General methodological notes

The judicial district of Montreal

My study's frequent focus on the judicial district of Montreal poses certain methodological problems, since the district did not remain constant through the period of my study. Up to the end of the 1780s, it comprised all of the colony's territory west of Trois-Rivières, including, from 1775, the military posts of the interior, and in the 1780s, the Loyalist settlements along the upper Saint Lawrence. In 1788 and 1790 respectively, the lands west of what would later become the Upper Canadian border, and east of Berthier and Sorel, were severed to form new districts. In 1823, the townships east of Lake Memphramagog were detached as part of the inferior district of Saint Francis. For a number of reasons, I decided to focus on the district of Montreal as it existed after 1790, notably its history as an administrative unit under the French régime and its relative cohesion as a geographical unit. Thus, when focussing on the district of Montreal, I avoided wherever possible using aggregate data that concerned areas not within the district as it stood after 1790, such as Trois-Rivières and the inland Loyalist settlements, and excluded these from my quantitative analyses, sample populations, and so on. The small part of the district of Montreal that was incorporated into the district of Saint Francis in 1823, most notably the townships of Stanstead and Bolton, posed a particular problem, since the inferior district had its own local courts centered at Sherbrooke; in this instance, I chose to include these townships in my study up to 1823, and to exclude them thereafter.

Periods used in aggregate analyses of cases in the district of Montreal

I have largely not presented aggregate data for the district of Montreal by year, but instead have generally broken the span from 1764 to 1837 into six sub-periods, based on several considerations, such as the structure of the courts and the personnel of the magistracy and the prevailing political climate. These periods run from 1764 to 1773, the first decade of British rule and the hegemony of the Protestant magistracy; from 1779 to 1793, when the magistracy was centered almost exclusively in Montreal and had a strong Canadien element, and before the ethnic tensions of the 1790s; from 1794 to 1799, at the height of the tensions described by Murray Greenwood and while the magistracy was dominated by non-francophone Tories; from 1800 to 1809, when most active magistrates were once again Canadiens; from 1810 to 1823, the time of McCord, Mondelet, and the Police Office in Montreal, and of the expansion of the number of active justices outside of the city; from 1824 to 1830, during the Dalhousie crisis and the renewed Tory domination of the magistracy under Gale; and finally from 1831 to 1837, with the dismissal of Gale and the closing of the Police Office. The periods have of course been adapted to each source according to sampling and source preservation; for example, for Quarter Sessions cases, the periods are 1780-1793, 1794-1799, 1800/05, 1810/15/20, 1825/30 and 1835.

Ethnicity and gender of parties

My analysis of the ethnicity and gender of parties is based almost entirely on names. I excluded from my analyses parties whose ethnicity or sex was not clear, and could not be determined from other information or descriptions in the case. However, there were exceptions to this rule. For example, in the Montreal Quarter Sessions registers, in the occasional cases where the clerk only entered the last name of the party, I assumed that the party was male, since I never came across a case where, this having been the case at one point in the register, the party afterwards proved to be a woman. Another complication was the Anglicization of French first names, with for example John replacing Jean or Mary replacing Marie; in these cases I based myself on the apparent ethnicity of the last name. Since women were usually listed by their maiden names, as in most legal documents of the time, I classed them by their ethnicity of birth rather than attempting, in cases where their husbands' names were also given, to amalgamate them into their husbands' ethnicity; the only exception was in the few cases where a woman was listed by her husband's last name and where the woman's first name was ambiguous (such as Mary), in which case I used husband's ethnicity. All of these factors involved individual decisions, some of which were probably wrong; but overall I feel confident that my decisions did not affect the general trends that I observed.

