Thanks to Jon Smithen [1] for a link to a BBC piece [2]discussing the availability of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 [3], which is a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.
The site is fascinating, although I would advise North American readers of Slaw to look at the site in the evening, since there is so much traffic from British researchers that the site is crashing.
A conference on the use of these resources [4] is planned for later in the Spring.