Perhaps you might wish to read the types of things that were considered crimes in England in the late 1700's....Many children were transported to Australia for such "crimes".... Be VERY careful what you say about the Australians, and for that matter, the Americans.
The Bloody Code..."Crimes" and how they were dealt with in the late 1700's-1800's....
72.14.253.104
Most Australians are well aware of the horrific punishments inflicted onthose found guilty of even minor crimes under the old British regime beforesome measure of reform of the criminal law took place in the late 1820sand early 1830s, roughly two-thirds of the way through the Transportation period.
Hanging, flogging, and transportation beyond the seas or to prisonhulks was the punishment for everything from murder to petty theft. Forminor offences there were the pillory, the stocks, or committal to the oldunreformed gaols and castle dungeons where storms of infectious diseasesregularly swept away a significant proportion of the inmates.This tells us little about the true experience or the reality of law and orderin the Britain of the time.
In actual fact, the severest punishment, the deathpenalty, though often pronounced was enforced reasonably sparingly, andtransportation had been the main punishment for most crimes for manyyears before 1788.
If we look at the convict experience through the eyes and the story of anancestor, our perspective is even more likely to be distorted, for all toooften we are looking at what the convict officials in particular saw as thegreat success of the system. After all, you are a descendant, you are the evidence that it was all for the best, it all worked out well in the end.However this is a very skewed perspective. Firstly, only a small minorityof male convicts, and possibly only a bare majority of the female convicts,ever married or had descendants in the Australian colonies.
Secondly, thevast majority were never in serious danger of being executed, howeverscary the prospect loomed to the individual facing the possibility of thehangman. Thirdly, a considerable majority of those found guilty of crimesthat could lead to transportation were not transported at all; they wereeither sentenced to minor punishment or even when sentenced totransportation many were never sent.The period of transportation of female convicts to the eastern colonieslasted for sixty-five years, 1788 to 1853, while the entire period of
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transportation of convicts from Britain to the Australian colonies lastedfor eighty years, 1788 to 1868.
This was also a period of modernisation inthe British legal system.To fully understand how all these parts of the jigsaw fit together, it isnecessary to look at the British system of law and order from the otherend, and begin with how that system threw up some people who wereeventually sent to Australia.
The Modern and the Medieval: a patchwork not a plan In the English or more generally the British tradition, somewhere betweenthe Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the present day the recognisablymodern world emerged. But it is not always easy for us to work out just which elements of the modern are already present at a given time, as distinctfrom those which seem to be modern but actually are not; and those whichseem on the face of it to belong in the medieval world but which can, withan adjustment of thought, be seen have modern elements of thought behindit.During the period that affected the transportation of convicts to Australia,there were quite extraordinary changes to the British criminal laws underwhich convicted felons were sentenced and there were, for instance,considerable differences between English and Scottish laws as well as considerable difference between the ways laws were applied in Englandand Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
Most of us looking back to the legal system of the 1880s, well after transportation had ended, would readily appreciate the system of criminal law and order that prevailed at that time.However, the same cannot be said of the Britain of the 1780s, the era ofthe Bloody Code when the American War of Independence had made transportation of convicts impossible.
The terror factor During the mid-1700s minor offences often attracted the death penalty,and this led the parliament to consider that more horrific crimes obviouslyrequired much more serious punishments than mere death. The terror factorin the punishments becomes more obvious. In 1752 the punishment formurder was supplemented by “some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy” which consisted of immediate sentence of death upon conviction(rather than waiting for the last day of the Assizes) and execution within two days (so that appeals for clemency could not be heard). Meanwhile the convicted prisoner was to endure solitary confinement on bread andwater until the execution.
After death the punishment was not yet complete and the body was to behanded over to the surgeons for dissection or to be hung in chains, and the convicted were to forfeit all their lands and goods. Severe penalties were prescribed for others who assisted in any way to avoid the strict carryingout of all details of the punishment including seven years transportationfor rescuing or burying the body before dissection or the completion ofthe period of hanging in chains.
The relatively immediate execution wasobviously designed to strike terror, in that it restricted the possibility ofapplying for mercy. Solitary confinement meant that family and friends would have no chance to visit and say farewell.
The diet of bread andwater struck at the traditions of a last meal, and the fact that many eighteenthcentury executions were carried out on people who were drunk, sometimes to the point of total insensibility. But it was the last three conditions, ofexpropriation of property, dissection and hanging in chains, that probablycaused the most terror.
Murder of a husband: ‘burnt with fire until dead’Women could be sentenced to be dissected under the terms of the 1752 Act but did not suffer the indignity of hanging in chains, though an evenmore horrific fate awaited those found guilty of petty treason. Petty treason,literally the lesser forms of being a traitor, referred to murder of either alord by a vassal, a master by a servant or a husband by a wife and also tocertain crimes against the state especially coining (counterfeiting, clipping,altering or colouring coin of the realm).
The penalty for male coiners had for long been hanging, but until 1790, three years after the First Fleetsailed for Botany Bay, the sentence for women was still to be “drawn tothe place of execution, and there burnt with fire until she was dead”.
The actual executions were usually a little more humane than the sentencesuggests. For at least most of the eighteenth century it was accepted thatrather than being “drawn” (that is dragged) along the street by horses, the condemned would symbolically travel on a hurdle, sled or in a cart. It was also accepted that the executioner would strangle the woman before the fire had time to reach her, though to do so was strictly against the law and was in itself the capital crime of murder. Because the original crimescovered under petty treason were derived from treason itself, the rules
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