One of Rewse’s frequent collaborators, Robert Saker (or Segars) was an
active thief-taker in his own right over much of this period, well-enough known
to be referred to casually by the ordinary of Newgate as ‘Mr Segars, the Thief-
taker’.^62 Saker was involved in thief-taking from at least 1694 , when he provided
information to a City magistrate about an escape from Newgate.^63 Like many
thief-takers in the 1690 s Saker was an active prosecutor of coiners and clippers.
He gave numerous depositions before Newton, the warden of the Mint, about
arrests he made on his own and with others, including Dunn and Rewse, as well
as another thief-taker, John Bonner, and with a City constable named John
Hooke.^64 Saker and his wife worked together from time to time to entrap and
arrest offenders. On one occasion, having offered to receive a number of coun-
terfeit gold pistoles from Mary Miller, who had been asked to distribute them by
a coiner, Francis Ball, Mrs Saker set up a meeting with Miller and Ball in an ale-
house in Smithfield, at which her husband and other men burst into the room
at the crucial moment of transfer and arrested them. Since Miller knew the busi-
ness the Sakers were in, it seems likely that she intended from the beginning to
betray Ball.^65 Mrs Saker was not the only wife who collaborated with her
husband in thief-taking.
Those who prosecuted for profit followed a variety of paths and took up a var-
iety of targets. The one thing they were likely to have in common, especially if
they survived for a number of years, was some knowledge of the most important
and most serious offenders, their associates, their favourite taverns and ale-
houses, and the receivers they dealt with. To some extent thief-takers had to be
part of that world themselves, or at least to have good contacts in it. The neg-
ative side of that, from the point of view of the authorities, who for the most part
were happy to use and support such men, was that their knowledge and their
contacts were a sure temptation to corruption. The availability of rewards for
convictions was a standing invitation to entrap innocent men into committing
offences for which they could be easily prosecuted, as was to become all too
clear in the eighteenth century. That no such cases came to light in this period
may mean simply that the authorities were less concerned and less vigilant than
some of them were to become fifty years later.
240 Detection and Prosecution
a libel suit against him before the consistory court of London, in which the source and level of his income
became a matter of importance since she was seeking maintenance (LMA: DL/C/ 156 , fos. 237 – 8 ;
DL/C/ 199 , fo. 373 ; DL/C/ 199 , fos. 366 – 83 ; DL/C/ 255 , fo. 383 ). Rewse continued as turnkey until at
least 1727 ; see [ Thomas Bayley Howell,] Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Procedures for High
Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours,from the Earliest Period to the Present, 34 vols. ( 1809 – 28 ), xiii. 775.
(^62) Ordinary’s Account, 21 June 1704 , pp. 1 – 2. Saker’s son was alleged in 1712 to be a well-known pick-
pocket—suggesting the possibility that, like Dunn and St Leger, Saker came by his knowledge of the
criminal world first-hand (CLRO, Papers of the Court of Aldermen, October 1712 : information of
Henry Broom against Charles Hitchen, 9 October 1712 ).
(^63) CLRO: London Sess. Papers,July 1694.
(^64) PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , nos. 19 , 60 , 62 – 3 , 73 , 164 , 167 , 252 , 270 , 443.
(^65) PRO, Mint 15 / 17 , nos. 6 , 12 , 14 , 15 , 24 , 141.