As the likelihood of war with revolutionary France grew at the end of 1792 and beginning of 1793, the pro-government press in England reported that a serious plan for an insurrection, scheduled for the first weekend in December 1792, had been nipped in the bud by the authorities. On December 3 The Times stated that, as it had not wished to create alarm, it had not previously mentioned the full facts of the seditious attempts being made in the country. These attempts, the newspaper maintained, had prompted almost daily meetings of the Cabinet climaxing in a meeting at Lord Grenville's house which had lasted until one a.m. on the preceding Saturday morning (December 1). It was from this meeting that the Cabinet had issued the royal proclamation which embodied part of the militia and which deplored the ineffectiveness of the May 1792 proclamation against seditious meetings and writings. Three weeks later, beneath the headline “Revolution Plans,” the World reported that two parties were involved in the projected insurrection: the “moderates” who sought first the destruction of the House of Lords, the Herald's Office, and the Horse Guards, and then the enlarging of the Commons; and those whose plans were “more extensive” and who would have gone on to destroy St. James's Palace, the Bank, the law courts, the prisons, the customs house, and excise office. A month later, under the headline “Project of an Insurrection,” the London Chronicle gave similar details of a plot “to overturn the government and the constitution of this country.”

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War a variety of commentators in England expressed concern that men returning from the war had become so brutalized and inured to violence that their behaviour would continue to be violent at home. But, while the stage was set for a ‘moral panic’ with the brutalized veteran as the new folk devil, no such panic materialized. This essay makes a detailed study of two contrasting newspapers to assess how violent crime was assessed and interpreted after the war. It notes an increase in the use of the concept of the ‘unwritten law’ (the traditional ‘right’ claimed by many men to chastise a disrespectful wife or a man who despoiled or dishonoured a wife) in the courts and the press, probably as an element in re-establishing pre-war gender roles. It also describes how the idea of shell-shock was deployed as a defence in criminal cases, something that probably contributed to a popular recognition that men might suffer mental breakdowns as easily as women. In conclusion, it suggests some of the factors that may have inhibited the press in identifying the violent veteran as a new folk devil.

In the exciting new social history of the 1960s the concept of class struggle tended to underpin much of the work on the working class in general, and on various labour groups in particular. Historians sought to find faces in crowds and to rescue others from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The police, however, when they appeared in this history, were usually as nameless and faceless as the crowds had been previously. They were also commonly portrayed as oppressors, and even in the more perceptive and ground-breaking attempts to explore the police themselves, they were seen through the refracted lens of their working-class critics as “blue locusts” and as a bourgeois instrument for controlling a new society. Parallel research conducted at roughly the same time by sociologists, social psychologists and others developed theoretical perspectives based on two assumptions: first, that certain kinds of authoritarian personality were attracted to police careers, and second, that policing roles had predictable effects on the behaviour and personality of policemen. Subsequent research has suggested these assumptions to be largely unfounded, yet in this respect also, historical explorations of policemen as workers remain few.

The law had always been deployed by the police to regulate traffic, but the development of motor vehicles, travelling at much greater speeds than previous road traffic, constituted a problem of a new dimension. By the early 1920s the use of the law to control motor vehicles was jamming the magistrates' courts and creating friction, hitherto unknown, between the police and the middle classes. The paper explores the way in which, and the extent to which, the criminal law was used to control the motorist in the first third of the twentieth century. It takes issue with the whiggish view of law making, which understands laws as logical remedies for readily identifiable problems; it rejects equally the idea of seeing laws as inspired by class interest. Rather the motor traffic legislation fits better with the concept of the ‘policeman state’ which, according to V. A. C. Gatrell, developed from the late nineteenth century. At the same time the paper suggests that a scapegoat – ‘the road hog’ – was created as the focus for criticism in much the same way that other criminal scapegoats have been established; the offender thus ceased to be a member of society and became an outsider, threatening respectable law-abiding citizens.