assistant keepers, along with other gaolers, were given warrants that authorized
them to arrest known thieves and other suspicious people, and to go in search
of felons.^9 The name was also known and used. As early as 1609 one John
Pulman, who had been engaged by the victim of a crime to find the man who
had stolen from him, was labelled a thief-taker by a magistrate drawing up a
recognizance.^10
Forms of thief-taking were thus being practised in the early seventeenth cen-
tury. Thief-catchers were also employed soon after the Restoration by ministers
of Charles II’s government, concerned not only about the threat of republicans
and religious dissenters to the stability of the restored regime, but more broadly
about the threat of crime, particularly of gangs, and their possible links to polit-
ical dissidents.^11 One can see this in the efforts of secretary Williamson and of Sir
William Morton, one of the judges of the court of King’s Bench, to prosecute
highwaymen in the late 1660 s and early 1670 s. Some of Morton’s claims to have
caught and convicted more than a hundred highwaymen should perhaps be dis-
counted since they are included in a letter emphasizing his expenses in getting
those men arrested, and requesting a grant to enable him to continue his work.^12
But his correspondence with Williamson over several years does confirm his
active engagement in the apprehension and prosecution of serious offenders.
Morton created a network of agents to pursue gangs of robbers and burglars
and the apparently increasing numbers of men and women engaged in coun-
terfeiting and clipping the coinage.^13 In 1670 he reported on his efforts to
apprehend a gang of thieves who had travelled back and forth from England
and Ireland, committing numerous offences. One of the gang, Francis Martin,
who among other things was suspected of stealing from the Duke of York, had
been caught, and Morton ‘employed [him] as a thief-catcher’, granting him a
warrant to arrest some of the thieves he knew.^14
A good deal of evidence of efforts by the government in the 1660 s and after to
encourage the detection and apprehension of serious offenders is to be found
among the State Papers. In addition, on several occasions in the late seven-
teenth century the keeper of Newgate gaol was granted warrants that author-
ized him to arm a party of his turnkeys and other officers, or indeed anyone he
cared to employ, to ‘ride about the highways’ to seek out robbers.^15 There is
Detection and Prosecution 229(^9) Archer, Pursuit of Stability, 236 – 7.
(^10) Alexandra F. Johnston and Robert Tittler, ‘ “To Catch a Thief ” in Jacobean London’, in Edwin
Brezette DeWindt (ed.), The Salt of Common Life(Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995 ), 233 – 69.
(^11) The political context of thief-taking and possible links between thief-takers and officials in both the
City and the central government is developed in Wales, ‘Thief-takers and their Clients’. On Williamson
and the court’s concerns about religious and political disaffection, see Alan Marshall, Intelligence and
Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660 – 1685 (Cambridge, 1994 ).
(^12) CSPD 1671 – 2 , p. 298.
(^13) CSPD 1668 – 9 , p. 242 ; CSPD 1670 , p. 50 ; CSPD 1671 – 2 , pp. 131 – 2 , 134 , 144 , 147 , 238 , 299.
(^14) CSPD 1670 , p. 393.
(^15) CSPD 1678 , p. 41 ; CSPD 1685 , pp. 56 – 7. On the latter occasion a similar warrant was issued to the
keeper of Warwick gaol (CSPD 1685 , p. 57 ).