a felony in this way was illegal. Many victims were clearly willing to pay for the
return of their goods—an outcome the criminal law could not guarantee. Such
transactions were also presumably attractive to thieves who might find return-
ing the goods for a portion of their value (and a promise not to prosecute) safer
and more profitable than dealing with a receiver. The author of Hanging, Not
Punishment Enoughcomplained in 1701 that such ‘Private Compositions’ were fre-
quent. They were, he thought, a consequence of the failure of the criminal law
to support the victims of offences—forcing them to undertake and pay for pros-
ecution, while failing to ensure, in the case of a theft, that their stolen goods
would be returned if defendants were convicted.^94
The author of this pamphlet did not notice the part that thief-takers might
have played in arranging these exchanges. But such mediation—if it can be
thought of that way—was almost certainly being practised in the late seven-
teenth century and seems to have increased further in the first quarter of the
eighteenth.^95 One of Joseph Billers’s informants, the burglar John Read, con-
firmed, for example, that ‘the practice of pretended Thief-takers was to com-
pound Felonies for the Thieves, to prevent their Prosecutions, and to harbour
them, and receive their stoll’n Goods’. He also said that two men engaging in
those practices ‘belonged to the City-Marshal’—a foretaste of what was to
come when Charles Hitchen got that office a few years later.^96
Thief-takers’ intercessions between thieves and their victims may have in-
creased in the last years of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth cen-
turies because they provided an alternative way of profiting from crime for men
who had been drawn into thief-taking by the statutory rewards offered after
1689 and who had found the easy pickings provided by coiners and clippers dry-
ing up after the recoinage. As we have seen, it was also the case that prosecutions
of minor crimes against property increased in the metropolis in those years;
crimes for which no large cash rewards were offered, but that were deeply ag-
gravating if they increased too much—shoplifting and theft by servants, for ex-
ample. These two offences were so common in this period that they were both
removed from benefit of clergy and made subject to capital punishment, in 1699
and 1713 respectively.^97 But the terror of the gallows clearly failed to bring them
under control. Indeed, possibly the reverse, since it is entirely likely that, even in
this period when the statutes were fresh-minted, the men and women of the
middling propertied classes, who are likely to have been most willing to
prosecute petty thefts, were not anxious to bring too many offenders to trial.
Detection and Prosecution 249(^94) J. R., Hanging, Not Punishment Enough for Murtherers, High-way Men, and House-breakers( 1701 ), 15.
(^95) It seemed so to William Blackstone looking back from the mid-century; see his Commentaries on the
Laws of England(Oxford, 1765 – 9 ), iv. 132.
(^96) Case ofJoseph Billers, 3 – 4. Read also said that two men were indicted at the Old Bailey in December
1709 for such practices: John Osborne and Thomas Charlesworth, were indeed tried at the Guildhall
Sessions 17 April 1710 (CLRO: SM 77 ) for compounding a felony, having been indicted in December
1709. They were found not guilty.
(^97) See below, Ch. 7.