---
id: "20260725-0222-do-the-bloody-code"
title: "Do the Bloody Code figures — ~50 capital offenses in 1688 to 200+ by 1820, and the 12-pence grand-larceny threshold — hold against a primary source?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
origin: "batch"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-englands-bloody-code-made-petty-property-theft-a-capital-crime.md (revised, not new — retrieve-before-write found this capture's counts and threshold were already the exact numbers this note carries flagged; upgraded its sourcing to Tier 1 instead of duplicating)","30-notes/claim-12-pence-grand-larceny-threshold-is-common-law-not-a-bloody-code-statute.md (new — the capture's own \"important correction\" that 12 pence is Blackstone's ancient common-law line, not one of Radzinowicz's 18th-c. statutes)","40-entities/entity-leon-radzinowicz.md (new hub — person, now Tier 1 load-bearing for two claim-notes)","40-entities/entity-grand-larceny.md (new hub — recurring/load-bearing term across 3 claim-notes)","40-entities/entity-bloody-code.md (new hub — recurring/load-bearing concept across 3 claim-notes, previously only a bare connects_to string on two other hubs)"]
not_promoted: ["Radzinowicz's George II/George III growth-mechanism figures (33 + 63 capital statutes) — folded as supporting detail into the revised claim-englands-bloody-code note rather than spun into a separate atomic claim; same underlying phenomenon (statute-count growth), not a distinct claim.","Thomas Fowell Buxton and Sir James Mackintosh as entity hubs — real named figures, but single-mention citation sources within Radzinowicz's own account (their estimates are evidence *for* the growth claim, not a subject of their own), same reasoning the vault applied to Shoemaker/Beattie earlier the same day. Left as mentions in the claim-note body, not hubs.","Samuel Romilly as an entity hub — same reasoning: a single quoted aside within Radzinowicz, not yet recurring or load-bearing enough to be the subject of a page.","Whether Buxton's and Mackintosh's counts trace to their own speeches/pamphlets rather than only to Radzinowicz's report of them (capture's 'further leads') — a nice-to-verify curiosity, not load-bearing under any claim actually kept; no claim in the promoted notes rests on resolving it, so no question was routed per the intake-discipline rule.","Wikipedia 'Bloody Code' entry's citation trail to Glyn-Jones 2000 (capture's 'further leads') — a research lead for a future session, not a claim; nothing to promote yet.","oldbaileyonline.org's 403 block on the 'Crimes Tried at the Old Bailey' page, and the 'one-twentieth of a skilled worker's weekly wage' contextual figure it would have sourced — already logged as a tooling gap in 00-meta/seek-flags.md by the sibling pious-perjury capture promoted earlier the same day; not re-flagged here to avoid a duplicate ledger entry.","Radzinowicz's Appendix I ('Capital Statutes of the Eighteenth Century,' pp. 611-659, 21 categories) — not read this session (only the p. 4 summary was). This is the one piece that would fully close question-verify-bloody-code-capital-statute-counts-and-larceny-threshold; left routed to that question rather than promoted as if already confirmed."]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "this batch run, 2026-07-25"
derived_from: []
tags: ["legal-history","georgian-england","bloody-code","capital-punishment","grand-larceny","radzinowicz","blackstone","primary-sources","verification","quantitative"]
sources: [{"source_url":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.238530","source_author":"Leon Radzinowicz, \"A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750,\" Vol. 1 (London: Stevens and Sons, 1948)","source_date":"1948","source_tier":1,"source_note":"Primary academic source — Radzinowicz's own archival count of capital statutes (Appendix I, 'Capital Statutes of the Eighteenth Century,' 49pp/21 categories, pp. 611-659, per TOC), treated as the standard scholarly enumeration. Full text (djvu OCR transcription) fetched via the mirror node ia801409.us.archive.org/20/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.238530/2015.238530.A-History_djvu.txt, reached via redirect from the archive.org/download path. Quotes below are from p. 4 of the printed text as rendered in that OCR."},{"source_url":"https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk4ch17.asp","source_author":"William Blackstone, \"Commentaries on the Laws of England,\" Book IV, ch. 17 (\"Of Offences Against Private Property\"), digitized by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School","source_date":"orig. c.1769; Avalon Project digitization undated","source_tier":1,"source_note":"Primary — Blackstone's own text, direct fetch succeeded. Same passage already used in the sibling claim-note on 'pious perjury'; re-confirmed here for the 12-pence threshold specifically."}]
---


This capture answers [[question-verify-bloody-code-capital-statute-counts-and-larceny-threshold]], the open flag on [[claim-englands-bloody-code-made-petty-property-theft-a-capital-crime]]. That note currently rests its three numbers (~50 in 1688, 200+ by 1820, 12-pence larceny threshold) on a Tier-4 Wikipedia entry. This session went to Radzinowicz — the standard scholarly count the historiography traces back to — and to Blackstone's own *Commentaries*, and largely confirms the figures, with one important correction to how they relate to each other.

## Claim: Radzinowicz's own count puts capital offences at "about fifty" in 1688

Leon Radzinowicz's *A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750* (Vol. 1, 1948) — the source underlying most later citations of this figure, including the Wikipedia entry the vault's existing claim-note relies on — states directly: "Even as late as 1688, despite the exceptionally rigorous laws which had been enacted during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, no more than about fifty offences carried the death penalty" (p. 4). This independently confirms the "~50 in 1688" half of the existing claim on a Tier 1 primary academic source rather than an aggregator.

