On 13 July 1757, William Williams was indicted for ‘making an assault on Thomas Smith, an infant about twelve years of age’ and ‘committing upon him that detestable crime call'd sodomy’. The boy's mother and a neighbour woman deposed that the ‘prisoner and the child used to lie together in one bed’, and one day, ‘the child made much complaint’ so they ‘examined his fundament, and found it disorder'd and in an extreme bad way’. However, because they could ‘say no more than what they heard the child say’ and the boy, when ‘examined as to the nature of an oath’, seemed to have ‘no knowledge of the consequence of false swearing’, the accused, Williams, was acquitted.

The scenario presented above, with the child complainant, the accused sodomite and the disconcertingly graphic glimpse of the boy's sexually wounded body in the mother's testimony, is not atypical of some sodomy trials brought to court in the eighteenth century. Twenty-five cases of sodomy were tried at London's Old Bailey between 1730 and 1780; of these, eight were cases that involved children, which in the eighteenth-century courtroom meant boys under the age of fourteen. The trials were published for the profit and delight of eighteenth-century readers in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (OBP), a periodical that appeared after each of the eight annual court sessions and featured accounts of all the cases tried there.