Just back from a great talk by my friend Dr. Kathy Chater, who I've mentioned here before. She told us some of the fascinating stories she'd uncovered in the Old Bailey court records.  You can now check them out yourself online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ 

But back in 2000, when Kathy began her research, she had to go through the cases on microfilm, scanning the pages for mention of black people. I sympathise as I've spent plenty of time doing the same with parish registers! The advantage of this over the modern keyword search is that you get a feel for the source and the context- Kathy noted how other people were treated in court, so was able to understand the black experience better.  

One of the great things about the Old Bailey records is that they're verbatim accounts of what was said in court, so you really hear people's voices coming through.  One memorable quote came from Ann Duck, who is recorded as shouting during an assault: "Hamstring the dog that he may never run after me again!", another one that made us laugh was the woman who testified "he put his impudence into me"!

Chater concluded that black people in the long 18th century were pretty law- abiding, as she's found less than 200 of them appearing in some 54,000 trials. There were still some juicy stories to be told however- of highwaymen and footpads, theft, rape and murder.  I was reminded of how extreme and sometimes gruesome 18th century punishments could be (see Hogarth's print above). We also learnt of Thomas Latham,  possibly the first black police constable (c.1746). The case is copied on the excellent Black Presence website, here: http://www.blackpresence.co.uk/black-people-at-the-old-bailey/

Anyway, I'm not going to try to recount every case here. You'll have to look for them yourself on the amazing Old Bailey website, or check out Kathy's book, now in paperback.

When I heard Todd Akin assert that pregnancy as a result of rape is “really rare” and that "from what I understand from doctors":

"If it is a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down," I  wondered which doctors he'd been speaking to. 

The last time I’d heard such a theory was when reading early modern English social history books. I wasn’t the only one- Guardian blogger Vanessa Heggie traces the “legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape” back to the 13th century. I remember being horrified when I first read that a 16th century rape victim had no case if she became pregnant.

In fact the medical theory on which this law was based is even older. As Corrine Saunders explains in her book Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England:

“One widely circulated medical theory, based on the ideas of Galen, held that women as well as men emitted seed, and therefore that only when an emission was made, through orgasm, could conception occur: Failure of either partner to achieve orgasm rendered intercourse nonprocreative... According to the Galenic theory of conception, for pregnancy to occur as a result of rape was impossible...”

As Galen lived from 129 –c. 200 AD, we can see that these ideas have been in circulation since ancient times.
  But even more disturbingly, Akin is not the only modern man to have espoused such ancient views regarding female biology, as Robert Mackey demonstrates in his latest blog for the New York Times.  

I thought it was fascinating that the works of Galen could continue to have currency as late as the Tudor and Stuart period that I’ve studied. It’s even more surprising to see men dangerously innocent of modern biology today.