CRIM 314 The History of Crime and Justice Assignment 1: Concept Definition Anglo-Saxon Law & Order

CRIM 314 Assignment 1

Assignment Tittle: Concept Definition: Anglo-Saxon Law & Order

Due Date: Friday 7 August, 4pm

Course Weighting: 30%

Word Length: Upper limit of 1,500 words (excluding references)

Assessment Guidelines

In this assignment, you have to demonstrate an understanding of some of the key concepts explored in EITHER Week 2 OR Week 3.

The concepts you have to explore in the assignment are the following:

Week 2

• Blood-feud
• Origins of English law (Laws of Aethelberht)
• Wergild & Compensation

Week 3

• King’s peace
• Community self-policing (tithing & borh)
• The hue and cry

You have to demonstrate an understanding of at least 2 of the concepts listed above (for your chosen week) in order to get a Pass. Your task is not simply to define these concepts but to use them and link them together in a harmonious and logical way to develop a historical narrative that relates to the main theme explored in Week 2 and Week 3, namely, Anglo-Saxon law & order. In other words, you can think of this assignment as a highly structured essay with a strict mandatory requirement to discuss specific concepts (as opposed to a regular essay where you are presented with a fixed essay question and your task is to offer a personalised response, i.e., develop an argument, based on independent research).

The purpose of your historical narrative about Anglo-Saxon law & order is to reconstruct an aspect of the past by discussing and interlinking the concepts from either Week 2 or Week 3.

If you choose to focus on Week 2, the aspect of the past you are required to reconstruct is the origins of public justice in the Anglo-Saxon period
If you choose to focus on Week 3, the aspect of the past you are required to reconstruct is the origins of policing in Anglo-Saxon society
Please note that you are not supposed to discuss your chosen concepts ‘in the abstract’. The main theme of the assignment is Anglo-Saxon law & order and this means that you are expected to provide an element of historical contextualisation and to discuss your concepts in their proper historical setting.

Structure of the Assignment

Please organise the assignment as follows:

• Introduction (1 paragraph)
• Historical context/intro to Anglo-Saxon law & order (1 paragraph)
• Concept 1 (1 paragraph)
• Concept 2 (1 paragraph)
• Concept 3 (1 paragraph)
• Key lessons from/insights about the origins of public justice/policing (1 paragraph)
• Conclusion (1 paragraph)
• Bibliography

If you choose to focus on 2 concepts rather than 3, simply write two paragraphs about one of those 2 concepts

Further details about what to include in your introduction, conclusion, and ‘key lessons/insights’ section are provided below.

Format of the Assignment

You should write your assignment in essay form with a proper introduction and conclusion. You need to discuss your chosen concepts in a cohesive manner with proper sentences (do not use bullet points) and smooth transitions from one paragraph to the next. Each paragraph should be around 200-220 words. Do not use headings. Remember to follow the academic writing formalities listed in the ‘Academic Writing Formalities’ document on Nuku.

Introduction & Conclusion

Introductions are important because they set the stage for your assignments. The purpose of an introduction in academic writing can vary depending on the context and this can be confusing for students. In the context of this CRIM314 assignment, keep the following guidelines in mind:

• The introduction should move from ‘the general’ to ‘the particular’

What this means is that you should start the introduction with a ‘general orientation’, i.e., you need to orient your readers by establishing the broader context your assignment engages with. In this case, that context is Anglo-Saxon society. So, you need to start the introduction with a (short) sentence or two about that.

• Next, you need to narrow the focus of your assignment

This is essentially what ‘moving towards the particular’ means. You narrow the focus by writing the next sentence or two about Anglo-Saxon law & order more specifically, because that is the key theme in this assignment.

• Then, you narrow the focus even further by stating your purpose

This is what we call a ‘purpose statement’, i.e., a single sentence that delineates precisely and unambiguously what your assignment will do. In that sentence, you will need to specify what aspect of Anglo-Saxon law & order you intend to discuss in your assignment: either the origins of public justice or the origins of policing.

• End the introduction with an outline of the assignment

This is self-explanatory: once you have set the scene and stated your purpose, simply lay out a step-by-step outline for the assignment that gives your readers a sense of direction and help them navigate the assignment: “This essay will first…Then…Finally…”.

Conclusions can also vary considerably depending on the writing context. In the context of this CRIM314 assignment, the important thing is to make sure that your conclusion sums up your main points and does not add any new material, observation, or insight. You do not need to include recommendations for future research. You are also not required to address the implications of your research, in a traditional sense, by asking ‘so what?’. That said, your ‘key lessons/insights’ section ought to include reflections about the value of thinking historically about present issues, and you will have to summarise them in the conclusion (without repeating yourself verbatim).

Key Lessons/Insights Section

In this final section of the assignment, you need to offer some insights about the sorts of things that we can learn by studying Anglo-Saxon law & order. Put differently, this is where you link past and present and reflect upon ‘the lessons of the past’. What can we learn by studying the history of justice, policing, etc.? There is no right or wrong answer to this question, but clues will be provided in the lectures. For instance, one of the things that we learn by studying the origins of public justice in Anglo-Saxon England is that the first law code of the Anglo-Saxons (i.e., the first English law) was essentially a system of ‘restorative’ justice and not ‘punitive’ justice. Justice was about compensating victims rather than punishing offenders. This is something that should make us ponder: why have we marginalised victim-centred restorative practices and replaced them with offender-centred punitive ones? Or, when we study the origins of policing in the Anglo-Saxon period, we see individuals who used to ‘police themselves’ through a system of community self-policing and who shared responsibility for each other’s behaviour. Does this historical fact help us imagine a world without police today? Or perhaps this insight suggests that social order can exist without police but not without policing! These are some of the insights that you may wish to discuss in this final section.

Sources for this Assignment

For this assignment you should draw from the lecture content presented in Week 2 and/or Week 3, along with relevant readings that are provided for these weeks. As a general rule, it is a good idea to also utilise your search skills to obtain additional information by engaging with pockets of the broader academic literature not covered in the course, though you can still get the top marks simply by engaging effectively and systematically with the weekly and further readings.

How Many References?

There is no definitive answer to this question. A rough figure for the average essay is around 10-15 sources. The reasoning behind this figure is the following: for this assignment, you should write paragraphs of around 200-220 words, so your essay will consist of 7 paragraphs in total. You do not have to include in-text citations in your introduction and conclusion (though you can*) – only in the main body of the essay, which will consist of 5 paragraphs. Each paragraph in the main body of the essay should contain at least 1 citation. The reason for this is simple: you are writing an academic essay and the points and observations you make must be informed by academic debates and discussions and must, therefore, be drawn from the academic literature. In academic essays, whenever you include points, observations, and arguments that are not your own, you must cite them, i.e., give credit to the scholars and researchers who made them. Since each paragraph in the main body of an academic essay should make a substantive point, introduce a new idea, provide further elaboration on a concept, present new data and evidence, etc. (none of which come directly from you but always from some other source that needs to be acknowledged and cited), then this means that each paragraph should contain at least 1 citation. This should also be taken to mean that 5 sources represent the bare minimum for a Pass. Well-researched essays will have more than a single citation per paragraph and, if you want to get a good grade for your essay and not just a Pass, then you should include at least 2-3 citations per paragraph (hence the 10-15 figure mentioned at the start of this section).

* NB Other courses may have different requirements about use of citations in introductions & conclusions

Assignment Grading

You will be graded on the following criteria (see below for detailed assessment criteria