Selling Sparrows: Victims or Villains? A True Story of Crime in 19th-Century Bedfordshire and Convict Transportation to Australia by Judy Wright

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Marks on foredges. Signed by author.

The early part of the 19th century heralded a period of want and distress for the agricultural labourer, and many were starving. In contrast, the gentry had their estates swelled by acquisitions warranted by recent land enclosures.

On a bitter winter night in 1849, landowners of Standbridge in Bedfordshire, seeking to protect their property from a gang of petty thieves, detailed two police constables to watch the activities of a local man thought to be the gang's ringleader.

The bloody events of that night were to have disastrous consequences for many families.

This true story depicts the lives of the three men who were arrested for a crime that, at the time, could carry a sentence of transportation to Australia. It details their trial and the intervention by the squire, convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice.