not, such measures made receiving apparently riskier than it had been—and
that in turn made it riskier for thieves to deal with receivers they could not en-
tirely rely on. Returning the stolen goods to their owner for a portion of their
value may have come to seem a safer option. In the case of objects with little in-
herent value, or at least with value that could not easily be realized—shopbooks,
or bills of exchange, or other commercial paper, for example—the usefulness of
negotiating with the victim for their return was even more obvious.
Certainly, such mediation was thought to be widespread in the early years of
the eighteenth century, and to have been regularly practised by those known as
thief-takers, including some of those active in prosecuting in the 1690 s.^103 An-
thony Dunn was named in a deposition in the City in 1707 , for example, as ‘a
pretended Thiefe Taker’ who had arranged for the return of forty pounds’
worth of plate to its owner for a fee.^104 The victim had ‘applied’ to another man
whom he clearly thought was likely to have information about the theft and re-
ceivers (a ‘Mr. Keyfar’, possibly Kiffett) who in turn put him in touch with
Dunn. Within a few weeks the goods were returned at an alehouse, and Dunn
accepted a fee of five guineas. Dunn was presumably called a ‘pretended Thiefe
Taker’ because he had no intention of ‘taking’ the thief, but rather locating him
and getting him to return the goods rather than selling them to a receiver.
Another five guineas went in the same case to Robert Saker.
Dunn and Saker no doubt found such business coming their way because
they had become well known. The experience ofThomas Hunter, a shoplifter,
provides some further insight into this. Hunter had committed several
thefts in goldsmiths’ shops in 1704 with two accomplices, Jacob Volt and
Richard Lewis. After one such theft, the goldsmith had sent around the neigh-
bourhood a printed notice about his loss, aimed at potential receivers of the
‘several rich goods’ he had lost. The paper had come to Robert Summers, who
was associated at other times with Saker and who Hunter was to describe
as a thief-taker in his conversation with the ordinary of Newgate. Summers
obviously had some idea of who might have been involved and where to find
them, for he found Hunter, Volt, and Lewis at the Dog Tavern near Newgate,
where he
read aloud the Paper which Mr. Fordham [the goldsmith] had sent abroad concerning
his Loss; and thereupon Sommers [sic] asking them (and particularly Hunter) whether
they knew anything of it, they answered no.... But to remove all Suspicion of it from
Detection and Prosecution 251those who bought goods without enquiring too closely into their ownership, but also at ‘the counsellors
and contrivers of theft and other felonies’, who, along with receivers, were said to be ‘the principal cause
of the commission of such felonies’.
(^103) As we have seen, it was at the very end of that decade that a man thought that thief-takers were best
known even then as those ‘who made a Trade of helping People (for a gratuity) to their lost Goods and
sometimes for Interest or Envy snapping the Rogues themselves, being usually in fee with them, and
acquainted with their Haunts’ (B.E., A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in
its several Tribes of Gypsies, Beggars, Thieves, Cheats, &c.[ 1699 ], unpaginated).
(^104) CLRO: London Sess. Papers, December 1707.