Digital gallows

Jonathan Wilder had no friends when the executioner killed him. In his own way, he used to be a civil servant-a joint bounty hunter and prosecutor. He chased thieves and recovered stolen property. He was a useful figure in London in the18th century. London does not have its own regular police force. These people are called "thieves", and Wilder is good at his job. But in the process, he became a man with more problems than solutions. He called himself "the thief general of England and Ireland", but he became the main criminal leader in London, specializing in robbery and extortion. He often instigates or even plans theft, sells stolen goods for a relatively small amount, and then returns them to the owner for reward. If his cronies try to betray him, he will arrest them, then hang them and get paid. It is said that he inspired the word "double cross" because he put two X's in his account book, next to the names of those who cheated him.

Daniel defoe, a journalist and the author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote a sketch biography of wild animals one month after he was hanged in 1725. Henry fielding, the author of tom jones and Joseph Andrews, satirized the late Jonathan Wilde in his life history. John Gay thinks he is the inspiration of vicious pitching in The Beggar's Opera.

However, when this work evolved into salter Brecht Coultwell's three pence opera two centuries later, Wilder almost disappeared from his memory. Thirty years later, when Bobby Darin made a splash in Mike the Knife, Wilder was basically a forgotten man.

But thanks to a pair of American expatriates who were attracted by the lifestyle of the other half of the British Enlightenment, now anyone with a computer can revive Jonathan Wilde and his dark world. The original record of his trial is in the old Bailey's lawsuit. This abstract describes and frequently transcribes more than 654.38+million trials held in London and middlesex criminal courts from 1674 to 1834. Robert Shoemaker, a historian at the University of Sheffield, and Tim Hitchcock at the University of Hertfordshire spent a total of about $6.5438+260,000 to digitize 52 million words of meeting minutes and put them into a searchable database for anyone to read on the Internet.

Built in 1539, next to Newgate prison, the nickname of the Ministry of Justice was named after its address in Old Bailey Street. The "Bailey" or "wall" in London was once the Roman border of the city. The court has tried serious crimes, including any death penalty cases. In a city, the biographies of criminals and detailed folk songs often record the achievements of famous criminals, while the lawsuit is a tabloid sensation.

The first problem of litigation is that it is thin, cheap and focuses on sex and violence, but with the passage of time, they become more comprehensive and formal, and finally get the status of official records; Shoemakers and Hitchcock called them "the largest non-elite text processor ever published." Non-elite, really! Court records show that as the commercial center of the western world, London has just begun to show its great strength. The program actually benefited from the publication of the first booklet and flourished in the following decades. It's easy to understand why.

Take the missing Elizabeth Canning in 1753 as an example. A month later, she hobbled home in rags, half hungry and half thirsty, and her head was bleeding. She said that she was robbed and kidnapped by gypsies, refused to go whoring, and was locked in a thatched cottage in a rural brothel for 27 days. In the attic, there is a black water tank filled with water and about 24 pieces of bread. She testified in a case that attracted the public for months. She claimed to live on these meager rations until she tore a board from a wooden window and fell to the ground about 10 feet. In the process, she cut her ear to escape. Iris, the defendant leader of the case, insisted before the trial that she had never paid attention to Canning, but she was convicted of robbery, which was more serious than kidnapping at that time and would be sentenced to death anyway.

Obviously, there are serious loopholes in Canning's story. Apart from her incredibly long-term survival on so little food, the evidence shows that when Canning was kidnapped, neither the squire nor the defendant acplices were near the farmhouse. Investigators visited the attic and said it bears little resemblance to the room described by Canning. The tenants there testified that Canning said they had been living here when she was locked up. The attic does have a small window, but it also has a much larger second frameless window, which can easily enter the yard below four feet instead of ten feet.

In the second trial, Canning was convicted of perjury and was "transported" to the American colony. There, she married the nephew of the former governor of Connecticut, gave birth to five children, and died in 1773 at the age of 40. No one knows what happened during her disappearance. The squire was pardoned and released.

The story in the lawsuit evokes the mean streets of Moore Flanders, the waterfront of Jim Hawkins, the promenade of Black Dog and John Silver, and Fagin and cunning Dodge running a group of "black guards" in a wet alley. For example, in 174 1, the robber john carr robbed a man in the park for 4 shillings and shot him in the eye. He was sentenced to death. Passers-by knocked down the car. When one of his pursuers asked him why he did it, the thief gave a reason worthy of Dickens' explanation: "Money, if you were here, I would also serve you."

