the 1690 s further encouraged victims and others to bring charges, and sup-
ported them in doing so. A second solicitor of the Treasury was appointed in 1696 ,
for example, specifically to handle funds set aside to aid in the prosecution of
Crown cases. It is true that the primary reason for this was almost certainly the
Treasury’s interest in further improving the prosecution of coining cases, which
had reached unheard of levels by the middle 1690 s, and perhaps other cases of
particular importance for the administration. But the Treasury solicitor’s inter-
ests and engagements broadened over time, or perhaps the sense of what was of
immediate interest to the government changed, and in the first half of the eight-
eenth century his office was helping to pay some of the prosecution charges of
a wider range of cases, including some ordinary felonies involving private
victims.^24 In addition to that stimulus from within the government, it is also
worth remembering the more pervasive and more general encouragement of
prosecutions that arose from the vigorous activity of the Societies for the Refor-
mation of Manners in the years following the Revolution. The reformers of-
fered rewards for the prosecution of blasphemy and sabbath breaking, of
prostitution and gambling, indeed of vice and immorality of all kinds, which, as
we will see, led some men into thief-taking more broadly.
A contemporary defined thief-takers as those ‘who made a Trade of helping
People (for a gratuity) to their lost Goods and sometimes for Interest or Envy
snapping the Rogues themselves, being usually in fee with them, and ac-
quainted with their Haunts’.^25 Two activities are described here: the one illegal
and corrupt, since it was against the law to compound a felony; the other legal,
but apparently rare, and only practised against those the thief-taker had been
dealing with as a receiver. This 1699 definition was accurate but incomplete. Ar-
ranging for the return of stolen goods was a useful service to victims—and per-
haps as much as any of them wanted. It had been a central activity for some
time of those who had knowledge of the criminal world, and with the help of
newspapers it was to become perhaps more highly organized in the first quar-
ter of the eighteenth century by Charles Hitchen and even more by Jonathan
Wild. But there was more than that to the thief-taking business in 1699. Thief-
takers’ sights were also on the money that could be earned by apprehending
and convicting robbers, coiners, and other offenders—rewards that had been
enlarged by parliament in the course of the 1690 s and that were further ampli-
fied by royal proclamations advertised in the London Gazetteand other news-
papers.^26
The surviving records of prosecution and trial make it impossible to gauge
the extent to which cases came to the notice of the magistrates and the courts as
232 Detection and Prosecution
(^24) See Ch. 8.
(^25) B.E., A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew in its Several Tribes of Gypsies, Beg-
gars, Thieves, Cheats etc... .( 1699 ).
(^26) On newspaper advertising of rewards in this period, see Wales, ‘Thief-takers and Their Clients’,
pp. 69 – 70 ; Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England( 2000 ), ch. 5.