1693 they appeared together before Sir Salathiel Lovell, the recorder of Lon-
don, along with a hatmaker, his wife, a second woman, and a constable, to
accuse a Dr Best of being a clipper. In the typical way such depositions were
phrased, Dunn and St Leger deposed that they ‘had notice’ of Best’s activities
from someone unnamed—the informers in this case were almost certainly the
hatmaker, who was Best’s landlord, and his wife—and went to his lodgings and
searched him and his room. There they found shears, clipped money, and other
evidence of coining, and Best was committed to trial.^38
Dunn and St Leger carried on such prosecutions in the expectation of being
rewarded by the Treasury. They were to appear together as witnesses in at least
a further nine clipping or coining cases from the City in 1693 , and no doubt
many more from Westminster and Middlesex, for they went wherever business
took them.^39 Indeed, in a petition to the Treasury for compensation in June
1693 , they were to claim that they had already made eighty arrests and secured
forty convictions of clippers and coiners, ‘money-changers’, and their accom-
plices, and that they had recovered false money, clippings, and tools to the value
of a thousand pounds.^40
It might be said that while the Mr Recorder Lovell, the lord mayor ofLondon,
and Mr Justice Ward, submitted a strong letter of recommendation to the Treas-
ury commissioners in support of rewards for Dunn and St Leger on this occasion,
the warden of the Mint, Benjamin Overton, was less enthusiastic about them. He
had his reasons for casting doubt as to ‘how fitt those men are to be Employ’d, or
Encouraged, in the prosecution of Clippers’, since he was interested in asserting
the Mint’s leading role in prosecuting coining offences. The day after he replied
to the Treasury’s enquiry about whether Dunn and St Leger should be encour-
aged in that work, Overton wrote to reaffirm the Mint’s belief that clippings and
tools and all materials related to coining seized in London should be sent to them,
and asked the Lords of the Treasury to press the reluctant authorities in the City
and in Middlesex to do so. He also said, in a further comment on the City’s en-
thusiasm for encouraging people like Dunn and St Leger, that he had himself
‘deputed (newly) severall Trusty persons to prosecute such Criminals upon
notice given Thereof to my Office in the Mint in the Tower’.^41
It is possible that Dunn and St Leger were disappointed of their rewards in
1693 , given this struggle over turf. But they were not shut out entirely. In 1694
and the following few years they made appearances at the Old Bailey, prosecut-
ing both City and Middlesex coining cases, most commonly, as before, in
association with a constable.^42 Along with John Gibbons, whom we shall meet
236 Detection and Prosecution
(^38) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,January 1693.
(^39) Based on the files and minute books of the City sessions of the peace and of City cases at the Old
Bailey, 1693 (CLRO: SF 391 – 8 ; SM 63 – 4 ).
(^40) PRO, T 1 / 22 , no. 40 , fo. 150. (^41) PRO, T 1 / 23 , no. 6 , fos. 26 – 7 ; T 1 / 23 , no. 8 , fo. 30.
(^42) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, February 1694 (two depositions), April 1696 (two depositions: Dunn
with two others); LMA, MJ/SP/ 1694 /May/ 14 , 26 ; MJ/SP/ 1695 /January/ 16 ; MJ/SP/ 1696 /Janu-
ary/ 66. They also appeared in three recognizances in 1694.