Assizes: Midland Circuit: Indictments and Other Documents Recovered from Private...

ASSI 80

1652-1688

Some material survives for each of the seven counties then in the Midland circuit, although there is very little for Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Three Staffordshire recognisances in a Derbyshire file apparently belong to it even though Staffordshire was in the Oxford circuit. Three of the items in the series consist of only a single stray membrane, and five others include less than ten. Some of the larger items may be almost complete files, for example the 1654 Lincolnshire and 1667 Derbyshire files. Four of the files consist entirely or almost entirely of recognisances, while the rest which are of any substance consist mainly of indictments and related documents like jury panels, with occasional informations.

Public Record(s)

English

19 bundle(s)

Topics

Legal

These documents were recovered from a dealer in 1968. Their whereabouts before 1967 and how they escaped from public custody is not known. They may have been among the 'cart load of old records', 'so much injured by time as to be in a great degree illegible', which Richard Lowndes, clerk to the Midland assize circuit, had in his possession in 1800. Lowndes considered that the records became 'of no use or value' after they became 60 years old, and it is likely that he disposed of them at about that time.(First Report of the Select Committee on Public Records, 1800, pp 238-239.) The records which he considered current, the earliest dating from 1757/8, were also missing when the records of the circuit were transferred to the Public Record Office in 1911; the earliest item then transferred dated from 1818 (ASSI 11/1), while the indictment files went back only to 1860: ASSI 12/1