Catalogue description Court of King's Bench: Crown Side: London and Middlesex Indictments Files

Presentments

The files include the presentments made by constables for a variety of minor offences in Middlesex (including the liberty of Westminster), where by virtue of its residence at Westminster the court had jurisdiction in the first instance. In the 1820s they were defined in the words of the precept charging the high constable of a hundred to report them as: ' high and petty treasons, extortions in officers in taking unlawful fees, or other oppressures, deceits, riots, routs, unlawful assemblies, batteries, bloodshed, rescuing of prisoners, whatsoever defects in weights or measures, hue and cries not prosecuted, watches and wards not kept, and against all forestallers, regrators, ingrossers, champarties, unlicensed alehouses, drunkenness, swearing, blasphemy, disordered houses and disorders in alehouses, harbouring of inmates and incroachments upon commons, building of cottages against the statute..., all annoyances and defaults in not repairing the highways and bridges, of perprestures or encroachments, and of not cleansing the streets or not paving the streets, or of not cleansing of ditches or common sewers, and of all houses for incontinency or bawdry unlawful haunters of taverns and alehouses, all persons that profane the Lord's day, all labourers of jurors, and generally of all manner of trespasses and offences whatsoever'. The presentments can therefore provide local information about social and economic affairs in Middlesex.

The presentments were made to two grand juries summoned in each term, one representing Ossulston hundred, the heavily urbanised part of Middlesex, which included the Westminster, Holborn, Finsbury, Tower and Kensington divisions and the liberty of the Tower, and one representing the less urbanised hundreds of Edmonton, Gore, Elthorne, Spelthorne and Isleworth. When each grand jury met it issued a precept to the high constable of each division asking for the presentments of all nuisances within their districts; the high constables in turn issued precepts to the petty constables of their parishes, who subsequently appeared before the appropriate grand jury. When they did so the clerk of the grand jury engrossed on parchment and filed presentments for the different offences, and against any constables who had refused or neglected to attend. The individuals presented were then summoned by the sheriff to make an appearance to be dealt with, and normally suffered the monetary penalty of the cost of making an appearance.

Informations

Criminal informations are common on the files in the seventeenth century, but then become less numerous than indictments until the early nineteenth century. Four kinds of informations appear, the main two being:

Informations ex officio were those exhibited by the attorney general, prosecuting on behalf of the king, without prior notice and without the need to establish a prima facie case against the defendant or defendants. They tended to be used in respect of misdemeanors, and usually concerned offences against the crown revenue, or seditious libels.

Informations by the king's coroner and attorney (also known as the master of the Crown Office), were exhibited by him at the instance of private individuals in cases of alleged misdemeanour. The alleged misuse of such criminal informations led in 1692 to a statute (4 & 5 William & Mary c 18) forbidding their exhibition without the express leave of the court, and making unsuccessful prosecutors liable to costs. It became necessary for prosecutors to swear affidavits to make out a prima facie case, and until the early nineteenth century defendants normally revealed their defence, also by means of an affidavit, as a means of attempting to prevent the exhibition of the information. Such affidavits as survive are in KB 1. As a result of the act the use of the criminal information was increasingly limited to gross and notorious misdemeanours, like criminal libel and riot.