evidence, too, of rewards being offered by victims of theft and robbery to induce
private men to search for stolen goods. After a theft of two silver tankards from
an inn in Hertfordshire in 1688 , for example, it was revealed in a subsequent in-
vestigation by Chief Justice Holt that a man called John Whitwood had been
‘imployed to find out ye Tankards’ and that an agent of his had apprehended a
man who was afterwards charged before a London magistrate and committed
to Newgate. Holt’s investigation revealed that Whitwood was a receiver who
controlled a number of thieves and occasionally returned stolen goods to their
owners for a reward. It also revealed that he had accepted a bribe from the
accused man he had arrested to produce the perjured evidence that acquitted
him. As Jonathan Wild was to do on a more dramatic scale, Whitwood (and no
doubt others like him) combined receiving with organizing thefts, earning
rewards for detecting offenders and making arrests, and at the same time using
bribery, intimidation, and perjury to arrange outcomes that would suit his
interests.^16
Whitwood had presumably been moved in the first place by the victim’s offer
of a reward for the arrest of the thief or the return of the stolen goods. The state
also began to offer rewards in the seventeenth century for the prosecution of
felons, and there is some evidence that such rewards became more common in
the thirty years after the Restoration. Ad hocrewards had perhaps long been paid
to individuals at the suggestion of judges and the secretaries.^17 But in addition—
following the lead of the Rump Parliament—the government also began to
make a standing offer of a ten pound reward to be paid by sheriffs to anyone who
gave the evidence that would convict robbers and burglars. Perhaps as a way of
signalling the reassertion of the king’s control over the administration of the
criminal law, these were offered not by statute but in a series of royal proclam-
ations.^18 The payment of rewards by the state was also expanded in the years
after the Restoration to counter the very large increase in coining offences in the
1680 s, including counterfeiting but primarily clipping. Men and women who in-
formed on coiners and clippers or were in other ways instrumental in their
arrest and conviction were being given gratuities in the 1660 s, not by right but
in response to their petitioning the Treasury and on the strength of a judge’s con-
firmation of their role in bringing offenders to justice.^19 The officers of the Mint
also became increasingly active in the prosecution of coiners in this period,
230 Detection and Prosecution
(^16) CLRO, London Sess. Papers,July 1691 (examination of Robert Bennison).
(^17) CSPD 1665 , p. 203.
(^18) Rewards for the conviction of highwaymen, burglars, and housebreakers were established by le-
gislation in the Rump Parliament in 1652 ( J. M. Beattie, ‘London Crime and the Making of the “Bloody
Code”, 1689 – 1718 ’, in Lee Davison, et al.(eds.), Stilling the Grumbling Hive, 52 ). They were renewed after
the Restoration in royal proclamations in 1661 and later years that offered £ 10 to be paid by sheriffs for
the conviction of robbers and burglars (CSPD 1661 , pp. 189 , 194 , 262 ; CSPD 1677 , pp. 203 – 4 ; CSPD
1680 , p. 410 ; CSPD 1683 , p. 35 ).
(^19) CTB 1667 – 8 , pp. 386 , 604 ; CTB 1669 – 72 , pp. 259 , 483 , 630. For offences against the coining, see
above, Ch. 1 , work cited in n. 114.