THE DEFICIENCIES OF THE COURTS

England in 1820 was on the verge of becoming ‘the first industrial nation’. Population was growing fast, from about 10 million in 1801 to 14 million by 1821 and more people were living in towns. Most towns were still small but some were growing at a tremendous rate and a few were already very large: Manchester had 90,000 people, Liverpool 83,000 and Leeds 53,000.

Apart from ports like Liverpool most towns were still what towns had always been, centres for the supply and exchange of produce for the surrounding countryside; but there were new ones whose primary function was making goods – the factory and the mill were becoming familiar features of the northern townscape. London was still a city apart: a home of industry, commerce, government and culture – the biggest and most diverse city in the western world. It still dwarfed all rivals at home, yet such was the rate of growth in provincial towns that London's share of the urban population of England fell from nearly three-fifths to barely one-third.

England had long been a commercial country but internal trade, facilitated by improvements in communications, became ever more intensive. Townsmen always had to be supplied with food and as more and more became wage-earners they had to buy almost everything they wanted, while in the countryside the march of enclosures was steadily eroding the possibility of even partial self-sufficiency for labourers; there was no peasantry worth the name in England by now.