In No Heathen Land

THE OLD BAILEY AND ITS TRIALS (226 pp.)--Bernard O'Donnell--Macmillan ($2.50).

"Hangman, I charge you pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man; scourge her till the blood runs down. It is Christmas--a cold time for madam to strip. See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly."

In such language the Lord Chief Justice of England's most renowned court of law, London's Old Bailey, ladled out a generous helping of what was known as British justice in the 1680s. It was shocking language from a judge, but few Britons were shocked. In the courts, as on the street, the times had a raw, cruel edge. Defendants stood trial in irons, professional witnesses under the court's protection glibly swore to false evidence, juries were bullied unmercifully.

Down with the Jury! The common practice in dealing with a jury in disagreement, writes Author Bernard O'Donnell, Fleet Street crime reporter, was to load its members into a cart and haul them around the city "so that a jeering populace could express their contempt for men so heedless of their duties as citizens." All in all, readers who still think that King John's Magna Carta brought a fairly modern sense of justice into British courts will have their eyes opened by Author O'Donnell's blood-curdling history of Old Bailey and its even older neighbor, Newgate Gaol.

The earliest trials were held once a year in Newgate in a building which dated from 1190. Later, in 1550, when Newgate had become too pest-ridden for the judges' personal comfort, the first of three successive Old Baileys was built next door. The two institutions were to stand side by side, one funneling miserable wretches to the other, for more than 300 years.

Up with the Body! From Newgate's governor down to the lowliest keeper, every prison official had his private source of income. The governor sold liquor and encouraged his charges to get drunk. For a price, a prisoner could get a drink of water, have his manacles removed, or sleep with a woman. "Even the prisoners themselves imposed a charge for what they called 'chummage'" upon a newcomer, in return for which he could have a seat near the fire.

Next door, in Old Bailey, life was just as sordid. In their dining room upstairs, the judges "indulged in feasts of gargantuan size" at state expense, then came staggering drunkenly down to pass sentence. Householders with windows looking out on the gallows had a lucrative business on hanging days. "As much as -L-10 a seat was demanded," says Author O'Donnell, "and the surrounding viewpoints in the street were thronged with deliriously excited men & women who gathered in position on the eve of the execution, whiling away the long night hours with song and dance and drunken debauch."

The Gratified Public. The sight of crowds stoning the swinging bodies pleased even Dr. Samuel Johnson. Thundered Johnson, in 1783, when there was talk of abandoning the execution procession from Newgate to Tyburn: "No, Sir! ... executions are intended to draw spectators . . . The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" Twenty years before public hangings were finally abolished (in 1868), Charles Dickens begged to differ: "I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the crowd . . . could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun . . ."

The Old Bailey is weakest where it might have been richest: in Author O'Donnell's sketchy, fleshless recounting of the trials that took place there through the centuries. He seems to be chiefly interested in showing off Old Bailey's progress from the dim, grim, soulless courtroom of the Reformation days, when more than 200 different crimes carried the death penalty, to today's "fine and stately" oak-paneled Central Criminal Court, where justices take a not-guilty verdict calmly.

Like the unblindfolded statue atop the "new" Old Bailey (erected in 1907), Justice finally has her eyes open in 20th Century England. But just to keep his fellow countrymen from congratulating themselves, Author O'Donnell reminds them that only a century or so ago a nine-year-old boy could be sentenced to death for stealing tuppence.

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