No recent moment has better captured the warped place of violence in modern political discussion than an exchange between Newt Gingrich and a CNN journalist during the Republican national convention. Donald Trump had referred to “poverty and violence at home”, but the journalist pointed out that violent crime across the US has, in fact, progressively declined. “The average American does not think crime is down,” said Gingrich.

“People feel more threatened,” the journalist insisted, “but the facts don’t support it.”

“As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel,” retorted Gingrich, “and you go with the theoreticians.”

As James Sharpe observes in the conclusion to his sweeping and ambitious history of violence in England, a similar disconnect obtains in this country: “All the statistics show that we are highly unlikely to fall prey to the murderous stranger,” he writes, “but clearly that’s not what many of us believe.” Sharpe, a social historian of English crime and witchcraft, moves nimbly between the presentation and analysis of statistics and vivid vignettes of particular crimes. He is also alert to the inescapable gaps in the historical record, and the persistent tendency to overstate the significance of lurid and eye-catching instances of violence. (I was reminded, during one of his asides on the likelihood of unreported transgressions, of Chris Morris’s satirical deadpan in Brass Eye: “So much for recorded crimes. But crimes we know nothing about are going up as well.”) Sharpe illuminates the point that Gingrich seeks to exploit: the history of English violence is inextricably the history of how such violence has been construed.

Sharpe's calm and judicious presentation is the perfect antidote to the scaremongering of Newt Gingrich and his ilk

Somewhat surprisingly, for a book whose pages bristle with head-bashings, stabbings, hangings and myriad forms of inflicted misery, the overall story that Sharpe seeks to tell is an optimistic one. Like Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature – which argued that the entirety of human history has involved a slow drift away from violence – Sharpe argues for a reduction of violence as a basic fact of everyday life across the centuries in England.

Much of the book is based around specific spheres in which violent behaviour once occurred, but in which brutality has become ever less widely accepted. Duelling, initially seen as “more civilised than random violence”, had come by the Victorian age to seem “bloodthirsty and antiquated”. Sports that had openly incorporated forms of deliberate harm – such as the “hackers” in rugby whose explicit role was kicking and tripping opposing players – gradually ruled against such nastiness: one commentator complained that this would “do away with all the courage and pluck of the game”. The routine beating of wives, children and servants all came to be socially stigmatised if not outlawed.

Sharpe is too careful a historian to be unaware of both the advantages and the risks of such a narrative. His calm and judicious presentation is the perfect antidote to the scaremongering of Gingrich and his ilk, and to the fears, stoked by the tabloids, that the lurking malevolence of particular groups makes modern life unprecedentedly dangerous: convicts, child molesters, illegal immigrants. Any attempt to dismantle this nastily Manichaean worldview, in which the forces of good can clearly identify and oppose the forces of evil, is to be applauded.

The risk of this optimistic account lies in reducing past eras to swamps of barbaric violence from which we have crawled, and which we can now regard with enlightened serenity, tut-tutting at the bad behaviour exhibited on the duelling field or the rugby pitch. Sharpe strains to avoid this patronising approach to the past, beginning with two substantial chapters on the middle ages that explicitly seek to overturn “the lazy stereotype of ‘medieval savagery’”. Similarly, in the chapters on modern attitudes that close the book, Sharpe acknowledges “how fragile and inconsistent our retreat from violence has been”, offering a thorough account of the anxieties fuelled by violent books, films, and computer games.

By contrast, the thematically organised chapters in the middle of the book tend to sprawl and drift. They are packed with gripping anecdotes intended to “point up what violence has felt like and meant at specific times in our history”, but the recurrent story of a progressive reduction of violence becomes repetitious and under-explained. Sharpe adopts the account of a “civilising process” developed by the historian Norbert Elias, and though he eventually subjects it to bracing scrutiny – describing it as neither “inexorable nor inevitable” – it tends to serve as an explanatory catch-all in these central chapters, underpinned by quite general accounts of social change. Rather too many potted biographies and plot summaries begin to clog up the narrative, and Sharpe discusses forms of action such as slander and libel, which lie beyond his initial intent to focus only on physical violence or its direct threat. These chapters risk becoming a baggier history of English crime and social change.

Despite this meandering mid-section, Sharpe is a humane and clear-eyed guide to a series of intractable and timely questions. No book on this topic could be comprehensive, but perhaps the most surprising omission is substantial discussion of terrorism, which is touched upon only briefly: the 2005 London bombings aren’t mentioned at all. Surely no other form of violence better captures its complex modern role: both the changed methods of human brutality, and the way in which fears and perceptions can create political realities of their own. In 2012, an independent report concluded that in the first decade of the 21st century as many people were killed in the UK by terrorists as by bee stings.

Joe Moshenska’s book, A Stain in the Blood, is published by Cornerstone.

A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England is published by Random House (£30). Click here to order a copy for £24