Stephen Banks – författare

An illustrated guide to the history of the duel and trial by combat in Britain and abroad.A duel could result from any challenge to a gentleman's honour, from minor insult to major accusation. At a prearranged time, two men at odds would meet, armed either with swords or pistols, to engage in a formal and sometimes fatal exchange.Gentlemen considered it their prerogative to fight, despite the illegality of duelling, and figures as prominent as the Duke of Wellington and Georges Clemenceau defended their honour in this way. Why did participants flout the law, what codes were followed, what were the changing roles of the seconds, and what were the consequences for victims and victors?Stephen Banks answers these questions and examines the evolution from Norman trials-by-combat to the formalised duel, analysing the custom's decline in England by Victorian times and its final disappearance from Europe by the twentieth century.

An illustrated introduction to the death penalty and the means of capital punishment in England since Tudor times.Executions have played a crucial – if grisly and controversial – part in British history and provided the bloody climax to many a life, from Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles I and Dick Turpin to untold thousands of anonymous wretches whose names are now forgotten. With the help of numerous illustrations, Stephen Banks details the history of formal execution in Britain, examining the fates of the grandest monarchs, the highest-profile gentlemen, the most learned heretics and the most petty of criminals. He looks also at the crowds, spectacle and grim pageantry that surrounded these events, helping us to understand their morbid but undeniable fascination and detailing the process that led to capital punishment’s abolition in Britain.

Explores why minor slights to certain kinds of gentlemen led to duels in order for honour to be satisfied, and how such ideas about honour changed over time.This book, the most comprehensive study of the English pistol duel yet undertaken, examines what it meant to be a man of honour in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. A thorough survey of the incidence and distribution of duelling, both socially and geographically, identifies those sub-groups of gentlemen most likely to duel. The author considers the mores and manners of such groups and asks why it was that within specific professions, minor slightscould only be requited by a demand for satisfaction. In doing so, the author rejects those traditional histories of duelling which have failed to engage with the internal dynamics and internal logic of the phenomenon itself.Too often historians have explained the rise of opposition to duelling in terms of social and cultural change whilst at the same time treating the duel as though its ideological content had become irrevocably fixed in the early seventeenth century. Honour culture too had a social and an intellectual history and the author outlines those conflicts of ideas within the culture of honour itself that did much to hasten the demise of the English duel. A Polite Exchange of Bullets will be welcomed as a fresh approach to an important social phenomenon by all those interested in duelling and in English social and cultural history. STEPHEN BANKS is a lecturer in criminal law at Reading University Law School and co-director of The Forum of Legal and Historical Research.

A study of law, wrongdoing and justice as conceived in the minds of the ordinary people of England and Wales from the later eighteenth century to the First World War.Shortlisted for the 2015 Katharine Briggs AwardThis is a study of law, wrongdoing and justice as conceived in the minds of the ordinary people of England and Wales from the later eighteenth century to the First World War. Official justice was to become increasingly centralised with declining traditional courts, emerging professional policing and a new prison estate. However, popular concepts of what was, or should be, contained within the law were often at variance with its formal written content. Communities continued to hold mock courts, stage shaming processions and burn effigies of wrongdoers. The author investigates those justice rituals, the actors, the victims and the offences that occasioned them. He also considers the role such practices played in resistive communities trying to preserve their identity and assert their independence. Finally, whilst documenting the decline of popular justice traditions this book demonstrates that they were nevertheless important in bequeathing a powerful set of symbols and practices to the nascent labour movement.This book will be of interest to scholars and students of legal history and criminal justice as well as social and cultural history in what could be considered a very long nineteenth century.Stephen Banks is an associate professor in criminal law, criminal justice and legal history at the University of Reading, co-director of the Forum for Legal and Historical Research and author of A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750-1850 (The Boydell Press, 2010).

Law and Society in England 1750–1950 is an indispensable text for those wishing to study English legal history and to understand the foundations of the modern British state. In this new updated edition the authors explore the complex relationship between legal and social change. They consider the ways in which those in power themselves imagined and initiated reform and the ways in which they were obliged to respond to demands for change from outside the legal and political classes.What emerges is a lively and critical account of the evolution of modern rights and expectations, and an engaging study of the formation of contemporary social, administrative and legal institutions and ideas, and the road that was travelled to create them.The book is divided into eight chapters: Institutions and Ideas; Land; Commerce and Industry; Labour Relations; The Family; Poverty and Education; Accidents; and Crime.This extensively referenced analysis of modern social and legal history will be invaluable to students and teachers of English law, political science, and social history.