This finely grained and richly textured study of crime and the judicial system in a rural county is a self-described ‘microhistory’ that places the accent on personal experiences and the way individuals interacted with the forces of law and order and the courts, mainly during the 1860s and 1870s. County policing and the structure of different courts locally were the same as elsewhere in England and Wales, and the author meticulously analyses the operation of the different tiers of the legal system: the petty sessions, quarter sessions and assizes, as well as the legal representation of the accused (where it occurred), the role of expert witnesses and the professionalisation of the courts. However, the case study is sufficiently distinctive to provide insights into an interesting interaction between specific circumstances and generic structures. Some of the distinctive features of the area derive from the fact that it is a border county that abuts the English county of Shropshire in the east and stretches across mid-Wales to an estuary that connects it to the coast in the west. This was a rural county with pockets of industrial activity. Rachael Jones has a deep familiarity with the social geography of the county, its languages, cultures and topography, and she uses this knowledge to shed light on fascinating aspects of the study of law and order. A telling insight is that the comparatively small constabulary of one hundred men was stationed at key turnpike nodes, which facilitated the surveillance of movement around the county, while the resident magistracy was mostly located along the Severn Valley, which bisects the county in a roughly west–east direction. That magistracy was English-speaking and Anglican, in a county that was strongly Anglican and anglicised towards the English border, but more markedly Nonconformist and Welsh-speaking in the west and north. The study exhibits a keen understanding of the religious complexion and complex matrix of linguistic patterns that characterised the area.

The county police force is located in a Welsh and broader context of rural policing. Mostly working class in composition, this constabulary was primarily involved in policing the behaviour of women and men of a similar social background to constables, much as was done elsewhere in Britain. Yet Rachael Jones also reveals intriguing evidence of how members of the middle class could be controlled by the police. She skilfully unpicks the links between the press, newspaper editors and the police, an analysis that hints at a rural dimension to the ways in which the local newspaper press in industrial towns of the period engaged in the surveillance of the behaviour of the middle classes as well as that of working people, as shown in studies by historians such as Andy Croll. This study of Montgomeryshire, therefore, points in the direction of the potential for further investigation of the relationship between the press, the courts and surveillance of behaviour in other rural areas.

The book includes a revealing analysis of particular categories of crime, especially those relating to the theft of clothing and boots. The gendered nature of crime in Montgomeryshire is a key feature of the study, a topic discussed by the same author in this journal in 2016. She finds that women were less likely to commit crime in the more thinly populated areas of the county, indicating perhaps that a combination of landscape, social structure, culture and the deployment of police geographically shaped criminal behaviour and reported crime. A fascinating chapter on ‘vice’ and prostitution is a nuanced study of a theme most readily associated with towns and cities.

This valuable study unravels the webs of relationships that turned around the legal system in a mid-Victorian rural area. In so doing, it underlines the significance of the county as a vector of rural relationships and demonstrates how a study of its legal institutions reinforces the county’s significance as a meaningful unit of analysis. Among the strengths of the book is its insistence on the need to root the study of crime and the operation of the judicial system locally in the context of social class and gender relationships. The book will be read profitably by historians of nineteenth-century rural society who are concerned with the dynamics of criminality and how local power structures were embodied in the legal system.