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Change in crime and punishment across the thousand years from c1000 to the present is the central analytical task of Edexcel Paper 1 Option 10. The examiners do not want candidates to narrate events; they want them to explain why change occurred at particular moments. To answer that question, Edexcel structures its mark scheme around six recurring factors: government, religion, attitudes, science and technology, individuals, and economy and population. A strong Q4 (explain why) or Q5/6 (judgement essay) response identifies two or three of these factors, supports each with precise examples, and shows how they interact. This lesson explains each factor, gives multiple examples from across the period, provides a cross-period summary table, and demonstrates how the factors combine in practice.
Government — Parliament, the monarch, the Home Office and the civil service — is the factor that turns pressure for change into law. Without a statute, a shift in attitudes or a reformer's campaign cannot alter the criminal code. Every major reform in this course is ultimately a piece of legislation.
| Period | Example of government action | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Medieval | Statute of Winchester 1285 | Formalised hue and cry, required weapons to be kept in each household |
| Early Modern | Act of Supremacy 1534 | Redefined heresy; denying royal supremacy became treason |
| 18th–19th c | Metropolitan Police Act 1829 | Created first professional police force |
| 18th–19th c | Gaols Act 1823 | Required inspection, salaried gaolers, separate women's wings |
| 18th–19th c | County and Borough Police Act 1856 | Made professional policing compulsory nationwide |
| Modern | Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 | Suspended capital punishment for murder |
| Modern | Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 | Codified stop-and-search and interview procedure |
Government is rarely the sole cause of change. Parliament legislates in response to other factors: reformers (individuals) build the case, attitudes shift, urban growth (economy) creates the need. But government is the mechanism through which those pressures become binding. An answer that ignores legislation will always feel incomplete to an examiner.
For most of the period religion is not a private matter; it is the foundation of law and the legitimacy of punishment. Religious authority structures how the state defines crime, how it investigates guilt, and how it justifies the death penalty.
| Period | Example | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Medieval | Trial by ordeal | Verdicts treated as God's judgement; priest blessed the iron or water |
| Medieval | Church courts and benefit of clergy | Anyone literate could avoid hanging by reciting Psalm 51 |
| Medieval | 1215 Fourth Lateran Council | Clergy forbidden from blessing ordeals; system collapsed |
| Early Modern | Reformation 1530s | Heresy redefined four times between Henry VIII and Elizabeth I |
| Early Modern | Witchcraft Acts 1542/1604 | Religious belief in maleficium underwrote capital prosecutions |
| 18th–19th c | Quaker prison reformers | Elizabeth Fry's Newgate work rooted in Quaker belief in the inner light |
| Modern | Chaplains in modern prisons | Continuity of religious presence despite secular state |
The direction of travel is from religion as the framework of law towards religion as one influence among many. Benefit of clergy, for example, was a medieval loophole that worked because literacy implied clerical status. As literacy became universal, the loophole became absurd, and it was abolished in 1827. The death penalty for heresy disappeared in practice by the seventeenth century even though the law lingered.
Attitudes are the shared moral assumptions of a society: what counts as an appropriate punishment, who deserves sympathy, what behaviour is acceptable in private. Changes in attitude are difficult to date precisely — they rarely happen on a single day — but they are decisive in explaining why reform becomes politically possible.
| Period | Attitude shift | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Medieval | Acceptance of divine intervention in trials | Trial by ordeal was socially legitimate |
| Early Modern | Fear of disorder from vagrants and masterless men | Harsh Vagrancy Acts 1547, 1572 |
| 18th–19th c | Revulsion at public executions as brutalising | 1868 abolition of public hanging |
| 18th–19th c | Belief in the reformability of offenders | Rise of the reformatory prison, Pentonville 1842 |
| Modern | Horror at miscarriages of justice | Support for abolition after Evans (1950) and Bentley (1953) |
| Modern | Changing views on domestic conduct | Criminalisation of marital rape 1991; coercive control 2015 |
| Modern | Shifting attitudes to children | Minimum age of criminal responsibility raised; borstals; juvenile courts |
Attitudes interact with the other factors rather than acting alone. The revulsion at public hanging was not new in 1868 — Dickens had written about it in 1849 — but it became politically decisive once reformers, Parliament and the press aligned.
Technology creates new opportunities for crime and new opportunities for detection. Motor cars produced a new class of offences (dangerous driving, drink-driving); computers produced another (hacking, cyber-fraud); DNA produced a new category of evidence. Technology is the factor that most obviously dominates the modern period.
| Development | Year | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Fingerprinting in English courts | 1902 | First conviction on fingerprint evidence: the Stratton brothers 1905 |
| Police radio | 1920s | Co-ordinated pursuit across a force |
| Motor car | Early 20th c | New offences; high-speed escape |
| National Criminal Record Office | 1913 | Centralised records |
| Forensic science service | 1935 | Ballistics, toxicology, trace analysis |
| DNA profiling | 1984 (Jeffreys) | First conviction 1988 (Colin Pitchfork) |
| CCTV in public spaces | 1980s onward | Evidence for convictions, deterrent presence |
| Internet | 1990s onward | Cybercrime, fraud, online harassment |
| Police National Computer | 1974 | Real-time access to criminal records |
Technology is rarely the whole story. DNA profiling required the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to authorise the National DNA Database. CCTV required government and local authority funding. Science accelerates change; it does not make change inevitable.
A small number of named individuals reshaped English criminal justice. Candidates should know each one's dates, what they did, and why it mattered.
| Individual | Dates | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| John Howard | 1726–1790 | State of the Prisons 1777; inspection and reform of gaols |
| Elizabeth Fry | 1780–1845 | Newgate women's wing from 1813; female wardens; education |
| Robert Peel | 1788–1850 | Metropolitan Police 1829; consolidation of criminal law; reduction of capital offences |
| Edwin Chadwick | 1800–1890 | Sanitary reform that reduced petty crime linked to slum conditions |
| Sir Charles Warren | 1840–1927 | Metropolitan Police Commissioner during Ripper investigation; resigned 1888 |
| Sydney Silverman | 1895–1968 | Introduced the 1965 Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act |
| Sir Alec Jeffreys | 1950– | Invented DNA fingerprinting 1984 |
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