I am a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. One of my specialities is the history of the English criminal trial and my first book, The Bar & the Old Bailey, described the emergence of a criminal bar and the development of an ethics of advocacy for defence counsel. More recently I’ve been exploring the issue of prosecution, both in a book chapter that re-evaluates the career of barrister William Garrow and in my new book, Class, Servitude, and the Criminal Justice System in Early Victorian London: The Russell Murder. As the title indicates, this monograph investigates master and servant relations – Lord William Russell was murdered by his valet – as well as revealing the way in which ‘public’ prosecutions were conducted prior to the creation of a Crown prosecution service.

I am also interested in agricultural and landscape history, and read widely in food history.