While everyone’s family has a sheep or two hiding perilously in the closet, it’s now possible to find out just how black they might have been. Legal duffers at London town’s Old Bailey have recently uploaded the records of criminal trials from 1674 to 1913 on their site, allowing you to see just how naughty your namesakes were. It’s also a delightfully sordid way to reacquaint yourself with 18th and 19th century verbiage, with certain dodgy streets described as ‘very low’ and some fearfully nasty sounding punishments, including hanging in chains, ‘private’ whipping and cheek branding. Those ASBO teens don’t know they’re born, etc.

The fruits of my own genealogical search produced a raft of badness, with one poor gal (accused of half-inching hankies) narrowly escaping a flogging in 1837. She shared first names with my enormously upstanding sister upon whom this is no reflection. But our dear editors’ ancestors weren’t shy of the courthouse, neither. Rogers and Nicholson (a bad lot, I tell you) came up squillions of times when I searched for those entries marked ‘Yor Goin' DAAAAHN’, or, in the site’s parlance, ‘guilty’. Indeed, Anthony Rogers of the Parish of St. Clement Danes was indicted for stealing a Cheshire cheese from one Samuel Eaton’s shop in 1715. According to the records, he was seen not long after with ‘some loose Fellows’. He reckoned he’d been given the dairy ‘just to carry, before the Beadle met him’. Ah, the classic I Was Just Holding The Cheese defense. Bad Mr Rogers was not ‘belive’d’ and got a massive great whipping for his light and cheesy fingers.

Find your own terrible ancestors at Old Bailey Online.