Power confrontation and verbal duelling in the arraignment section of XVII century trials

Abstract

This paper takes as its focus the relationship between power and impoliteness in the arraignment section of seventeenth-century trials. Two sources are examined in this regard: The State Trials and The Old Bailey's Proceedings Online. Drawing on Archer's distinction between impoliteness and verbal aggression (2008) and on Culpeper's classification of behavioural norms (2008), this study analyzes facework dynamics in cases where defendants refused to plead unless the court first proved the legitimacy of its procedure. This generated an escalation of face-threats which turned the courtroom into an arena of conflictual discourse. In order to establish whether and to what extent the power confrontation between professionals and defendants was related to the status of the prisoner and/or the seriousness of the crime committed, three types of court cases are taken into consideration: treason trials involving defendants of high status, cases of religious subversion where defendants are upper and middle class Quakers and trials for ordinary crimes (robbery and housebreaking) involving lower class prisoners. The analysis reveals that both upper and lower status defendants attempted to resist the reified power of the authorities, albeit for different reasons. It is also argued that the way in which judges and Attorney Generals construed the prisoners' requests to be heard as impolite/improper testifies to: (i) the high deference expectation of the court and (ii) the professionals' design to frame the prisoner as a subversive individual capable of committing the crime for which he was indicted. By and large, the dataset shows that seventeenth-century defendants were required to conform to a pleading script which – being necessarily detrimental to their cause – cast them in a no-win situation from the very beginning of the trial.