176 1 year, Thomas Daniels was convicted of murder for leaving his naked wife Sarah. One night in August, he came back from the bar and went out of the window on the third floor. But he won the pardon after recording his spouse's bad temper and claiming that she hit him on the head with an unknown object that night and then ran to the window to "fly out".

Litigation has long been the main source of daily life in London in the18th century, but their wealth is only reserved for those who stubbornly browse hard copies in research libraries, or those who squint at microfilms for several hours from 1980. "I read page by page," said John Betty, an honorary historian at the University of Toronto. He began to study crime and courts in Britain in 1980s, and finished his research in 1990s. At the same time, he wrote a book "Police and Punishment" in London from 65438 to 65438 to 0750.

However, this process was transformed into oldbaileynline.org, and shoemakers and Hitchcock brought them to ordinary people's laptops, showing how computer science can make the past survive.

Now, software "tags" can be placed in a large number of digital data, so that researchers can find something only by computer retrieval. This high-speed search is not only used for file classification, but also for searching phone records, directory fingerprints or almost any other task that needs to navigate a large amount of data. However, this was not the case when shoemakers and Hitchcock started their careers in the late 1980s.

"When I was interviewed for my first speech, they asked me if I could teach' Calculation in History'," Hitchcock said. I said "Yes" because I wanted this job, even though it was not true. On the computer at that time, they developed some programs that allowed you to fly from one page to another. You can see the potential, but not the mechanism.

Hitchcock from San Francisco and a shoemaker who grew up in Oregon are Ph.D. students of Greater London Records in the basement of 1982 City Hall. Both of them are interested in Hitchcock's so-called "looking at history from below"-he is writing a paper about the English workhouse in the18th century, while the shoemaker is studying the public relations of minor crimes in Greater London during the same period. The two men helped edit a collection of essays published in 1992, and then produced a CD-ROM course on18th century English towns in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, the Internet provided Hitchcock with what he called a "mechanism": "The old Bailey proceedings looked natural, and two people conceived the idea of digitizing them at the beginning of 1999. They received $565,438+00,000 from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, equivalent to the National Humanities Foundation, and $680,000 from the New Opportunity Fund for Digital Learning Materials, Equipment and Space.

"This is a lot of money, and we are very lucky," said the shoemaker. They recruited Sheffield College of Humanities to customize the software of the search program, but first they needed a digital copy of the text.

There is no easy way to get it. The technology in 2000 was not enough to scan words from microfilm; Even the printed text of18th century is full of broken fonts and ink "oozing" from the other side of the page, which may make this technology unusable.

Therefore, the researchers hired a person to take digital photos of all 60,000 pages of microfilm, and then sent these images to India by CD. There, in a process called double typing, two groups of typists type the whole manuscript independently, and then enter the copy into a computer, which will highlight the differences, which must be corrected manually. It took two years and nearly half a million dollars. Subsequently, the shoemaker and Hitchcock gathered a group of researchers and embedded more than 80 different computer "tags" in the whole manuscript, allowing search by name, surname, age, occupation, crime, crime location, sentence and punishment.

The plan was implemented in stages from 2003 to 2005. Sheffield technicians constantly improve and update the software, and recently added map links to help people locate the crime scene more effectively. Their next task is to link the stolen items mentioned in the lawsuit with the images in the London Museum.

At the same time, the team obtained enough new funds to digitize the proceedings of the Central Criminal Court (the successor of the old Bailey). The 654.38 million trial records of the Central Criminal Court started from 1.834 to 1.9 13. These should be online in 2008. They also plan to digitize another 30 million words of18th century records, including those of carpenters' guild, Brideville prison and madhouse, and integrate them into the original project. Hitchcock said that this will enable us to track people through this system and create a collective biography of working people in London in the18th century.

With Oldbaileyonline.org, finding a needle in a haystack is now easy to surrender. Genealogists often search it to track family history. A scholar searched the internet for information about the court's treatment of "* * *", who are people with cognitive impairment. With a few keystrokes on the keyboard, you can count crimes such as burglary (4754 in the database), murder (1573), arson (90), forgery (1067), or generate a crime map. The etymologists of the Oxford English Dictionary found that the word "impossible" was thought to have originated in university of south dakota in 1960s, and it seemed to appear in the case of 1787.

