On this day in 1742 a man was sentenced at the Old Bailey for stealing a sheep worth 40 shillings. The record of his fate is stark: “Guilty, Death”.

The case of Edmund Larrat is one of almost 200,000 that can now be accessed free of charge online after the Central Criminal Court in London doubled today the number of case records published on its website.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, accessible at www.oldbaileyonline.org.uk, allows users to view details of every criminal trial from 1674 to 1913.

Searchable by keywords or categories such as crime, verdict and punishment, the records are supplemented by more than 190,000 digital images of original court documents.

The website, a collaboration between the universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and the Open University, is one of the biggest published sources of information on the lives of ordinary Britons.

An earlier version was launched in 2003 featuring cases from 1674 to 1834. It attracted more than 10 million visits.

The latest tranche of cases includes details of crimes by Irish terrorists, train robbers and suffragettes. Records of Oscar Wilde's conviction for indecency and the infamous trial of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, convicted of killing his wife, are also available.

Robert Shoemaker, head of the history department at the University of Sheffield and one of the project directors, said: “Up until now this treasure trove of social, legal and family history has only been available to a few dedicated historians, who were prepared to spend months peering at microfilms.

“Now everyone from school children and amateur historians to scholars working in a range of academic disciplines can have easy access to this wealth of information.”

Researchers said that the cases showed how attitudes to crime and punishment have changed. In one case, a 13-year-old was sentenced to death for burglary. However, by the early 20th century, a new crime of neglecting a child had been introduced.

Clive Emsley, of the Open University, another of the project directors, said: “Crime is something that fascinates everyone, and what the Old Bailey Proceedings does is provide people with the opportunity to see what crime was really like in the past.

“For example, we think of terrorism being new, but people will see terrorists who are attempting to do the same things 100 years ago.”

Tim Hitchcock, of the University of Hertfordshire, which performed the digitisation of the text, said: “Over 240 years, what is evident in the trial reports is the profound extent to which British trials evolved and changed. It was at the Old Bailey that the modern adversarial trial was created and all the rights we associate with the modern criminal justice system were put in place.”

The project was funded by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Big Lottery Fund.

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