The inauguration of conferences, volumes of essays and a journal will provide sufficient evidence to convince historiographers that the history of crime had by 1979 become established as a distinct branch of historical science. One might even assert that the history of ‘crime’ – whatever that means – has become a growth industry. The same could not be said of the history of criminal law. The ‘law’ is more or less irrelevant to the enquiries of social historians, except in so far as the legal system happens to have produced the records on which they are dependent for factual information. Legal theory is an embarrassing concept for the historian who regards the law as a means by which county members and magistrates imposed their views of order on the populace. Even non-Marxist historians are rightly concerned to explore the gap between legal theory and practical reality in the administration of criminal justice, and to a certain extent this can be achieved without seeking to understand the abstractions of the lawyer in their own terms. When historians do turn their attention to the formulation or development of the criminal law, it is usually to Parliament and the incessant tinkering with statutory offences and penalties at the behest of pressure groups that they give their attention. All this makes good history, which the legal historian is unwise to ignore.