work-discipline to be imposed on minor offenders who had been convicted by
juries. A clause in the statute of 1623 that extended benefit of clergy to women
who stole goods worth less than ten shillings authorized the judges to imprison
such women in a house of correction for up to six months as well as ordering
them to be burned in the hand, but no use was being made of it at the Restor-
ation.^126 The reason seems clear enough: local communities were left to shoulder
the charge. A similar statute that was to be passed in 1706 was also put into prac-
tice in some places and not others, suggesting that legislation that imposed dis-
cretionary burdens without providing resources to support them would likely be
ignored unless local authorities found it to their benefit to make use of the
powers they granted.^127
Two other penal possibilities were regularly canvassed in the Restoration.
One was some form oflabour in a workhouse of the kind suggested in 1677 as an
alternative to transportation. Similar ideas were put forward by other propon-
ents of workhouses in this period, connected with ideas about ways of managing
the poor and the Poor Law and at the same time harnessing labour in the
national interest.^128 Among a number of possible amendments of the criminal
law sketched by Francis North, lord keeper in the last six years of Charles II’s
reign, was the suggestion that ‘poor prisoners after conviction to be set on work
at the judges’ pleas[ure] or may be sent to the house of correction, if no stock
raised [in a parish workhouse or similar institution] and have such correction as
the judges shall think fit’.^129 Other kinds of hard labour schemes had been pro-
posed in the 1650 s involving the harshest forms of discipline, and they surfaced
from time to time thereafter.
An anonymous document among the papers of the secretaries of state that
may date from the late 1670 s as the weaknesses of transportation were becom-
ing apparent urged the need for alternative punishments, principally punish-
ments involving work. The anonymous writer reiterated many of the radical
arguments of the interregnum—indeed, it is possible that the document drew
heavily on an earlier tract. He made two main points. First, that property crime
was caused by ‘Necessity or Luxurious Prodigality’ and (because ‘mischiefs are
easier and better prevented than redressed’) required that strict controls be
310 The Old Bailey in the Late Seventeenth Century
(^12621) James I, c. 6 , s. 3 ( 1623 ). (^127) See below, p. 334.
(^128) The possibility was raised in the Court of Aldermen in 1686 of building a workhouse in the press
yard in Newgate gaol ‘for setting and keeping at work the prisoners’. The sheriffs and the keeper were
ordered to bring in an estimate of the costs involved, and a committee of four aldermen were asked to
consider it, but nothing came of the proposal (Rep 91 , fos. 78, 186).
(^129) BL, Add. MS 32518 , fo. 127. North here anticipted a statute of 1706 , as we shall see. He also sug-
gested that the courts be given authority to order rewards for the apprehending of felons to be paid out
of the accused’s goods, and ‘To take away Clergy wch is Now a mere formality and abused, and the priv-
ilidg to be ousted in burglary in shops and houses empty or furnished, tho no Inhabitant [inside] and for
felonys to ye value of 10 s. or more.’ Shoplifting and the forms of theft from houses that he seems to have
in mind were both to be removed from clergy in the expansion of the range of capital punishment after
the Revolution. For those enactments, see below, Ch. 7.