Randall mcgowan of the University of Oregon said that Oldbaileyonline.org had "broadened his horizons" and he was writing a fake history book of18th century. "You can find that most forgers are men." (Most employees who are weak in gambling or women have the ability to imitate the handwriting of the boss in the "handwritten sign", that is, the rich get money by borrowing money. )

T Traditionalists point out that any technology, from micro-movies to the Internet, will add "distance" to academics, which is not necessarily a good thing. Although Beatty of the University of Toronto thinks that the Internet is "indispensable" for his current research, he said, "I am very happy to receive a letter from henry fielding. I have unpacked bundles of still defiled18th century documents."

London described in the minutes of the meeting is a central country, ranking among the best in the world in the18th century. 1700, the population of London is nearly 600,000. By 1800, the population increased to more than100000, and the economy broke out.

Without a regular police force, Londoners had to protect themselves at the beginning of this century. Neighborhood appoints householders as "policemen", who have the right to arrest the perpetrators or ask for help. The law requires citizens to pay attention to "call for help" or "stop, thief!" And bring the criminals to justice, as they did in the john carr case.

With such a simple public security management, * * * pays attention to deterrence. Under the so-called "blood code",1in a series of laws promulgated in the middle of the eighth century, more than 200 crimes were sentenced to death. These include not only violent crimes, but also everything from forgery to shoplifting and pickpocketing.

The shoemaker said, "The death penalty is used to make an example." But because neither the authorities nor the public wanted to hang people for relatively trivial crimes, only one third of the death penalty was executed in the18th century. With the development of this century, the public's enthusiasm for hanging has gradually weakened.

"Nobody wants to wash blood," said the shoemaker. Instead, many condemned prisoners were branded, some were pardoned, some were "transported" to North American colonies, and later "transported" to Australia. Only in the 1970s 17, when the American revolution interrupted traffic, imprisonment became a more common choice.

Even if there is a bloody code, there is no formal investigation or prosecution system, so * * * began to provide huge bonuses for those who committed serious crimes. London attracts young workers, who are busy in prosperity, but idle and often dangerous in depression. The war continues, and every treaty brings a batch of military talents. Their most marketable talent is weapons skills.

Crime is getting more and more serious, and new law enforcement means are needed. One of the innovators was henry fielding, who, together with his half-brother John, served as a medieval sheriff in Bowie Street near Covent Garden. 1753, the garrison urged * * * to set up an arch street running team composed of former police officers to hunt down criminals and bring them to justice. Betty, who is writing a history of runners, said: "They are real detectives, tracking criminal gangs.

They replaced thieves, who were trapped by hopeless corruption in simple times because of Jonathan Wilder and others.

Crime, wild, started at1725 65438+1October 22nd, which is modest enough. Irish immigrant Henry Kelly testified that when Wilder advised them to rob a shop run by a blind shoemaker, he and his friend Margaret Murphy were drinking gin at Wilder's house. ""I'll go with you and show you out, "he told them." When Kelly and Murphy went in,

"Wild waiting outside. Shopkeeper Catherine Steham later testified that the couple were "too difficult to get along with" and that her samples could not "please them". She went upstairs and found that others liked them better. But "we can't agree on the price," Sturm testified that Kelly and Murphy left. Half an hour later, Miss Steham wore a box of lace.

After leaving the store, Kelly and Murphy met Wilder again. Kelly later testified that Wilder offered to pay them "three guineas and four large pieces" on the spot (the salary of a house is slightly higher than seven pounds a year) d) or, if Sturm paid them, they would insist on more lace. Kelly said they took the cash,

As expected, Stephen turned to Wilder for help. She announced a reward of 15 guineas in the advertisement. According to her testimony, she told Wilder privately that she would give 20 or 25 guineas.

Wilder, who claimed to be an honest legal official, apparently only accepted Statham's 10 guineas to pay the agency fee, and made the lost lace in time. "I don't care at all", according to her testimony, he told her that I did these things not for the benefit of the world, but for the benefit of the poor.

But Kelly and Murphy told a different story, which the jury thought was convincing, at least to some extent. They acquitted Wilder of theft, but convicted him, which would be called "Jonathan Wilder's behavior"-obstructing justice by accepting payment without trying to sue the thief.

Wilder was hanged in Tibourne on May 24th, 725/KLOC-0. Daniel defoe wrote that the road from Newgate Prison to the gallows was filled with cheering crowds. "They angrily asked the executioner to send him away." . The proceedings summed up the case in a typical economic way: "The jury acquitted the prisoner who was charged with theft for the first time and found him guilty of another crime. Death.

Guy Gugliotta, a former journalist of * * *, first appeared in the Smithsonian Museum in this article.