The treatment that some members of that gang received in the pillory when
they were finally exposed—treatment that resulted in one of them being
killed—makes it clear that there were decided limits to popular acceptance of
thief-takers’ activities. Indeed, the public’s view of them almost certainly de-
pended entirely on what they did. They were not invariably regarded with the
disdain and hostility that was visited on informers who made it a practice to
report victimless offences. Helping victims of property crime to get their goods
back—even if the means employed were not strictly legal—was not likely to
meet with popular disapproval. And at least some aspects of what one might call
detective thief-taking appear to have been regarded as an acceptable pursuit,
or at least with nothing worse than ambivalence. Thief-takers occasionally
helped ordinary people to get their stolen property returned by finding and
prosecuting the thief, as well as negotiating the return of goods for a fee—ser-
vices that no public official was prepared to offer. That some thief-takers were
accepted as men performing a useful, though perhaps distasteful, service is sug-
gested by some of them being known as ‘Mr so-and-so, the thief-taker’—as a
man doing what was apparently regarded as a legitimate job. Certainly, much of
what thief-takers did was encouraged and supported by public policy, and in
turn they drew both the central government and local authorities into their
work, bringing to bear a blend of private energy and public authority in the
business of detection and prosecution. The result, unintended and in the end
largely negative, was that thief-takers played an important role in the emer-
gence of policing forces and in public attitudes towards police.
Thief-takers and constables in the 1690 s
Thief-takers did not appear for the first time in London in the late seventeenth
century. Men had been engaged in some aspects of thief-catching a hundred
years earlier. Indeed, in the ‘rogue’ or ‘cony-catching’ literature in vogue in the
late sixteenth century, they had a central role in accounts of thieves and con-
men, prostitutes and receivers in the capital.^7 The picture that these accounts
suggest of a highly-organized underworld in Elizabethan London does not
stand scrutiny.^8 But it seems unlikely that thief-taking activity would have been
entirely invented for the purposes of these pamphlets; and there is no reason to
think that the self-interest that encouraged significant numbers of men to seek
out offenders, to facilitate the return of stolen goods, to mount or manipulate
prosecutions in the late seventeenth century was entirely missing in the reign of
Elizabeth. Indeed, there appears to have been in the late sixteenth century
something very like thief-taking centring on Newgate, where the turnkeys, or
228 Detection and Prosecution
(^7) Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London(Cambridge, 1991 ), 204 – 5.
(^8) See, for example, John L. McMullan, The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld, 1550 – 1700 (New
Brunswick, NJ, 1984 ), who uses this literature to study the organization and extent of crime in London in
the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Archer finds little to confirm the size or organization or
sense of permanence of the underworld to be found in the rogue literature (Pursuit of Stability, 206 ).