In the case of fifteen men and twenty-seven women in our Sample who had
been found guilty of petty larceny after being charged with an offence for which
they might have been hanged, the jury’s partial verdict (and the whipping sen-
tence that followed) was more obviously merciful. Their conviction for petty lar-
ceny reduced the charge by two steps, as it were. No doubt they were glad to
escape the threat of the gallows, though they too may have preferred to have had
a less-generous reduction to the clergyable form of larceny and to have endured
the private pain of a branding (and the threat for the future that it carried) rather
than the humiliation and greater pain of whipping.^117 Three men charged
directly with petty larceny and convicted were also whipped.
The court record does not disclose where and when whippings were to be
carried out in London. They were almost certainly administered in public and
with the offender tied to the back of a cart and whipped on his or her naked back
until blood was drawn. The French traveller Misson, who was particularly in-
terested in the English system of criminal justice, said that offenders convicted
of petty larceny were ‘to be whipp’d thro’ the Streets’.^118 The unusually full ac-
count of the December 1678 Old Bailey session, at which Jeffreys delivered the
sentences as recorder, makes that clear. He sentenced three men and seven
women convicted of petty larceny to ‘be carried from hence to the place from
whence you came, and from thence be dragg’d ti’d to a Carts-tail through the
streets, your Bodies being stripped from the Girdle upwards, and be Whipt till
your Bodies bleed’. He singled out Mary Hipkins for particular chastisement.
She was well known to the Old Bailey bench, having been convicted, sentenced
to death, pardoned, and released the previous year for the theft of goods worth
eighteen pounds from the Duke of Buckingham. Having been convicted yet
again, on this occasion of petty larceny, Jeffreys ordered the man who was to
whip her to be sure to ‘scourge her soundly’.^119
That several offenders at every session of the Old Bailey were convicted of
petty larceny and ordered to be whipped reminds us of the quite remarkable cir-
cumstance—remarkable in terms of the practice in every other criminal court
306 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^117) Leniency was no doubt genuinely intended in some of the cases in which convicted offenders were
in danger ofbeing hanged. The Sessions Paper reporter clearly thought that that was the point of the
verdict in the case of a woman charged in 1687 with the theft of linen and clothing well over the
clergyable limit of 10 s. and who confessed in the course of her trial: ‘the jury brought her in guilty’, he
reported, ‘yet in consideration it was her first fact, only to the value of 10 d.’ And, of another woman tried
at the same session, that the jury found her guilty of the reduced charge ‘in consideration the things
[stolen] were of small concern’ (OBSP, May, 1687 , pp. 2, 3(Wright, Rooks) ).
(^118) Misson, Memoirs and Observations, 359. Plates 8 and 9 show two forms of whipping in public. In one
a vagrant is being scourged at a whipping post by the beadle of the ward; the other illustrates ‘The man-
ner ofWhipping at the Carts Tayle for petty Larceny and other Offences’. They are taken from A Book
of Punishments of the Common Laws of England(London,? 1678 ; copy in the Guildhall Library at AN. 18. 3. 25 ).
I am grateful to John Langbein for my knowledge of this volume and for providing me with copies of the
illustrations.
(^119) An Exact Account of the Trials... Decemb. 1678 , p. 35. For Mary Hipkins’s pardon in 1677 , see PRO,
C 82 / 2504.