the powers they, and they alone, were able to exercise. It was crucial, too, to the
efforts of government departments like the Post Office and the Mint to mount
prosecutions, and to the work of the secretaries of state in their pursuit of do-
mestic enemies. The secretaries commonly instructed the messengers of the
chamber, for example, to take a constable with them when they mounted a
search or intended to make an arrest of someone suspected of sedition—for rea-
sons made all too clear later in the century in their conflict with John Wilkes and
the printers of the North Briton, when arrests made by the secretary’s messengers
without the support of constables left them open to prosecution.^87
thief-takers and receivers, 1700– 1720
It is possible that the level of prosecuting activity by thief-takers was unusually
high in the 1690 s because coining and clipping provided a large number of soft
targets. Knowledge about such targets was also easy to come by: there seem to
have been plenty of people willing to pass on information about their neigh-
bours, especially when they themselves came under suspicion—and large num-
bers came under suspicion because of the huge volume of new coins and clipped
coins available to be ‘put off ’.
When clipping became more difficult following the recoinage, opportunities
to prosecute for profit diminished. There continued to be substantial rewards to
be earned for the conviction of other felons: cash payments for highway robbers
and burglars; a certificate with a market value that granted relief from the obliga-
tion to serve in local offices awarded for the conviction of shoplifters; further
money awards added in the eighteenth century in royal proclamations. And
men continued to earn those rewards, not merely by prosecuting when they
were themselves victims of an offence, but by ‘vigorously endeavour[ing] the
discovery and apprehending of... malefactors’—as the act creating the forty
pounds reward for prosecuting burglars enjoined.^88 One such man in Anne’s
reign was Joseph Billers, a silkman in Cheapside, who, according to his own
brief published account, became involved in thief-taking when burglars broke
into a warehouse in 1704 and took fifty pounds’ worth of his silk. He set out to
find the culprits, joined by agents of the East India Company, which had also
lost silk to the same gang of burglars, and for some years thereafter engaged
in detection and prosecution.^89 He was commended by a parliamentary
Detection and Prosecution 247(^87) On the basis of the illegality of the warrant and of the arrests, the printers involved were able to
mount successful actions for damages against the messengers. See John Brewer, ‘The Wilkites and
the Law, 1763 – 74 : A Study of Radical Notions of Governance’, inJohn Brewer and John Styles (eds.),
An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries( 1980 ), 143.
(^885) Anne, c. 31 ( 1706 ), preamble
(^89) A Short State of the Case of Joseph Billers, Citizen of London. Shewing the Occasion of his being concern’d in the
Prosecution of Burglars, and other Criminals; His Progress therein; And the many Obstructions he hath met with in the
Course of it.( 1709 ). They caught some of those involved when a woman confessed to receiving the stolen
silk and revealed their names. John Smith was indicted in December 1705 for breaking and entering and