CHAPTER 7
Crime in the Age of Industry
and Empire
Property crime and thieftakers
By the end of the seventeenth century, the speed and scale of growth of towns
began to increase and become generally uncontrolled. Urban population levels
rose sharply, and with them came more crime, disorder, riots and drunkenness.
It was a period of largescale immigration–from the countryside to the towns,
and from strifetorn areas of Europe to Britain. Populations had become more
mobile, more fragmented, and thus harder to control. While the revolution in
industrial processes made fortunes for some, it also made paupers of a great
many people, living in urban slums. Various wars also had their effects,
leading some to imprisonment and execution for treason, and turning
criminals into soldiers and sailors (and back again).
At the start of the period there was still no provision for organised policing.
London in particular, with a population of some 600,000, was rife with crime.
In theory, it was opposed by City officials such as Charles Hitchen, who
became Under Marshal in 1711, having bought the appointment for £700.
Hitchen’s own behaviour seems to have been far from exemplary. He is
reported to have accepted bribes to free criminals and to have coerced favours
from male prostitutes. The Board of Aldermen found out about these activities
and suspended him from his post in 1713. It was about this time that Hitchen
approached Jonathan Wild, then aged around thirty, who had served prison
time for debt. Wild had so ingratiated himself with his gaolers that he was
permitted to accompany officers who went out to arrest thieves. Through his
marriage to a prostitute who ran her own gang, he became familiar with
London’s underworld. In 1712 he was released from prison, and went to work
as a pimp and a fence before Hitchen offered him a job as a thieftaker–a
‘nice little earner’which paid £40 for each arrest made.
The rise in crime, particularly property crime, grew more threatening in the
public mind because of the increasing number of daily newspapers that were