Aim: The aim of the study is to explore, analyse and compare the beginnings of English and Hungarian policing, the system of public administration that comprised it, and the characteristics of criminal justice from the Middle Ages to the establishment of professional police organisations.
Methodology: The publication relies on the relevant literature in English and Hungarian and on a wide range of sources. Among other things, it uses data from a work on the history of the police in a small town near Liverpool, based on original sources.
Findings: Historical specificities determine the development of a country’s law enforcement institutions. This is the main explanation for the many similarities between English and Hungarian organisations and institutions in pursuance of examining the medieval history of law enforcement. However, due to the different pace of industrial and civil development, and the preservation of feudal relations in Hungary, there are significant differences in the formation of English and Hungarian professional police organisations. In the United Kingdom, the various decentralised police forces were created as a grassroots initiative based on the demand of the citizens, while in Hungary the centralised state police was created from above (otherwise using the London model). This certainly played (plays) a role in the different perception of the police in the two countries, too.
Value: Although there are relatively many studies on the prehistory of Western European countries’ police forces, and for some time this has also been true for the history of Hungarian policing, there is relatively scarce comparative historical research. And the specific topic under discussion here has, to the authors’ knowledge, never been examined in such detail.