The Old Bailey Online

The Old Bailey, also known as Justice Hall, the Sessions House, and the Central Criminal Court, was named after the street in which it was located, just off Newgate Street and next to Newgate Prison, in the western part of the City of London. Over the centuries the building has been periodically remodelled and rebuilt in ways which both reflected and influenced the changing ways trials were carried out and reported.

As the central criminal court for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, the Old Bailey was where all trials took place for serious crimes occurring in the London area north of the Thames. This includes all trials for felony (crimes which were, or had been at one time, punishable by death), and some of the most serious misdemeanours.

The general categories of crime type used in this project are modern ones, and were created in order to facilitate statistical analysis. Nonetheless, the specific categories follow, as much as possible, the precise descriptions of offences used in the original Proceedings, which in turn tend to repeat the language of the actual indictment on which the defendant was tried.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online cover the period 1674-1913 and is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.