Use of the terms "complaint" and "plaintiff"

My general use of the terms "complaint" and "plaintiff" is an attempt to deal with the complexity of terms used at the time and their relationship to the intent of those who brought matters to the attention of the justice system. Insofar as "complaint" is concerned, I use the term in its general sense of "Outcry against or because of injury; representation of wrong suffered; utterance of grievance" (OED), to cover the bringing a matter before the criminal justice system, rather than the specific legal mode adopted, such as an information or a presentment. The term also puts the emphasis on the intent of the person initially making the complaint: to assert that some other person had done wrong. As for "plaintiff", the term often used in the scholarly literature on the English criminal justice system for the person who complained to the justice system is "prosecutor", but this is unsatisfactory on two levels. First, it assumes that a person who initially made a complaint (such as a deposition) intended to pursue the matter as far as a formal court case (where they truly became "prosecutors"), whereas as the book demonstrates, this was manifestly not the case in many complaints. Further, again as shown in the book, in an increasingly large number of cases, the prosecutor in court was not the person who had initially made the complaint. The other terms used in the literature are "plaintiffs" and "complainants", both of which had specific technical meanings (plaintiffs for those who launched civil suits, complainants for those who launched actions in Chancery or ecclesiastical courts) but also the more general sense of a person who launches a legal action. It is in this latter sense that I opted for "plaintiff".

Use of the term "Tory"

How to name political conservatives in Lower Canada, those in opposition to the supporters of the Canadien/Patriote party, has long been a thorny historiographical problem. As a rule, in the book, I adopt the term "Tory" to refer in general to those who, in Lower Canada, constructed their political identity on support for the colonial administration and, even more, the Imperial connection and on an anti-Canadien/Patriote party and more generally anti-republican stance. Evidently, it refers more to a general political tendency than to a well-defined group of people or policies - there was no "Tory" party as such. Indeed, the term itself was little used in Lower Canada at the time. However, there was no other single encompassing term, with designations such as "Château Clique", "English Party", "Constitutionalists", "Bureaucrats", and so on used at different times, by different people and referring to different, generally more limited groups. My use of "Tory" is both for the sake of simplicity and to attempt to avoid the problems associated with each of these other terms.

Prostitution, morality and "loose, idle and disorderly"

Under English criminal law, as received into Quebec, the only prostitution-related activity that was unquestionably a criminal offence was brothel-keeping (keeping a disorderly house). The situation of street prostitution was more ambiguous. In England, many legal observers stated that the mere condition of being a prostitute, or the mere act of solicitation, was not an offence, at least in the common law courts (though lewdness could be prosecuted on indictment and also in the ecclesiastical courts). At the same time, English magistrates like the Fieldings regularly had women arrested and convicted as common prostitutes. The English situation was thus less than clear. The usual legal solution adopted in Quebec and Lower Canada, notably in the first decades of the nineteenth century, was to charge street-walkers under the vagrancy statutes, as "idle and disorderly"; in Montreal (though not in Quebec City), the practice was also to add the moral qualifier "loose", making "loose, idle and disorderly". These increasingly became the standard charge, though sometimes along with other qualifiers such as "prostitute", "vagrant" or "vagabond". In general, following what Mary Anne Poutanen has shown for my period, I have assumed that most women arrested as "idle and disorderly" or "loose, idle and disorderly" were arrested for prostitution, or at least for general immorality. Whatever the proportion of actual prostitutes among them, however, the summary vagrancy, idle and disorderly and prostitution charges against women should be seen as a single nexus concentrated on repressing the disorderly and immoral public conduct of women.

Quotations

The spelling in quotations from contemporary documents respects as much as possible the original, though in some cases poor handwriting may have affected my transcription. However, as is common practice in the transcription of early modern texts, to facilitate reading, especially of long blocks of text, I have modernized the capitalization of most of the texts, except in a few cases where it was judged important to retain the emphasis provided by capitalization. Punctuation has also sometimes been modernized, as in the use of periods in the place of the sentence-ending dashes sometimes used by contemporary writers. The long "s" has been rendered as a normal s, ligatures generally as their individual letters, and superscript abbreviations shifted to normal text. Generally, no attempt has been made to render other textual ornamentations such as size changes, underlining or differently-coloured ink, unless it was judged important to the understanding of the text. Finally, in the case of quotations spanning more than one paragraph, the paragraph break has generally been suppressed.