data suggest that about sixty men and women from the City were executed in
the sessions sampled in the three decades after 1660 , that is to say, almost one
each session on average, or about seven a year. In judging the significance of that
level of capital punishment, we must remember that we are concerned here only
with property offences and that significant numbers of men and women were
executed in the late seventeenth century for murder, infanticide, coining and
clipping, and several other forms of treason and felony. In addition, we must also
bear in mind that our data concern only property offences from the City of
London and that the Middlesex cases at the same sessions of the Old Bailey
would have resulted in the execution of an even larger group of men and women
at Tyburn than arose from the City.^104 An estimate of somewhere in the order of
twenty-five executions a year on average for all offences would seem to be a rea-
sonable minimum. Such a level of execution in the metropolis was a consider-
able reduction from the experience of a century earlier. Jenkins’ reconstruction
of the available evidence suggests that the watershed decade may have been the
1630 s, or at least that the exceptionally high levels of executions that had taken
place all over the country, including London, under the Tudors and into the
seventeenth century, had been sharply reduced before the civil war.^105
By sixteenth-century standards, capital punishment may have been imposed
with a good deal of circumspection in the decades after the Restoration. Execu-
tion none the less remained the principal penal response to property crime and
the procession to Tyburn, and the public hanging of men and women chosen as
examples remained regular events on the metropolitan calendar. And from time
to time, when the state of crime or public opinion or political circumstances re-
quired it, the numbers executed in the public interest could rise sharply. Aver-
age figures conceal some large variations in verdicts and sentences from session
to session. Jurors and judges and the king could combine to condemn very few
accused at one session, many more at the next. This is revealed even more
clearly when one takes the full Old Bailey calendar into account—including,
that is, Middlesex cases as well as those from the City. At the April 1680 Old Bai-
ley session, twenty-four convicted men and women were sentenced to death—
‘the number being so great’, the Proceedings reported, ‘the common bar could
not contain them when they were brought back into court for sentencing’.^106
This session occurred in the midst of the political crisis surrounding the effort to
exclude the Duke of York from the succession to the throne, a period in which
public order in London was a source of major concern for the court.
The twenty-four convicted offenders who faced the death penalty had not
committed public order offences, and there was thus no direct connection
300 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^104) See above, Ch. 1 , Table 1. 1 , where I have estimated that City cases made up about 40 % of the full
calendar at the Old Bailey in the late seventeenth century.
(^105) Jenkins, ‘From Gallows to Prison?’, 555 – 7, 60– 1 ; see also Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England,
142 – 4.
(^106) The True Narrative of the Proceedings at... the Old Baily.. .(April 1680 ), p. 4.