## Claim: contemporary counts near 1820 cluster around 200-223, not a single exact "1820" figure

Radzinowicz does not himself state a clean count for the year 1820. Instead he reports two contemporary observers' tallies that bracket it: "In 1819 Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton put the number of capital offences at 223; while in 1828 Sir James Mackintosh assessed it at 200" (p. 4). He also gives the growth mechanism in the intervening period: "Thirty-three capital offences were created in George II's reign — about one for every year — and a further sixty-three were added during the first fifty years of the reign of George III (1760-1810)" (p. 4), and notes that "in 1786 Sir Samuel Romilly observed that 'their number had been considerably increased since that author (Blackstone) wrote'" (p. 4, quoting Romilly).

This substantially confirms the magnitude of the "200+ by 1820" figure — two named contemporaries independently put the count at 200 and 223 within a decade of 1820 — but the Wikipedia-derived claim's precise pairing of "1820" with "200+" appears to be a rounded synthesis of these two nearby estimates (1819/223 and 1828/200) rather than a figure either contemporary or Radzinowicz stated for that exact year. Worth noting when the sibling claim-note is revised: the underlying magnitude holds on a Tier 1 source, but the specific year-to-number pairing is looser than the note currently implies.

## Claim: the 12-pence grand-larceny threshold is real, but it is the older common-law line, not one of the "Bloody Code" statutes being counted

Blackstone's *Commentaries*, Book IV ch. 17, states the threshold explicitly: "the stealing of goods above the value of twelvepence, is called grand larciny; when of goods to that value, or under, is petit larciny," and on its punishment: "the punishment of grand larciny, or the stealing above the value of twelvepence, (which sum was the standard in the time of king Athelstan, eight hundred years ago) is at common law regularly death" (Avalon Project full-text digitization, Book IV ch. 17). This confirms the 12-pence figure on a Tier 1 primary source.

The important correction: Blackstone dates the twelvepence line to the reign of Athelstan (10th century) — it is the ancient *common-law* grand/petty larceny divide, not one of the 18th-century statutory additions Radzinowicz is counting when he tallies capital statutes growing from ~50 to ~200-223. The existing vault claim-note presents the 12-pence threshold as part of the same growth story as the statute count; the two are related (both make property theft capital) but are historically distinct layers — one ancient common-law baseline, one a wave of 18th-century parliamentary additions on top of and around it. This distinction should be carried into any promoted note.

**Net answer to the core question:** yes, on the whole the figures hold. The ~50 (1688) figure and the ~200-223 (1819-1828) range are both independently confirmed on Radzinowicz's Tier 1 primary-academic count, and the 12-pence grand-larceny threshold is independently confirmed on Blackstone's own Tier 1 text. The one thing that does *not* hold as stated is the implication that "12 pence" and "50→200+" are the same kind of fact on the same timeline — they are not, and untangling that was the second half of the original open question ("was the capital line 12 pence, or was 12 pence the grand/petty larceny divide with capital liability keyed to other thresholds").

## Safety flags

None. All sources fetched this session (archive.org / Internet Archive mirror node, avalon.law.yale.edu) were straightforward historical/legal text with no addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential requests, or urgency framing. No `tls:"unverified"` provenance encountered.

## Further leads

- Radzinowicz Vol. 1, Appendix I, "Capital Statutes of the Eighteenth Century" (pp. 611-659, 21 categories) — the full statute-by-statute enumeration was not read this session (only the summary passage on p. 4); reading it directly would let a future note confirm the property-crime share of the growth, not just the aggregate count.
- The Wikipedia "Bloody Code" entry's own citation trail leads to Glyn-Jones 2000, not Radzinowicz directly — worth checking whether Glyn-Jones cites Radzinowicz or an independent count.
- oldbaileyonline.org's "Crimes Tried at the Old Bailey" page (oldbaileyonline.org/about/crimes/) appears to be the direct phrasing source for Wikipedia's "goods worth more than 12 pence, about one-twentieth of the weekly wage for a skilled worker" sentence, but the site returns HTTP 403 to automated fetch (consistent with the block hit in the sibling pious-perjury capture) — the "one-twentieth of a skilled worker's weekly wage" contextual figure remains unverified against a primary or Tier 1-2 source.
- Buxton (1819, 223) and Mackintosh (1828, 200) are themselves contemporary political figures citing counts in parliamentary reform debate, not independent historians — a future session could check whether their counts are traceable to their own speeches/pamphlets rather than only to Radzinowicz's report of them.

## Entity candidates

- Leon Radzinowicz — person — criminologist whose *History of English Criminal Law* is the standard scholarly source for Bloody Code statute counts; now load-bearing for a Tier 1 claim and worth its own page.
- Thomas Fowell Buxton — person — reform-era MP whose 1819 estimate (223 capital offences) is one of the two bracketing figures near "1820."
- James Mackintosh — person — reform-era MP/philosopher whose 1828 estimate (200 capital offences) is the other bracketing figure.
- Samuel Romilly — person — reformer quoted by Radzinowicz (1786) on the growth of capital offences since Blackstone's time; recurring figure in this cluster of claims.
- grand larceny — concept/term — the common-law twelvepence threshold predating the Bloody Code statutes; worth a definitional page distinguishing it from the later statutory expansion.
- Bloody Code (statutory capital-offence expansion, 18th c.) — concept — worth its own page distinct from the older common-law larceny baseline, given how often the two get conflated in secondary retellings.