Insults just aren’t what they used to be, according to a study called The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660-1800 by Robert B Shoemaker, professor of British history at Sheffield University.
Shoemaker pored over records of court proceedings from the late 16th through to the early 19th centuries, paying special attention to the insults. Time was, insulting someone in public – or even in private – could easily propel you into court, and thence, if the insult was good or your luck wasn’t, to jail.
Shoemaker charted the number of insult-fuelled prosecutions in the consistory court of London over those centuries. “The pattern is clear,” he writes, “a massive increase in the late 16th century to a peak in the 1620s and 1630s, followed by a collapse … By the late 18th century, per capita prosecutions in London had fallen to only one or two per 100,000 per year.”
By the late 1820s, the number of prosecutions had dropped to an insulting one or two, total, per year….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.