The is a vast and fascinating digital history database, collating records of nearly 200,000 criminal proceedings that passed through the iconic London courtroom between 1674 and 1913.
Alumni donations helped finance a full technical rebuild and significant expansion of the website in August last year.
Now, as a direct result of this overhaul, the project has been awarded the 2024 Mary Dudziak Legal History Prize by the .
A landmark case in its field
The Mary Dudziak prize, acknowledging excellence in the online field, is named after a leading scholar of 20th-century US legal history. It's awarded annually to an 'outstanding digital legal history project' that was either launched or significantly updated in the previous twelve months.
Winning is testament to the tireless work of the academic-led team behind The Old Bailey Online, widely recognised as a landmark resource for anyone with an interest in Britain's legal past.
Fittingly, the award also aligns with the 20th anniversary year of the project's launch. The database was first developed in 2003 by a team including co-director Robert Shoemaker, Professor Emeritus of Eighteenth-Century British History at Sheffield.
Today, this unique and powerful web-based research tool is managed by the University of Sheffield’s .
Professor Robert Shoemaker
Unlocking history for millions
Over the years, the database has been cited in countless academic studies, and proven a valuable resource for students and teachers alike. It has also given rise to multiple other major online resources, built largely upon the wealth of information it holds.
Moreover, note its founders, it has helped millions of users discover more about the histories and stories of their own families, communities, and places.
The creation and development of Old Bailey Online has always been a team effort, and has occupied substantial proportions of the working careers of several historians and digital humanities experts.
It now has a life of its own, and has been used in ways that its designers could never have anticipated. We hope that making these materials available free of charge at the click of a mouse [...] will make the wider social conversation that is history writing more inclusive, more fully grounded in evidence, and more accessible to all.
We are grateful to University of Sheffield Alumni for funding this major update.
Professor Robert Shoemaker and Professor Tim Hitchcock
Co-directors, The Old Bailey Online
A new chapter begins
As part of its alumni-supported 2023 rebuild, version 9.0 of the site is built upon a powerful new search engine. It also delivers a full UI redesign for ease of use on smartphones and tablets.
Among other new tweaks and additions, entirely new categories of data have also been made searchable. Records now show:
- Enhanced details of the defendant’s plea before the start of the trial
- A historical classification of the victim's occupation status (HISCO) at the time
- Crimes categorised as being against official bodies or private companies
- New subcategories within all existing Offence, Verdict and Punishment records
- Additional statistical visualisations, including pie charts, bar charts and line charts
- Newly updated historical background pages
You can learn more about what's new on the site's own .
In all, version 9.0 represents a comprehensive reworking of an already impressive and impactful resource. As the site itself now greets its many academic and non-academic visitors, 'welcome to the New Old Bailey Online'.
Congratulations to all involved - here's to the next 20 years of innovation and discovery in digital legal history.