Records of proceedings at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913 have been put online today.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey has been developed by a group of universities including Sheffield, Hertfordshire and the Open University.

Almost 200,000 cases are on display, mainly as digital images of official documents.

However, as with the attempt to put Census records online, the Old Bailey site appears to have crashed as a result of too much demand from the public.

Professor Robert Shoemaker, head of the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, and co-director of the project, said: "It is now possible to search records of 197,745 individual trials, running to 110,000 pages of text and some 120 million words.

"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 microfilm.

"Now everyone from schoolchildren, amateur historians and scholars working in a range of academic disciplines can have easy access to this wealth of information."

Trials are searchable by verdict, crime and punishment and cover a wide variety of cases, from sheep thieves sentenced to death to leading suffragettes.

One of the most popular searches is likely to be the case of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was sentenced to death in 1910.

Crippen was the first criminal to be caught thanks to wireless communication, after he was recognised on a cruise ship by the captain.

Co-director Professor Clive Emsley, of The Open University, said: "Crime is something that fascinates everyone, and the Old Bailey Proceedings provides people with the opportunity to see what crime was really like in the past.

"They can make comparisons and see close parallels to what is happening today. For example, we think of terrorism as new, but in the Old Bailey Proceedings people will see terrorists who attempted to do the same things 100 years ago."