themselves, they immediately went to Mr. Segars [i.e. Saker] in the Old Baily; where
[they] staid a little while and talked of the matter, saying they knew nothing of it.
Saker must have appeared to them to be a man of some consequence, and a
man who could call off Summers if he could be satisfied—in some way not speci-
fied—that they had not been involved in the thefts. The story did not end there,
however, which is why we know about these negotiations. Shortly afterwards
Jacob Volt was arrested for another offence and Hunter and Lewis became con-
cerned that he would ‘discover’ them to save his own skin. To forestall that, they
sent for Segars and told him they could procure the goods stolen from Fordham.
They did so. The thief-taker paid them off and returned the goods to the gold-
smith, who no doubt reimbursed the money he had given the thieves and added
a reward. Hunter’s career as a shoplifter continued, until, soon after these
events, he was arrested, convicted at the Old Bailey, and hanged at the age
of 23 ,—a young man, the ordinary observed laconically, ‘but an old offender’.^105
Unlike that of a highway robber or a burglar, the conviction of this shoplifter
earned Summers and Saker no large monetary reward from the sheriff of Lon-
don. The shopkeeper, on the other hand, would pay to get his goods back. What
an experienced thief-taker had to offer such a victim was information—infor-
mation about thieves, about receivers and pawnbrokers who were known to
handle stolen goods, and about other thief-takers who might know what had
happened to the goods, or could find out. The world of illegality was not so large
that a network of men could not keep up with at least the serious thefts and
known receivers. Thief-takers commonly worked together in this way. Know-
ledge—and mutual help—enabled them to apprehend offenders who were vul-
nerable and valuable. It also enabled them to profit from the misfortunes of
some of the victims when it was not possible to profit from the conviction and
execution of the offenders.
If there was an increase in such mediation between thieves and their victims
in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, it was almost certainly facilitated
by the growth of the London press in this period, for the advertising columns of
the newspapers made it possible for thefts to be publicized and contacts to be es-
tablished. The impression that such contacts between thieves and victims were
being more regularly and systematically forged in the first quarter of the eight-
eenth century also derives from the activities of Charles Hitchen and the more
notorious Jonathan Wild.^106 It is impossible to know whether Hitchen—to deal
with him first—was a more active go-between than men like Saker and Sum-
mers. We happen to know a good deal about him because he got into com-
petition with Wild as the latter was establishing his empire, and published
a pamphlet about thief-taking practices that he clearly knew about from
252 Detection and Prosecution
(^105) Ordinary’s Account, 21 June 1704.
(^106) For the careers of Hitchen and Wild and the relationship between them, see Howson, Thief-Taker
General, chs 6 – 8 , 12.