presently—they survived a great deal of evidence collected in 1696 by Isaac
Newton, the new warden of the Mint, that they had been corruptly ‘helping
away clippers and bringing them to compositions, under the colour of appre-
hending them’, an accusation that other evidence reveals as entirely accurate.^43
And, perhaps because by the middle years of the decade coining seemed to be
entirely out of control, Dunn and St Leger clearly worked their way back into
the good graces of the Mint and the Treasury. In August 1697 Dunn and John
Gibbons were employed by the Treasury to travel ‘into the country for His
Majesty’s special service’ to conduct prosecutions.^44 And when the statutory re-
wards were created for such prosecutions, Dunn and St Leger were among
those successfully making claims.^45
Coiners, and especially clippers, made easy targets for men like Dunn and
St Leger, but they were not their only prey. They had come from the company
of burglars and highwaymen, whose habits, haunts, and receivers they knew
well, and from the beginning of their thief-taking enterprise they earned reward
money by prosecuting them, too.^46 But they seem to have turned more regularly
to seeking out such men when coining and clipping diminished with the Great
Recoinage, and to have gone far afield to do so. Dunn received a portion of an
eighty pound reward from the Treasury for apprehending burglars in 1698 ; in
1703 St Leger earned portions of the statutory rewards for convicting highway-
men in Wiltshire and Leicestershire.^47
How lucrative all this activity had been it is impossible to say. A woman who
went to St Leger’s house in Red Lion Square in 1698 to engage him to help her
brother who had been accused of coining, reported to Newton in her depos-
ition—clearly in answer to his pointed question—that though his house was
‘mean’, as she described it, she had seen a trunk full of plate, parcels of Flanders
lace, ‘and other things of value’.^48 He was at the least not poor.
Dunn and St Leger had taken up thief-taking after being in danger of being
hanged. Several of the active prosecutors of serious offenders in William’s reign
had been for some time active in the reformation of manners campaign, the
efforts of voluntary societies (with official blessing) to support the prosecution
of vice, immorality, and irreligion. Two such men—Bodenham Rewse, an
Detection and Prosecution 237(^43) G. P. R. James (ed.), Letters Illustrative of the Reign of William III from 1696 to 1708 , addressed to the Duke of
Shrewsbury, by James Vernon, Esq., Secretary of State, 3 vols. ( 1841 ) i. 9. In a deposition before Newton in a
coining case in 1698 it was said that a woman arrested with counterfeit money had been persuaded to
become an evidence against her four associates ‘by the means of Dunn and St. Leger’, presumably
because they had something on her they had not reported (PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , no. 19 ). Another woman
seeking help for someone charged with coining in 1698 was put in contact with St Leger (PRO, Mint
15 / 17 , no. 42 ).
(^44) PRO, T 38 / 736 , p. 49. (^45) CTB 1697 – 8 , p. 150.
(^46) St Leger, for example, earned £ 40 in 1694 for the conviction of a highwayman (CTB 1693 – 6 , p. 524 ).
(^47) CTB 1697 – 8 , p. 213 ; CTP 1702 – 7 , pp. 167 , 181 ; CTB 1703 , p. 359. They also earned further rewards
in 1703 for the conviction of four counterfeiters in London (CTB 1703 , p. 420 ).
(^48) PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , no. 42.