The history of crime is an exciting field, forming one aspect of a much wider increase in interest in social history as a whole. This book, based on a detailed study of court records in Essex between 1620 and 1680 combines a detailed study of fluctuations in crime and punishment in a seventeenth-century English county with an analysis of the social processes which lay behind prosecution. In so doing, it marks a major contribution to the field. Dr Sharpe's objective is to break away from older treatments of crime in the period, which have depended too much on an uncritical use of literary...