The Country Justice and the Case of the Blackamoor's Head

The legal system in eighteenth-century England has generally been viewed as an instrument of class justice, imposed by magistrates drawn from the gentry and aristocracy, and weighing harshly on the labouring and servant classes. The rare survival of the justicing notebooks (1787-1798) of Thomas Dixon of Riby make it possible to draw a more nuanced picture. As a working farmer, Dixon was an unusual recruit to the magistrates' bench; but his notebooks provide an illuminating glimpse of the justice system in operation at its lowest level, where stealers of ducks and absconding servants were brought before a country justice. The detail furnished by these volumes is amplified with extracts from other records, including those of quarter sessions and parish constables. In the second part of the volume, legal papers drawn up in the course of a mundane dispute over an unpaid account provide a wealth of information of life at the time, dealing with the financial difficulties enmeshing the Thorold family of Harmston, cattle-droving, and the drainage of the upper Witham. The investigation into the activities of Jack Catton as tenant of the Blackamoor's Head in the early 1830s reveals the key role of this obscure alehouse, both in quenching the thirst of the "bankers" employed on widening the river, and in catering for the drovers and the large numbers of cattle in their charge, stopping there for the night on their way from Scotland to the markets in London.