Business as usual in fact meant little business at all. It had become abundantly
clear that to remove every offender pardoned by the king on condition of trans-
portation would require government intervention and public money. Late
Stuart governments gave no sign of contemplating either.
The problems surrounding transportation ensure that we can never be cer-
tain that offenders pardoned from capital punishment in the thirty years after
the Restoration and ordered to be transported actually left the country. On the
other hand, we can be reasonably sure that whether they were transported or
not their pardon was not likely to have been revoked, and that the court records
and the pardon documents together provide a reasonably accurate guide to the
numbers of offenders from the City who were executed and the offences for
which they had been condemned. The data set out in Table 6. 3 , derived from
our Sample of sixty-nine sessions over the twenty-six years 1663 – 89 , show that
a total of 74 men and 116 women pleaded guilty or were convicted of non-
clergyable property offences and were thus in danger of being hanged. What
was their fate? As we have seen, a significant number were pardoned and sub-
jected to an alternative punishment or simply allowed to go free. One of the
striking consequences of the belief in the possibilities and the value of trans-
portation was the practice of the judges in the years after 1660 of interrupting
and foreshortening the ordinary procedure of the court by awarding ‘pardons’
beforethey had sentenced convicted felons to death, and ordering that they be
held in gaol in order to be transported or, in a few cases, discharged. The judges
seized on the possibility of transportation as a way of dealing with the large
number of women convicted of offences that were non-clergyable for them but
not for men—that is, simple thefts of more than ten shillings in value. As we can
see in Table 6. 3 , a significant number of women who pleaded guilty or who were
convicted of non-clergyable property crimes were reprieved in this way: over 70
per cent of them were ordered to be transported as a condition of pardon. These
296 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
Table 6. 3 .Sentences in non-clergyable property offences: City of London cases at the Old
Bailey, 1663 – 1689Convicteda Reprieved Sentenced Pardoned Hanged Conditions of reprieves/pardons
before to death Transportation Otherb
sentence
Men 74 11 63 30 33 29 12
% 100. 0 44. 6 39. 2 16. 2
Women 116 54 62 48 14 83 19
% 100. 1 12. 1 71. 6 16. 4
Notes:
aIncluding three men and ten women who pleaded guilty
bIncludes absolute/free pardon; ‘held in gaol’ and probably pardoned and discharged; unknown sentences
Source: Sample