The Summary Courts and the prosecution of assault in Northampton and Nottingham, 1886-1931
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The focus of research has traditionally been upon the higher courts of the Quarter Sessions and the Assizes where the study of violence has tended to rest upon areas of a serious or lethal nature. Comparatively much less attention has been given to minor violence prosecuted in the Petty Sessions. The research presented in this thesis offers a contribution to the existing historiography, specifically in relation to the manner in which the summary courts dealt with the prosecution of assault. This extant court registers of Northampton and Nottingham provide a comparative quantitative analysis of the levels of prosecuted assault, which during this period declined. Outcomes for the verdict and sentencing patterns of in excess of 6,000 cases strongly indicate there was a definite focus upon male offending. Female offenders were found guilty less often and the resultant sentencing policy was also less harsh in comparison. Assaults upon the police were highly likely to be found guilty and the sentences were found to be harshest for this group of defendants. Qualitative analysis supplements the statistical research using local press trial reports providing a contextual understanding of how and why assaults came to occur, which commonly located assaults in the streets, the public houses and the homes of Northampton and Nottingham. The summary courts were accessible to the majority of the population and the process was highly discretionary. Individuals used the courts for their own ends and the process was neither linear nor predictable in its outcome. Magistrates were shown to act as brokers of settlement, often attempting to preserve civil relations between individuals as far as possible, as much as being an arbiter of the law when dealing with assault cases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".