Convicted felons at the Old Bailey and on assize in nineteenth-century England had no right of appeal. They had either to submit to their fate or, if they had the means, petition the Crown for a pardon. The legal avenues for redress were limited. A writ of error would lie to a superior court for legal errors that appeared on the face of the record but by the nineteenth century this was seldom used. More significantly, it was open for the trial judge to reserve questions of law for the informal and private consideration of all the common law judges. In their illuminating studies of this practice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, James Oldham and Randall McGowen elucidate the ways in which the judiciary used reserved cases to develop legal doctrine and to shape the operation of criminal justice. The trend toward increased formalization of procedure that they identify, culminated in 1848, when Parliament created the Court for Crown Cases Reserved (CCCR). The new court adopted the existing method of reserving cases, but was a court of record that sat and gave judgment in public. It became the highest judicial forum for the determination of questions of criminal law until 1908, when it was superseded by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Penal reformers in the 1810s and 1820s condemned the English criminal law as a ‘bloody code’: a monolithic mass of draconian statutes inherited from a former, less civilized age. This overwhelmingly negative image underpinned the dramatic and unexpected repeal of the capital statutes in the 1830s and survived to define a whole era of criminal justice history. This article explores the conditions that enabled the reformers to establish such a powerful critique of the law in such a short space of time. It contends that a key to their success was their ability to exploit contemporary scandals to argue that the law had lost touch with public opinion. Forgery aroused more controversy than any other species of capital crime in the 1820s and became the focal point for opposition to the capital laws. By analysing how reformers used the scandal surrounding forgery to foster the notion that the law was a ‘bloody code’, this article presents a new perspective on the early nineteenth-century penal reform debate.