JUSTICE can be a brutal instrument, and a blunt one. Even today, when forensic scientists can locate single fibres from a victim's clothes, or identify individual hairs from a murderer's head left at the scene of their crime, there are false convictions, miscarriages of justice, wrongful incarcerations.

But the law of the 18th and 19th centuries had no such sophisticated tools at its disposal. Magistrates relied on witness statements, circumstantial evidence, uncovering false alibis. In the days before fingerprints, the finger of guilt could be enough to ensure a conviction.

And the punishment was usually final. Prior to the mid-19th century, executions were carried out for almost every offence, from murder to stealing a sheep. Nor did it stop at hanging. After death, the body was often exhibited in chains, both to deter others and to demonstrate the severity of the law.

The savagery of this life is captured in the book, Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Durham, which follows the publication of a similar volume based around the Tees, and takes Durham's Palatinate boundaries, stretching from the Tyne to the Tees, as its borders. Recounting tales of murder and of retribution, it offers a picture of crime and punishment in previous centuries.

One tells of how a couple returned home to their farm after Christmas celebrations, to be greeted by a horrifying scene.

John and Margaret Brass, who lived at Brass Farm, near Ferryhill, had gone visiting, leaving their children Jane, 20, 17-year-old John and Elizabeth, 11, along with servant Andrew Mills, aged 18 or 19, at the farm. When they arrived home, on January 25, 1683, they found the mutilated bodies of their three children, alongside two bloodstained axes.

By his own account, Mills had entered the house with an axe, and, according to which record is to be believed, killed either Jane or John first, in both cases felling them with the axe before cutting their throats. He then dragged Elizabeth from under a bed and killed her, before leaving the scene and running through the village, covered in blood.

He told his trial that the devil had appeared to him in bodily form and told him to kill the children. Nothing had been stolen, and there was no other apparent motive. Mills was found guilty of murder because he had been in league with the devil.

A century later, he might have been judged insane and committed to an asylum, but in the 17th century it was judged that the devil could not enter a person's mind unless invited, and Mills was executed on August 15, 1683, his body left on a common just north of Ferryhill, for nature to take its course. The ghosts of the victims and their attacker are said to haunt the area around the old farm, and the altar tomb of the three children sits, barely decipherable, in Kirk Merrington churchyard.

Around 150 years later, William Jobling was hanged for the murder of Nicholas Fairles, a magistrate for the County of Durham. On June 11, 1832, 71-year-old Fairles was riding to Jarrow Colliery when two pitmen appeared in front of him, one taking hold of his hand while the other dragged him from his horse.

Fairles fell to the ground and was hit on the head with a brick, and then beaten and kicked until he lost consciousness. His assailants ran off and Fairles was taken to a doctor, but he lost the battle for life ten days later.

Witnesses named the two pitmen as Ralph Armstrong and William Jobling, stating it was Armstrong who had actually delivered the blows. Jobling was arrested, although Armstrong had disappeared, possibly after taking employment on board a ship.

On trial for his life at Durham Assizes, Jobling expressed remorse and said he had not meant to harm anyone. He denied being the principal attacker, but he was found guilty of murder and, shortly after noon on August 3, he was led to the scaffold and hanged, his body twitching for several minutes until he expired.

The body was left hanging for an hour, before the clothes were removed and the body covered in pitch, with the clothes then replaced. Jobling's remains were then paraded through the county to Jarrow Slake, and there it was displayed on a gibbet until August 31, when it mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps there was someone who believed Jobling merited a decent burial, whatever his crimes.

When Milner Lockey killed Thomas Harrison at Urpeth Mill in 1860, the question for the jury was whether Lockey acted in a fit of passion, or whether his crime was premeditated.

Lockey was estranged from his second wife Elizabeth, and had moved out of the cottage they shared next to Urpeth Mill house. Inflamed by his daughter from a previous marriage into believing his wife had been unfaithful, he went to the cottage to find Elizabeth lying with Thomas Harrison, a one-eyed former policeman now working as a bailiff, who had moved into the mill house when the miller went bankrupt.

According to Lockey, when his wife jumped from the bed, he said to her: "Well hinny, how art thou?", to which she replied: "Middling", at which he said: "I think you are going on bonny here; damn your blood, I've a good mind to kill you both", at which he pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed both Elizabeth and Harrison, injuring the former and killing the latter.

But the jury also heard from Samuel, one of Elizabeth's sons from her first marriage, that his mother had been fully dressed when she was stabbed, and cuts in the material proved she had been fully dressed at the time of the attack.

The jury decided Lockey had lied about his wife being in bed with Harrison when he had burst into the cottage, and also heard that an ironmonger sold a knife to a man resembling Lockey on the morning of the killing. The defence that it was a crime of passion was dismissed, and Lockey was hanged on December 27, 1860.

His was one of 93 recorded hangings in Durham in the 18th and 19th centuries, by no means all of them seemingly as clear-cut. But many of the executions were for the murder of a partner, often in an alcohol-fuelled rage. Domestic violence, drunken brawls, unfathomable cruelty, all were an everyday hazard among the villages and towns of County Durham in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many of these are now forgotten, but some have left their mark in history.

* Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Durham, by Maureen Anderson (Wharncliffe Books £9.99)