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Early Modern England

Yale, , Prof. Keith E. Wrightson

Updated On 02 Feb, 19

Overview

General Introduction - The Tree of Commonwealth : The Social Order in the Sixteenth Century - Households: Structures, Priorities, Strategies, Roles - Communities: Key Institutions and Relationships - Countries and Nation: Social and Economic Networks and the Urban System - The Structures of Power - Late Medieval Religion and Its Critics - Reformation and Division, 1530-1558 - "Commodity" and "Commonwealth": Economic and Social Problems, 1520-1560 - The Elizabethan Confessional State: Conformity, Papists and Puritans - The Elizabethan - Economic Expansion, 1560-1640 - A Polarizing Society, 1560-1640 - Witchcraft and Magic - Crime and the Law - Popular Protest - Education and Literacy - Street Wars of Religion: Puritans and Arminians - Crown and Political Nation, 1604-1640 - Constitutional Revolution and Civil War, 1640-1646 - Regicide and Republic, 1647-1660 - An Unsettled Settlement: The Restoration Era, 1660-1688 - England, Britain, and the World: Economic Development, 1660-1720 - Refashioning the State, 1688-1714 - Concluding Discussion and Advice on Examination

Includes

Lecture 15: Crime and the Law

4.1 ( 11 )


Lecture Details

Early Modern England Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)

In this lecture Professor Wrightson examines the problem of order in early modern society, focusing on crimes of violence and upon property crime. In examining violence, he notes the existence of special cases geographically (the borderlands) and socially (aristocratic violence) before looking at the lower (and gradually declining) levels of homicide in general. He then considers property crime, distinguishing the various categories of theft and the manner in which cases were brought to, and handled in, the courts. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed a peak in prosecution, but while the law could be harsh and bloody in meting out punishment, it was also characterized by discretionary extension of mercy. Interpretations of the use of such discretion are compared and assessed -- as are the limits that existed on its use in a society that believed in the deterrent effect of exemplary punishment.

0000 - Chapter 1. The Question of Violence
0325 - Chapter 2. Examples
1101 - Chapter 3. Responses
1648 - Chapter 4. Homicide
2316 - Chapter 5. Property Crime Capital and Non-capital, Clergyable and Non-clergyable
2747 - Chapter 6. Incidences
3452 - Chapter 7. Responses

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website httpopen.yale.educourses

This course was recorded in Fall 2009.

Ratings

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Comments
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Sam

Excellent course helped me understand topic that i couldn't while attendinfg my college.

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Dembe

Great course. Thank you very much.

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