” Assizes, Northern Circuit, 1763: Assi 45/27/1/12.

¹¹⁸ Guthrie, James, The Ordinary of Newgate, his account of the behaviour, confession, and dying words of the malefactors who were executed at Tyburn on … 24 December 1744 … (London, 1744–45), 47Google Scholar.

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¹²¹ Williams, Long Revolution, 46.

¹²² The issue of sobriety cut both ways. The victim's intoxication at the time of the crime was of great interest to the court: it undermined his or her credibility and often resulted in an acquittal.

¹²³ Fielding, Enquiry, 154.