make promises ahead of the trial about verdicts or the royal pardon. None the
less, the hope of a better outcome following a confession must have seemed a rea-
sonable expectation to some prisoners, and so it proved. In the case of ten women
in our Sample—of one session in three between 1663 and 168965 —who con-
fessed to an offence for which they were not eligible to apply for clergy and were
thus in danger of being hanged, all but one were subsequently reprieved. Two of
the three men who pleaded guilty derived no such benefit from confessing to of-
fences that were regarded as too serious to be forgiven; they were sentenced to
death and hanged. But in non-capital cases—offences for which benefit of clergy
remained available—confession did have some marginal benefit for men. Of the
fifty-four men who were willing to plead guilty to the charges they faced, three-
quarters were allowed clergy, and were thus burned in the hand and discharged
from the court at the conclusion of the session; of men in that position who
insisted on taking their trials, 60 per cent were granted clergy.^66
The vast majority of those accused of property offences pleaded not guilty
and were brought to trial before City juries. The verdicts arrived at in their cases
are set out in Table 6. 1. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the juries’ decision-
making is the level of acquittals they brought down. Forty-two per cent of men
and 48 per cent of women on trial for property offences in the thirty years after
the Restoration were found not guilty by City trial juries and were released.
Juries were especially inclined to acquit women accused of the most minor of-
fences—those charged with clergyable felony, which in this period were thefts of
less than ten shillings in value. Even though only forty-five such charges were
laid in the sixty-nine sessions of the court we have sampled over thirty years,
more than half the women involved were acquitted. Whatever intentions lay be-
hind the extension of clergy to women convicted of theft below ten shillings in
value in 1623 , the effect had clearly not been to encourage prosecutions, or at
least had not encouraged magistrates to send women accused of these petty of-
fences to trial at the Old Bailey. The trial juries at the Old Bailey seem to have
shared that reluctance. The few women who were selected to be tried for theft
below ten shillings had not apparently been chosen with a view to the strength
of the evidence against them, but for some other consideration—perhaps the
insistence of the prosecutor.^67
284 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^65) For the ‘Sample’ see above, p. ix.
(^66) There was a further advantage at the sentencing stage. Men who were denied clergy were in dan-
ger of being sentenced to death. In the case of those who confessed and were denied clergy, all were re-
prieved by the judges before sentence and ordered to be transported. As we will see, some of the men who
were excluded from clergy after being tried and found guilty, were in fact executed. The expectation of
being branded and discharged led some men to plead guilty not only to the offence with which they were
charged, but in addition to ‘all others [with which they might have been charged] within the Benefit of
the Clergy’. See, for example, The Tryals of Several Notorious Malefactors... in the Old-Baily... December 1681 ,
2 (Smith, Stevens, Clark).
(^67) Some married women were acquitted because they were charged with offences committed in the
company of their husbands, as in the case, for example, of Mary Granvil, found not guilty of two bur-
glaries because she ‘was not capable by Law to commit any Felony in the presence of her Husband’