CHAPTER FIVEDetection and Prosecution:
Thief-takers, 1690 – 1720
Early modern policing, like modern policing, centred broadly on the mainten-
ance of the peace and the keeping of order in society.^1 Then, as now, crime pre-
vention was a major concern of the authorities, and, as we have seen, they
thought that surveillance on the streets and public places was one way to achieve
that. But in 1700 other aspects of what we take to be matters at the heart of mod-
ern policing were not within the purview of the constabulary or the night watch-
men. No public body had the responsibility to investigate crimes, to detect
offenders, or to gather the evidence that would sustain a prosecution. All of that
was left to the victim. The state provided the machinery of criminal justice, but
there was no expectation that constables, or other public officials, would act as
detectives or prosecutors—not, at least, with respect to the serious offences that
harmed individual victims.
That is not to say, however, that the business of detecting and apprehending
offenders had to await the emergence of the professional police of the nine-
teenth century or even the policing innovations that Henry Fielding and Sir
John Fielding put in place at Bow Street in the third quarter of the eighteenth.
The Fieldings gave policing considerable visibility, and new institutional forms.
They made innovative use of the press and demonstrated the possibilities of
aggressive detection and apprehension of serious offenders.^2 But in so doing they
took advantage of changes long underway, and of which indeed their attitudes
and outlook were themselves a product. They extended, harnessed, and publi-
cized forces that had been taking shape in the metropolis at least since the late
(^1) Much of the research for this chapter was the fruit of my collaboration with Tim Wales on a project
to write a joint article on thief-takers. We collected much more material than we anticipated, and came
to the conclusion that we should each draw on the evidence and write separate pieces. Tim used it in his
contribution to Londinopolis(Manchester, 2001 ), edited by Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner, and I have
drawn on it in this chapter.
(^2) Radzinowicz, History, iii. chs 1 – 2 ; John Styles, ‘Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal
Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5 th ser., 33 ( 1983 ),
127 – 50 ; idem, ‘Print and Policing: Crime and Advertising in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England’, in
Hay and Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution, 55 – 111 ; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Confronting the Crime Wave:
The Debate Over Social Reform and Regulation, 1749 – 1753 ’, in Lee Davison et al.(eds.), Stilling the Grum-
bling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689 – 1750 (Stroud, 1992 ), 77 – 98.