How We Did This

Every case you hear on this programme happened. The people were real. The evidence is real. The verdicts were returned by real juries, in a real courtroom, at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court. We invent nothing but the sound.

The Proceedings

From 1674 to 1913, London did something extraordinary: it wrote down its trials and sold them on the street. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey recorded nearly a quarter of a million hearings, witness by witness, question by question, the largest surviving body of testimony about the lives of ordinary people ever printed. Servants, sailors, midwives, night-men, apprentices: people who left no other mark on history speak in these pages, verbatim, often on the worst day of their lives.

The scholars who saved it

That we can read them at all is owed to the Old Bailey Online project, a landmark of digital scholarship led by historians at the University of Sheffield and the University of Hertfordshire. Over more than two decades they photographed, transcribed, and structured 197,000-plus trials so that anyone, anywhere, can search them freely. It is one of the great acts of public history of our time, and this programme simply would not exist without it. If our work sends a single listener to their archive, it has done its job.

The care we take

Admiration comes with obligations, and we hold ourselves to them painstakingly. The original printed Proceedings are long out of copyright; the project's modern transcriptions, markup, and database carry their own terms of use, and we respect them. So we go back to the record itself: we work from the public-domain facsimile images of the printed sessions papers, read those pages, and produce our own transcription. We cross-check names, dates, charges, verdicts and sentences against the historical record, and what you hear is our own writing and our own production, a dramatisation of the testimony, never a reproduction of their transcriptions, markup, or speaker tags. Where the record is silent, we say so. Where a transcript in our apps was prepared by machine, we label it.

Why we do it

A verdict is a moment when a community decides what it believes. Most of the quarter-million verdicts in the Proceedings have not been spoken aloud since the day they were returned. We think they deserve to be, not as trivia, but as the strongest surviving signal of how ordinary Londoners lived, lied, judged and were judged. Our goal is to uncover the forgotten verdicts, one case a week, and hand them to a generation that can hear them with fresh ears, then take the juror's seat and rule for themselves.

Forgotten Verdicts is an independent production. We are not affiliated with, nor endorsed by, the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey), the Old Bailey Online project, or its partner universities.