Marshall Rare Books
An Act to authorise, for a limited Time, the Punishment by Hard Labour of Offenders who, for certain Crimes, are of shall become liable to be transported to any of His Majesty's Colonies and Plantations
Anno Regni GEORGII III REGIS Magnae Britaniiae, Franciae, & Hiberniae, DECIMO SEXTO. At the Parliament Begun and holden at Westminster, the Twenty-ninth Day of November, Anno Domini 1774, in the Fifteenth Year of our Sovereign Lord GEORGE the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith.... FIRST EDITION, [2], 1091-1102, woodcut coat of arms on title, woodcut floriated initial, text in black letter, unbound, folio (320 x 200mm), London, Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1776
Anno Regni GEORGII III REGIS Magnae Britaniiae, Franciae, & Hiberniae, DECIMO SEXTO. At the Parliament Begun and holden at Westminster, the Twenty-ninth Day of November, Anno Domini 1774, in the Fifteenth Year of our Sovereign Lord GEORGE the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith….
FIRST EDITION, [2], 1091-1102, woodcut coat of arms on title, woodcut floriated initial, text in black letter, unbound, folio (320 x 200mm), London, Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1776
This important Criminal Law Act temporarily suspended the established system for transporting convicts to the British American colonies, in response to the outbreak of the American Revolution. The American Revolution had made continuing transportation there unfeasible, with the last convict ship to cross the Atlantic docking in Virginia in April that year.
Under the Criminal Law Act, felons continued to be sentenced to transportation, but with no place to go, were liable instead to a sentence at hard labour until alternative provisions could be made. “Any Male, convicted in England of any Crime punished by Transportation to America, may instead thereof, be kept to Hard Labour in cleansing the River Thames…”.
The rebellion and the end of transport to America in part prompted the British use of prisons for punishment and the start of prison building programs (as opposed to the use of gaols related to trial or sentencing) because the important transportation alternative to the death penalty had been removed. While initially suspended for two years by the 1776 Act, it would be continued until 1779 by the Criminal Law Act 1778 (18 Geo 3 c 62) and the Criminal Law Act 1779 (19 Geo 3 c 54), with little resolution of the developing accommodation problems.