The Documentation of Individual Identity: Historical and Comparative Perspectives since 1500

Paul Griffiths’ eagerly anticipated study of petty crime in early modern London – Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550-1660 - has recently been published by Cambridge University Press, and is teeming with identification angles. It discloses a metropolis ‘flooded… with false papers’, in particular the counterfeit vagrant travel permits and forged beggars’ licenses around which a booming cottage industry developed. It also discusses the compulsory badging of fishwives, the false identities created by suspects and the use of bodily branding to signal dubious pasts (‘Like paper, bodies had spaces to put data that might come back to haunt a recidivist’), and devotes an innovative concluding chapter to the systematic recording of suspects’ names and offences in the Bridewell courtbooks. These ‘active archives’, carefully alphabeticised and often equipped with additional finding aids such as calendars, tables and indexes, were used by magistrates to piece together criminal biographies, and participated in a larger project of ‘numbering Londoners’ manifested elsewhere in parish registers, tax lists and censuses of vagrants, aliens, alehouse-keepers and street-sellers.