seventeenth century and perhaps much earlier, forces created by the merging of
private energy and self-interest with public resources and authority.
A central figure in the emergence of more active policing was the so-called
‘thief-taker’. Thief-taking describes a range of activities. At its narrowest, it
meant the detective work of private citizens (usually men, though very occa-
sionally women) who sought out, apprehended, and prosecuted suspected of-
fenders for profit. Rewards for convicting offenders were occasionally offered by
victims. But the main support for the activities of thief-takers were the rewards
paid under the authority of statute (supplemented by those offered by royal
proclamations) for the conviction of certain kinds of offenders, including rob-
bers, burglars, and coiners.^3 The principal rewards were instituted in the reigns
of William and Anne to encourage private efforts to apprehend and prosecute,
and (along with the offer of a pardon) to encourage offenders to impeach and
give evidence against their erstwhile accomplices.
The incidence of prosecution for the rewards offered by the state may have
fluctuated over time, depending perhaps on the availability of accessible targets
and on alternative opportunities to profit from crime. But this was not the only
business that attracted men who had contacts in criminal circles—and it may
not have been the most profitable, though on the matter of profits from the
variety of activities that thief-takers engaged in we remain very largely in the
dark. There was clearly money to be earned by those who could help victims to
recover their stolen goods—arranging to get belongings returned for a fee that
would compensate the middle man and the thief, and at the same time cost the
victim less than the value of stolen possessions. Such brokering or mediation
had long been practised, since if they could not have both vengeance and their
goods back, most victims of theft or robbery or burglary are likely to have at least
wanted their belongings returned. Tim Wales’s study of newspaper advertise-
ments, through which thieves and thief-takers were making contact by the last
decades of the seventeenth century, has shown the way the expanding press
facilitated this form of thief-taking activity.^4 The career ofJonathan Wild, who
combined ruthless prosecution with the profitable return to their owners of
goods stolen by the thieves he controlled, was to make it abundantly clear that it
remained particularly common in the early decades of the eighteenth century.^5
Thief-takers engaged in other practices in the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, some of them shady, even illegal, some vicious. An illuminating analysis of
a mid-century gang who earned rewards by drawing young men into commit-
ting robberies who they could then easily prosecute and convict has confirmed
how readily thief-taking led to corruption and to blood money conspiracies.^6
Detection and Prosecution 227(^3) See pp. 230 – 2 , 376 – 83.
(^4) Wales, ‘Thief-takers and Their Clients in Later Stuart London’, in Griffiths and Jenner (eds.),
Londinopolis, pp. 67 – 85.
(^5) Gerald Howson, The Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall ofJonathan Wild( 1970 ).
(^6) Ruth Paley, ‘Thief-takers in London in the Age of the McDaniel Gang, c. 1745 – 54 ’, in Hay and
Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution, 301 – 41.