Transgressing against discipline: Courts martial and legal reform in the Royal Navy, 1812-1889

Dr Andrew Johnson's 2025 paper can be obtained here. Abstract:

The nineteenth-century British Royal Navy was the unquestioned master of the world’s oceans, having won such standing after over a century of near-uninterrupted warfare. However, while the strategies, tactics and technology of the navy evolved dramatically during this period, the laws that governed its many thousands of sailors and officers remained virtually unchanged from the earliest days of the sailing navy. Despite minor amendments throughout the eighteenth century and a more thorough revision in 1749, both capital and corporal punishments were frequently employed as punishment for minor offences in a system that made England’s ‘Bloody Code’ look positively humane. The 1860 Naval Discipline Act provided the first substantive overhaul of the original Articles of War, but the impact of the Act and its amendments on courts martial have received little scholarly attention. Using parliamentary records, orders and correspondence from the Admiralty, and statistical data collected from thousands of court martial records, this dissertation argues that the legislative changes of the 1860s had an immediate effect on courts martial in the Royal Navy as the disciplinary authority of individual officers became increasingly limited in favour of a ‘uniformity of punishment’ enforced by the Admiralty. This legislative reform also cemented changing attitudes towards harsh punishments begun a half-century earlier, as both the noose and the lash were used far less frequently once the disciplinary concerns brought about by active war were no longer relevant. Viewing how charges and sentences changed on the global scale, it becomes clear that the “arbitrary and cruel punishments” of previous centuries had at last given way to a more formalised expression of discipline, enforced by courts martial in a manner not unlike the civilian courts of the day.