a result of people being willing to inform on their neighbours. Such information
must have been crucial to the prosecution of some offences, especially offences
like coining that were carried on in private and in which it was rare for there to
be a victim whose interests were immediately harmed. My interest here is on the
men (and the few women) who acted on that information and on their own
knowledge of the criminal world to arrest and prosecute offenders whose con-
viction would bring financial rewards—rewards occasionally from victims,
more commonly from the state. Such thief-takers appear with some regularity
in the records of the courts. John Pulman, who was labelled a thief-taker by a
Jacobean magistrate, can be found playing various roles at the Middlesex
sessions and was named sixty-seven times in the recognizances and indictments
of that court alone in the decade 1606 – 16.^27 In the 1690 s and the first few years
of Anne’s reign, some thirty to forty men and a few women can be found in the
court records of the City of London acting in ways that suggest that for longer
or shorter periods of time and to a greater or lesser degree they engaged in thief-
taking. I give an account of some of the best documented among them as a way
of illustrating the prosecuting activities of thief-takers in this period and to un-
cover an aspect of their business that seems to me very important indeed in the
history of policing in the metropolis: the extent to which thief-takers were asso-
ciated with officials in the City and in particular cases with constables.
Thief-takers got involved in what was always likely to be a seamy business by
a variety of routes. One was from the criminal world itself. Both Anthony Dunn
and Anthony St Leger were pardoned felons when they took up the trade of
thief-taking. St Leger was said to have been associated with the receiver and
thief-taker we met earlier, John Whitwood, and to have taken part, at Whit-
wood’s direction, in the burglary of the Countess of Portland’s house in March
1688 in which more than three hundred pounds’ worth of plate was stolen. In a
later deposition, St Leger was said to have been ‘sent... into Ireland or some
other place beyond the seas’ by Whitwood, presumably to get him out of the
way while efforts were being made to find the countess’s plate. He returned and
was once again associated with Whitwood, though for how long is unclear.^28 In
August 1689 he turned up at the Old Bailey for the first time, when he was tried
and acquitted of burglary. He was back in court in January 1690 on a similar
charge but was convicted of the lesser offence of grand larceny, making him eli-
gible to plead his clergy and—he would have every reason to expect—to be dis-
charged with a warning from the judge that he better not repeat such bad
behaviour. In fact, and unusually, judgment was not passed immediately by the
court, and his case was respited till further order. St Leger was returned to New-
gate and it is clear the judges at the Old Bailey intended to see if something a
little stiffer could be imposed on him, perhaps simply to frighten him a little, for
Detection and Prosecution 233(^27) Johnston and Tittler, ‘To Catch a Thief ’, 245 – 6 , n. 24.
(^28) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,July 1691 (deposition of Robert Bennison).