England was and is only one of four countries in the United Kingdom, but only English cases, and therefore legislation, will be discussed here. Probably this is due partly to the difference in size – England has during the centuries of interest here been the most populous of the four. However, reasonably there should be cases in the other countries too, a suggestion strengthened by the Edinburgh native John Abercrombie.578 In the United Kingdom and especially in England the eighteenth and early nineteenth century has generally been seen as a period where the risk of being sentenced to death and possibly executed was high due to the many crimes that were punishable by death.579 A question of interest is how much the push for severer penalties was related to the crimes studied here. Although they seem not to have been acknowledged as a certain group in the general push for severer penalties a theological element was present and starting in the 1740’s the sermons preached to the court of assizes in England often demanded harsher punishments. Both on the British islands and in North America the idea of murder as a specific guilt and treason against God through the destruction of His image also was argued by preachers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Often in England during this time also the eternal punishments were seen as the natural continuation of the execution. The common attitude to find severer punishments resulting in deterrence as asolution to the problem of crime, according to André Krischer, eventually in the early nineteenth century resulted in the ”Making-Examples-Doktrin” of terrorising and severer penalties being the answer even to all calls of the method not working.580 From the reign of George II (King of Great Britain and Ireland and Duke of Hanover) we can find an example of the close relationship between radically different rules in diverse legal environments. TheCrimiEngland different realities and reactions 578 See Abercrombie 1859 p 238. 579 See e g Radzinowicz 1948 p 3 sqq. Lately vigorous research and debate on the reality of this view exist. See e g King and Ward 2015 and Devereaux 2017. 580 Faller 1987 p 73 sq, Krischer 2008a p 256 sqq (quotation p 261). 165
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