Crimes and Misdemeanours

In this book, David Bentley, the author of The Sheffield Hanged 1750-1864 and The Sheffield Murders 1865-1965, has put together a fascinating pot pourri of legal tales drawn in the main from the nineteenth century. Grouped under four headings Tales from Sheffield and Beyond, Judges behaving badly, Petticoat Perjury and Gallows Tales, they include topics as diverse as the Pentridge Rising of 1817, the Sheffield chartist martyr, Samuel Holberry, grave robbing, the death of a judge in a Nottingham brothel, the capture of two Jesuit priests at Grindleford, inquest rigging by a shropshire coroner, the house at Stoney Middleton which was home to a nineteeth-century Lord Chief Justice, the muderess, Martha Browne, and her link with Tess of the Urbervilles, Sheffield's debtor's prisons, Charles Dicken's role in securing the dismissal of a London magistrate, an Irish rape prosecution which ended with the accused and accuser marrying in the judge's room while the jury were out considering their verdict and a baronet who acted as assistant executioner at a Carlisle hanging.