Abstract

The author deals with the problem of reconstruction of English penal practice in the 18th century and applies the interdisciplinary approach and the principles of narrative jurisprudence. Legal historians, who long ago described the criminal law system of the 18th-century England within the framework of the political-legal approach, set the paradigm for generations of scholars for more than a hundred years. The exclusion of the historical context from the study led to a simplification of the legal discourse of the period in question. Narrative jurisprudence, a relatively new trend in the philosophy of law, is a special way of thinking about law, based on the fact that it is constructed from stories presented in a public form. Its methodology makes it possible to examine the problem from the perspective of the various actors in the discourse on countering criminal activity and to link together the legal communicative practices of the period. The author chooses the handbook titled The Country Justice: Containing the Practice, Duty and Power of the Justices of the Peace, As Well In As Out of Their Sessions by Michael Dalton, a judge from Cambridge, as an authentic source, which was popular in professional circles. Dalton introduced an alphabetical ordering of court precedents on matters within the jurisdiction of justices of the peace, i.e. roads, fines, taxes, arms, rebellion and robbery, etc. This arrangement differs from the later descriptions of the English legal system compiled by W. Blackstone and J.F. Stephen. The representation of the historical and cultural context, in which the Bloody Code “matured” and the legal thesaurus developed, is based on a unique alphabetical guide to the criminal biographies of the prisoners of the famous London prison, the Newgate Calendar. The author of this article examines such a felony as “burglary” by comparing its treatment in the relevant chapters of The Country Justice and the Newgate Calendar, which details the circumstances of the relevant crime and a particular individual’s trial.