Tips for Teaching and Assessing with Old Bailey Online

Digital archives have transformed how history is taught. Among the most impressive and accessible resources is Old Bailey Online, a searchable collection of nearly 200,000 trial reports from London’s Central Criminal Court. It offers an unparalleled window into the lived realities of crime, justice, and society from 1674 to 1913.

Old Bailey Online is a powerful pedagogical tool helping students develop core skills like source criticism, contextual analysis, and digital literacy. Whether teaching history, criminology, law, or wider subjects across humanities and social sciences, there are numerous ways to integrate this archive into your syllabus.

Below, I outline strategies for teaching with Old Bailey Online, each paired with suggested classroom activities and assessment ideas. These approaches encourage students to engage deeply with historical texts, understand the complexities of the past, and become active researchers.

Orientation and Trial Literacy

Start with foundational skills. There is a vast amount of material available at Old Bailey Online, which can be initially daunting and overwhelming for students. Introduce students to the Old Bailey and some foundational legal and social history knowledge. Prepare students for primary research by going through the ‘How to Read a Trial’ guide.

An activity for this session could be a workshop where students dissect a short trial together, identifying key components and unfamiliar terms. Use group work to build confidence. Students can help each other, share ideas, and assist you with identifying knowledge gaps.

An idea for formative or summative assessment is an annotated trial extract. Students mark up the transcript with comments explaining each section and submit a glossary of terms that they had to research.

Structured Thematic Searches

In the taught part of this session, guide students through using filters (e.g., offence category, gender, age, date, verdict) to uncover patterns in judicial treatment. This fosters digital literacy and an understanding of how data shapes historical narratives.

Once you have demonstrated the filters, ask students to run their own comparative searches. For example, female theft defendants 1750–1770 and 1800–1820, and reflect on changes or continuity in language, sentencing, or witnesses.

As an assessment, ask student to produce a short report or presentation interpreting search findings. Students must describe their search methodology, give examples, and situate their findings within the broader historiography.

Methodology

Deliver a session on methods of historical research. Explore how historians have engaged with court records, the methods they used, and their research questions.

This session sets up an on-going activity. Students can create weekly journal entries, digital logs, or blog posts detailing their progress on a larger project. Include reflections on unexpected findings or failed searches.

The weekly activity then feeds into a summative assessment, where students submit a final reflective commentary evaluating how their research question(s) evolved, their chosen methodology, and what they learned about historical methods.

Quantitative History

After an overview of historical methods, you may want to deliver a session focused on quantitative research. Use Old Bailey data to teach students about long-term trends in crime and punishment, such as shifting punishments, changing legal priorities, or gendered patterns in prosecution. Talk students through the Old Bailey Online’s ‘Doing Statistics’ guide.

Ask students to produce charts or tables to present their findings. These might show overall trends in their chosen offence or sentence or include subcategories such as specific types of theft or demographic factors like the sex of defendants.

Once the data is visualised, students submit a Report outlining what the charts reveal about their topic’s historical trajectory. They interpret how patterns of crime and punishment evolved, linking these to broader legal, social, economic, or political changes.

Qualitative History

Teaching qualitative history encourages students to engage deeply with historical court records, trial transcripts, and personal narratives to uncover the lived experiences behind legal documents. Emphasise critical analysis of how law intersects with social identities like gender, class, and race, fostering an understanding of justice as a social process.

Encourage students to select a single trial and explore it in depth. This cultivates empathy, historical imagination, and source criticism, especially when dealing with fragmented or mediated narratives.

This can lead to an assessed Case Study. This assignment transforms students from passive consumers of trial stories into active historians who critically interrogate qualitative evidence. It is an excellent way to combine digital skills with historical thinking and to produce substantial, original research projects. Require students to engage with relevant academic literature and module themes to contextualise their findings.

Courtroom Re-enactment

In the taught part of this session, you can explore how justice was not only a legal process but also a social performance designed to convince an audience, whether jury, court officials, or the public, of a particular narrative. The courtroom is not just a place where justice is done, but where stories are told, power is negotiated, and identities are performed.

You can ask students to turn trial transcripts into classroom performances. Put students into groups and ask them to assign roles (judge, prosecutor, defendant, witness, jury) based on a trial transcript. This helps bring the material to life and helps students grasp the emotional and rhetorical dynamics of the courtroom.

This activity could be a formative or summative assessment. Alternately, the group performance could be followed by reflective writing. Each student explains what they learnt theatre and engages with the historiography on their chosen themes.

Critical Reflection on the Archive

Use Old Bailey Online to discuss the limitations and silences within archives, including whose voices are recorded, whose are missing, and why, and whether we can ‘hear’ voices in this archive. This critical reflection deepens students’ understanding of the archive as a constructed and partial source.

Activities can include comparing trial transcripts with other contemporary records like newspapers, petitions, or literature. Encourage students to consider how factors like class, race, gender, or ability affect who is visible in the record.

Assessment might involve a critical essay such as ‘To what extent is it possible to hear the voice of a defendant in Old Bailey records?’ Require students to engage with historians like Robert Shoemaker, Frances Dolan, Natalie Zemon Davis, Tim Stretton, Amanda Capern, or Joanne Bailey.

Digital Storytelling and Public History

Use Old Bailey Online to teach public history and digital storytelling. Explore the importance of communicating research to wider audiences, think about best practice, methods, and ethical considerations.

Students can transform trial narratives into videos, podcasts, or blogs aimed at wider audiences. This activity fosters skills in communication, digital media, and translating academic research for non-specialists.

As an assessment, students submit their digital stories with a reflective essay discussing their research process, interpretative choices, and challenges in balancing accuracy with accessibility.

Overall, Old Bailey Online is more than a database; it is a dynamic classroom resource that invites students to become historians. By combining digital literacy with traditional historical skills, lecturers help students uncover hidden complexities in the past and develop critical thinking skills that extend far beyond the classroom. Through structured tasks, open inquiry, creative projects, shared learning, and critical reflection, students engage actively with diverse questions on justice and society. Integrating Old Bailey Online into your teaching offers a compelling way to make history tangible, relevant, and inspiring.

Blog author photo: (c) Chris Lacey Photography

Banner photo: London, Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons