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Crime And Punishment In The Elizabethan Era

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Queen Elizabeth’s rule sported a new humanistic culture and higher literacy rates in England that have not been seen before with previous ruling monarchs. According to Elizabethan England, more books and pamphlets were published in England. This is caused by a growth in printing which in turn means books could be made for less money and significantly less time. The sheer amounts of books now being produced allows cheaper and easier access to books for everyone. With more access to books, literacy rates were able to increase such as the yeomen who “were illiterate at the start of Elizabeth’s reign but literate by its end” (177). Also it is apparent in Nobles and gentlemen that they were almost all literate along with craftsmen and traders all …show more content…

However, the severity of punishments and the methods used by the law were beneficial and practical and they helped to reduce the amount of crime in England. The article “Crime and Punishment in the Elizabethan Era” expresses that crime was an issue in Elizabethan England, and a threat to the stability of society. To maintain order the penalties for committing minor crimes were generally punished with some form of public humiliation. For major crimes including thievery, murder, and treason those convicted were put to death. The sheer ruthlessness of the punishments discourage any sort of crime as they will scare the citizens into never breaking the law in fear of the consequences. The document “Crime and Punishment in the Elizabethan Era” also points out that the law was flexible and could be applied differently based on the situation. When a person was convicted of treason, they were not always executed immediately. Some were inhumanely tortured for more information to see if they were working with others, despite the obvious lack of morality in doing this, it worked. However, on the other hand, the Elizabethan Law did have at least some moral sense to it as people some were spared from torture, and even execution in certain circumstances. When pregnant women were sentenced to death they could be spared for their the lives of their unborn children. The severe Elizabethan Law provided England the means to help reduce crime, practical application of torture, and even some sense of

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The Elizabethan Era had many rules and laws, so many that sometimes they were hard to keep track of. The capital offenses included robbery, larceny/theft, rape, and arson (Harrison). The more frequently committed crimes included theft, begging, cutpurses, adultery, debtors, poaching, forgery, fraud, and dice-cogging (Elizabethan Crime). In a desperate effort to control how the less fortunate and homeless behaved, Parliament passed the Poor Laws, which made it illegal to beg for food and money (Harrison). These laws went so far as to make it illegal to live on the streets (Crime and Punishment).

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Capital Punishment, or the death penalty, has gone back and forth between Supreme Court cases for years (Death Penalty). Since 1972, with the case Furman v. Georgia, the legality of the death penalty has been challenged, along with it’s principality and methods. The first recorded use of death as a punishment in America was in 1608 (Reggio), George Kendall of Virginia was executed under the belief that he would betray the British Empire to the Spanish, and the first legal execution occurred in 1622, when Daniel Frank of Virginia was put to death for thievery. Historically, the death penalty was inflicted under crimes like theft, murder, perjury, adultery, rape and statutory rape, buggery and beastiality, arson, blasphemy, and the Duke’s

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