Edmund Tew's notebook is a remarkable if cryptic record of the troublesome relationships of local people in a rapidly developing area of North-East England. In the coal-exporting towns of Sunderland and South Shields, notorious for the collective violence of their industrial conflicts, there were no formal structures of local government, and so, as the notebook indicates, it was the lone magistrate who provided the opportunity for judicial intervention into and resolution of the many individual and personal disputes which arose. As magistrate, Tew dealt with many problems, such as vagrancy,...